School art from Nazi era shows children's view of Third Reich

By Tony Paterson in Berlin
Published: 22 October 2005


Punch and Judy are depicted as brutal sadists; the words scrawled on an army lorry by a schoolboy warn the British Prime Minister: "Chamberlain we're coming." Such stirring images are just two of a collection of more than 500 drawings and paintings of Nazi school children's art on show in Munich's Art Pavilion.

After lying unseen in the archives of the city's schools for more than 60 years, the pictures have been put on public show.

The exhibition is the first in post-war German history to illustrate in detail what adolescent school pupils chose or were ordered to draw in the Third Reich while they attended art classes at Munich grammar schools during the 1930s and early 1940s.

Brigitte Zubor, an art historian from Munich university who organised the exhibition, spent months combing art archives of 26 of the city's schools to come up with the exhibits. She said: "They combine an extraordinary mixture of works that display rigid attention to detail and others which simply legitimise the crimes of the Nazi regime."
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article321386.ece

I really don't think people realize that Hitler's rise to power took years. It didn't just happen in minutes.

That's why people get so offended if someone compares Bush to Hitler.

No, this isn't Nazi Germany.

Yet.

But neither was Germany in the early 30's

there's a caveat in the No Child Left Behind Act that requires all the kids' drawings be destroyed?

Wonder how much of that hatred remains? :shrug:

My mother was born in 1932 and is 73 years old. If the kids were drawing these pictures in the 1930s then they would have been at least six or seven years old. They would be at least 68 and most probably over 70.

"Nazi school propaganda material states that attention to careful and accurate artwork is "intended to promote inner cleanliness among pupils"."

That just looks chillingly evil. Never noticed that before.