Nazis on Celluloid

The staggering problem of a generation of German children systematically taught to be fanatical Nazis is dramatized for the U.S. cinemasses in two new films released this week. Both are based on Education for Death, best-selling (1941) study of Nazi education by Gregor Ziemer, onetime head of the American Colony School in Berlin (TIME, Nov. 3, 1941).

Hitler's Children, a full-length movie, confects a boy-girl romance as a vehicle for Ziemer's report on Nazi child-training. In Berlin a German-born U.S. schoolgirl meets a U.S.-born German lad who is being indoctrinated in a Nazi school. Several years later he is a Gestapo officer, she a teacher at Berlin's American school. In the course of their tragic, not too credible romance, the camera visits German parents fearful that their offspring will snitch on them, a girls' work camp where rabbit morals are encouraged, a state home for unwed mothers (beams a pregnant Fraulein: "I hope I have much pain. I want to suffer for der Fuehrer"). Most awesome shot: thousands of children ringed about a pillar of flame in a midnight, midsummer pagan ceremony, dedicating their lives to Hitler.* Most terrifying shot: a busy Frauen Klinik where women are being sterilized.

Education for Death is Walt Disney's distillation of Ziemer's survey to a nine-minute cartoon--a sort of Pinocchio in reverse. Little Hans is educated into a heiling, marching puppet, at last becomes a wooden cross marker in a vast military cemetery. Funniest bit: a Nazified fairy tale, in which the handsome, armored Prince (Hitler) wakes the rotund, snoozing Princess (Germany) with a kiss, lugs her away on a white horse to a boozy version of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. Most pointed bit: little Hans is punished for sympathizing with a fabled rabbit devoured by a wolf. Hans learns his lesson: "I hate the rabbit--the rabbit is a weakling --he is no Nazi rabbit."

* Hitler's Children was previewed last week for a group of tough Manhattan schoolchildren. They concluded they were not so abused by their teachers as they had thought.

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