By Aditya Kumar
“Jews they are and Jews they remain. For our Volk they are poison.”
I recently came across a story children were made to read in Nazi Germany, called “The Poisonous Mushroom”. It begins with a mother teaching her young son Franz, the difference between good mushrooms and poisonous mushrooms by comparing them to good and bad people. But the entire conversation soon turns anti-Semitic.
She tells him: “However they disguise themselves, or however friendly they try to be, affirming a thousand times their good intentions to us, one must not believe them. Jews they are and Jews they remain. For our Volk they are poison. Just as a single poisonous mushrooms can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire Volk.” The Jews were portrayed as the cause of misery, distress, illness and death.
These lines straight away pinpoint Hitler’s anti-Jew propaganda which the Nazis wanted to spread far and wide. They wanted to build a master race of German Aryans whom they considered far superior than the Jews.
Today, we know all these claims about the Jews are fake, but at that time it was pursued to such an extent that people had actually started believing in them, had started seeing their own Jewish friends as evil and inferior.
This tells us the impact such propaganda can have. If young, impressionable children are taught this way from childhood, they will start to think of Jews as villains. Thus, by making the curriculum anti-Jew, children were gradually turned insensitive and hostile towards an entire race of innocent people.
Nazi Germany was a totalitarian state and Hitler did any to everything to fulfill his ideological utopia of a single race of pure bred German-Aryans.
It stuns me that one person could make millions believe in and support his false propaganda. How gruesome life would have been for the Jews who suffered without any fault of their own.
They too were patriotic Germans who were deeply affected by the humiliating defeat in the WW1, they didn’t deserve to be blamed alone for it. It is something truly ghastly to think about.