The cruel politics of textbooks

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Editor's note: One of Adolf Hitler’s first priorities after coming to power was to transform the German education system, expelling teachers who were Jewish, Communist or simply dissident, and rewriting the textbooks. The education of a Nazi child was all-encompassing, from the picture book that depicted Jewish people as insects or cockroaches, to the biology lesson on how species survive by fighting and defeating inferior species, to the math question of “if there are X number of Aryans and Y number of Jews in Europe today, and if the Aryans are growing at the rate of A and Jews at the rate of B, how long before the Jews take over Europe?”  Imagine arriving at this answer yourself, at the age of 12 or 13; imagine how convinced you would be then of the Nazi project; imagine if the numbers were wrong all along because, after all, this is simply a hypothetical math problem, not a political science lesson. The Nazis were confident that, if the young people were properly educated in Nazism, the Third Reich would last for a thousand years.  …