Sparta's German Children

The Ideal of Ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps, 1818-1920, and in National-socialist Elite Schools (the Napolas), 1933-1945

Author: Helen Roche Series: Sparta and its Influence

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The use by the Nazi regime of idealised images of ancient Sparta is increasingly recognised as an important element of the Third Reich. This work explores the historical roots and the personal effects of these ideals. The author uses new archival research and freshly-elicited eyewitness testimony, to study the Royal Prussian Cadet-Schools, which trained boys from the age of ten to become army officers, and the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten (Napolas), which aimed to educate the future elite of the Third Reich. She shows that, for over a century, the Spartan paradigm was considered a crucial element in the formation and socialisation of Prusso-German military commanders, and that cadets regarded Spartan youths as their ultimate role-model. During the Third Reich, these ideas were transmuted in accordance with Nazi racial ideology, which presented the Spartans as the most Germanic and racially pure of all Greeks. Pupils at the Napolas were taught the importance of the Spartan example, particularly in terms of heroism and self-sacrifice.A feature of this book is the revealing information its author has collected by interviewing survivors who, as children in the dying years of the Third Reich, were exposed as pupils to Nazi educational methods and ideals.

About the Author

Helen Roche has published studies both of Greek historiography and of the reception of Sparta in modern Germany. Dr. Roche is Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge.

More on this Book

From the eighteenth century until 1945, German children were taught to model themselves on the young of an Ancient Greek city-state: Sparta. From older children, from teachers in the classroom, and from higher authority first in Prussia, then in Imperial and National Socialist Germany, came images of Sparta designed to inculcate ideals of endurance, discipline and of military self-sacrifice. Identification with Sparta could also be used to justify ideas of domination over Germany's eastern neighbours. Helen Roche is the first to examine this still sensitive topic systematically and in depth. She collects and analyses official and published German evocations of Sparta but also, and remarkably, reconstructs the experiences of German children taught to be 'little Spartans' in the Prussian Cadet Corps and National Socialist elite schools, the Napolas. In treating the final, and gravest, period of this process, the author has personally collected testimony from numerous surviving German witnesses who attended the Napolas as children in the early 1940s. That testimony is presented here, in a work which is likely to proof definitive, not only for its treasury of new information, but for its elegant - and humane - analysis.