Bela Bodo. East European Quarterly. Volume 37, Issue 1, Spring 2003.
The history of foreign students in Nazi Germany has so far escaped the attention of historians. This neglect is difficult to explain, considering the number of books written on the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities and the important role that visa students play today in the globalization process. The topic should be of interest to both German specialists and those who are interested only in Nazi foreign policy for a number of reasons. First, it promises to shed additional light on the nature of Nazi foreign policy, especially towards the population of Eastern Europe, and on the intimate relations between ideological obsessions and traditional (diplomatic, economic and cultural) concerns. Second, the examination of foreign students’ lives in Nazi Germany can also make an important contribution to current historical debates on the nature of Nazi Germany, such as whether the most important decisions in the Third Reich were made by the Nazi leadership or were they locally initiated, and whether conflicts between state and Party organizations hindered Nazi plans or promoted further radicalization. Finally, the discussion of sexual relations between German women and foreign students (whether such relations should be perceived as the inevitable result of the war which removed German men from the campuses or as a form of political opposition) raises important questions about non-conformity and political resistance in the Third Reich.
The Position of Foreign Students in Weimar Germany
We cannot talk about the existence of a clearly defined state policy towards foreign students during the Weimar Republic. There were a number of organizations, each with its own philosophy and particular set of objectives, which dealt either on a full or part-time basis with foreign students. The two national organizations, the Foreign Office (Auswartiges Amt or AA) and the Reich Ministry of the Interior (Reichsministerium des Innern or RMdI), established their own cultural department after the First World War; the first focuses on the recruitment and the second on the control of foreign students. Between the two organizations, the Foreign Office had more power because it also controlled the German University Conference, which served as the most important forum for the discussion of university concerns, including the admission of foreign students, in the 1920s and early 1930s. However, the German University Conference was a lame duck because it lacked constitutional power to enforce its resolutions. During the Weimar years, the education ministries and the individual universities had the ultimate say over the admission of foreigners to German universities; the same institutions provided the better part of social assistance for needy foreigners or helped to organize their extra-curricular activities.
The most important of these state ministries was the Prussian Ministry of Education (Preussisches Ministerium far Wissenschaft, Kunst and Volksbildung or PrEM). In 1922, the PrEM established the Central Office for the Study by Foreigners in Prussia (Zentralstelle fair das Studium der AuslAnder in Preussen) with the explicit task of standardizing admission requirements for foreigners. By 1924 the PrEM had created a fairly sophisticated system, which compared the value of foreign high-school diplomas with that of German Arbitur as the basis of admission. The University Conference in Cuxhaven in 1924 recommended this system as a model for individual universities to determine admission standards for foreign candidates. However, as a sign of the Conference’s impotence, the universities and states continued to operate independently in the better part of the 1920s, and consulted Remme’s institution only in controversial cases. Only during the University Conference in Berlin in February 1929 did the education ministries finally pledge to follow closely the model developed by Remme’s office.
The organizations involved in the recruitment of foreign students also found it difficult to come to an agreement on the issue of tuition and other types of fees. In the early 1920s, the majority of university teachers and administrators in the education ministries wanted to reduce the number of foreign students by making their studies and stay in Germany more costly. In the immediate post-war period, the Foreign Office, the education ministries and the university administrators shared the German students’ long-standing aversion towards foreigners, especially Russian Jews. Already before the First World War, nationalist students, especially those in the dueling fraternities, sought to limit the number of foreigners at German universities. Under their pressure, a number of states had imposed quotas on Russian citizens. Not surprisingly, German students’ hostility towards foreigners only increased as the result of the lost war. Thus the first student convention at Wurzburg in July 1919 passed a resolution to the effect that foreign students should bear the full cost of their studies. Student activists also demanded that university authorities examine the educational background of foreigners more rigorously in order to prevent the admission of unqualified candidates. Some even called for a national law that would limit the number of foreign students at each university and in any faculty to five percent. Pressured by student organizations, the Foreign Office and, to a lesser extent, by the education ministries, the German University Conference raised fees for visa students in both 1922 and 1923.
While they had proved susceptible to students’ complaints in the early 1920s, the Foreign Office and the education ministries soon changed their minds on the issue. At the end of 1923, the Cultural Department of the Foreign Office sent a memorandum to education ministries which argued that its “foreign-cultural policy” was one of the few remaining areas in which Germany could still act without Allied supervision. To make the most of this freedom, in early 1924, the AA began advocating a reduction of fees for visa students in order to entice more foreigners into Germany and thereby improve its image. After some hesitation (informed by their legitimate fear that a radical reduction in the fees of visa students might elicit negative reactions from domestic students and university teachers), the majority of education ministries came out openly in support of the Foreign Office’s proposal. At the University Conference in Cuxhaven in September 1924, the education ministries accepted the principle that visa students should not pay more in fees than their German counterparts. However, the implementation of this resolution at every university and faculty took time: higher fees for foreign students were uniformly abolished only in 1927.
The end of discrimination in fees and the standardization of admission requirements helped the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst or DAAD) to fashion the first comprehensive German “foreign-cultural policy” after 1931. The DAAD was created through the merger of three organizations at the end of 1930: the Academic Exchange Service (Akademischer Austauschdienst or AAD), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the German Academic Foreign Office (Deutsche Akademische Auslandsstelle or DAASt). The head of the DAAD, Adolf Morsbach, had close ties to the Young Conservatives and the Catholic Center Party, which in the late 1920s and early 1930s had become more conservative. Both Morsbach and his second-in-command, Arnold Bergstrasser, who Was in charge of long-term planning, embraced the ideology of the Young Conservatives. They saw the nations as large organic entities, whose interests allegedly transcended those of individuals and social groups. Neither individual rights nor the universal desire for peace but only the intuitive understanding of the other party’s uniqueness could serve as a legitimate ground for cooperation between nations. This cooperation would be pioneered by the cultural elites, who, Morsbach and Bergstrasser contended, embodied the best qualities of their ethnicity. The task of the DAAD was to preserve the cultural diversity of the world and, at the same time, promote the 14 meetings of cultures” through academic exchanges, scholarships and social assistance for foreign students.
Foreign Students in Nazi Germany Before 1939
Because of its lack of expertise in cultural matters, the new Nazi regime took a conservative stand on the issue of foreign students after 1933. It did not want to frustrate the efforts of the DAAD, the Foreign Office and the education ministries, which tried desperately to reverse the decline in the number of foreign students. This decline was, indeed, dramatic. Between the winter semester of 1932/33 to the summer semester of 1934, the number of students from the United States, for example, had fallen by 53.9 percent. The decrease was also serious in the case of other countries such as Hungary (53.6 percent), Yugoslavia (47.4 percent), Poland (46.4 percent), the Baltic states (40.6 percent), Austria (39.4 percent), and Czechoslovakia (38.9 percent).9 The decline had numerous causes: the economic crisis, the increasingly isolationist policy of European states and, most importantly, the anti-Semitic policy of the Nazi regime (Jewish students had made up almost one-fifth of the foreign student population in the 1920s) tended to keep foreign students away.
The general lawlessness of the Depression era and the political violence associated with the rise and victory of the Nazi movement, especially in Berlin, must have also dissuaded many foreigners from taking up or continuing their studies in Germany. Political violence, as the following story demonstrates, inevitably touched on the lives of foreigners in big cities. In early 1933, a marching SA column in Berlin, made up mostly of Nazi students, beat up Geoffrey S. Cox from New Zealand because he had failed to salute the flag of the division. Ironically, Cox was a Nazi sympathizer who had come to Germany with the mission to collect stories that might change the negative opinion his fellow citizens had of Hitler’s regime. Seeking confirmation of his preconceived ideas, he developed a very flattering view of German youths, as he had observed them in a labor camp in 1932. Thus, the incident with the SA came to him as a great shock and disappointment. The case was hushed up but the DAAD, who promised that the perpetrators would be punished.
After the Nazi takeover, Party and state organizations tried to refute similar stories and to convey to foreign governments the impression that life for most people remained the same in the Third Reich. In the fall of 1933, the education ministries, the DAAD and university authorities all urged foreign students to tell their parents, teachers, and friends at home that they were safe and sound in Germany. At the same time, journalists, probably under pressure from the education ministries, published the praises that many foreign students had for Nazi Germany and its leader at length. Besides this propaganda campaign, the education ministries sought to lower admission requirements in order to entice more foreigners. Typically enough, the DAAD grasped onto the idea in order to increase its power over the admission process by creating a new organization, the Central Office for the Admission of Foreigners (Zentralstelle far die Zulassung der Auslander). However, the education ministries, most importantly the PrEM, supported by the AA, the RMdI, and the Reich Ministry of Propaganda, defeated the DAAD’s plan in early 1934. Instead of establishing a new office, the REM turned Remme’s Central Office for the Study by Foreigners in Prussia into the Reich Central Office for the Study by Foreigners (Reichszentralstelle fair das Stadium der Auslander) in August 1934. This move left the power of admission yet again in the hands of university administrators and the education ministries. Thus the first round of bureaucratic struggle ended with the narrow victory of the education ministries and the newly formed Reich Education Ministry (Reichserziehungsministerium or REM).
Unlike the education ministries and the REM, which had essentially maintained control over the admission process until the outbreak of the war, the DAAD fell victim to the purges that followed the Rohm Affair in the summer of 1934. Until 1942, the DAAD operated, with greatly reduced power, under the aegis of the REM; then it came under the control of the Reich Student Leadership. In the second half of the 1930s, the number of organizations involved in the recruitment of foreign students increased rapidly: besides the REM, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Propaganda, Ribbentrop’s Office, the Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP, the Reich Student Leadership, and the National Socialist German Lecturers’ Association (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund), all tried, with varying degrees of success, to influence German “foreign-cultural policy.” Bureaucratic fights continued unabated: in 1935, the REM, the Foreign Office and the Reich Ministry of the Interior formed a temporary alliance against Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, which, by creating a new organization, the Institute of German Cultural Exchange (Anstalt Deutscher Kulturaustausch), sought to dominate cultural exchanges. After 1936, however, the REM tried to limit the power of the Foreign Office which, as a result of the influx of more competent administrators, such as the foreign policy expert of the NSDAP, Wilhelm Bohle, felt entitled to advise the REM on its admission policies. The appointment of Ribbentrop (who had developed a strong interest in cultural affairs during his ambassadorship in London) to the post of Foreign Minister in early 1938 further strengthened the hands of administrators such as Bohle. In the late 1930s, the Foreign Office effected the subordination of the DAAD cells abroad to German embassies. In short, the power of the Foreign Office increased after 1936 at the expense of the REM, but neither the AA nor any of the new Nazi organizations was able to gain complete control over academic exchanges. The picture was that of bureaucratic chaos, which tended to undermine the effectiveness of individual organizations.
While they disagreed on details, most organizations involved in the recruitment of foreign students agreed that the Third Reich had a lot to gain from the presence of foreign nationals on university campuses. In order to entice more foreigners, the DAAD, the education ministries and the REM sought to increase financial assistance for foreign students after the Nazi takeover. In May 1934, shortly before the arrest of Morsbach and the emasculation of the DAAD, the education ministry in Baden proposed that foreign students could also apply for the remission of their fees. It also recommended that the education ministries should ease restrictions on foreign students obtaining a degree in Germany. This proposal floundered because of the resistance of the PrEM which feared that these measures would negatively influence the mood of domestic students. Nevertheless, the education ministry in Baden, supported by the DAAD, continued its campaign. In 1935, the same ministry ordered its universities to provide more financial support for foreign students. It is not clear whether the education ministries in other states followed Baden’s example. However, the agitation of the DAAD on the behalf of foreign students had borne some results in that the Lufthansa and the Reich Railway offered reduced prices for foreign students, while large manufacturing companies began distributing scholarships among foreigners before the outbreak of the war.
The policy to reduce tuition fees and living costs failed to achieve its purpose: the number of foreign students continued to decline between 1934 and 1939. The Nazi authorities rightly perceived this decline as a failure of their propaganda campaign, which continued unabated in the second half of the 1930s. In September 1934, German papers reported the first, and still positive, impressions of a group of Americans who came to study in Germany. In 1935, they quoted a young Englishman who described the political transformation of Germany in the most glowing terms. The newspapers informed their readers about the wonderful time that Swedish students had allegedly had during their stay in Germany. The Nazis also tried to use international student conventions to convince foreigners and foreign governments about the correctness of their cause and the normalcy of life in the Third Reich. Thus we learn from the Nazi newspapers that German student activists discussed both German domestic politics and international affairs with their English counterparts at a ski camp at Berchtesgaden in January 1935. In the same year, German and French law students held a conference on “the core issue of national socialism: the racial question.” The Kieler Zeitung reported that during the conference, French students had rejected the accusation made by their German comrades that they lacked “racial consciousness.” They stated that the “Negroization and Judaization” of French society was indeed a serious problem but, fortunately, the phenomenon was confined to a few cities like Paris. The Nazi paper also reported, with obvious satisfaction, the French students’ remark that their nation was more anti-Semitic than the German. While the two sides agreed on the need to maintain “racial purity” in both countries, German students had a more difficult time convincing their French comrades of Hitler’s historic greatness, the Kieler Zeitung told its readers.
It is difficult to judge the impact that these student conferences and the propaganda campaign in general had on foreign students. In the 1930s, as a result of the First World War and the crisis of liberalism and democracy, the majority of foreign students were nationalistic; they were also more receptive to the exultation of violence and the hero-cult than their predecessors in the late nineteenth century. While the fascist temptation was real, strong nationalist sentiments, ironically enough, increased their distrust of the Nazis. The attitude of foreign students to Nazism thus on the whole mirrored that of their national leaders. Primary sources also suggest that, because of their racial and nationalistic obsessions, the Nazis had problems finding the appropriate tone with foreign nationals and could not reconcile differences, for the sake of Germany’s interests, between quarrelsome allies. In 1938, for example, the German-Foreign Student Club in Munich planned to organize a “Danube Night” which would have provided entertainment for students from South-Eastern Europe. However, Hungarian students felt that the idea was a major insult to their country and, therefore, angrily turned down the invitation. In a long letter to the rector, the Hungarian consul (after chastising the German hosts for their lack of knowledge about South-Eastern Europe in general and Hungary in particular) rejected the invitation with the remark that “We Hungarians would have to settle first a few issues with the Romanians before we could dance with them.”
Nazi Policy Towards Students from the Conquered Western European States
The conflict between traditional concerns (the need for allies, economic considerations, etc.) and ideological obsessions became even more pronounced during the Second World War. After 1939, the Nazi attitude toward foreign students became primarily a function of the Third Reich’s foreign policy, which aimed at the creation of a German-dominated and racially purified Europe. The majority of Western European students, including young Dutchmen both at home and in Germany, was to recognize the racial thrust in Nazi foreign policy and what this thrust meant for the survival of their country. Germany occupied the Netherlands in the spring of 1941. In preparation for the eventual annexation of the country, the Nazis, among other things, began to expel Jewish students and teachers from Dutch schools in the summer of 1941. Dutch university students fiercely resisted Nazism not only on the campuses but in every aspect of public life as well. The Gestapo estimated that by 1943 every third person caught in sabotage or other types of illegal acts was a student. Only about 15 percent of all university students signed the famous loyalty pledge, which allowed them to proceed with their studies in return for a promise to seek employment in the Third Reich after graduation. The majority of Dutch students went into hiding and, if caught and drafted into labor service, spent the remaining part of the war in labor camps either at home or, more likely, in Germany.
Dutch students recognized that passive or active resistance to the occupiers was the only morally viable alternative. Students in Luxembourg reacted the same way to the conquest of their land by the Nazis in the spring of 1940. Although not yet officially annexed, Luxembourg became attached to the Party administrative district of Koblenz-Trier to form Gau Moselland during the war. The Nazis began the “Germanization” of the Grand Duchy immediately: they imposed their language, administration, currency, education system, and laws on the conquered population. The Germans introduced compulsory labor service for both men and women, recruited men into the Waffen SS and herded teenagers into Hitler Youth. At the end of August 1942, all men of draft age were subjected to compulsory service in the German army. To remove all legal barriers to the draft, the Nazi government granted definite or provisional German citizenship to the “Germanic” section of the population. Simultaneously, Nazis began preparing for the eventual expulsion of Italians, French Walloon Belgians and persons of so-called mixed blood from Luxembourg. But first, following its “fishing for good blood” policy, the SS ordered the compilation of a comprehensive racial registry which, Himmler believed, would help the Nazi authorities to identify “Teutonic” elements among the Italians and the French and to facilitate their “re-assimilation into the German race.”
The Nazi policy towards students from Luxembourg studying at various German schools was conceived as an important step towards the integration of the Grand Duchy into the new Reich. The Nazi government wanted to see an increase in the number of students from Luxembourg because it needed administrators loyal to Hitler’s regime. Moreover, administrators in the REM hoped that the recognition of high-school diplomas as equivalent to the German Arbiter and the remission of fees for the first semester would entice more students into Nazi Germany and that at least some of these Luxembourgers would remain in Germany after the conclusion of their studies, thus mitigating the country’s dire need for more professionals.
The policy of the REM, which was in general favorable to students from Luxembourg, was not, however, free of contradictions. Instead of providing support for all Luxembourgers, the REM ordered that only members of the German Folk Movement of Luxembourg (Volksdeutsche Bewegung Luxembourg), who had received provisional German citizenship, could apply for scholarships or remission of their fees in subsequent semesters. The Reich Student Leadership was even more blinded by distrust, sick suspicion and ethnic arrogance. In the fall of 1940, at the request of the Reich Student Leadership, the Gestapo arrested a group of young Luxembourgers during an introductory camp to university; as a punishment for their mild criticism of the Nazi regime and its foreign policy, the REM prohibited their enrollment in German universities. At the end of the same year, again at the prompting of Nazi students, the Gestapo interrogated five Luxembourg students because they had presumably denied the German character of the Grand Duchy, supported England and the United States in the war, and “displayed Bolshevik-Marxist tendencies.” It was probably under pressure from the Reich Student Leadership and the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) of the SS that, in 1941, the REM confined students from Luxembourg to a few universities in the western part of the country until the summer. The abolition of this measure in 1943 was an empty gesture since there must have remained (because of the drafting of men into the German army after August 1942) very few Luxembourgers at German institutions of higher learning in the last two years of the war.
The policy of the REM towards students from the recently annexed Alsace were motivated by the same goals: the Nazi leadership wanted to integrate this much disputed territory into the Third Reich and, as a concomitant and to some extent contradictory objective, procure professionals for Nazi Germany. This policy did not directly follow from earlier Nazi plans, however. Until 1939, Alsace occupied a subordinated position in Hitler’s plans; the dictator, to the exasperation of some of his advisors, even contemplated using Alsace as a bargaining chip with the French and the English in order to gain a free hand in Eastern Europe. Intoxicated with their easy victory over France, however, Hitler opted for the annexation of Alsace in the summer of 1940. In the same year, a new province, Gau Oberrhein, was created, which merged Baden with Alsace. The Nazis re-drew the borders, re-organized the bureaucracy and, more importantly, tried to turn the ethnically and culturally diverse Alsace into an outpost of German civilization. The resultant destruction of French culture and the “re-education” of the local population took many forms. Zealous Party officials changed street names, prohibited the showing of French plays and films, forced people to change their French-sounding names and advocated the use of literary German at the expense of the local dialect. They even made the wearing of Basque caps punishable under the law. Nazi authorities herded Alsatians into the Hitler Youth, the Labor Service and, in August 1942, into the army. These actions were accompanied by the use of terror against the population. Those who refused to change their political and cultural allegiance (or continued to wear Basque caps) were stamped as racially undesirable and deported together with their families into France or the conquered territories in the East.
In Alsace the REM had to contend with other organizations, mainly the SS, over the direction of cultural policy and the admission of students. The creation, under SS supervision and patronage, of the Reich University in Strasbourg (whose equivalent in the East was the University of Posen), shows just how much power Himmler’s organization had accumulated in the cultural realm since the outbreak of the war. It comes as no surprise that the rapid Nazification of the curriculum (politically sensitive subjects such as history were taught almost exclusively by SS personnel) and student life alienated large numbers of local students. Many of these students crossed the border into France, where they re-established their university as the Universite de Strasbourg in Clermont-Ferrand at the end of 1941. However, it did not take long until the Nazis caught up with them: one year after the German occupation of the whole of France in November 1942, the Nazi government put an end to the existence of the University de Strasbourg in Clermont-Ferrand. An SS squad occupied its buildings and, with the help of doctors, they selected 39 out of the 107 students as carriers of what the Nazis called biologically valuable blood. The rest of the students, together with their teachers, were packed into cattle trucks and shipped to Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
The increasing power of the SS during the war could also be seen from the fact that its Security Service had become more frequently involved in the disciplining of foreign students after September 1939. The SD reported on the presumably neglected outlook and easy-going attitude of many Alsatians, who liked to greet one another with the French “Salut.” The same report also described Alsatian students at German schools as politically unreliable: Alsatians studying in the Reich allegedly spread rumors, avoided work service, especially in armament industries, and withdrew from sports and political activities. The police complained that Alsatians did not mix and they went home regularly for the weekends and found reinforcement of their anti-Nazi attitudes in the circle of their families and friends. Alsatians were allegedly against conscription; according to SD reports, very few registered in the army as volunteers. At the University of Heidelberg, students from Alsace grew beards in solidarity with French students who swore that they would not shave until France was free again.
Besides the SS, the Reich Student Leadership also increased its disciplinary power over students during the war. At the University of Strasbourg, the local student leader interrogated Andreas Germann because he had claimed during his registration in the fall of 1942 that he was French. At the request of the local student leader, the secret police revealed that Germann and his family had been Francophile for generations; his grandfather had supported the French during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Enraged by Germann’s repeated assertion that he was French, the local student leader demanded his immediate expulsion from the school. The REM did not even have the chance to get involved in the case because the university administration, under pressure by the SS and Reich Student Leadership, promptly removed Andreas Germann from the University of Strasbourg at the end of 1942.
While the SS and the Reich Student Leadership were its main competitors, the challenge to the authority of the REM could also come from unexpected directions. The Office of the Reich Master Forester (Reichsforstmeister), supported by local Party officials, for example, wanted to expel six Alsatians from the University of Heidelberg for their refusal to allow their native comrades into the army in the summer of 1942. Although the REM protected these students with the argument that military service had not yet been made compulsory for Alsatians, the harm had already been done; in fear of punishment, the Alsatians left the University of Heidelberg without waiting for the final decision. In March 1943, the German governor in Alsace, Robert Wagner, wanted to restrict students, except those at the University of Strasbourg, to small German towns like Munster, Erlangen, Gottingen and Marburg. He argued for increased police surveillance and political indoctrination because he believed that it might help turn Alsatians into “good National Socialists.” However, this time the REM refused to carry out the request because it feared that a retraction of one of its earlier orders, which had allowed students from Alsace free mobility in Germany, would only exacerbate the situation and increase resistance. Improvement in political indoctrination was not possible either, according to the REM, because student leaders and many teachers were at the front. Instead, the REM proposed exemplary punishments that might frighten other Alsatians into submission. Still, the governor in Alsace was not convinced by this argument and continued to press for restriction of their movement. The REM made one concession: it ordered the rector of the University of Freiburg to initiate a stricter selection process and lower the number of Catholic theology students from Alsace. This concession failed to improve the image of the Nazi government in the eyes of most Alsatian students during the last two years of the war. Frustrated by their treatment at the hands of the Nazi authorities, especially after the spring of 1943, many Alsatian students crossed the border into occupied France.
Nazi Policy Towards Eastern European Students
While foreign students from the newly annexed or conquered states of Western Europe had every reason to complain about Nazi harassment, they still fared much better than their counterparts from the Slavic countries of East-Central and Eastern Europe. The treatment of Slavs at German universities was a direct consequence of Nazi racism and the devastating racial war that the Third Reich waged on the East-Central and Eastern European nations. In the fall of .1939, the Nazis began eliminating the Polish intelligentsia and destroying Polish culture. They closed down schools, leveled historic buildings and stole art treasures and scientific objections from churches, museums and private persons. The Nazis were especially eager to obliterate Polish institutions of higher learning and liquidate their personnel. Teachers and students were also brutally beaten at the universities in L6dz and Kattowitz, and in Krakow 183 university teachers were arrested and sent into concentration camps. In Danzig, a numerus clausus was soon imposed on Poles. In Posen, the Nazis confiscated the buildings, equipment and the library of the university and created an SS-run school similar to the University of Strasbourg.
After a short period of relative tolerance, the Nazis turned against Czech culture as well. In Prague, the new authorities first transferred the German Karl-Universitat in the city to the jurisdiction of the Reich in early November 1939. However, on November 17, in reprisal for a student demonstration held as a protest against the killing of one of their comrades, Nazi security forces attacked university dormitories, executing nine students on the spot and sending 1200 others to concentration camps. After this event, the Nazis ordered the closure of all Czech institutions of higher learning for three years. The universities remained closed during the entire period of German occupation.
The destruction of Slavic cultures shifted into high gear after the attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. The burning of churches and synagogues, the pillaging of museums and research institutions and the leveling of historical buildings and schools were an integral part of Nazi foreign policy, which sought to obliterate every manifestation of Slavic culture from what Hitler and his cronies saw as the new German Lebensraum. Nazis officially closed all institutions of higher learning in the Ukraine, Byelorussia and Russia. The Baltic states formed a special case; from early 1942 on, the Nazis sought to “Germanize” rather than destroy local universities. Thus, they allowed a highly selective and politically reliable group of nonGerman students to continue with their studies and even encouraged freshmen to take courses in the fields of medicine, agriculture, science and technology. At the same time, they wanted to attract more German students and replace native teachers with German personnel. Unfortunately for them, very few German students and professors were eager to move to this war-torn region.
To facilitate the destruction of Slavic cultures, the REM prohibited the admission of Poles and Czechs from conquered Poland and Czechoslovakia to German institutions of higher learning at the end of 1939. Only students who had begun their studies before September 1939 were allowed to stay in school. Ironically enough, along with the Czechs, it also prohibited Slovaks, who were ready to integrate into Hitler’s new order, from enrolling in German schools. Only after months of bickering and pressure from the AA did the REM remove the restrictions on the admission of Slovaks. Russians, except for those who had registered at German universities before September 1939, were permanently barred from German institutions of higher learning after June 1941. The Nazis cared precious little about traditional diplomatic and even economic considerations in the East. Even though the Ukrainians were potential allies against Stalin’s Russia, the REM ordered that Ukrainian students could complete their degree requirements in Germany only if they had begun their studies before September 1939. Similarly, Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians, despite their anti-Soviet attitude, could study in Germany only with the REM’s permission. As a sign of Nazi obsession with race and racial war, the REM also prohibited Serbs and Slovenians from enrolling in German universities in the spring of 1941.
During the war, the SS, which increasingly acted as “a state within a state,” constantly got involved in the recruitment of foreign students and their admission to German universities. The elaboration of the SS goals in the field of “foreign-cultural” policy began soon after the appointment of Himmler as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (Reichskommissar fur die Festigung deutschen Volkstum) in October 1939. By the end of 1941, planners in the Reich Central Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA) of the SS had prepared a number of drafts for the reorganization of Eastern Europe. In January 1942, Himmler charged Professor Konrad Meyer in the Main Section on Planning in the RSHA to develop a structural plan on all problems related to the Germanization and colonization of the eastern regions. In May 1942 Professor Meyer presented Himmler a memorandum entitled “General Plan East, Foundation of the Judicial, Economic, and Territorial Reconstruction of the East.” Over the next twenty-five years, this plan predicted the expulsion of 31 million people from Poland, the Baltic states and the western part of the Soviet Union. These new lands would be resettled by “Teutons” from Nazi Germany, Holland, England and the Scandinavian countries as well as by ethnic Germans from Romania, South Tyrol and Hungary. The plan also foresaw the assimilation of approximately 14 million so-called racially valuable elements, mainly from the Baltic states and to a lesser extent from the Ukraine. These “new Germans” would help with the rebuilding of the freshly conquered territories and would make an important contribution to the next war effort.
The theoretical framework for the Germanization process (Eindeutschung) was worked out by Erhard Wetzel, the director of the central advisory council of the Office for Racial Policy of the Reich Leadership of the NSDAP, who also maintained close ties to the Reich Ministry for the East and to the RSHA. During the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1942, Wetzel prepared three memorandums which discussed, among other things, the policy of the SS towards students from Eastern Europe. Wetzel argued for an increase in the number of students from the Baltic states at German universities for four reasons. First, a few Eastern European students might be persuaded to remain in the country after graduation, thus mitigating Germany’s acute need for professionals. Second, professionals trained in Nazi Germany would provide indispensable help for the occupying authorities seeking to undermine and ultimately destroy native institutions and identities. Third, the employment of German-trained professionals would ensure the smooth and cost-effective exploitation of local peoples and natural resources. Future students and collaborators, however, have to be carefully screened, argued Wetzel. Candidates should undergo strict medical examinations to determine their racial value (Rassewert); then they would be sent into the Labor Service for at least a year. Only after the completion of their studies would they finally be allowed to return home and find employment in the local Nazi bureaucracy.
Hans Ehlich, an SS-Standartenfuhrer working for the RSHA, repeated many of Wetzel’s arguments in a memorandum at the end of 1942. Ehlich stated that students would be among the first targets for assimilation since the Third Reich suffered from a lack of professionals. The assimilation of the talented and ambitious should be promoted because it could head off effective resistance to German power. Selection of students should be based upon ideological and political considerations. Slovaks, for example, should be attracted to German schools in order to turn them away from Pan-Slavism. Serbs should be totally excluded, while Slovenians might be admitted in exceptional cases. Although the policy towards Ukrainians could change in the future, at present they had no place in German institutions. Poles had to be barred from German schools; yet, similarly to the Czechs, a select group of students should be allowed to register and even obtain financial assistance. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians had to undergo a strict selection process, administered by the Reich Student Leadership and the SS, before their enrollment. The goal of Nazi policy towards foreign students, he concluded, was to select the racially most valuable elements and help their assimilation into the German people.
Thus, by the end of 1942, the goals of Nazi policy towards Eastern European students became clear: it generally excluded Slavs from Eastern European countries with which Nazi Germany was at war. However, it made exceptions for groups of candidates selected upon the basis of favorable racial and political criteria. The question is whether the REM and the SS were able to enforce these policies. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, no statistics exist on the ethnic distribution of foreign students during the war. The sources suggest, however, that both Nazi authorities in the occupied countries and university administrators in the Third Reich tended to ignore the REM’s orders. Thus, after the occupation of their country, Czechs, for instance, continued to enroll at the University of Vienna and the Institute for International Trade (Hochschule ftir Welthandel). They also considered studies at the Consul School (Konsulakademie) in the same city. Despite restrictions imposed on their movement by the REM, many went abroad, mainly to Italy, to obtain a degree. Although Czechs who had received foreign citizenship through marriage could not theoretically study at German universities without previous selection, a Czech woman, the wife of a Hungarian chemistry professor, was not only allowed to take course but also worked as an assistant at the Technical University of Prague. She was probably not the only Czech who found a loophole in the system.
The regulations were not rigorously applied to other groups either. Although the Reich Ministry of Education barred Ukrainians from German universities, they continued to enroll at German institutions of higher learning until the end of the war. In 1942, the Security Service reported that many Ukrainians studied at Italian universities. The SD was especially angry at the German authorities in Lemberg who continued to give graduates of Soviet school automatic permission to study in Germany. Over three hundred of these Ukrainians pestered the academic administrators at the University of Munich and demanded that their school-completion certificates (Reifezeugnisse) should suffice for admission. The same report argued that Slovenians also circumvented Nazi regulations and, especially those with Italian and Croatian citizenship, continued to take courses at German universities. At the German University of Prague, the secret police even discovered a resistance group made up of Slovenians from Italy, Croatia, and the German-occupied lands. The situation was most serious at the Austrian schools; at the University of Graz alone there were more than 100 Slovenians who had been admitted without proper selection and proof of political reliability.
While “undesirable” Eastern Europeans continued to study at German universities, the Nazis, paradoxically, failed to recruit “racially pure” Eastern European students in sufficient numbers. This failure reflected in part the unrealistic expectations that the SS attached to the Generalplan Ost. The naturalization of targeted groups on Eastern Europeans began very slowly in early 1942 and soon bogged down in the quagmire of ineptitude and corruption. Because of the reversal of German military fortunes in early 1943, the SS plans increasingly relegated the issue into the background and basically abandoned the plan during the last year of the war. In regards to foreign students, the assimilation of a large number of Eastern European students did not go very far for two reasons. Nazi student activists and local Party officials opposed the SS Plan because they feared that the appearance of a large number of Eastern European males on the campuses would create a backlash among male German students fighting on the Eastern Front. Even more importantly, the naturalization and assimilation of Eastern European students failed because the Nazi authorities were unable to attract students from the occupied territories in significant numbers. Lack of financial support and the extreme imperialist intentions of the Nazi regime discouraged Eastern European students from undergoing the strict selection process and take up their studies in Nazi Germany.
The evolving nature and ultimate failure of Nazi policy can be perhaps best demonstrated with the example of Czech students. As mentioned earlier, the student riot in the fall of 1939 was followed by the closing of Czech universities and the prohibition of the members of this ethnic group from attending German universities. This and similar Nazi measures (such as language ordinances and school restrictions in ethnically mixed areas), their draconian character notwithstanding, at first did not go beyond traditional methods of assimilation. The Nazi authorities in the Protectorate and the bureaucrats in the Reich Ministry of Education even contemplated opening the Czech universities in June 1940. They argued that the closure of these institutions placed an unnecessary burden on the Nazi administration. Academic pursuits would have at least preoccupied the minds of the Czech intelligentsia and confined them to a few institutions where they could have been easily observed.
This relatively moderate policy, championed mainly by the REM and the Reich Protector, Konstantin von Neurath and his state secretary, Karl Hermann Frank, contrasted sharply with the attitude of Nazi radicals in the Office for Racial Policy of the Reich Leadership of the NSDAP. These radicals began preparing proposals for the emigration, assimilation and forced resettlement of Czechs as early as the spring of 1939. Hitler first became involved in the debate in the spring of 1940, when, enraged by SD reports about frequent sexual liaisons between German men and Polish and Czech women, he ordered the immediate dismissal of Nazi officials who had been violating the basic tenets of Nazi ideology. However, probably under the influence of Neurath, who in September 1940 had penned a memorandum advocating the assimilation of the majority of the Czech population, the dictator soon changed his mind on the issue. In the same month, he declared that only a minority of Czechs would be expelled or subjected to what he called “special treatment” after the war. In typical fashion, Himmler seized upon his announcement and jumped into action immediately. In October 1940 he conferred with Reinhard Heydrich (who, in addition to his other duties, acted as the Deputy Reich Protector) about the necessity to conduct racial examinations in the Czech territories. Heydrich then ordered the Race Settlement Main Office (Rasse- and Siedlungshauptamt) of the SS to produce questionnaires which Czech doctors had to complete during the routine medical examination of school children. As a part of the planned assimilationist drive, the Nazi authorities also contemplated the introduction of compulsory labor service for Czech adolescents. Significantly, the draftees for the Labor Service would have had to undergo medical and racial examinations. The idea was dropped only in 1943. Meanwhile German anthropologists and historians scrutinized old conscription records for information such as the height of the recruits that they thought would provide clues to the racial composition of the Czech population. In 1942, mobile X-ray units (SS Rontgensturmbann) traveled the countryside conducting mass screening and racial examinations under the pretext of fighting tuberculosis. Racial experts drew the conclusions from the collected data that the majority of Czechs could be assimilated without detrimental effects on the racial value of the German people.
To speed up the assimilation of Czechs, in August 1942, Nazi authorities withdrew previous legislation that prohibited intermarriage and sexual conduct between Czechs and Germans. They also encouraged Czechs to apply for Reich citizenship. Despite the obvious leniency of the Nazi authorities (especially if compared with their brutal treatment of Poles and Russians), however, these measures failed to attract a considerable number of converts. During the entire occupation, the number of Germans in the Protectorate increased only by 70,000, including immigrant workers and officials from the Reich, thus putting the actual number of converts below one percent of the total population.
The failure of the larger Nazi plans foreshadowed the inevitable debacle of efforts aimed at the naturalization of Czech students. At the end of September 1940, prompted by Hitler’s favorable decision, Nazi authorities revisited the issue of Czech students at German universities. In March 1941, Hitler authorized the Reich Ministry of Education to allow the enrollment of a group of carefully selected students at the German Universities of Rostock, Greifswald and Freiburg as well as at the Technical Universities of Darmstadt and Dresden. Excellent racial characteristics and political reliability were prerequisites for admission. Out of an unspecified number, the Nazis selected thirty-three students. They were put under police surveillance and the REM received regular reports on their behavior. According to these reports, one of them applied for Reich citizenship, another one for membership in the Waffen-SS, and a third expressed great admiration for everything German. The majority of them, however, remained “politically extremely cautious.” The experiment was repeated in the fall of 1941. Out of 20,000 eligible young men and women, only 27 applied. A few months later, due to continuing demand for more professionals, regulations were further relaxed: now, virtually any Czech who had obtained the permission of the Reich Student Leader and the civil authorities in the Protectorate could study at German institutions of higher learning. Although the Reich Student Leadership declared the selection of Czech students a success at the end of 1943, it is doubtful that these new measures attracted more than a handful of Czechs to German universities in the Third Reich.
As the Czech example has demonstrated, Nazi authorities faced serious difficulties in ingratiating themselves with the young. and talented members of the conquered nations. Yet the scattered evidence also suggests that a less rigid policy would have gained more supporters among Eastern Europeans. Instead of welcoming him as a potential collaborator, for example, the police arrested Andreas Muschniski, who had applied to a German university on the basis that he was on the German National List, because they discovered that he was an ethnic Pole. Maria Bozena Steuer had also studied medicine with the permission of the local student leadership at the University of Breslau, when the Party disclosed in 1941 that she was in fact Polish and subsequently expelled her from the university. The propensity of many Eastern Europeans to put their lives and careers ahead of the interests of their nation was not confined to prospective students. In L6dz, for example, a professor of law, Julius Korener, claimed that he was an ethnic German and as such sought employment as a university teacher in the Warthegau. However, the SD reported that he was in fact a Ukrainian known by the name of Koronec. It was true that he had studied in Vienna and had written his dissertation in German; yet his heavy accent betrayed his true ethnicity. The case of Alfred Kokoschinski, a chemist, demonstrates even better the precarious position and moral failings of many intellectuals in the occupied lands. Kokoschinski was Polish on his father’s side and German on his mother’s side. He worked for years as an assistant at the University of Czernowitz (Chernovtsy). After an investigation into his political beliefs, the SD reported that as a young man he had been a Polish nationalist but later transferred his loyalty to the Romanians, a move that could be explained with the changing borders after the First World War. As the war was approaching, Kokoschinski made friends with the German consul and became his hunting companion. By 1939, he had become an ardent German nationalist and the following year even applied for membership in the SS. However, his goal to obtain a teaching position at the University of Posen was probably frustrated by the SD report.
In Germany, the SD relied mainly on denunciations coming from Nazi students, who seem to have been obsessed with foreign students and with the potential that they represented “the pollution of the German race.” German students at the Technical University of Munich complained that foreigners, especially Bulgarians, behaved outrageously in the student eatery. Bulgarians allegedly failed to learn the German language, neglected their studies and brought translators to their examinations. In typical fashion, the SD official was even able to forge a connection between foreign students and Jews. He argued that in Berlin over 50 percent of foreign students rented their accommodation in Jewish homes. Jews, who were forbidden to rent their houses to Germans, offered cheaper rates to foreigners and allegedly acted as go-betweens for foreign students and German women. The report accused Jews of spreading enemy propaganda among students, thus destroying sympathies and ideas implanted during political lectures and social events. The Security Service also painted a dark picture about the sexual appetite of foreigners, especially those from SouthEastern Europe, who purportedly found willing partners among German girls and women.
To head off further resistance among foreign students, at the end of 1941 the Security Service demanded a more rigorous selection of candidates for the fellowships of the Humboldt Foundation. The SD argued that the political past of these candidates should be closely scrutinized, foreign students should be housed in dormitories where they could be closely observed and remain under police surveillance during their entire stay in Nazi Germany. Before their enrollment, foreign students should be instructed on how to behave towards German girls. Foreigners who violate these rules should be immediately expelled both from the school and from Germany and their names should be circulated in order to prevent future admission.
The obsession with sexual relations between German women and foreign students forced the SS to draw up bizarre plans, which it believed would prevent further “racial contamination.” In the spring of 1942, in anticipation of a German breakthrough on the Eastern Front towards the Caucasus, the RSHA proposed the establishment of several universities in the southern part of the Soviet Union. The RSHA wanted to transfer all Turkish and Middle-Eastern students presently taking courses at German universities to these schools. If graduates from these new universities decided to remain in Germany, they would find employment in these newly conquered territories. The SS decreed that not only “non-Aryans” but also German children of mixed marriages would be forced to attend these new universities. Thus “non-Aryans” and “people of mixed blood” could still work for Nazi Germany without endangering its racial purity.
The Reich Ministry of Education did not accept the SS proposals and, for diplomatic reasons, even tried to dull their racist edge. The REM argued that the behavior of foreign students was a minor issue and it should concern mainly the cultural ministries and the universities. Resenting the expanding power of the SS in the cultural field and its involvement in university affairs, the REM demanded that the Security Service should first inform universities and the Reich Ministry of Education about its findings and the right to expel students should remain the prerogative of academic administrators and the REM. In regard to the SS proposals, the REM admitted that many foreigners spoke poor German and their professional training should also improve. These problems, however, could be easily solved through an increase in time devoted to language training and through tougher examinations especially during the first two or three semesters. The REM adamantly opposed the idea that foreigners should be instructed on how to behave towards German women for two reasons. First, it believed that instruction of this kind would be perceived as an insult by prosperous and politically influential foreigners. Second, lectures on sexual morality would make them think that they had to do a favor to German men and that the German government was weak because it could not control its own people. The REM concluded that the sexuality of German women should remain an internal German matter and that the government should deal with this issue calmly and without unnecessary alarm.
Even though the REM dismissed the SS reports, in November 1941, as if to demonstrate that every branch of the Nazi state apparatus suffered from the same paranoia, it ordered university administrators to report regularly on the behavior of foreign students. In early 1942, the AA and the Propaganda Ministry proposed the removal of foreign students to small towns where they could be better observed. The REM again rejected the proposal on the basis that the research institutions and faculties that had attracted foreigners to Germany in the first place were located in the cities. Furthermore, the REM pointed out, small towns lacked the facilities, such as dormitories, to accommodate the large number of foreign students.
While a comprehensive solution eluded Nazi authorities, their obsession with “racial contamination” guaranteed that the issue of foreign students would remain on the agenda until the end of the war. The issue of foreign students was, of course, part of a much larger problem: the influx of foreign workers and the presence of a large number of POWs in Germany after September 1939. The Nazis punished sexual relations between foreigner workers and German women severely: the lot of Eastern European men was death, while German women were publicly humiliated and often sent into concentration camps. As the case of Ursula Richter, a philosophy student at the University of Berlin and her Turkish lover, who studied at the Technical University of Berlin, suggests, however, that Nazi authorities, because of diplomatic considerations, could not judge foreign students by the same standards. Richter had become pregnant and on Yalcindag’s advice visited a Turkish doctor and got an abortion. Exposed by Nazi students who denounced her to the SD, Richter first tried to put the blame on Yalcindag by arguing that he had raped her. The charge did not stick, however, and the Nazi students continued to demand the immediate expulsion of both. Richter and her lover were indeed expelled and imprisoned but, because of the intervention of the Turkish consulate, Yalcindag was soon released. To make it worse for fanatical Nazis, he even took up his studies again and obtained a degree in early 1944.
In most cases, sexual relations between German women and foreign students were the result of the numerical imbalance between the genders that developed during the war. The open rejection of racism by German women probably played little part in these affairs. Most likely many German women engaged in sexual relations with foreigners without denying the validity of racial and ethnic stereotypes. Some may have even taken foreigners into their beds because they believed that foreigners possessed mysterious power and high sexual potency. In most, but not all, cases, as the example of Pia Mayer and her family shows, sexual relations became a political matter only because of the totalitarian pretensions of the Nazi state and the ideological obsessions of its representatives. During her work service at an armaments factory in Augsburg, this student of the University of Prague fell in love with a French prisoner-of-war named Etienne Coste. She introduced him to her parents who agreed to their engagement. However, this love story soon had a tragic end as Nazi students, probably motivated by jealousy, reported the affair to the police. Mayer was arrested and sentenced to prison for six months because her relationship with a foreigner violated the sensitivities of the population. Jealousy clouded the Nazi students’ minds so much that, while the rector was reluctant to expel Pia Mayer, the Reich Student Leadership asked for her permanent removal from German universities.
While the case of Pia Mayer was only about the partial rejection of Nazi ideology, the story of a German female student who refused to stand up during the German national anthem suggests that private and public behaviors were closely connected and that the choosing of a lover or marriage partner from a “tainted group” was both a form of protection and a political protest. This female student justified her behavior with the argument that she had recently married a Bulgarian and, therefore, no longer considered herself German. The university authorities, prompted by the Nazi students and the SD, quickly expelled her from the school in 1941. Three years later, at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, a chemistry student, Lieselotte Burkard, even pretended that she was Bulgarian. Although the university administrators had first tried to defend her by arguing that she was drunk when the incident occurred, finally gave in to the pestering of the local student leader and expelled Burkard from the school.
The presence of foreign male students provided some German girls with the opportunity to temporarily forget about wartime misery and sufferings. Others, however, used foreign students as scapegoats to vent their frustration about the war and the disintegration of German society. In Erlangen, for example, female students in the Labor Service protested that they were lodged in the same barracks with Dutch, French, Italian and Bulgarian female workers, from whom they were separated only by barbed wire. A female student even denounced a male foreign laborer, who worked under terrible conditions, for loafing on the job. It was the complaints of German students that forced the REM to decree that any Bulgarian student caught profiteering would be immediately expelled.
The apparent hostility of German students must have made life even more difficult for foreigners, who had in any case a lot to worry about during the last stage of the war. In 1944, the Reich Ministry of Education decreed several times that every able-bodied male, including foreigners, should take up arms in defense of Germany. Female foreign students also had to work in the factories, act as streetcar conductors and help to clean up the rubble caused by the constant bombing. Only seriously injured war veterans and students whose studies were vital for the war effort were allowed to remain at universities. In 1945, Eastern European students faced a truly existential dilemma: they had to decide whether they should stay in a war-torn Germany where fighting was still going on or return to a homeland that now lay in the Russian-occupied part of Europe. Many probably remained in Germany, thus increasing the number of displaced persons after the war.
Conclusion
The story of foreign students in Nazi Germany tends to lend support for the position of the “moderate structuralist” historians: the Third Reich was indeed characterized by bureaucratic chaos and bureaucratic struggles, coupled with ideological obsessions, which had a radicalizing impact on the regime. The conservative DAAD remained in control of German “foreign-cultural” policy until the removal of Morsbach and his close associates from leadership of this organization in the summer of 1934. This event seriously weakened the DAAD, which came under the supervision of the REM. After 1935, the REM was challenged on all sides, as more and more institutions tried to get involved in German “foreign-cultural” policy. After 1939, and especially after 1941, the most serious challenge came from the SS. Increased power, however, did not mean that the SS was able to realize all its plans. The “fishing for good blood” policy of the SS floundered because of the resistance of the local population and the incompetence of Nazi administrators. At the same time, ironically, the SS failed to prevent the admission of “undesirable” Eastern Europeans to German schools.
The SS and even the REM tended to invoke the ideological goals of the regime in order to justify the harassment and mistreatment of foreigners. At the local level, however, especially after 1942, the same policy served to vent the frustration of German students with the war. The Nazis repeatedly raised the issue of sexual relations between German women and foreign male students because they were fanatics and because they wanted to control every aspect of students’ lives. These sexual affairs, in the majority of cases, were the result of an absence of German male students on the campuses; as far as the parties were concerned, they had nothing to do with politics. Sexual relations between German girls and foreign students did not pose a serious danger to the existence of the regime, even though they do suggest that the Nazi state found it increasingly difficult during the war to enforce its laws. At least in a couple of cases, however, sexual affairs went beyond the level of non-compliance and were rightly perceived both by the representatives of the Nazi state and the couples concerned as a form of protest against a brutal regime and its dehumanizing ideology. Thus the close examination of these sexual affairs suggest that there existed a significant reservoir of resentment against the Nazi regime among German university students and that political resistance in a police state could take unexpected forms.