In the earlier drafts, the featured legislation was called the “Law against the Foreign Infiltration of German Universities.” [Fascist] propaganda often tried to portray Jews—including German Jews—as a foreign threat. But Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick had observed that the law might “draw too much international attention to the intended exceptional treatment of Jews.” Although the final title of the law did not mention any racial, ethnic, or religious group, it was specifically aimed at Jewish students.
Many universities used the law to justify greater enrollment restrictions against Jewish students. After the passage of the law, Jewish enrollment in German universities dropped drastically.3
(Emphasis added. Click here for details.)
Quoting Karl A. Schleunes’s The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939, pages 106–8:
[The Third Reich] faced the imperative of perpetuating itself by passing its ideological insights on to a generation of school children. This required an immediate end to the Weimar teachings regarding democracy and equality.
Above all it required the inculcation of racial pride into German school children. Administrative efforts preceded the first [Fascist] legislation pertaining to schools. In Bavaria the Minister of Culture formulated a curriculum around Theodor Fritsch’s “standard‐setting work on the Jewish question.”23 In Berlin the [Fascist] school commissioner directed the city’s Jewish teachers to take an immediate leave of absence “to prevent incidents and unrest in our schools.”24
The School Law of April 25 was not, however, a direct response to these pressures. For the most part it was concerned with the overcrowded conditions in German schools. The World War and Depression had led to a lag in school construction which by 1933 had begun to raise serious problems. Rather than embark on a school construction program, the [Third Reich] chose to limit enrollment in general and to reduce the enrollment of Jewish students in particular.
In the first instance German higher schools (primary schools were unaffected) were directed to limit the number of students in such overcrowded professional studies as law. Jewish students on the other hand were subjected to a numerus clausus. The number of Jews to be admitted to high schools (Gymasien), technical institutes, and universities was restricted to 1.5 percent of the total enrollment.25
With the concentration of German Jewry in the large cities such as Berlin and Frankfurt, the numerus clausus worked a particular hardship upon the Jewish community. Exceptions were made in communities where the percentage of Jews exceeded five percent of the total population. Here five percent of a school’s students could be Jewish, but in no case was the Jewish percentage allowed to be greater. Consistent with the other April Laws, children of Jewish war veterans were not counted as part of the Jewish quota.
The School Law was also the first of the [Fascist] laws to go slightly beyond the vague Aryan/non‐Aryan definition of the Civil Service Law. A non‐Aryan child had to have two non‐Aryan parents. The child with one Aryan and one Jewish parent was still considered to be Aryan. The generosity of this legal definition did not have long to survive.
The Jewish community was forced by the School Law to set up its own emergency school system. However, those Jewish children who were still allowed to attend German schools can hardly be said to have been advantaged. They suffered the full burden of the anti‐Semitism which was being institutionalized into the [Reich’s] education structure. Each school had in its curriculum a course in racial theory which both [gentile] and Jewish students were required to attend. Here they learned of Jewish racial inferiority in its many dimensions.
The notebook of a young Jewish girl from Offenbach, the daughter of a rabbi, indicates the content of her teacher’s lecture on racial theory. The girl was thirteen when she recorded that:
- The Jewish race is much inferior to the [black] race.
- All Jews have crooked legs, fat bellies, curly hair, and an untrustworthy look.
- Jews are responsible for the World War.
- They are to blame for the armistice of 1918 and they made the Peace of Versailles.
- They were the cause of the inflation.
- They brought on the downfall of the Roman Empire.
- Marx is a great criminal.
- All Jews are communists.
- They are the rulers of [Soviet] Russia.26
Shortly thereafter this girl’s teacher became director of the school.
At first glance the School Law, along with the exclusionary laws affecting Jewish professional activity, would appear to have been an effective means of disentangling the threads of German–Jewish assimilation. The School Law supported the legislation requiring immediate exclusion of Jews from the professions by assuring that only a very limited number of Jews would be trained to enter these professions.
Within a generation the vast majority of Jews would have been excluded from the life which characterized their assimilation into German society. Within two generations the exclusion would have been virtually complete. If disassimilation was the [Reich’s] objective, its Jewish policy was at least headed in the right direction. Whether [Fascist] patience was equal to the leisurely pace of such a solution was, however, highly questionable.
Click here for other events that happened today (April 25).
1944: The Axis troops at the Chausson plant at Meudon got the hell out of it because the workers therein protested the Axis’s presence by abstaining from work, crossing their arms.
1945: Finland reported that all of the Wehrmacht troops were now out of its boundaries (which was ten days later than the Soviet demand), and Benito Mussolini fled to Como, Italy.
21 years later the US decided
non-aryanblack kids can visit regular schools.