The Biopolitics of Education in the Third Reich’s ‘Special Schools’ and ‘Elite Schools’

Roche, Helen; Pine, Lisa

doi:10.1017/s0018246x22000358

The Biopolitics of Education in the Third Reich’s ‘Special Schools’ and ‘Elite Schools’

Roche, Helen; Pine, Lisa

Authors

Dr Helen Roche helen.b.roche@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Lisa Pine

Abstract

While discussion of eugenics and biopolitics during the Third Reich has largely focused upon the regime's most destructive and genocidal policies, this article concentrates on Nazi ‘special schools’ and ‘elite schools’ as a crucial sphere of quasi-eugenic thought and praxis, drawing attention to education as a previously under-researched category of intervention in the history of modern biopolitics. The article also sheds new light on the racialized nature of the Nazi ‘national community’ (the Volksgemeinschaft), and contributes to recent debates on the Third Reich's status as a ‘racial state’ which suggest that the National Socialist regime was driven less by fanatical adherence to racial ideology, and more by a mixture of anthropological and eugenic racism, combined with productivist pragmatism. The two case-studies draw attention to less familiar corners of the National Socialist pedagogical landscape, covering both extremes of the spectrum of biological selection in education, from the negative, eugenic policies applied to supposedly ‘abnormal’ pupils at the so-called ‘special schools’ (Hilfsschulen), to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the National Political Education Institutes (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten, NPEA), the regime's principal training institutions for the future elite of the Third Reich.

Citation

Roche, H., & Pine, L. (2023). The Biopolitics of Education in the Third Reich’s ‘Special Schools’ and ‘Elite Schools’. Historical Journal, 66(2), 413-434. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x22000358

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Dec 7, 2022
Online Publication Date	Jan 3, 2022
Publication Date	2023-03
Deposit Date	Dec 22, 2022
Publicly Available Date	Dec 22, 2022
Journal	The Historical Journal
Print ISSN	0018-246X
Electronic ISSN	1469-5103
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	66
Issue	2
Pages	413-434
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x22000358

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