We know the power of education. We know of its power to expand one’s worldview and to teach students how to become members of a collective society. However, we also know about the controlling nature of education, the way it becomes an extension of those in power and used as a means of control, to gain and maintain power over a populace. Nazi Germany understood this, as Hans Massaquoi’s memoir succinctly points out. Due to his ancestry, his teachers viewed him as inferior, as less than, because they espoused Aryan supremacy.

Looking backwards, we all like to think that we would never get duped into buying into the virulent ideologies that the Nazis taught students or into the Lost Cause rhetoric of the Jim Crow South. We tell ourselves that could not be us. We, no matter our age, would never succumb to such thoughts. When we say these things, we delude ourselves because, if we were students during that time, in those classrooms, most of us, if not all of us, would fall in line. We would do this because of the authority we grant to educators. We would do this because we’d see the same thing happening outside the classroom. We’d do this because we’d want to fit in.

As a parent and an educator, I think about these questions a lot, especially as I look back to the Jim Crow South and World War II. I ask myself, “How does a person succumb to such violence? Such hate? How does a person become a torturor and murderer in the name of nation and patriotism?” Massaquoi answers these questions from his perspective, and writers such as Anna Seghers and Nora Krug do as well, both from different moments in history. Seghers writing in the midst of the war and Krug writing decades afterwards, looking back at her own family history and whether or not her ancestors acquiesced to the virulent ideology or not.

Anna Seghers wrote “A Man Becomes a Nazi” in 1942 and 1943 while in exile in Mexico during the war. Seghers fled from the Nazis to save her life, and she ended up across the Atlantic, writing about what she experienced in Nazi Germany. “A Man Becomes a Nazi” takes place over twelve pages, a tightly woven narrative tracing the life of Fritz Mueller from his birth right after the end of World War I to his execution at the hands of a Red Army tribunal after he commits war crimes against civilians. Ingo Schulze, in discussing the story, points out that “[i]t is impossible to say what plays the greatest role in making him a Nazi.” Mueller’s father experiences unemployment. Mueller’s teachers indoctrinate him. Mueller himself can’t get a job. Just as Seghers does in her novel The Seventh Cross, she does not present a clear answer for why someone becomes a Nazi. Instead, she highlights a myriad of overarching factors that lead to one’s decision, and education, I would argue, plays a major role.

During his education, Mueller goes through multiple teachers and curriculum. He begins with teachers “of the old guard,” those who, amidst the economic depression following the war, tell him that “Work dignifies” and that “Once you know a trade you will never starve.” Mueller sees his father’s inability to get a job even though he fought in the war, and the the fact that he brothers couldn’t apprentice with anyone. The younger teachers, though, came in with new ideas and methods, eager to try them out on students. They cared more about their methodology than their students’ achievement.

Later, Mueller’s class got a new teacher who taught them about ideas such as “peace among nations, equality of people, freedom.” Mueller didn’t buy into any of this, especially when Ernst Busch, who Mueller’s father called the son of “a little Jew tailor,” became the teacher’s pet. None of what the teacher taught meant anything to Mueller because “he wished he could have the kind of war adventures his father talked about; freedom meant nothing to him, because he liked ordering the weaker boys around and being himself ordered around by the strong ones; and equality meant nothing to him because he longed to be well dressed.” Here, we get a hint of Mueller’s predisposition to “order” and “discipline,” but these aspects get exacerbated through his reluctance to hear what his new teacher says and through his father’s antisemitism that seeps into his own being.

The next year, Mueller got another new teacher, one that focused on “the meaning and order and discipline” over memorizing poems. He learned about the Nazi idea of Lebensraum and understood it because “he slept in the same bed with his brother” and thus “understood why the German people needed more space.” He also, because of his father’s comments about Busch’s father and the antisemitism he heard at home and in the community, bought into the teacher’s ideas that “it was the fault of the Jews that he never had enough to eat.” Unlike like previous teacher, Mueller latched onto the new teacher because he reinforced Mueller’s beliefs and ideas. Mueller did not allow himself to open up. Lillian Smith points out “that education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience,” and Mueller closed himself off from all of that because it did not align with his private self.

Mueller encountered both of these teachers during his formative years, in the 1920s, before the Nazis came to power in 1933. He took in the ideas of each and weighed them against his own experiences. Mueller may have learned critical thinking, but that critical thinking did not lead his away from fascism. Jason Stanley notes that critical thinking is not a panacea against fascism — some of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers, including the philosopher Marin Heidegger, were fascists.” Education is much more that what one learns in the classroom; however, what one learns in the classroom also impacts one’s thoughts and actions.

Mueller becomes a member of the Nazi party before 1933. He serves in the party through the 30s and commits war crimes during the war, leading to this execution by the Red Army. A myriad of factors play into his decision to become a Nazi, education being one among them. While Mueller, through his teachers, received multiple ideas, those like Krug’s ancestors did not, especially after 1933. In the next post, I will look at Krug’s uncles and how, through education, they became indoctrinated into Nazi ideology. Until then, what are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.