Peter Wolfgang Becker Witness: Napola Student and Hitler Youth

This is how Peter Becker summarized his childhood experiences during the Third Reich. He was born on September 6, 1929, in Germany and first lived 150 miles north of Berlin. At the age of 6, he was enrolled in one of the special schools set up to indoctrinate the future generation of Nazi leaders: one of 43 National Political Education Institutions (or Napola short for Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt), located in Potsdam near Berlin. In an interview for the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust in 1991, Becker explained that he was enrolled in the boarding school after his father died in 1935. He did not understand why his mother left him at this early age and he never got used to the “environment” and being away from home. Then, after he turned 13, he became ill, was discharged from the school, and “became a normal child in a normal public school.”

Dr. Becker is an important witness to the Holocaust. Even though his schooling at the Napola was nothing special, neither his experience as a member in the Hitler Youth, first during the time at the Napola and then as a member of “the regular Hitler Youth outside” — as he put it. School was difficult for many students and his experiences are now a commonplace — bedwetting, illnesses, to be deemed “no longer fit material for the future elite” of Nazi Germany — so much so that we hear about them in novels, documentaries, and films (e.g., “Before the Fall” (Germany, 2004) or All the Light We Cannot See (2014) by Anthony Doerr). What makes Peter Becker’s testimony unique are his insights into the imperceptible indoctrination and his reflections on his own “painful” and “reluctant” acknowledgement of Germany’s unconceivable atrocities.

Becker also talked briefly about his memory of antisemitism. He describes how — maybe surprisingly — “Jews actually were not mentioned very often” at the Napola and in the Hitler Youth. Still, he did become aware of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It is one of the key moments in the interview when he recalls questioning his grandfather after seeing Jewish prisoners: why were not only “the enemies of Germany” but also Jews incarcerated in Sachsenhausen? His grandfather’s answer was simply that Jews were also “enemies of Germany,” and they were “put to work” clearing rubble after an air raid. Young Peter took note but did not think much of it.

After the war, he became a member of a boys’ club established by the Americans to — in Becker’s words — “transform little Nazis into little democrats.” It is only then that he learned about concentration and extermination camps, Einsatzgruppen or Nazi death squads, and the atrocities committed against Jews and others. His candid reflections are striking; he acknowledges “I was asking myself what kind of a Nazi was I, and I think I was 150% Nazi.” It was the beginning of a very slow process that led him to study History in the United Sates to become a Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. There is a beautiful logic in his career choice. The kind of indoctrination to which he was subjected was possible because his knowledge of German history “was very limited” due to his schooling in Nazi Germany. Consequently, he wanted to teach young adults about History. And in this way, he studied History all his life. His reflections, his honesty about his indoctrination, and his evaluation about himself as a boy in the Napola and the Hitler Youth make this interview so extraordinary. At the age of 62, as the Department Chair of History at USC, Dr. Peter Becker did not seek excuses for himself or others. His assessment of the manipulation of young Germans between 1933 and 1945 are based on historical facts and clear-eyed, life-long self-contemplations. In 1991, he was, however, also hopeful. Knowing about and having experienced WWII and the Holocaust guarantees that “a Hitler would never come to power again in Germany.” Sadly, this outlook is today fading, just as the memory of the Holocaust is in danger of vanishing as well. Is the reverse also true? That if one has not lived through such experience, one more easily accepts antisemitism? That if we do not understand the lessons of the Holocaust, we will become more easily receptable to hate, just as the young Becker had? ■