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Telling tales

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Telling tales

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Anti-Semitic schoolbook
(Mary Evans Picture Library)

'Give me a child at five and I will give you the man.' No one took this old Christian saying more to heart than the Nazis. They knew that portraying Jews as sub-human, as evil, as the devil, was the best way to indoctrinate the Aryan child.

Children’s story books, at school and home, were filled with anti-Semitic references, placed without raising any question of doubt. Principal works included picture books, published by Der Stürmer, owned by Julius Streicher.

In Trau keinem Fuchs auf grüner Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid! (Don’t Trust a Fox in a Green Meadow or the Word of a Jew!), two powerful images are juxtaposed in the same way as film director Riefenstahl used romantic images of German youth. A fox schemes to trap its prey while a Jew swears a deceitful oath under the Star of David. By linking the two, the author makes an association with Jews and the folklore distrust of foxes. One section reads: 'Like a fox, he slips about. So you must look out.'

In another story, Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom), the Jewish religious book, the Talmud, is rewritten to show the Jews as learning how to enslave the Germans.

Some of the rhymes used in various books are not subtle, but were no doubt effective on children.

'A devil goes through the land,
It’s the Jew, well known to us
As a murderer of peoples,
A race defiler, a child’s horror'

It ends with the line:

'Stay away from every Jew,
And happiness will come to you.'

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