MRomanych
25th May 2009, 00:47
An interesting article from an unlikely source - The National, United Arab Emirates
Nazi college to become museum
By David Crossland
May 13, 2009
From: www.thenational.ae
VOGELSANG, GERMANY // One of Germany’s biggest Nazi sites, a sprawling training college built to resemble a castle, is being converted into a museum after emerging from a 60-year time warp that left it with an embarrassing wealth of well-preserved symbols, including a giant swastika laid into a floor and the towering figure of a Teutonic torch bearer.
Dominated by a mediaeval-style keep, Vogelsang Castle has a magnificent setting overlooking densely wooded hills in the Eifel region of western Germany. The Nazi party built it in the 1930s to churn out an elite of brainwashed and physically fit bureaucrats to run the Third Reich.
The hilltop complex had been off limits since the end of the Second World War because it served as a military base for Belgian Nato forces who evidently treated the place with kid gloves. They vacated Vogelsang in 2004, forcing German authorities to confront the legacy of Nazi ideology hewn in stone.
Proposals to turn it into a residential home, a luxury hotel or even a leisure park with a Go-Kart race track were dismissed as historians argued that Vogelsang should be used to teach visitors about how the Nazis indoctrinated young people.
“We want to explain how people’s minds and bodies were shaped by the Nazis,” Jost Dülffer of Cologne University, who helped devise a permanent exhibition for Vogelsang, said in an interview. “We want to provide a comprehensive overview here of the Nazi education system.”
Regional authorities are investing €35 million (Dh176m) in the project to build a museum, youth hostel and visitor centre. The museum is not scheduled to be completed until 2011, but a local development company offers guided tours of the site.
It has attracted more than 500,000 visitors since it opened to the public in Jan 2006.
The complex consists of barracks, community halls and sports arenas that hug a steep slope leading down to a lake. It was built between 1934 and 1936 to overcome a severe shortage of staff for government and administrative jobs throughout Hitler’s Reich.
It catered to selected male party members aged between 20 and 30 who usually came from lower middle-class backgrounds. Applicants to the college did not require academic qualifications. It was far more important that they had pure Aryan ancestry and a strong physique, and that they were married.
Robert Ley, Hitler’s head of organisation in the Nazi party who set up Vogelsang and two other such colleges, judged that a man who was not married by 25 was too indecisive to become a senior Nazi official. The final selection came at a ceremony at which Ley looked each candidate in the eye to judge whether he was what he called a “real man”.
The students were called “junker”, a mediaeval term that means “squires” and was part of a strategy to make them feel like a chosen elite. While the communal halls were feudal and elaborately decorated, the sleeping quarters were spartan barracks. That contrast was part of the Nazis’ emphasis on placing the community over the individual, and of instilling military discipline.
“A lot of emphasis was placed on physical activity, sports, even elite sports such as fencing, riding and flying aeroplanes, but also boxing and athletics,” Prof Dülffer said.
The squires did not learn any practical skills at Vogelsang. Instead, ideological indoctrination dominated the classroom agenda. As they sat in echoing stone halls with murals of Teutonic knights glaring down at them, they were taught that the German race was superior and needed “Lebensraum” (unification) in the east.
Lessons included Germanic heritage and recent history from a Nazi standpoint: the glorious rise of Hitler’s party and the outrage of reparations payments imposed on Germany by the Allies after the First World War.
Only 1,500 squires studied at Vogelsang, and none of them finished the three-year course because teaching stopped with the outbreak of war in 1939. Most of them left to join the army and Vogelsang became a military base. Honed to become fanatics, many squires are believed to have committed war crimes.
“This is where the perpetrators were trained,” Prof Dülffer said. “We still don’t know enough about what they ended up doing because we have no comprehensive archive. But most of them joined the army and were deployed on the eastern front in Ukraine, and some became regional officials there.
“The attempt to instil a sense of elite in them probably had a big effect on their behaviour during the war. They were meant to carry out orders unconditionally.”
More than half are believed to have died in the war.
Historians say Vogelsang is a suitable location to explain the Nazis’ indoctrination techniques and to illustrate how they used architecture and even the countryside to propagate their ideology.
The landscaping of the site, with its majestic position on a hill and the terraced layout down the slope, is meant to evoke power.
“There’s genius in the combination of architecture with the landscape,” said Volker Dahm, an expert on Nazi sites who devised a highly regarded museum at Hitler’s Berghof mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps.
The architecture uses a bewildering mixture of ancient Greek and Roman styles, Christian symbols, Germanic legends and modern functional designs that were concocted into a pseudo-religious philosophy.
Teutonic knights on horseback adorn two bombastic pillars at the entrance. Above a fireplace in the canteen, German riders with spears gallop eastwards. The main hall contained a pseudo-religious “cult chamber”, where students held ritual ceremonies.
Mr Dahm said such sites as Vogelsang are worth preserving because they help give a complete picture of the Nazi era. “The concentration camps offer limited scope to give visitors a historic understanding of the rise of the Nazis because they obviously place emphasis on the remembrance of the victims,” Mr Dahm said in an interview.
“In places such as Auschwitz, respect for the victims makes it inappropriate to explain the propaganda and the political seduction the Nazis waged.
“But without that aspect one can’t understand why this regime was accepted and even enthusiastically celebrated by the German people,” Mr Dahm said.
That makes Nazi sites such as Vogelsang, the Berghof and the Nazi party rallying ground in Nuremberg so important. “They’re complementary. Only by having such sites and the concentration camps together can you give a comprehensive picture to future generations.”
Photo from article: The Vogelsang training college was meant to churn out officers to lead the Third Reich.
Nazi college to become museum
By David Crossland
May 13, 2009
From: www.thenational.ae
VOGELSANG, GERMANY // One of Germany’s biggest Nazi sites, a sprawling training college built to resemble a castle, is being converted into a museum after emerging from a 60-year time warp that left it with an embarrassing wealth of well-preserved symbols, including a giant swastika laid into a floor and the towering figure of a Teutonic torch bearer.
Dominated by a mediaeval-style keep, Vogelsang Castle has a magnificent setting overlooking densely wooded hills in the Eifel region of western Germany. The Nazi party built it in the 1930s to churn out an elite of brainwashed and physically fit bureaucrats to run the Third Reich.
The hilltop complex had been off limits since the end of the Second World War because it served as a military base for Belgian Nato forces who evidently treated the place with kid gloves. They vacated Vogelsang in 2004, forcing German authorities to confront the legacy of Nazi ideology hewn in stone.
Proposals to turn it into a residential home, a luxury hotel or even a leisure park with a Go-Kart race track were dismissed as historians argued that Vogelsang should be used to teach visitors about how the Nazis indoctrinated young people.
“We want to explain how people’s minds and bodies were shaped by the Nazis,” Jost Dülffer of Cologne University, who helped devise a permanent exhibition for Vogelsang, said in an interview. “We want to provide a comprehensive overview here of the Nazi education system.”
Regional authorities are investing €35 million (Dh176m) in the project to build a museum, youth hostel and visitor centre. The museum is not scheduled to be completed until 2011, but a local development company offers guided tours of the site.
It has attracted more than 500,000 visitors since it opened to the public in Jan 2006.
The complex consists of barracks, community halls and sports arenas that hug a steep slope leading down to a lake. It was built between 1934 and 1936 to overcome a severe shortage of staff for government and administrative jobs throughout Hitler’s Reich.
It catered to selected male party members aged between 20 and 30 who usually came from lower middle-class backgrounds. Applicants to the college did not require academic qualifications. It was far more important that they had pure Aryan ancestry and a strong physique, and that they were married.
Robert Ley, Hitler’s head of organisation in the Nazi party who set up Vogelsang and two other such colleges, judged that a man who was not married by 25 was too indecisive to become a senior Nazi official. The final selection came at a ceremony at which Ley looked each candidate in the eye to judge whether he was what he called a “real man”.
The students were called “junker”, a mediaeval term that means “squires” and was part of a strategy to make them feel like a chosen elite. While the communal halls were feudal and elaborately decorated, the sleeping quarters were spartan barracks. That contrast was part of the Nazis’ emphasis on placing the community over the individual, and of instilling military discipline.
“A lot of emphasis was placed on physical activity, sports, even elite sports such as fencing, riding and flying aeroplanes, but also boxing and athletics,” Prof Dülffer said.
The squires did not learn any practical skills at Vogelsang. Instead, ideological indoctrination dominated the classroom agenda. As they sat in echoing stone halls with murals of Teutonic knights glaring down at them, they were taught that the German race was superior and needed “Lebensraum” (unification) in the east.
Lessons included Germanic heritage and recent history from a Nazi standpoint: the glorious rise of Hitler’s party and the outrage of reparations payments imposed on Germany by the Allies after the First World War.
Only 1,500 squires studied at Vogelsang, and none of them finished the three-year course because teaching stopped with the outbreak of war in 1939. Most of them left to join the army and Vogelsang became a military base. Honed to become fanatics, many squires are believed to have committed war crimes.
“This is where the perpetrators were trained,” Prof Dülffer said. “We still don’t know enough about what they ended up doing because we have no comprehensive archive. But most of them joined the army and were deployed on the eastern front in Ukraine, and some became regional officials there.
“The attempt to instil a sense of elite in them probably had a big effect on their behaviour during the war. They were meant to carry out orders unconditionally.”
More than half are believed to have died in the war.
Historians say Vogelsang is a suitable location to explain the Nazis’ indoctrination techniques and to illustrate how they used architecture and even the countryside to propagate their ideology.
The landscaping of the site, with its majestic position on a hill and the terraced layout down the slope, is meant to evoke power.
“There’s genius in the combination of architecture with the landscape,” said Volker Dahm, an expert on Nazi sites who devised a highly regarded museum at Hitler’s Berghof mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps.
The architecture uses a bewildering mixture of ancient Greek and Roman styles, Christian symbols, Germanic legends and modern functional designs that were concocted into a pseudo-religious philosophy.
Teutonic knights on horseback adorn two bombastic pillars at the entrance. Above a fireplace in the canteen, German riders with spears gallop eastwards. The main hall contained a pseudo-religious “cult chamber”, where students held ritual ceremonies.
Mr Dahm said such sites as Vogelsang are worth preserving because they help give a complete picture of the Nazi era. “The concentration camps offer limited scope to give visitors a historic understanding of the rise of the Nazis because they obviously place emphasis on the remembrance of the victims,” Mr Dahm said in an interview.
“In places such as Auschwitz, respect for the victims makes it inappropriate to explain the propaganda and the political seduction the Nazis waged.
“But without that aspect one can’t understand why this regime was accepted and even enthusiastically celebrated by the German people,” Mr Dahm said.
That makes Nazi sites such as Vogelsang, the Berghof and the Nazi party rallying ground in Nuremberg so important. “They’re complementary. Only by having such sites and the concentration camps together can you give a comprehensive picture to future generations.”
Photo from article: The Vogelsang training college was meant to churn out officers to lead the Third Reich.