The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas

Abstract

The National Political Education Institutes (NPEA, or Napolas) were boarding schools for the Third Reich’s future elite. Founded on the occasion of Adolf Hitler’s birthday in 1933, the Napolas represented the National Socialist regime’s most consequential experiment in the realm of education. As institutes of “total education” and extreme microcosms of the Nazi racial community, these schools spread from the Prussian heartland into all corners of Nazi-occupied Europe, and immersed boys (and later girls) of impeccable “Aryan” qualities from the age of ten and upward in a curriculum that amalgamated pedagogical elements from antiquity, Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, the British public school system, and, of course, Nazi racial ideology. By the end of the Second World War, over forty Napolas had opened their doors to thousands of aspiring leaders of the Nazi New Order—many of whom struggled for decades after the collapse of the Third Reich to make sense of their youths as Nazi elite school pupils.