WEST GERMANY: Forgotten Horror

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What do you know about Hitler? Pointing his movie camera into dozens of high school classrooms, Frankfurt TV Reporter Jiirgen Neven-DuMont put his question to scores of German students aged 15 to 17. Telecast last week, their answers displayed a surprising ignorance of Nazi turpitude. In fact, nine out of every ten students either knew nothing at all about Adolf Hitler or thought that he had accomplished more good than harm. Sample replies:

¶ "Hitler revived Germany. He provided bread and work for 7,000,000 unemployed, and built the Autobahnen.'"

¶ "He punished taxi murderers, took the youth off the streets, organized sea voyages for workers."

¶ "It is bad that Hitler started the war; it is even worse that he lost it."

¶ Asked to identify prominent Nazis, students named Tito, Khrushchev, Hindenburg.

¶ Asked to estimate the number of Jews that Hitler killed, most guessed a few thousands (actual total: somewhere between 4,000,000 and 6.000,000).

Teachers interviewed by Neven-DuMont blamed their pupils' ignorance on "crammed curricula," which allow no time for history since 1918. The German press had other ideas. Warned Die Welt: "There is something rotten in our German schools."

Said the Frankfurter Allgemeine: "A great number of our schoolteachers seem to lack courage to discuss our ugly past with their students." Asked the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung: "Can we afford to raise a generation of young people who know nothing about Hitler except that he had a funny little mustache?"