GERMAN WAR SPIRIT

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4951, 4 February 1937, Page 6

GERMAN WAR SPIRIT

EXHIBITION IN BERLIN. LESSONS FOR CHILDREN. Berlin school teachers and children recently went in large numbers to see an exhibition, organised by the National Socialist Teachers' League, the object of which was to show how interest in Germany's preparations for war and the military spirit could be stimulated in the schools. The exhibition was called "National community defensive community" (says the Berlin correspondent of the Morning Post. Painted in large letters on the wall ran the following words of Herr Baldur von Schirach, the Reich Young leader: "No child, schoolboy or schoolgirl, may leave school without the desire to be in life and death a mortal enemy of Jewish Bolshevism. The objects on view show how the military spirit can be fostered among schoolchildren in work and play." The walls were covered with watercolour and pencil sketches of troops, guns, tanks, battleships, and aeroplanes in action —the majority executed by children of 12. One such juvenile sketch had the footnote: "What are we now? Hitler lads. What do we want to be? Soldiers." A corner of the exhibition was devoted to a series of illustrations suggesting how teachers could lead from the concentration on camouflage in the animal world to the contemplation of camouflage in modern warfare. Among the maps drawn by children and considered exemplary was one of Europe in which German and Polish soldiers were looking over their frontiers towards Russia. There were several bound volumes of essays on various military subjects written by children in schools.

A section of the exhibition was devoted to games that are likely to rouse the players to take an interest in military matters. There were jigsaw puzzles which when pieced together revealed the battlefields of the last war complete with trenches and dugouts, and also some new kind of game which was played on a chessboard with miniature shells and bombs, and was claimed by the makers to introduce children to military tactics.