Education for Death
| Education for Death | |
|---|---|
| File:Education for Death.jpg | |
| Distributed by | RKO |
Release date |  15 January 1943 |
Running time | 10 minutes |
| Language | English narration with German dialogue |
Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi is an animated short film produced by Walt Disney and released on January 15, 1943 by RKO Radio Pictures. It was directed by Clyde Geronimi and principally animated by Ward Kimball. The short is based on the non-fiction book of the same name (ISBN 0-374-98905-2) by American author Gregor Ziemer. The cover of that book appears as the short's title card.
Plot
The film features the story of Little Hans, a German boy born and raised in Nazi Germany, who is educated to become a merciless soldier.
At the beginning of the film, a German couple prove to a Nazi supreme judge that they are of pure Aryan blood and agree to give their son, whom they name Hans at the approval of the judge, into the service of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. They are given a copy of "Germany's bestseller," Mein Kampf by the judge as a reward for their service to Hitler. There then follows the only extended comical section of the cartoon, the tone of which is very light compared to the rest of the film. The audience is told that as Hans grows, he hears a distorted version of Sleeping Beauty depicting Hitler as the knight in shining armor rescuing Sleeping Beauty, a huge obese Valkyrie representing Germany, from a wicked witch, representing Democracy. Thanks to this kind of distorted children's story, Hans becomes greatly fascinated with Hitler as he and the rest of the younger members of the Hitler Youth give a portrait of Hitler dressed as a knight the Hitler salute.
In the following segment the audience sees Hans sick and bedridden. His mother prays for him, knowing it will only be a matter of time before the authorities come and take him away to serve Hitler, a Nazi officer bangs on the door to take Hans away, but his mother says he is sick and needs care. The officer orders her to heal her son quickly and have him ready to leave, implying if Hans does not get well, he will be euthanized. He orders her not to do anything more to him that will cause him to lose heart and be weak, explaining that a soldier must show no emotion, mercy, or feelings whatsoever. Hans eventually recovers and resumes his "education" in a school classroom, where Hans and the rest of his classmates, after giving portraits of Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels the Hitler salute, watch as the teacher draws a cartoon on the blackboard of a rabbit being eaten by a fox, prompting Hans to feel sorry for the rabbit. The teacher, furious over the remark, orders Hans to sit in the corner wearing a dunce cap. As Hans sits in the corner as punishment, he hears the rest of the classmates "correctly" interpret the cartoon as "weakness has no place in a soldier" and "the strong shall rule the weak". This sparks Hans to recant his remark, and agrees that the weak must be destroyed.
Hans then takes part in a book-burning crusade, burning any books that oppose Hitler, replacing the Holy Bible with Mein Kampf and the crucifix with a Nazi sword, and burning a Catholic Church. Hans then spends the next several years "Marching and heiling, heiling and marching!" until he reaches his teens still "marching and heiling" until he becomes the "Good Nazi" embroiled in hatred towards anyone else who opposes Hitler, "sees nothing but what the party wants him to see, says nothing but what the party wants him to say, and he does no more than the party wants him to do."
In the end, Hans and the rest of the soldiers march off to war only to fade into rows of graves. Thus Hans's education is complete. "The education... for death."
Production
Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi was released when Disney was under government contract to produce 32 animated shorts from 1941-1945. This was due to the fact that in 1940 Walt Disney spent four times his budget on the feature film Fantasia (1940) which produced very little in the box office. Nearing bankruptcy and faced with a strike that left less than half of his employees on the payroll, Walt Disney was forced to look for a solution to upturn the production of the studio. Physical proximity to the military aircraft manufacturer, Lockheed, made it convenient for the U.S. government to offer Disney a contract for 32 short propaganda films at $4,500 each which would create work for his employees and in turn save the studio.[1]
The dialogue of the characters is in German, neither subtitled nor directly translated by Art Smith's lone English language narration. A voice track of Adolf Hitler in full demagogic rant is used in a torchlight rally scene. A sequence follows in which Hans becomes a Nazi soldier along with other Hitler Youth.
Intended as anti-Nazi propaganda during World War II, the film is rarely shown today, but it is featured on the DVD Walt Disney Treasures: On the Front Lines, a compilation of Disney's wartime shorts released on May 18, 2004.
Relationship to the Ziemer book
Gregor Ziemer, an American author and educator who lived in Germany from 1928-1939, wrote the book Education for Death after fleeing Germany on the eve of World War Two. The book highlights what was going on in the Nazi schooling of the German youth.
The narrative story focuses around a group of youth that under the guidance of a Nazi storm trooper, Franzen, take a hiking trip into the woods. As night falls, Franzen "lectures the troop on their duty to preserve the purity of the human race, and proposes they symbolize this task with a solemn ritual to 'impress on us all that fire and destruction will be the end of those who do not think as we do.'" Franzen then hands out six books: the Talmud, the Koran, the works of Shakespeare, the Treaty of Versailles, The life of Stalin, and the Bible. The books are passed around the circle and each boy spits on the books, hands them back to Franzen who doses them with kerosene and lights them on fire. The troop then sings the Deutschlandlied and the Horst Wessel anthem around the fire.
The book inspired two different adaptations; Education for Death and Hitler's Children. Education for Death took Ziemer's conclusions very seriously as it showed the education of Hans from an innocent, kind youth into a chained and muzzled Nazi drone. The scene of the storm trooper and the hiking trip is transplanted to a classroom where the teacher instructs the students about nature's laws about the strong wolf having the right to kill the weak rabbit. When Hans does not agree with the teacher, he is punished until he falls in line. The scene involving the book burning is part of the ending compilation of Nazi transformation and destruction. It shows a torch-bearing crowd setting fire to a pile of books of: Milton, Spinoza. Einstein, Voltaire, and Mann. It then shows a burning of Mendelssohn's wedding march, an allusion to the Nazi race laws, and burning of a pile of art. [2]
See also
- Walt Disney's World War II propaganda production
- American propaganda during World War II
- Der Fuehrer's Face
Notes
- ^ Raiti, Gerad, The Disappearance of Disney Animated Propaganda: A Globalization Perspective, Animation,2007, 2; 153
- ^ Fishburn, Matthew, Books Are Weapons: Wartime Responses to the Nazi Bookfires of 1933,, Pennsylvania State University Press