Types of Ostjuden - An original antisemitic board for teaching race in a Nazi Germany school. 1930s.

Types of Ostjuden - An original antisemitic board for teaching race in a Nazi Germany school. 1930s.

Ostjuden Typen - "Types of Eastern Jews" original antisemitic wooden board for teaching race in the Werner-Heisenberg-Gymnasium high school in Heide. Original photographs of Jews pasted on the board which were displayed in classrooms with the aim of showing the ugliness and facial features of the "Jewish subhuman". Germany, 1930s. Extremely rare.

A hardwood board on which original photographs of Jews were pasted, specifically chosen for their strange appearance, and the caption at the top left: Ostjuden Typen - "Types of Eastern Jews" - the term used by German antisemites to generalize all Jews, claiming that they were all basically "Ostjuden". The photographs show bearded and sidelocked Jews alongside Jews in modern attire, profile photographs of Jewish men and women similar to the models introduced by Hans Günther in his race books in order to identify the nose and facial features of the Jew, as well as photographs of North African Jews.

Facial images of racial types were an integral part of the anthropological-racial field of knowledge, and were also perceived as a natural part of teaching this field in schools. Boards like the one before us were displayed both in German popular literature, in textbooks, and in teaching aids - posters, slides and cards. At the educational level, these facial images helped turn abstract principles such as 'biological diversity' into tangible, scientifically establish common antisemitic physical stereotypes of Jews on the one hand, and lend further validity to a neo-classical ideal of beauty and health that was prevalent in Germany, in which the "perfect" faces of the Nordic races were presented. The anti-Jewish race laws enacted in Nuremberg in September 1935, which degraded the status of Jews to second class and deprived citizenship rights to anyone not of Aryan descent, directly affected the lives of Jews, but these laws had another implication - they established new curricula in schools in Nazi Germany. The new biological conception that was at the center of the subjects was illustrated to the students who were educated on the knees of the distorted racist system, perfection of Aryan creation on the one hand - in the form of posters and presentations of perfect Nordic faces, and the Jew on the other hand who was presented as the lowest of humans.

At the same time, new schools were even established especially for teaching the doctrine of Nazi race theory, such as the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt - National Political Educational Institutions (NPEA) network whose purpose was "to educate national-socialist youth, and to train body and soul for service to the people and the state", the "Hitler Schools" high school network - Adolf-Hitler-Schulen - established at the initiative of Baldur von Schirach, the NS-Ordensburgen - "Castles of the National Socialist Order" also called Schulungsburgen (schools developed for the elite Nazi military ranks - with strict admission requirements for the schools. Candidates had to be between 25 and 30 years old, belong to the Nazi Party, Hitler Youth, Sturmabteilung or Schutzstaffel, be completely healthy physically and be of pure blood without hereditary defects), the Deutsche Heimschule Schloß Iburg which operated between 1942 and 1945 in what was then the city of Iburg in Lower Saxony, was actually a boarding school for teaching race theory (the person in charge was the head office of SS-Obergruppenführer Heißmeyer under the leadership of SS-Obergruppenführer August Heißmeyer. According to Martin Bormann, head of the NSDAP Party Office on October 1, 1942, home schools should become in the future a means of implementing the state's overall educational demand in accordance with the Führer's orders), schools under the Reichsarbeitsdienst - Reich Labor Service, and many others. In these schools that were built especially for this purpose, and in the rest of the schools in Nazi Germany, the students studied race theory as part of the curriculum, and race teaching boards displaying Aryan portraits alongside dark portraits of Jews were common in all classrooms. Teaching materials for the upper grades in Nazi Germany contained guidelines for learning race theory as formulated by Hans Friedrich Karl Günther. Facial images of racial types were an integral part of the school curriculum throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. Teachers in the classrooms used facial templates to teach race, and students accepted it as an unquestionable biological fact.

A board for teaching race in a classroom in Nazi Germany became particularly famous in a photograph showing two German schoolgirls pointing with a pole at the different types of Aryan races (the photograph was published in various places under the heading: Schulungslager für Schulhelferinnen, 1943 - "Training camp for school assistants, 1943"). The racist illustration from 1938 comparing "German youth" to "Jewish youth" titled "From the face speaks the soul of the race" is also known (see example at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), the board comparing senior Nazi regime figures to well-known Jewish philanthropists, as well as countless boards displayed in the textbooks of race theory in Nazi Germany (see at length a systematic review of race teaching materials in Nazi Germany in the book by Hans-Christian Harten - Rassenhygiene als Erziehungsideologie des Dritten Reichs - Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich, Berlin, 2006).

The name "Ostjuden" which appears as the title of the board before us, carried a negative connotation of inferiority and backwardness, and was used mainly in the context of the immigration of East European Jews to German-speaking countries. The aversion and fear of Eastern European Jews were prevalent mainly among German Jews, whose geographical proximity to the area in question brought them into constant contact with its inhabitants: these feelings merged with the common perception in German consciousness of these areas as primitive. Negative opinions, ranging from reservation to revulsion and disgust, were expressed by them towards Eastern European Jews from the beginning of the Berlin Haskalah. The tension remained at the basis of the relationship between the two diasporas and intensified especially when hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were directly exposed to the Jewish masses in the East during World War I, and with the great immigration from there westward after the fighting. The term "Ostjuden" accumulated negative connotations and was used as a racist label against its subjects by the antisemites in Germany. In the pogrom held in the Scheunenviertel district of Berlin in November 1923, the demonstrators shouted: "Ostjuden out" The antisemites gradually used it to generalize all Jews, claiming that they were all basically "Ostjuden". With the invasion of Poland in 1939, the propaganda units of the German army noted the benefit of exposing the soldiers to the "Ostjuden in their natural state" in cities like Krakow, in order to justify the racial policy in the Reich itself: in thousands of letters sent back home, as those responsible for the matter noted with satisfaction, tones of revulsion and disgust arose. Despite this, it was not enough to completely blur the differences between the two populations even in the eyes of the antisemitic German government that destined both to death.

Provenance: The board before us was displayed in the classrooms of the Werner-Heisenberg-Gymnasium high school in Heide (in 1933 the school was renamed "Adolf Hitler School"). We received it from Mrs. Bächli Gerda through our emissary in Germany. The board was kept by her family since the war years, And it was even used in the 1970s for educational instruction against anti-Semitism.

Wooden board: 61x46 cm, board thickness: 2 cm. Thin cardboard boards are glued with photographs of average size: 13x8 cm. Stains around the photos. Good condition.