In 1926, the President of the German Reich Committee for Physical Exercise (Deutscher Reichsausschuss für Leibesübungen, or DRAL) Theodor Lewald discussed the significance of sports for the German economy and national health in a presentation to the Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce. Lewald deplored the physical state of the German population as a consequence of the lost war. Two million of the physically and mentally strongest German men had been killed, while millions of German men, women, and children were permanently physically weakened as a result of starvation during the war and the allied hunger blockade after the armistice. To make matters worse, the hygienic benefits of military service that had guaranteed the physical strength and fitness of male youth had been lost. Prior to the war about 500,000 men had served in the German army or navy where they had learned regimens of cleanliness, order, and discipline. According to Lewald, by limiting the size of the German army to 100,000 men, the victorious allies had not only weakened Germany militarily, but they had also tried to paralyze Germany economically by permanently weakening the “strength of the German people” (deutsche Volkskraft).Footnote ¹

In this formulation, Lewald presupposed a connection between compulsory military service, the physical and psychological fitness of the German population, and the state of the German economy. Citing President Hindenburg's autobiography, he claimed that army service had instilled inner strength and self-confidence into the physical and psychological performance potential of thousands of men. Now, not only the educational benefits of military conscription were lost, but gone also were the annual medical inspections of new recruits that had provided the most reliable measures for the state of the nation's health. Even so, the remaining general medical statistics along with social insurance statistics of the state sickness, accident, and disability insurance system gave some alarming information about the burdens that the lack of fitness of the population posed for the German economy. In this context, the improvement of the overall health and performance level of the German population was seen to be the key to controlling spiralling social insurance costs. This could best be achieved by promoting sports and other physical activities for which Lewald tried to enlist the support of the Berlin business community.Footnote ²

Conditioning the body for performance was, in Lewald's view, an integral part of Germany's biological reconstruction efforts after the lost war. Along with a number of physicians, psychologists, business leaders, and government officials, people such as Lewald promoted performance conditioning through sports as part of a comprehensive program to rebuild and refine human resources. Since they successfully mobilized scientific, financial, and political support for sports and physical education, “Leibesübungen” became an important element of qualitative population policies that aimed at the restoration of the productive capacities of the German population.

In this essay, I will focus on two aspects of performance conditioning through sports and sports research. In the first part of the essay, I will consider proposals by medical scientists and physical educators to condition the bodies of workers and athletes in order to improve the overall fitness and productivity of the population. Increasing the physical performance levels of the German population in general was an important aspect of Weimar biopolitics understood in a broad sense as attempts to manage and improve the physical and psychological condition of the German population in a systematic manner.Footnote ³ The second part of the paper focuses on the use of sports to transform the human psyche. Psychological conditioning through sports and physical exercise was a central aspect of Weimar sports discourses. Sports psychologists and physical educators believed that sports were not only important for the physical health of the German national community, but they also argued that sports were important for building character. Sports would raise the productivity of people by instilling in them a performance-oriented habitus based on a strengthening of the will and self discipline. Some also claimed that physical exercise was an important tool to enhance the mental performance level of students as well as adults.

By focusing on the utilitarian aspects of promoting sports, I do not want to deny the pleasurable aspects of sports. During the 1920s, sports were regarded as a mass entertainment, not just in Germany but in most Western societies. German promoters of sports were particularly impressed by the prominent role of popular, college, and professional sports in the United States. The rise of mass spectator sports—in particular soccer, cycling, and boxing—as well as the millions of people who joined sporting voluntary associations during the Weimar period attest to a widespread popular fascination with sports as part of a hedonistic mass culture. The sports literature of the 1920s left out no opportunity to promote exercise as a wholesome way of fun, and there is no reason to believe that the popular mass enthusiasm for sports was not genuine. People's enthusiasm for sports and the promotion of sports for utilitarian purposes are not contradictions, however. Because it was fun, many people considered sports a promising instrument for the creation of fitter and performance-oriented individuals.Footnote ⁴

Weimar discussions about physiological and psychological dimensions of sports were tied into wider debates about a “human economy” (Menschenökonomie) that aimed at the conservation, restoration, and rational utilization of human resources in the broadest sense. As I argue, debates about sports performances and physical and psychological conditioning through sports reflected wider interventionist trends and concerns with productivity in German medicine and psychology in the early twentieth century. The treatment and rehabilitation of war hysterics, for example, was based on the assumption of German psychiatrists that war victims had to be turned into productive citizens as quickly as possible—to prevent them from becoming permanent economic burdens to German society.Footnote ⁵ Similar assumptions underpinned the rehabilitation efforts aimed at the war-wounded with permanent disabilities.Footnote ⁶

Based on a wide range of medical surveys, Weimar physicians expressed concerns about the ways in which the poor health and weak constitutions of workers, schoolchildren, apprentices, and university students threatened the productivity of an already weakened nation. Historians of science and medicine have at great length discussed the demands by Weimar medical experts to improve the future fitness of the nation through eugenics.Footnote ⁷ This emphasis on hereditary health was complemented by other Weimar projects that tried to improve the mental and physical performance levels of individuals and by extension of the nation. Whether one looks at the impressive increase of maternity and infant clinics that tried to ensure the health of mothers and infants, the proliferation of welfare services for youths, or the attempts by physiologists and psychologists to utilize better the abilities of workers, such efforts were part of qualitative population policies that tried to nurture the performance potentials of children and adults.Footnote ⁸

This essay demonstrates that the promotion of mass sports (Breitensport) was central to Weimar strategies to improve the quality of the German population. While not trying to improve people's genes directly, such efforts were part of a “care for the hereditary endowment” (Anlagenpflege) that tried to make sure that people could live up to their full hereditary potential without being stunted by an adverse environment. As I argue, sports constituted an underappreciated aspect of qualitative biopolitics or “Menschenökonomie” that included both eugenic and environmental approaches. Along with social welfare, better nutrition, and improved housing, medical professionals, psychologists, and physical educators promoted sports not only as a way of strengthening the physical constitution and health of people. Many of them also believed that sports mobilized psychological performance potentials that raised people's enthusiasm for physical and mental work. During the 1920s, such an emphasis on improving the productivity of the populace paved the way for close collaborations between the work and sports sciences. Their efforts were part of a larger biopolitical discourse about a “human economy” (Menschenwirtschaft) that aimed at the rational development, refinement, and deployment of human resources in the interest of national efficiency. These concerns continued to be important after 1933, which is why the final section of the essay briefly discusses the role of sports in qualitative population policies during the late Weimar Republic and Nazi periods.

Conditioning the Body for Physical Performance

In 1920, the German Reich Committee for Physical Exercise (DRAL) celebrated the founding of the “German University for Physical Exercise” in Berlin (Deutsche Hochschule für Leibesübungen, or DHfL) in the presence of Reich President Friedrich Ebert.Footnote ⁹ In his opening speech, the president of the DRAL, Theodor Lewald, emphasized the central role that the DHfL was to play in the reconstruction of Germany. “Physical Healing” through physical exercise should provide the “strength for mental and moral renewal.” The school was not to breed “brainless athletes” but the “harmoniously developed human leader (Führermensch) of the future who, based on healthy physical strength, full of courage and the will of deed (Tatwillen), mentally trained with the entire armory of science, with sober judgment and self-confident patriotic feeling should show his people the path to new heights.” Lewald pointed here to one of the main purposes of the new institution: the education of academically and practically trained sports and physical education teachers who would become the backbone of a broad-based physical education offensive in schools and private sports associations.Footnote ¹⁰

Like Lewald, Carl Diem, the designated acting director of the DHfL and General Secretary of the DRAL, explained the founding of the institution as a response to the human losses of the war. Since the leadership of German gymnastics and sports associations had been decimated by the war, the DHfL had to replace them. Diem—probably best known for his role as chief organizer of the 1936 Olympics—was a tireless promoter of popular fitness through mass sports.Footnote ¹¹ In his view, it was necessary to raise the “health of the people” and their “strength of will.” Only gymnastics and sports were suited to develop human beings with firm and balanced characters who were filled with a joy of life, and most importantly the “will to work.” In other words, sports were to create a performance-oriented individual physically “accustomed to the strains of life” (anstrengungsgewohnt) in post-war Germany.Footnote ¹² A brochure of supporters of the new institution pointed out the promotion of physical exercise was crucial to the survival of the German nation: “The will and the ability of the German people to work are characteristics of the German people” that even the war could not take away. Therefore the strength and health of the people (Volkskraft und -gesundheit) were “our most precious and noble capital,” which had to be increased through physical exercise.Footnote ¹³ The language of these remarks points to one of the most important economic and political themes in Weimar debates about health and sports: after the losses of the war human beings were considered a precious resource for the economic recovery of the nation—a source of human capital that could be augmented and refined through sports and physical exercise.

The DHfL was conceived as a private institution of higher education run by the DRAL, the umbrella organization of so-called “bourgeois” (bürgerliche) sports and gymnastics federations. The DRAL was by far the largest sports federation in Weimar Germany.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite the private character of the “Hochschule,” the interest of the Reich government in the institution was considerable. President Ebert and other high-ranking government officials attended the opening ceremony, and almost half of the budget for the institution came from the Reich Ministry of the Interior.Footnote ¹⁵

The Reich support for the DHfL should be seen in the context of greater financial and political support for sports and “Leibesübungen” more generally. During the 1920s, support for sports increased on all levels of government because officials believed that physical exercise was essential for the physical recovery of the German population. In 1921, a sports fund was created in the Ministry of the Interior to support sports-related activities and institutions such as the DHfL which were to serve as a national model for sports and sports teacher education. In 1928, the fund distributed 1.5 million Reichsmarks, and there were smaller funds available in other Reich ministries for the support of sports.Footnote ¹⁶

Before the 1920s, there was little federal support for sports, in part because sports were considered the province of the states. Prussia along with other states also used public funds for the support of sports. Until 1931, Prussia supported sports-related activities along with sports medicine with about one million marks, and a considerable part (three million RM) of the funds for youth welfare (Jugendwohlfahrt) was also earmarked for sports-related activities.Footnote ¹⁷ The Prussian gymnastics teacher seminary in Berlin-Spandau was turned into the “Prussian College for Physical Exercise” (Preussische Hochschule für Leibesübungen, or PHfL) which the Prussian government tried to build up as a competition for the DHfL. In addition to this, the states founded University Institutes for Physical Exercise (Hochschulinstitute für Leibesübungen) at universities, which promoted physical exercise in order to increase the fitness of university students.Footnote ¹⁸ To be sure, the combined state and federal support for sports was probably still rather modest, especially if one believes sports physicians and officials who always complained about insufficient financial support; however, there is evidence that municipalities and local governments poured considerable resources into the support of sports. This included building minor and major sporting venues, such as the major stadiums in the cities of Munich, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Cologne built in the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁹ The 1920s also witnessed a founding wave of “City Offices for Physical Exercise” (Stadtämter für Leibesübungen). These administrative bodies served as a liaison between local government and private sporting associations. They organized the provision of sports fields for schools and sports clubs and promoted physical exercise among the population at large. According to Carl Diem, their task was to ensure that schools, sports associations, and the government promoted physical activities that strengthened all those who were physically weak, kept the healthy healthy, and enabled the physically talented to become champions. In his vision, the Stadtämter were an integral part of a physical education offensive for the population in general.Footnote ²⁰ According to a 1927 survey by the DRAL, there were twenty cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants that had founded Stadtämter after the war and there were many smaller cities that had designated offices to administer sports fields and/or promote sports or activities related to physical education.Footnote ²¹

City officials such as Dr. Wagner, the mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of the Silesian city of Breslau, made clear their belief that physical exercise countered the population's moral waywardness and degeneration. Wagner saw in physical conditioning (Körperertüchtigung) a means to create productive citizens because “it is shocking to see how many funds a city such as Breslau has to raise for all those who were physical and moral failures.”Footnote ²² The specter of rising welfare expenses—attributed to a decline of the moral fiber and physical fitness of the population at large—was thus one of the reasons that Weimar municipalities promoted Leibesübungen.

The claim that regular exercise prevented illness and social dependency by making people socially and economically self-sufficient was made frequently. Citing memoranda by labor minister Brauns of the Center party and the statistical office of the Reich, Theodor Lewald painted a devastating picture of German national health that imposed grave burdens on the German national economy. He claimed that the expenses of health insurance funds had risen by thirty-seven percent from 1924 to 1925 which was in part due to the rise in sick days from 187.5 million to 229 million. Early invalidity was on the rise at a time when—as a consequence of the war—there were fewer people of working age than in previous generations. In order to preserve the working capacity of people into old age, he insisted that the entire population be subjected to exercise from an early age.Footnote ²³ The DRAL had no trouble enlisting support from renowned members of the medical profession for such demands, since many shared the assumption that exercise and sports promoted health and social fitness and contributed to lower social and health insurance costs. They justified their support for Leibesübungen in economic terms—as an investment in Germany's productive future that prevented illness and invalidity.Footnote ²⁴ In Lewald's view, physical exercise would also significantly lower the costs of accident insurance, because more than half of all accidents were caused by a lack of physical dexterity.Footnote ²⁵

The mayor of Berlin, Gustav Böß, maintained that sports-educated people were “competent in life” (lebenstüchtig), and he was glad to see that the national business community (Volkswirtschaft) recognized in sports the “unrecovered treasures” (ungehobenen Schätze) necessary for the “struggle for survival.” Experience showed that the strength of the Volk grew on the sports field where the “physical devaluation” (physische Entwertung) of people had to be stopped. By using the term “Entwertung”—an allusion to the hyper inflation of 1923—Böß tried to make a connection between the economic chaos of the German post-war crisis and the physical state of the German population. The implication was that human bodies were precious economic capital whose value had to be carefully preserved.Footnote ²⁶ In Böß's view, it was urgent “to care for and develop the forces of the people that we still have” because medical surveys had shown that one third to a fourth of all school leavers in big cities lacked the physical strength to take up gainful employment.Footnote ²⁷ Böß was one of the most vocal advocates of Leibesübungen in Weimar Germany. As the mayor of the largest city in Germany, he used his influence to lobby successfully members of the Prussian Landtag to provide youth welfare funds for Leibesübungen. He also convinced leading businessmen to create a private foundation which, according to a report of the Berlin Stadtamt für Leibesübungen, provided considerable sums for the financial support of public sporting facilities.Footnote ²⁸

That sports and gymnastics were widely regarded as a means for the biological reconstruction of the German nation is also evident in the prominent role given to physical exercise during the large hygiene exhibition Ge-So-Lei in Düsseldorf. The acronym Ge-So-Lei stood for Health Care, Social Welfare, and Physical Exercise (Gesundheitspflege, Soziale Fürsorge und Leibesübungen). The exhibition propagated preventive hygiene and exercise as means to rebuild national health. It took place over a period of several months in 1926 and attracted more than seven million visitors. For Ernst Poensgen—a major industrialist, promoter of sports, and co-organizer of the event—the Ge-So-Lei had great economic importance because it pointed the way to a rational human economy (rationelle Menschenwirtschaft) by demonstrating how human beings could preserve their health and working capacity, prevent impairments, and remedy damage to their health. Poensgen's goal was to rebuild the working capacity of people so that they could deliver work performances of the highest level with great endurance.Footnote ²⁹ The emphasis of Ge-So-Lei sporting exhibitions, therefore, was on exercise for the mass of the population. Gymnastics associations and sports clubs demonstrated the athletic skills and fitness of their mostly male members. Athletes introduced different sports ranging from gymnastics and track and field disciplines to soccer and handball competitions to encourage visitors to take up physical exercise “in order to boost their physical abilities.”Footnote ³⁰

The idea that sports and sports-related activities were a means to create reliable and productive workers ensured considerable support for sports from private industry. In 1920, for example, German industry supported the DRAL with several million RM hoping that sports would help ease tensions in industrial relations. The electrical giant Siemens and a couple of Berlin banks also helped to finance the construction of sports fields in the capital. Throughout the 1920s, sports were credited with raising the productivity of the workforce. In 1927, the Siemens company newspaper, for example, praised exercise as a means to compensate for the unavoidable one-sided physical burden that industrial labor imposed on workers. Sports would also “increase our economic performance through exercise and training of physical and mental traits” that were important for job performances.Footnote ³¹

During the 1920s, the DHfL in Berlin would become one of the most important German institutions for training sports and physical education teachers as well as an internationally recognized institution for research into various aspects of work and sports performance. High expectations about the DHfL were closely linked to expectations about the rational manageability of physical performance in fields such as work physiology.Footnote ³² In the 1920s, the Hochschule established a close collaboration with the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Work Physiology (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute für Arbeitsphysiologie, or KWIA) that existed from 1921 to 1929. The director of the physiological-experimental department of the KWIA, Edgar Atzler, was also the director of the physiological institute of the DHfL. Atzler and his assistants worked on issues that were relevant for work and sports physiology; however, his work was determined by his own research interests, since his contract with the DHfL specified that there was to be no interference from officials of the Hochschule.Footnote ³³ The close collaboration between the two institutions came about because work and sports physiology promised to provide basic knowledge on the “optimization” of processes of physical labor in sports and work. According to this view, sports were a special form of physical labor. The understanding of athletic performances therefore had implications for the rationalization of physical labor in industry and vice versa.Footnote ³⁴

The KWIA's journal Arbeitsphysiologie, one of the leading international journals on work physiology, was devoted to research on the “physiology of man at work and during sports.”Footnote ³⁵ German research on work and sports physiology focused on increasing the overall efficiency of physical labor. Time and motion studies sought to gain insights into the nature of sports performance by dissecting complex movements into basic elements. The Frankfurt sports physician O. Schmith, for example, analyzed films of the runs of elite hurdlers in this way.Footnote ³⁶ Such research was based on the assumption that all forms of labor in sports and work could be divided into basic elements of movements, for each of which the optimum energy efficiency was experimentally determined in respiration studies. The hope was to provide scientific knowledge for the design of machinery, sports equipment, and the organization of work processes. Time and motion studies would provide a scientific basis for determining the lengths of working periods and the spacing and durations of work breaks in order to assure the most efficient use of physical labor.Footnote ³⁷

Initially, sports physiologists as well as physical educators thought that it was possible to dissect human movements in order to establish degrees of efficiency for work processes and sports movements.Footnote ³⁸ Atzler thought that there were about thirty to forty basic different movement components that in various combinations could account for all physical movements in human beings. By disassembling and joining these elementary movements one could create the most complicated movement forms in human beings, in a way similar to that in which the vocabulary of a language could be created from the letters of the alphabet. By determining the energy used for each of the elementary movements, Atzler hoped to develop strategies for optimizing movement complexes. By 1925, his research program had managed to determine the energy efficiency of five elementary movements (such as weight lifting under different working conditions), and he hoped that in coming years he would be able to examine the rest of them.Footnote ³⁹

From a practical point of view, however, an analytical approach such as Atzler's proved to be unsatisfactory because it promised few immediate possibilities of practical applications. Atzler himself estimated that it would take his laboratory about a year to assess the conditions for the optimal efficiency of a single work or movement component.Footnote ⁴⁰ The emphasis of physical educators shifted, therefore, toward a more holistic assessment of movement complexes that relied a great deal on the experience of coaches and athletes and therefore promised greater practicability.Footnote ⁴¹ In the mid-1920s, research by work and sports physiologists was based on the assumption that the physiological processes were the same for work and sports performances. Scientific knowledge based on one type of performance was therefore considered directly applicable to the other. Sports research could provide insights into the nature of physical performances in general and thus provide insights for the rationalization of physical labor. The KWIA, for example, promoted research on the ways in which physical activities during work breaks might counter fatigue and restore the overall performance level of workers.Footnote ⁴² The goal was to find out how to intensify physical labor without compromising the long-term health and performance levels of workers. In an Universum Film AG (UFA) movie, with the title “Work Capacities and their Protection” (“Arbeitskräfte und ihre Schonung”), work physiologists promoted rationalization as a kind of sustainable performance management that guaranteed higher workplace productivity by allowing for recovery periods to restore the working capacity of employees.Footnote ⁴³

Sports fulfilled an important rationale in this “human economy.” Physiologists emphasized the importance of regular exercise for the improvement of the physical performance level of individuals. Physical exercise promoted the functional adaptation of specific muscle groups for specific types of physical labor. According to the work and sports physiologist Robert Herbst, who worked in the physiological laboratory of the DHfL as well as in the KWIA, physical exercise hardened (stählen) the body and enabled it to resist the damaging influences of economic deprivation. Proponents of sports pointed to the remedial aspects of exercise. Sports could compensate for health damages caused by one-sided physical labor that compromised workers' health and posture. It increased the performance level and diminished the predisposition for a range of diseases. From the perspective of many physicians, sports had definitive hygienic benefits. Robert Herbst, however, warned that exaggerated sports training could also lead to fatigue and have negative consequences for people's performance level at work.Footnote ⁴⁴

Weimar physiologists wanted to optimize the long-term performance potential of workers and athletes. They were not interested in maximizing short-term performances since they believed that this compromised long-term health and productivity. They counseled against exaggerated exercise and performance enhancement because they considered the human body a most valuable resource for a rationally organized modern economy.Footnote ⁴⁵ German physiologists thus rejected Frederick Winslow Taylor's system of scientific management. The Taylor system, they claimed, aimed at maximizing performance through the intensification of labor. In Atzler's view, such an approach to productivity enhancement might be possible in an immigrant society such as the United States where labor was easily replaceable. A country with limited biological resources such as Germany had to husband these resources more carefully. In addition, the Taylor system was based on the utilization of healthy people whose ability to perform was not diminished through war and hunger. By contrast, Germany had to integrate impaired and weakened workers into the work process without overtaxing them.Footnote ⁴⁶ Weimar's human economy, therefore, had to be based on an understanding of the physiological implications of rationalization.

At the core of the debate about human performance enhancement through sports were questions about the malleability of the human constitution. Was human performance potential determined by heredity, and if so, how could it still be enhanced? Sports physicians considered it important to diagnose the hereditary performance potential. In particular they hoped to diagnose specific genetic aptitudes for specific sports disciplines. While most Weimar physicians considered eugenics as a rationalization of reproduction an important aspect of the “human economy,” many of them did not adhere to a strict hereditarian determinism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rudolf Herbst, for example, claimed, “Certainly there is much in the genotype that cannot be changed, at the same time there are things that can be changed through the conditioning influences of the environment.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Herbst believed that the degree of malleability of the human body was determined through heredity. But he also thought that it was well worth researching whether genetic “minus-variants” could be changed through physical exercise.

Disentangling the complex relationships between heredity, environmental influences, and physical conditioning was an important if somewhat elusive goal of sports physicians. The director of the anthropometric department at the DHfL, Wolfgang Kohlrausch, developed a research program on “sports type research” (Sporttypenforschung) based on anthropometric measurements.Footnote ⁴⁹ All students who entered the DHfL underwent such physical measurements, and their physical development was monitored regularly. Kohlrausch tried to relate his findings to the constitutional typology developed by the psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer. The asthenic (weak) or leptosome body type, he claimed, could be found especially among long- and middle-distance runners because this body type was best suited for sports disciplines that required endurance.Footnote ⁵⁰ Behind these classification attempts was the assumption that it would eventually be possible to diagnose specific hereditary aptitudes of athletes (and by implication workers) based on their “constitutional type.”Footnote ⁵¹

The anthropometric surveys conducted by sports physicians have to be seen in the context of a whole range of surveys during the Weimar Republic into the health of the German population. Such surveys tried to assess the physical and psychological state of the German population in order to formulate policy suggestions for rational population management. Deficits of the German population were to be diagnosed, and scientific experts proposed various remedies for them as part of an all-encompassing “human economy” of human resource development. One research emphasis of the “Emergency Community of German Science” (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft), the most important funding body of German science, was anthropological research on the state of the German population, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. During the interwar years, the foundation funded biomedical research in many Western and central European countries. In Germany, Rockefeller funding focused on research in human biology with an emphasis on psychiatry and anthropology. Perceived as state-of-the-art research at the time, such approaches promised long-term solutions to serious social and medical problems.Footnote ⁵² The anthropological research aimed to assess the hereditary quality of the German population by determining mental and physical hereditary predispositions of large groups of people. A goal was to diagnose hereditary psychopathic characteristics in large populations as a precondition for a scientifically based eugenics program.Footnote ⁵³

There were other surveys without such an explicit eugenic agenda, however. The sports physicians Herrmann Rautmann and Fritz Duras, for example, developed a survey for the health assessment of students at the University of Freiburg. The surveys were conducted from 1923, and participation for male and female students was compulsory. The goal was to identify diseases at an early stage as well as diagnose physical deficiencies. The exam covered anthropometric as well as physiological examinations such as a cardiographic examination of heart functions. Examiners passed judgment on the general health of the students and pointed out specific deficiencies such as weak muscle development, deformations of the thorax, and problems with posture. As a remedy, the physicians suggested specific gymnastic exercises.Footnote ⁵⁴ Between 1923 and 1933, about 13,000 Freiburg University students had to undergo such physical examinations.Footnote ⁵⁵ The main aim of this type of survey was not eugenic selection, at least not during the Weimar years.Footnote ⁵⁶ Apart from diagnosing infectious diseases among the student population, these surveys tried to identify students who had performance deficits because of “physical inferiority, constitutional weakness, or a lack of exercise.”Footnote ⁵⁷ These students received the opportunity to exercise under medical supervision in special exercise groups (Förderriegen). According to Duras, it was especially important for the physically less well-developed to exercise and improve their health and physical strength.Footnote ⁵⁸ The rationale of the Freiburg health survey was, therefore, educational and rehabilitational. Physicians hoped to help people develop fully their physical potential through exercise that was tailored to their specific needs. This was in line with Diem's thinking that people should do remedial exercises to rid themselves of partial physical inferiorities. Such “compensatory work” (Ausgleichsarbeit) was in Diem's view one of the most important ways in which sports could contribute to the “health of the people” (Volksgesundheit).Footnote ⁵⁹

Similar assumptions informed the health surveys that the sports physician Hans Hoske conducted on young apprentices for the “German National Union of Commercial Employees” (Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband, DnHV), a right-wing union for lower-level employees in commerce and industry that was concerned about the impact of the war on the physical health and performance capacity of young apprentices. Hoske had been a student at the DHfL and worked there as a teacher and scientific assistant until 1926 and as a sports physician from 1926 to 1929. In 1925, Hoske also served as a medical intern at the KWIA. In 1929, Hoske became director of the department for preventive health care of the DnHV health insurance. In this capacity, he was concerned about the social burdens imposed by the deplorable physical conditions of young people.Footnote ⁶⁰

In 1931, 4,200 DnHV male apprentices in 174 cities were examined during the second year of their apprenticeship to determine their physical fitness. Hoske's survey gathered data on their age, height, weight, chest circumference, lung capacity, pulse, and blood pressure. The apprentices were also asked whether they exercised regularly. The survey confirmed contemporary suspicions about the bad state of health of German youth. The typical commercial apprentice was tall but underweight with a narrow chest. Weakness and inhibited physical development, bad posture, bad teeth and flat feet, weak circulation (Kreislaufschwäche), and neurasthenia were also frequently diagnosed. Hoske did not attribute these deficits to bad heredity. Instead he blamed bad environmental and working conditions that inhibited the development of young people and prevented them from reaching their full hereditary potential. According to Hoske, the physical neglect of young employees could only be remedied through more leisure time for sedentary workers. The sports physician Hoske shared the views of life reformers and physicians advocating preventive hygiene that physical exercise, sun, and fresh air were important aspects of healthy living and contributed to the creation of a healthy and productive populace.Footnote ⁶¹

Workers' bodies were of great concern in Weimar biopolitical debates. Atzler, for example, thought that due to the declining birthrate of the war years, there would be a significant worker shortage by the mid-1930s. Therefore one had to keep the existing human resources as fit as possible for as long as possible and avoid their premature physical deterioration.Footnote ⁶² The first “International Workers Olympics” held in 1925 in Frankfurt am Main offered a unique opportunity to assess the physical condition of working-class athletes and thus gain some insight into the physical condition of healthy workers. A group of physicians and anthropologists received permission from the organizers to assess systematically a large number of athletes. According to Alfons Gersbach, the director of the Frankfurt physicians' association, the Arbeiterolympiade would provide new insights about the influence of sports on the performance capacity of workers with different professions. The worker athletes seem to have participated enthusiastically in the Frankfurt survey.Footnote ⁶³ One of the participating physicians considered it to be in the interest of all the participants to “subject themselves to continuous medical control” throughout their lives as a preventive measure.Footnote ⁶⁴

Of particular concern to the examiners were athletes with one-sided physical development. The physical anthropologist Ernst Schwartz, who conducted the anthropometric measurements at the event, was worried that too many workers neglected the remedial effects of physical exercise. Instead of choosing sports that compensated for the deleterious impact that their working conditions had on their physical conditions, some workers chose sports that reinforced the negative impacts of their work. “Heavy athletes” (Schwerathleten) such as weight lifters, who were often from physically demanding professions such as locksmithing and woodcutting, often reinforced their professionally acquired dispositions through the sports they chose. While these predispositions enabled them to do well in their sport, they frequently damaged their health and productivity.Footnote ⁶⁵

The anthropological survey of the Frankfurt Olympics examined the relationships between sports, health, and the working capacity of women as well as men. Medical concerns centered not only on the impact of sports on women's reproductivity—a topic that has found extensive treatment in the historiography on women's sports and sports medicineFootnote ⁶⁶—there were also concerns about women's productivity as workers and employees. While conservative physicians, such as the gynecologist Hugo Sellheim continued to warn about the deleterious effects of competitive sports on women's reproductive systems, male and female physicians working at the DHfL rejected, for example, claims that sports had a negative impact on women's menstruation.Footnote ⁶⁷ Instead, physicians and physical educators saw exercise and competitive sports as increasingly important for women's general health and physical performance.Footnote ⁶⁸ Feminist sports teachers claimed that sports were the best way to prepare women for the competitiveness of modern life.Footnote ⁶⁹ Others thought that physical fitness made it possible for women to cope with the double burden of their jobs and housework. Toughening up women's bodies was important for the health and productive strength of the nation. While the physician Fritz Kirchberg expressed concern about the negative impact of the declining birthrate on the biological viability of the German people, he thought that not much could be done about declining reproductivity, and he advocated instead increasing the working power of men and women. In his view, a new type of female sports teacher emerging from the DHfL had demonstrated that the most strenuous kind of physical labor had no adverse effects on women's health. In keeping with traditional notions of femininity, he still demanded that female sports teachers learn how to cook in order to prepare meals in accordance with the nutritional requirements of modern exercise science, but like other advocates of physical exercise—among them the outspoken mayor of Berlin Böß—he had abandoned notions of a deficient female physiology that needed special protection from physical exertions.Footnote ⁷⁰

Some employers recognized the importance of sports for women's health and well-being, and promoted exercise programs in order to keep their female workforce happy and productive. The Berlin-based shoe-store chain Leiser, for example, enjoined its female sales force to participate in gymnastics exercises during breaks as a compensation for long hours of standing and unnatural postures. Physicians and physical educators also maintained that sports had a positive effect on the intellectual performance and character of women.Footnote ⁷¹ This was in line with their thinking more generally. Weimar promoters of sports argued that physical exercise was an important instrument to improve the intellectual performance of men, women, and schoolchildren. They thought that sports were important for the formation of a performance-oriented character. The shaping of the body had thus important psychological components, which I will discuss next.

Psychological Conditioning through Sports

Research on the physical performance potential of different body types found its counterpart in the attempts of psychologists to identify “the right man for the right job” in Weimar psycho-technics and work psychology. In the early Weimar years, industrial psycho-technics sought to identify specific elementary abilities such as reaction times, visual and aural perspicacity, and manual dexterity in order to assess the suitability of job candidates. From the mid-1920s onward, psychologists shifted their assessment criteria to less tangible and less measurable character traits of the worker personality as a whole, such as reliability, diligence, and conscientiousness.Footnote ⁷²

There are interesting parallels to be drawn between the debates of sports and work psychologists that complicate the ways in which people perceived the relationship between sports and work performances during the Weimar years. The DHfL took research and teaching on the psychological aspects of sports very seriously. Psychological discourses informed the practice of sports teacher education in the Hochschule which also had a sports psychology laboratory that pursued basic research on psychological aspects of sports.Footnote ⁷³ As in the case of sports physiology, sports psychology was initially based on the premise that sports were a type of work (sportliche Arbeit). The first director of the DHfL's sports psychology laboratory, Robert Schulte, promoted a view of sports psychology as a form of aptitude psychology based on psycho-technical tests. Schulte was a former student of Wilhelm Wundt, the influential Leipzig psychologist, who from the 1870s onward had devised a number of tests to measure basic psychological traits and abilities such as sensations, reaction times, and attention spans.Footnote ⁷⁴

In Schulte's view, the theory and methodology of work psychology also applied to sports psychology, and sports and physical exercise were to play a vital role in the human economy.Footnote ⁷⁵ Sports science was not a “luxury science.” It was a practical science that promoted education through physical exercise and contributed to the “strength of the people” (Volkskraft). The goal was to improve the mental and physical performances of individuals in the “interest of job performance and the national economy.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Sports were a means to lift the “efficiency (Wirkungsgrad) of the nation.” It improved national “economic fitness” at a time when economic competition replaced war as a means of politics between nations. Schulte demanded that physicians, psychologists, and national economists quantify how physical exercise increased job performances.Footnote ⁷⁷

At the DHfL Schulte examined the abilities of elite athletes to determine the psychological traits that made them exceptional performers. Based on this research he wanted to gain insights for the physical education of the “broad mass of our people” in universities, schools, and sports associations. Sports were to help people reach their physical and mental performance optimum. Mental and physical inferiorities of individuals had to be diagnosed and corrected through sports therapy based on a close monitoring of their physical and mental development.Footnote ⁷⁸

As in the case of work psychology, Schulte designed tests that measured elementary abilities such as reaction times, dexterity, and visual abilities as well as attention spans and the ability to concentrate.Footnote ⁷⁹ He devised psycho-technical experiments and tests to diagnose with some precision the aptitude of individuals for specific sports or jobs. This again shows that he assumed that the psychological processes in both activities were quite similar and that in both cases psycho-technical tests could identify the right person for an athletic discipline or work. The acuity of eyesight, the ability to measure distances, the accuracy of the fencer, the “beat and rhythm feeling” (Takt- und Rhytmusgefühl) of rowers, attention, and the ability to concentrate were all subject to physiological and psycho-technical measurements advocated by Schulte.Footnote ⁸⁰ He maintained, for example, that relatively simple reaction trials could provide valuable insights concerning the relationship between physical and mental processes. The mental expressions (seelische Ausdruckserscheinungen) of physical impressions should therefore be subjected to exact psychophysical measurements. Schulte was quite aware of the shortcomings of the experimental measurements of elemental abilities in psycho-technics. Such simple measurements could, for example, not account for motivations and complex cognitive processes such as “the higher and more complex activities of the human will.” Schulte insisted, however, that such scientific laboratory experiments were fundamental to both work and sports psychology.Footnote ⁸¹

In 1925, Schulte resigned from the DHfL. His successor was Hanns Sippel, a psychologist, who made a name for himself with a dissertation on the impact of sports on the performance level of schoolchildren. The replacement of Schulte was more than just a change in personnel. It signified a theoretical and methodological shift in the practice of sports psychology and physiology. In a letter to Diem, Schulte regretted that after his departure from the DHfL scientific methods of performance testing based on laboratory experiments were neglected.Footnote ⁸²

The shift from the dissection of movements to the examination of entire movement complexes in sports physiology was accompanied by a similar shift to a more holistic and synthetic sports psychology with less emphasis on the diagnosis of elemental abilities through laboratory experiments. According to Diem, the DHfL was the ideal place for a “synthetic science” that integrated physiological with psychological approaches in sports research. Psychological research had demonstrated that the interpretation by the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso that sports inevitably led to mental fatigue was wrong because sports could counter mental fatigue and increase the mental performance level of individuals.Footnote ⁸³ This meant that sports were no longer considered just another form of physical labor. It was seen as a form of physical labor that took place under more favorable psychological circumstances than other physical work because sports labor (sportliche Arbeit) was motivated by considerable enthusiasm.Footnote ⁸⁴

The German sports and gymnastics movement had long claimed that physical activity during school days could enhance the mental performance level of schoolchildren and campaigned for a daily hour of gymnastics.Footnote ⁸⁵ The DHfL psychologist Sippel provided the scientific rationale for this demand with his work about the relationship between physical exercise and mental performance.Footnote ⁸⁶ With his study of the impact of physical exercise on schoolchildren, Sippel pursued two goals. First, he rejected the prejudice that good physical development and high mental performance levels were mutually exclusive. Good gymnasts and good athletes, he argued, were more and not less successful in school than those without sporting ability. He backed this up with statistical evidence from a 1915 study published in the “Journal for Applied Psychology” that showed that the best gymnasts were also the most successful in mental competitions because they had better grades. Compared to students with lesser physical abilities they also had lower failure rates.Footnote ⁸⁷ The second of Sippel's goals was to demonstrate that sporting activity did not reduce people's mental performance through fatigue as Mosso and others had argued.Footnote ⁸⁸ By contrast, physical exercise during school breaks could enhance students' mental performances and enable them to achieve their full performance potential. In order to demonstrate this, Sippel tested the mental performance of students before and after physical exercise. One of his tests asked students to add as many numbers as they could in short periods of time. The result was represented in the form of performance curves for individual students and in the form of aggregate results for entire classes. Sippel asked students to perform such tests before and after physical education classes. He concluded that the results showed considerable improvements in students' mental performances after periods of physical exercise both in terms of quantity (the quantity of numbers students managed to add) and quality (the accuracy of students' calculations). Memory tests (Gedächtnisproben) that evaluated students' ability to memorize words, pairs of words, or foreign language vocabulary provided additional evidence for Sippel's hypothesis that physical exercise enhanced the mental performance levels of students.Footnote ⁸⁹

Sippel moved away from a sports psychology based on the principles of psycho-technical work physiology. Instead of diagnosing elementary psychological characteristics that could be taken as an indicator of sporting or working ability, Sippel claimed that his work demonstrated the “psychological depth structure” (psychologische Tiefenstruktur) of individuals. One of his practical goals was to determine the ways in which the development of this structure in children and youths was influenced by physical exercise.Footnote ⁹⁰ Sippel maintained that sports profoundly shaped the character of individuals by strengthening their will, self-confidence, and determination. The physical labor in sports was in his view different from other kinds of physical labor. Sports were not so much work; it was play that indulged the natural movement drives of children and adults and therefore had a liberating and rejuvenating effect. Sports did not counter physiological fatigue. It rather mobilized people's enthusiasm and helped them overcome psychological fatigue.Footnote ⁹¹ Children who were inattentive and unenthusiastic about schoolwork had to be given the opportunity to indulge their “natural” urges to move about. Then they would abandon their psychological inhibitions against mental work and their school performance would improve.Footnote ⁹² In that way sports helped to improve physical and mental performance levels. This was in line with Carl Diem's emphasis on the transformation of individual subjectivities as a pre-condition for a healthy and productive nation: sports formed firm and balanced characters that were not only full of joy but also endowed with a “will to work.”Footnote ⁹³

Similar notions about psychological performance conditioning through sports informed contemporary debates about the psychological conditioning of young workers. The “German Institute for Technical Schooling” (Deutsches Institut für Technische Arbeitsschulung, DINTA) promoted sports and physical exercise for young workers and apprentices. Under the leadership of Karl Arnhold, DINTA established worker training programs that tried to instill performance-oriented attitudes in workers. The goal was to educate “skilled and flexible workers” (wendige Arbeiter) who were motivated to work enthusiastically for the benefit of the “corporate community” (Werksgemeinschaft). The DINTA concept was based on the assumption that a complex rationalized modern economy required certain subjective predispositions on the part of workers. Workers had to be able to work independently and make their own decisions motivated by the will to contribute productively to the corporate community.Footnote ⁹⁴ They had to be educated for work (Erziehung des Arbeiters zur Arbeit). DINTA education, therefore, aimed at rationalizing the human factor in production by overcoming the worker's “inner resistance” against work.Footnote ⁹⁵

Sports played an important role in DINTA's educational program. As part of an economic program for the rational utilization of human resources, people such as Arnhold saw in sports and physical education a means to form reliable and performance-oriented worker characters. Supported by West German heavy industry, DINTA promoted sports for young apprentices to instill in them the “love of orderliness and cleanliness.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Competitive sports incited rivalries between different apprentice groups and raised their “will to perform.” Arnhold shared Theodor Lewald and Carl Diem's concern that the end of military conscription deprived German males of the character-forming benefits of military service. As compensation he advocated sports to create a new worker type who was accustomed to hard physical labor. The new worker would transfer his competitive attitude from the sports field to his work and would be prepared to sacrifice his own interests for the benefit of the “Werksgemeinschaft.”Footnote ⁹⁷ According to the DINTA engineer Hans Riedel, sports were a promising tool in the education of apprentices because education had to be tied in with the experience of the young worker. Since apprentices had little work experience, the educator had to appeal to experiences with which they were familiar. If workers understood their work training as analogous to sports training, they would be more prepared to work in a disciplined manner and accept unavoidable sacrifices. This was in addition to the other benefits of sports, which included improving the physical fitness of young workers, making them more dexterous and skillful in their work, and turning them into tenacious and energetic human beings with a strong will.Footnote ⁹⁸

During the Weimar years many employers promoted sports or physical exercise among their employees.Footnote ⁹⁹ Some companies forced their workers to exercise during breaks to compensate for sedentary or one-sided work. Workers and Socialist working-class organizations often resented this type of involuntary activities because it deprived workers of the self-determined use of their breaks in order to increase productivity.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Sippel criticized this type of physical exercise as counterproductive, because it turned sports into an aspect of work instead of mobilizing the enthusiasm generated by voluntary physical activities for a better work performance.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The DINTA and many employers, therefore, supported the voluntary engagement of young workers in popular sports during their leisure time. Soccer teams were promoted, because team sports encouraged camaraderie and sacrifice for the good of the team. Gymnastics promoted vigor and dexterity, while track and field disciplines and boxing pitted “man against man” and rewarded strong and assertive characters. In this way sports promoted “working skills, the will to perform, the ability to subordinate oneself, and the joy of fighting,” which according to DINTA pedagogy were all important character traits of productive and happy workers.Footnote ¹⁰² Such psychological discourses on performance enhancement and character formation saw in sports an important educational tool. They played a central role for the promotion of sports in schools as well as in private industry or among public employers such as the German railroad or the German postal service. Transforming the subjective attitudes of workers and citizens was as important to Weimar work and sports scientists, educators, government officials, and employers as was the preservation and enhancement of their physical health and performance potential.

Sports and Qualitative Population Policies between Weimar and Nazism

During the 1920s, physicians, psychologists, physical educators, and government officials thought that sports would play a central role in the biological recovery of the German nation. In survey after survey they diagnosed the deficient fitness of the population and warned of dire consequences for the health, performance levels, and productivity of people. Sports were to be a therapy of the national body or, as the mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Cologne and the future chancellor of the Federal Republic Konrad Adenauer put it in 1927, “Sport is the practical physician at the sick bed of the German Volk.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Sports figured prominently in discussions about human resources, their utilization, and their refinement. As a performance enhancement tool, the promotion of sports held promises similar to the rehabilitative, therapeutic, and preventive trends in social welfare, medicine, and psychiatry: the production of healthy and willingly productive citizens.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Like contemporary debates about hereditary health and eugenics, psychological and medical debates about human performance management were informed by similar economic assumptions. In my view, eugenics and debates about performance conditioning were both complementary aspects of the human economy (Menschenökonomie) of Weimar biopolitics. Propagators of sports and eugenics argued that it was necessary to improve the quality of the population because the war had done great damage to the health of the workforce and limited the nation's human performance potential at a time when this potential was needed urgently for the economic recovery after the war. Therefore, they proposed countermeasures to raise the fitness of the population, which they defined in terms of people's ability to contribute socially and economically to German society. Eugenics and performance enhancement through sports were both based on a rationale of preventive biological social engineering. Eugenics or racial hygiene aimed at preventing hereditarily diseased offspring, while the promotion of sports was based on a notion of “preventive welfare” (vorsorgende Fürsorge). Both strategies were seen as recipes for the control of spiralling health and social insurance costs because they promised to create productive citizens.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Eugenicists intended to improve the hereditary performance potential of future generations, propagators of performance enhancement through sports claimed that physical exercise helped people fully mobilize their hereditary potential. While these strategies were complementary and promised to improve the efficiency, performance, and competitiveness of the German population in the future, their prominence varied depending on the circumstances. During the years of stability of the Weimar Republic from 1924 to roughly 1929/1930 sports and physical exercise received comparatively generous financial and organizational support from national, state, and municipal governments. This would change during the Great Depression. Public support for sports would dwindle along with other expenses of the Weimar welfare state. With the transition from the “regenerative” to the “degenerative” welfare state, to use the terms coined by Greg Eghigian, there was less emphasis on “preventive welfare” through physical exercise.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The same is true for the financial support of sports and sport-related activities from major private employers even though there is some evidence suggesting that some large employers rated the disciplinary and educational aspects of sports so high that they continued to fund sports-related activities throughout the Depression.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The selectionist emphasis on the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring received greater credence with political authorities toward the end of the Weimar Republic, in part because it promised to curb welfare expenses in the long run. The rise of Nazism to power exacerbated these trends, leading to the notorious “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” in 1933, which sanctioned the forced sterilization of 360,000 people.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Nazi emphasis on hereditary health, however, did not displace “nurture” with “nature.” Nazi biopolitics aimed at the elimination of the “unfit” and “inferior” but Nazi policies also attempted to assure that those who met the Nazi criteria of racial purity and hereditary fitness would become healthy, productive, and reliable members of the Nazi “Volksgemeinschaft.” The successor of DINTA, the Work Science Institute (Arbeitswissenschaftliches Institut) of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront), for example, envisioned a work science that explored the interplay of environmental and hereditary factors in determining the performance level of workers.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Nazi physicians propagated medicine as “performance medicine” (Leistungsmedizin). Preventive medicine, healthy living, and sports were all part of a campaign to create healthy subjects who could work as hard and as long as possible. According to the concept of “Leistungsmedizin,” Germans should ideally be productive members of the community all their lives. Their death should coincide or follow shortly after the end of their working years. In this way, they would not become a burden to the social security system. Raising and preserving the physical performance levels of individuals into old age was the main goal of Nazi “performance medicine,” which tried to prepare people of all ages and sexes for the physical demands of a society at war. This goal echoed the calls by Weimar physicians and work physiologists for sustainable human resource management in order to ensure the physical performance level of the German population in the long term.

The Nazi period witnessed the widespread use of physical performance tests and surveys which not only gave indications about the state of fitness of the population but also served to encourage people to work on their own fitness. The SA sports medal, for example, was awarded to three million Germans who had demonstrated their fitness in a series of fitness tests and sporting competitions. People who were considered racially and hereditarily inferior were excluded from these competitions, while healthy Germans were encouraged to exercise and demonstrate repeatedly that their performance level merited the award of the SA sports medal.Footnote ¹¹⁰

During the reign of Nazism the physical education of workers aimed at shaping performance-oriented subjects. With the destruction of unions and Marxist working-class parties, there was no opposition left against the instrumentalization of sports in the service of greater industrial efficiency. In late 1933, the National Productivity Board (Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit, or RKW), a semi-public institution supported by the Reich and industry, pointed to the important role of sports in the service of national productivity. An RKW report on the human factor in rationalization explained why sports were a tool for the “performance enhancement” (Leistungssteigerung) in workers. Industrial pedagogy should foster sports as a means of improving the physical quality of workers by providing compensation for physically one-sided industrial labor. Equally important were the psychological benefits of physical exercise, because sports during or after work strengthened the “goal orientation and camaraderie within the work community.” The report pushed for industrial training programs for apprentices and workers that appealed to the spirit of sports (Sportsgeist) in employees. The “spirit of sports” would produce the “healthy ambition” in workers which made them into “permanent bearer[s] of high-quality work.”Footnote ¹¹¹

In subsequent years, the NS-organization “Strength through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude, or KdF) promoted sports for the masses. Millions of workers had to participate in physical exercise with their colleagues at work or competed in sporting events with employees from other companies. The hope was that the joy and enthusiasm generated by sports would also benefit the productivity of workers.Footnote ¹¹² Sports were also to shape the character of people and instill combative, aggressive, and soldierly values in boys and men.Footnote ¹¹³ Education through sports and physical exercise was central to Nazi pedagogical projects whether one talks about the Hitler Youth, the Labor Service, regular schools, or Nazi elite schools such as the Napola.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This kind of educational philosophy also affected university students, who were required to participate in sports activities or face ex-matriculation, and civil servants in state-owned companies such as the German postal service and railroad, who were required to document their participation in sporting activities in their personnel files.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Mass sports and fitness tests for workers and students were part of a comprehensive effort to condition the German nation for mental and physical performance in work and war. In these efforts, the Nazis could draw on programs and experiences from the Weimar Republic.