Colonial Schools in Imperial and Weimar Germany

The Witzenhausen Colonial School (1899–1944) opened its doors to the first class of fourteen students in the small town near Kassel in 1899, with Ernst Albert Fabarius as its director. The grounds of the DKS included an old manorial land and cloister (known as the Wilhelmshof) and the Gelsterhof. The Wilhelmshof housed dormitories, classrooms, a botanical garden, a dairy, stables, cows, pigs, and a laboratory. In the Gelsterhof, students cared for sheep and cultivated a variety of crops. The outbreak of World War I interrupted the school's work, when ninety-six of the one hundred students and the majority of the staff were drafted.Footnote ⁵

After the war, the overseas colonies were part of the territorial losses imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. This penalty was justified, in part, by the 1918 “Blue Book Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany,” compiled by South Africa and presented to the British Parliament, which charged Germany with excessive brutality toward its colonial subjects.Footnote ⁶ With the loss of the colonies, the supposed former glory of the overseas empire became part of many Germans' nostalgic memory of Imperial Germany. During the Weimar Republic, agitation for the return of the colonies was as much a protest against the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles as a pro-colonial stance. Colonialists increased their activism, driven by a desire to reclaim the lost overseas territories and to support those Germans who continued to live there.Footnote ⁷

Within this context of colonialist irredentism, the DKS reopened in the summer of 1919 with sixty-eight students. There does not appear to have been any question that the school would reopen, despite the changed political circumstances. In fact, its reopening reflected the colonialists' optimism in the early years of the Weimar Republic that the overseas empire would soon be reclaimed. It also signaled the belief of the school's leadership and backers that the education it provided still had value, despite the lack of administrative control over any colonies. In fact, graduates of the DKS (as well as of the KFR) had never restricted their choice of settlement solely to the former German colonies. By 1925, enrollment at the DKS had rebounded to a record 107 students. Between 1918 and 1925, 150 graduates found positions abroad, and between 1920 and 1938, 726 students graduated from the DKS with a diploma.Footnote ⁸

The 1920s also saw the opening of the Rendsburg Colonial School for Women (1926–1945). The KFR was the third school established by the Women's League of the German Colonial Society (Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft), following a short-lived school in Witzenhausen (1908–1910) and one in Bad Weilbach, near Wiesbaden (1911–1914). The number of German settlers in former German Southwest and East Africa dropped after the end of World War I, but rose again to fourteen thousand over the course of the 1920s.Footnote ⁹ Because Germany no longer had administrative control over this population, cultural support took on increased importance for colonialists.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1926, the Women's League established the KFR on the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal in Schleswig-Holstein to support this mission. As an early KFR prospectus declared, “the Germanness of the settler territories stands and falls with the worth of the women living there.”Footnote ¹¹

In 1929, following financial difficulties, the board of directors renegotiated the school's financial structure. The Ministry of the Interior (Reichsministerium des Innern, or RMdI) took over 90 percent of the school's stock (18,000 RM), and the Women's League and the city of Rendsburg each pledged 5 percent (1,000 RM).Footnote ¹² In 1930, Karl Körner took over as the school's director. He had led the German School in Turkey from 1917 to 1919 and had served as the director of the German Oberrealschule in Windhoek, Southwest Africa, for three years before coming to Rendsburg. Körner remained the KFR's director until its dissolution in 1945. Enrollments at the KFR remained relatively constant through the 1930s. In total, the school enrolled close to 1,200 students between 1926 and 1945, with 888 graduating with a certificate.Footnote ¹³

The Machtergreifung in Rendsburg and Witzenhausen

In the early 1930s, colonialists added the Nazi Party to their list of potential allies, encouraged by the third point of the Party's 1920 program: “We demand land and territory (colonies) to feed our people and in which to settle our excess population.” Despite this early platform, Adolf Hitler and many leading Nazis did not consider overseas colonialism a priority. Yet, the Nazi Party's irredentism and anti-Versailles stance gave colonialists hope, which was why many welcomed the Nazi seizure of power. After 1933, the German Colonial Society declared its allegiance to the new regime and “coordinated itself” (sich gleichschaltete). Beginning with a membership of thirty thousand in 1933, the Colonial Society grew to fifty thousand by 1936, when it was “coordinated” again but this time consolidated with other colonialist organizations into the unified Reich Colonial League (Reichskolonialbund, or RKB). The years after 1936 saw an increase of colonialist activism, in large part because of the RKB's new state-approved status, as well as Hitler's more aggressive foreign policy. By 1941, the RKB had two million members.Footnote ¹⁴

The goal of the colonialist movement in the Third Reich was to foster a colonialist identity among Germans, seeking to create a mass movement that would provide a groundswell of support for Hitler when he moved to reclaim the former colonies.Footnote ¹⁵ To inspire this mass movement, the colonialists' narrative of Germany's need for colonies built on three layered arguments. First, all Germans—not only those with personal ties to the former colonies—should see overseas colonialism as central to their national identity and crucial for the future of Nazi Germany. In fact, colonialists argued that Germans were inherent colonizers, born with exceptional talents for governing colonial subjects and administering colonial territories. Second, Germans had proven their ability to colonize through scientific and technological advances in the colonies and through the loyalty shown by the Askari (African soldiers who had fought with the German Schutztruppe [colonial forces] in Africa). This loyalty supposedly demonstrated Germans' benevolence toward their colonial subjects—in contrast to the allegations of brutality used by the victorious Allied powers to justify transforming the colonies into League of Nations mandates. Finally, colonialists claimed not only that the Allies' charges were unjustified, but also that the evidence provided for the arguments just outlined proved that Germans were, in fact, better colonizers than the French and British.

Given the regime's hesitancy about overseas colonialism and its emphasis on European “living space” (Lebensraum), the question of German settlement in these former colonies came to the fore after 1933. In a December 1933 memo, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels rejected the idea of mass settlement of German farmers in Africa, declaring that “National Socialism recognizes only one Heimat, Germany, only one Volk from one blood, on native soil (auf heimischem Boden).”Footnote ¹⁶ A secret Propaganda Ministry press briefing in May 1934 confirmed this view, stating that the idea of settlement must “absolutely be kept out of every discussion.”Footnote ¹⁷ Leading colonialists sought clarification from the Propaganda Ministry and were told that the ban applied only to discussions of mass settlement.Footnote ¹⁸ Despite the regime's objections, colonialists nevertheless continued to view the colonies as potential territories for German settlement. In March 1934, months after Goebbels's memo, the Colonial Society's standing committee still overwhelmingly agreed not to abandon propaganda for settlement.Footnote ¹⁹ For colonialists, settlement in the colonies continued to be important, both as a means of securing the Germanness of these territories and of providing exemplars of Germans' supposedly inherent colonizing abilities for their domestic propaganda, thereby giving the colonial schools a continuing mandate.

School business carried on as usual in Rendsburg after 1933, even as the school became enmeshed in the country's racial and organizational realignment. Applicants—who were supposed to be “unflinching bearers of the ideas of the Third Reich”—were required to submit a certificate of Aryan standing (Ariernachweis).Footnote ²⁰ Students at the KFR were expected to participate in Nazi organizations such as the Arbeitsgemeinschaft nationalsozialistischer Studentinnen (ANSt), and, starting in 1940, prospectuses expected applicants to have been active members of the Bund deutscher Mädel (BDM).Footnote ²¹ As part of the school's activities, KFR students made yearly trips to the NS-Frauenschaft headquarters and to the RKB in Berlin, as well as to German communities in nearby Denmark, and participated in “national-political events” in Rendsburg.Footnote ²²

In Witzenhausen, the DKS's Gleichschaltung continued in fits and starts, and much of it was student-driven. Wilhelm Arning, who had replaced Fabarius as school director after his death in 1927, declared his support for the new regime in a March 1933 speech. Lambasting Jews and Social Democrats, Arning's speech seemed to be a heartfelt declaration of faith in the Nazi cause. Yet, only two years earlier in 1931, Arning had expressed concerns to a fellow teacher about the radicalization of the DKS students. In response to the other teacher's tempered support for the “radical [political] parties” in their fight against Bolshevism (but a rejection of their antisemitism), Arning admitted to similar views. His rejection of these parties (including the NSDAP) was stronger, however, because of Hitler's “disavowal of colonial politics.” Arning added that he should have told the students “that those who really belonged to Hitler's movement lacked… the inner qualifications (innerliche Berechtigung) to be members of the Colonial School.”Footnote ²³

The number of Nazi supporters in the student body in Witzenhausen before 1933 was apparently noticeable. Arning estimated in 1931 that twenty-four students (about 20 percent) belonged to the Nazi Party.Footnote ²⁴ This group participated in the street fighting that characterized the last years of the Weimar Republic. In one episode, recounted in 1938 in the school's journal, Der deutsche Kulturpionier, DKS students in the local SA (Sturmabteilung) chapter rushed to the nearby town of Wendershausen in defense of a comrade supposedly knocked from his bicycle by a group of Jews.Footnote ²⁵ Reaching Wendershausen, the article recalled, the Jews attacked the SA and members of the Stahlhelm, including DKS students, with “chair legs, poles, stones.” Greatly outnumbered, the SA and Stahlhelm were saved by the arrival of police from Kassel, and the DKS students retreated across the river to the school. The day after the “Jew Battle” (Judenschlacht), the police arrested twenty-two students, which prompted loud protests on the part of their classmates. The students were released from police custody and several were subsequently forced to leave the DKS.Footnote ²⁶ This kind of street fighting continued after the Nazi takeover, with DKS students joining the police, SA, SS (Schutzstaffel), and Stahlhelm in June 1933 to patrol Witzenhausen's streets to “prevent” communists from doing any damage.Footnote ²⁷

The student body was “coordinated” along Nazi lines after 1933. With the beginning of the winter semester that year, student Hermann Vergin declared in the school's journal that one “can notice that something different from before now commands us DKS'ers.”Footnote ²⁸ The new daily schedule began with morning exercises, and one could no longer “sleep in so nicely” or “spend lectures in bed.” Students' work also began differently: “A duty officer (Wachhabender) line[d] up [the students] and report[ed] to the service leader (Dienstleiter). All in all, it [was] clear that the previously ‘very cozy’ life must make way for strict discipline.”Footnote ²⁹ In an article that appeared in 1934 in Der deutsche Kulturpionier, Carlheinz Uhlitzsch further emphasized the political training underway. His fellow students, Uhlitzsch reported, were to familiarize themselves with the ideals of Nazism because “it is imperative to create a new type of student who is fundamentally different from the pre- and postwar student, a type of political student.”Footnote ³⁰ In addition to racial questions, “camaraderie, loyalty, discipline, and subordination, the foundations of National Socialist thinking and action, should be hammered into every German student through official SA duties (SA-Dienstpflicht).”Footnote ³¹ In 1936, the DKS's “fraternity house” (Kameradschaftshaus) became a central office (Stammhaus) of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (National Socialist German Students' League, or NSDStB).Footnote ³²

Gleichschaltung also brought structural changes to the DKS. The fifteen-member Board of Trustees, which was affiliated with the Colonial Society, was dissolved in 1934 and replaced by a new board, whose twelve members were chosen by the RMdI.Footnote ³³ This new board of trustees included the president of the Colonial Society, Heinrich Schnee, Hitler Youth Kolonialreferent Adolf Friedrich von Oertzen, and Kurt Weigelt of the Deutsche Bank.Footnote ³⁴ The Aryan paragraph restricted student admissions, disqualifying six applicants in April 1935, for example, on racial grounds.Footnote ³⁵

The Nazi seizure of power also put the question of geographical focus into sharper relief. The question of “Africa or the East” plagued the colonialist movement more broadly after 1919. Like many Germans, colonialists desired a larger territorial revision of the Treaty of Versailles that went beyond the punitive clause on overseas colonies. The Colonial Society's mantra that colonial politics and Eastern politics were “not mutually exclusive, but rather complemented each other,” left this tension unresolved.Footnote ³⁶ DKS students and staff also discussed eastern Europe as a place of German settlement, as well as the relationship between “Eastern policy” and “colonial policy,” in the pages of Der deutsche Kulturpionier. In 1932, for example, a student article expressed interest in securing the “Eastern borders” and suggested that students serve as “outposts of Germanness” in places where Germanness was supposedly most threatened.Footnote ³⁷ Similar articles continued to appear into the late 1930s.Footnote ³⁸

Their support for eastern European irredentism did not come at the expense of their desire to reclaim the overseas colonies—despite attempts in 1933 by Richard Walther Darré, the Minister of Food and Agriculture, to turn the DKS into a school for eastern European settlement.Footnote ³⁹ Given his personal background—Darré had been born in Argentina and briefly attended the DKS—colonialists might have hoped that Darré would support their cause, but they were mistaken. He was a radical agrarian who restricted his territorial dreams to lands in central and eastern Europe. In the end, Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick intervened to ensure that Witzenhausen would maintain its overseas focus, indicating that colonialists still had some well-placed allies who would support them.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Nazi seizure of power created a new social and political context for colonialist agitation and for the colonial schools. After 1933, the KFR and the DKS experienced a number of changes, both internally in terms of the student body (especially in Witzenhausen), and externally in terms of new pressures for political and ideological conformity. Yet, as Frick's intervention demonstrates, both schools were able to maintain their overseas colonial mission, which the broader colonialist movement now framed as highly compatible with Nazism.

The Witzenhausen and Rendsburg Curricula

One aspect of the education at the colonial schools—and of the colonialists' narrative more generally—did align with the rhetoric of the Nazi regime. Given the overseas colonies' paltry economic value, colonialists had to include other justifications to explain the necessity of reclaiming these territories. Overseas colonialism, they claimed, enabled Germans to develop their national character through struggle against foreign climates and landscapes, through the maintenance of national/racial culture and purity, and through the creation of a Heimat overseas. After 1933, these endeavors supposedly linked overseas colonialism to the values of the Nazi regime. As W. Oetting of the Academic Colonial League declared in 1935, “Uplifting the honor and greatness of our Volk, forming a new, farsighted (weitschauende), purposeful person, who feels connected with German culture and German thinking as a member of a great people's community (Volksgemeinschaft) with all the hundred thousand others—these are the foundations of National Socialism as well as colonial work.”Footnote ⁴¹ Since their founding, the DKS and KFR had offered their students a varied curriculum meant to prepare graduates for the multifaceted work of colonial settlement, as well as to develop character traits considered necessary for life overseas. These curricular goals transitioned easily into the Third Reich.

Fabarius, the founder of the DKS, had planned the school's curriculum as a symbiosis of theory and praxis, following what he called “colonial pedagogy” (Kolonialpädagogik).Footnote ⁴² Like Körner later in Rendsburg, Fabarius believed that the integration of theoretical with practical knowledge would prove essential to life in the colonies, where one often had to be self-sufficient. The title of the school's journal, Der deutsche Kulturpionier, which implied cultivation and pioneering on various levels, reflected this ideal of the colonizer. To achieve this synthesis of theory and practice, the curriculum consisted after 1902 (continuing, in large part, through the 1940s) of a training year (Praktikantenjahr), during which students learned basic handicraft skills, followed by four semesters of lectures, interspersed with one day of work in the fields per week, as well as various hands-on sessions.Footnote ⁴³ The lecture topics fell into six main categories: Kulturwissenschaften (history, civics, ethnography, etc.), business training, natural sciences, agricultural economics, foreign languages (English, which was mandatory, and a choice of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, Swahili, or Malay), as well as technology and trades.Footnote ⁴⁴ In addition to these theoretical subjects, DKS students worked in the dairy, in the fields, in crafts workshops, and with the livestock, and participated in sport activities. By 1938, the list of lecture topics and practical exercises filled three pages of the institutional plan.Footnote ⁴⁵

This education also aimed to develop the type of character supposedly appropriate for colonial settlers. As indicated in an article on the school that appeared in 1938 in the colonialist movement's newspaper, the Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, the profession of colonial farmers and settlers was “so varied and… so physically and morally demanding that only the most valuable and strong personalities qualify for this kind of training.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In fact, the training year served as a trial period to weed out those not suited to life at the school or in the colonies. The school's 1938 institutional plan emphasized that the DKS was “not suitable for young people of weak character, whose education has already been difficult; such [people] do not belong in the colonies.” Likewise, those who “do not possess the necessary zest and joy (Lust und Freudigkeit) for this profession, for the tasks here [at the school], and for the particular life in our Internat (boarding school)” were discouraged from applying.Footnote ⁴⁷

In addition to the theoretical and practical lessons, communal life at the school would cultivate this character as well. “Nowhere,” the Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung article continued, “is there a better opportunity to develop the personality as among likeminded comrades, who are all brought together by a common goal.”Footnote ⁴⁸ As an Internat, the DKS had regulated its students' behavior since its founding, including a nineteen-point set of house rules adopted in 1899 that called for firm discipline on the part of the students and “reverence and obedience to the director as their immediate superior.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In the Third Reich, this emphasis on camaraderie would simultaneously serve as political education, for the “most valuable effect of the communal life (Lebensgemeinschaft) is the promotion of character formation and education of a true German Weltanschauung as defined by the present state.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The militarization of this camaraderie was also evident in the students' descriptions, quoted earlier, of changes in daily life after 1933.

The emphasis on character, ability, and camaraderie at the DKS also emerged at the KFR, especially under Körner, who developed the KFR from a “finishing school for girls into a school with specific goals.”Footnote ⁵¹ To maintain the relevance of the students' preparation, Körner claimed to have developed a curriculum, based on communication with graduates living overseas, that incorporated what their experiences had demonstrated was necessary for colonial living. The KFR also wanted to encourage the teaching staff to exchange visits with teachers at the Hedwig Heyl Housekeeping School in Windhoek.Footnote ⁵²

The course of study envisioned by Körner consisted of two semesters of practical and theoretical lessons in Rendsburg, a third semester of nursing training in a hospital in Hamburg or Berlin, as well as a “trial” period with a German family in the eastern German border regions, which was meant to test the graduates before sending them overseas.Footnote ⁵³ The KFR never made this last component mandatory, however, because it took place after students had left the school. Rather than an actual component of the curriculum, it reflected Körner's wish for a maturing period before sending graduates overseas.Footnote ⁵⁴ During their two semesters in Rendsburg, KFR students studied a wide range of subjects. Practical ones included butchery, carpentry, blacksmithing, glazing, upholstery, first aid, animal husbandry, and beekeeping. Students, in groups of seven, would also live together for six weeks at a time in a cottage called “Klein-Windhuk,” where they were responsible for baking their own bread, growing their own vegetables, slaughtering their own meat, etc.Footnote ⁵⁵ Theoretical courses covered topics such as hereditary health, racial studies, Auslandsdeutschtum (“Germandom abroad”), colonial problems, nutrition, nursing and infant care, tropical hygiene and illnesses, bookkeeping, shorthand, typing, and foreign languages (with English, Spanish, and Portuguese as options).Footnote ⁵⁶ The new curriculum under Körner added “national-political education” (nationalpolitische Schulung), physical education, Swahili and Otjiherero, as well as cooking with “makeshift equipment” (behelfsmässige Geräten).Footnote ⁵⁷

In 1935, Körner described the KFR as a “sieve,” with three layers of sifting to identify those best suited to go abroad. The first cut was admission to the school.Footnote ⁵⁸ The second and third winnowing out of students involved the rigors of the Rendsburg year, as well as the practical semesters in hospitals or (theoretically) with German families in the borderlands. The KFR accepted applicants from Germany, from the former colonies, and from German settlements around the world. Prospectuses from the 1940s praised this community of German-born students and colonial Germans, noting that “close communal life[,] all bound together in National Socialist community… in the service of Germandom, gives the school its special stamp.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Given the short stays of the students, the wide-ranging nature of the DKS and KFR curricula in Witzenhausen and Rendsburg raises questions about the schools' success in training their students and finding them placement abroad. The June 1940 KFR prospectus addressed this very issue, stating that “all sorts of crafts will be undertaken, not to make our girls into master craftsmen—or into dabblers (Pfuschern). We would much rather that they overcome, on their own, the traditional prejudice that girls are not fit for such things, and that they gain the confidence to help themselves in case of emergencies.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This was the essence of the Kolomädel imagined by Körner: capable and independent, equipped with will and determination as much as skill, and able to handle any situation resourcefully. In a 1944 letter to the RMdI, Körner described the KFR curriculum as a diversified education, and explained that many graduates went overseas to take one job, but later did something entirely different. Of the close to 120 graduates who had emigrated to Southwest Africa since 1930, Körner counted 70 clerks, 22 saleswomen, 16 dressmakers, 7 hairdressers, 1 milliner, 1 photographer, 1 washerwoman, and 1 technical assistant.Footnote ⁶¹ All these occupations could have been pursued in Germany as well, of course, and did not require some of the school's more unconventional coursework. Still, a number of students continued to go overseas to the former colonies upon graduation. The KFR reported that, between 1934 and 1938, 143 graduates had gone overseas (out of a total 186 graduates, though some who went abroad did so later than the year they graduated).Footnote ⁶² Körner claimed that the percentage of Rendsburg graduates who went overseas between 1935 and 1939 was four times as many as the percentage of those from Witzenhausen.Footnote ⁶³

A 1938 report on Witzenhausen graduates published in Der deutsche Kulturpionier found that between 1920 and the spring of 1938, 153 (i.e., 52.4 percent) of the 292 students surveyed had gone overseas.Footnote ⁶⁴ Of these graduates, over half had gone to former German colonies. Fifty-nine (38.5 percent) had returned to Germany, however, mostly for economic reasons. The article noted the difference in emigration rates and longevity abroad for the graduating classes of the 1920s, as opposed to those of the 1930s. Among graduates from 1920 to 1929, 52.7 percent lived abroad for an average of seven years. From 1930 to 1938, the percentage of graduates living abroad dropped to 35.7 percent, with the average time sinking to two-and-a-half years.Footnote ⁶⁵ Changes in the domestic political and economic situation following the Nazi seizure of power may have played a role in keeping more DKS graduates in Germany.

Through their curricula, the KFR and the DKS aimed to create German colonizers in attitude as well as skill. When confronted with the real world of life overseas, a certain flexibility (promoted by this attitude) was required, as seen in the case of the Rendsburg graduates. Such career flexibility may not have been possible for DKS graduates, which may explain their high rate of return to Germany. What the DKS and KFR graduates' continuing emigration indicates, however, is that the Nazi seizure of power did not interrupt the colonialists' mission to send young Germans overseas. Through their descriptions of their curricula, in fact, the colonial schools asserted their ideological conformity and the continued value of their work.

Disputed Directors and Local Conflicts

Even if the characteristics of the students and the values supposedly instilled through the curricula transitioned relatively easily into the Third Reich, disputes emerged about the men responsible for implementing this colonial education. The controversies surrounding Karl Körner (KFR director, 1930–1945) and Karl W. H. Koch (DKS director, 1934–1939) illuminate the marginal but often complex position of the schools vis-à-vis the Nazi regime. There was general consensus that a school director should display political loyalty, colonial expertise, and firm leadership, but not on whether Körner or Koch had achieved these standards. The schools mirrored the place of the colonialist movement more generally in Nazi Germany. While publicly declaring their loyalty to the regime, colonialists continued to assert their organizational autonomy through the Colonial Society and later through the Reich Colonial League (RKB). Their expert and often first-hand knowledge about the overseas colonies made them more qualified, they felt, to direct colonial policy and propaganda than most Nazi officials. Having convinced themselves of the regime's support for their cause, they also interpreted instances of obstruction by Nazi officials as logistical rather than ideological blocks to their public activities. Colonialists in the Third Reich practiced a combination of adaptation, negotiation, cooperation, and denial to maintain their public presence, and such practices also emerged in the conflicts surrounding the school directors.

In Rendsbug, for example, Körner was engaged in a long dispute with local party representatives in Gau Schleswig-Holstein that lasted from 1936 to the end of 1944. The complaints that came from Schleswig-Holstein—as well as Körner's adamant rejoinders—fill a thick file in the RMdI records in Berlin, reflecting the intensity of the conflict. Körner had made, according to his opponents, an insufficient effort to embrace Nazism publicly and integrate Nazi thinking into the school. In 1936, Heinrich Carl, Kreisleiter for Rendsburg, complained to Gauleiter Hinrich Lohse that the KFR had not shown any interest in the work of the NS-Frauenschaft or the BDM, and had also rejected the idea of holding the NS-Frauenschaft's “motherhood courses” at the school because of supposedly insufficient time in the schedule. Carl doubted this explanation, complaining that “there is enough time for other things, such as rowing regattas and riding lessons, etc.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The school was “closed off from the outside world” and had a “pronounced life of its own,” which made it difficult for local Nazi officials to get a complete picture of the goings-on there.Footnote ⁶⁷

Körner was not a member of the Nazi Party (local party officials rejected his application in 1937). Given the description of him by the Rendsburg Kreisleiter as a “bellyacher” and “reactionary,” Gauleiter Lohse thought it unlikely that he would ever be accepted into the party.Footnote ⁶⁸ Körner claimed, in his defense, that his application had been denied because of obstruction by the offices of the Kreisleiter and Ortsgruppenleiter. He had not tried to join the party earlier, he explained, because of his disgust with the opportunism of those who had raced to join in early 1933.Footnote ⁶⁹ Instead, his wife joined the NS-Frauenschaft, his son the SA, and he the NS-Lehrerbund (National Socialist Teacher's League) and the NS-Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist People's Welfare). When membership opened again in 1937 (after being restricted in May 1933), Körner and his wife applied with the support of the Colonial Policy Office of the NSDAP (Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, or KPA), but were rejected after a two-year wait.Footnote ⁷⁰

Some of the attacks against Körner were personal, including complaints about his daughter's marriage to a Greek doctor. According to a 1943 RMdI memo, Körner's new son-in-law was the son of a long-time Greek envoy to the United States, where he had spent much of his youth, but was actively serving with the Wehrmacht in Greece.Footnote ⁷¹ These facts did little to assuage Körner's critics. Professor Wilhelm Holzmann of the Hamburg Gauamt für Volksgesundheit (District Office for Public Health) complained that Körner was not “suitable to lead the Colonial School in Rendsburg, since his daughter, either through predisposition (Anlage) or through education—both of which are the responsibility of the father—feels herself so little National Socialist that she would marry a Greek.”Footnote ⁷² Körner was thus not in a position to instruct KFR students about the maintenance of correct attitudes toward foreign races.Footnote ⁷³

Other complaints centered on organizational turf, a common source of conflict in the Third Reich. The Gauleiter in Schleswig and the Kreisleiter in Rendsburg felt that they should have a say in the running of the KFR and that Körner should turn first to them, with appropriate deference, with issues relating to the school. Instead, as the district president in Schleswig complained to Gauleiter Lohse in 1941, “Körner turns immediately to the central authorities in Berlin with his wishes and proposals, even when they are of a local nature; he ignores the local [authorities] at every opportunity.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Körner's close relationship with Berlin, in particular with the RMdI (which provided the vast majority of the school's funding), infuriated local officials, solidifying their impression that the KFR existed in isolation from the surrounding town.Footnote ⁷⁵ The subdivision “Colonial Work” in the Reichsfrauenführung similarly declared in 1940 that education at the KFR was “not at all conducted as ideologically as we would like,” and complained as well when the RMdI refused to fund its plans for “colonial motherhood schools” because the KPA had already made the same request to expand the KFR in this direction.Footnote ⁷⁶ The steadfast patronage of the RMdI and the KPA nevertheless obstructed local Nazi officials' plans to remove Körner.

In January 1941, Gauleiter Lohse wrote to the RMdI that he and local party officials were no longer willing to work with Körner. Lohse informed the RMdI that he had appealed to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess to remove Körner, clearly hoping to mobilize his own supporters in Berlin and Munich to outmaneuver Körner's supporters.Footnote ⁷⁷ Karl Jung of the KPA—and chair of the school's board—came to Körner's defense, personally vouching for the director's “proper Nazi sentiments.” Jung wrote to Hess that in his “almost nineteen years of party membership, [Jung] had met few men for whom National Socialist thinking was as self-evident as for Körner.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Unsuccessful in 1941, Lohse renewed his efforts to remove Körner in August 1944. Looking for a compromise that would avoid dealing directly with the question of Körner's suitability, the Party Chancellery in Munich asked whether the KFR itself could continue to exist, given the new measures necessary for total war. Closing the school would solve the matter of Körner's leadership by default.Footnote ⁷⁹ The RMdI responded that the issue of replacing Körner would be set aside until after the end of the war, and that the KFR would not be closed—in large part because of Heinrich Himmler's intervention.Footnote ⁸⁰ Key to the school's survival (and to Körner's continued directorship) was the KFR's appeal for those promoting Germany's irredentist agenda: the colonialist organizations of the RKB and the KPA and, during the war, Himmler and his Germanization projects in eastern Europe (discussed later). Despite this flood of complaints against him, Körner managed to remain director of the KFR until 1945.

Two years before Körner's conflict with local Party officials began in 1936 in Witzenhausen, the DKS had encountered problems with Arning's successor, Karl W. H. Koch. Koch had lived in the English Gold Coast, China, Cameroon, and Angola. Upon returning to Germany in 1932, he joined the Nazi Party and the SA, and worked in the Wehrpolitisches Amt (Office of Military Policy). He was also a member of the Colonial Society's steering committee.Footnote ⁸¹ Koch enjoyed the support of Franz Ritter von Epp, the head of the KPA, and of Heinrich Schnee, the president of the Colonial Society, and became director of the DKS in April 1934. Opposition to Koch centered among the school's alumni. In a letter to the president of the DKS's board of directors in November 1934, Otto von Scherbening, the head of the school's “old boys association” (Verband Alter Herrn der Kameradschaft vom Wilhelmshof), recounted the numerous letters he had received from Germany and abroad opposing Koch's appointment. Scherbening also thought that “party political forces had contributed greatly to Koch's appointment.” Attempting to discredit him, Scherbening and Koch's opponents claimed to have evidence of Koch's misappropriation of funds relating to a business venture in Angola. Epp and the RMdI cleared Koch of these charges, which Epp called “bush gossip.”Footnote ⁸²

Factions within the Colonial Society opposed Koch, but he was able to maintain influence because others perceived him as a linchpin between colonialists and the Nazi Party. In October 1932, some members of the Colonial Society had protested Koch's election to that organization's steering committee because of concerns about his moral integrity. Those who spoke in favor of Koch's election had pointed out that not to include Koch would be a mistake, especially as the Colonial Society attempted to improve its relations with the ascendant Nazi Party.Footnote ⁸³ Like Körner, Koch seems to have had different relationships with both colonialists and Nazi leaders on local and national levels. While local Party representatives sometimes worked against him, Koch represented the Nazi Party on the national level within the colonialist movement.

Koch also faced opposition from students at the DKS, leading to student mutinies in 1936 and 1938. Such actions at the DKS had a longer tradition, as the students had gone on strike in 1908/1909, demanding more academic freedom and less routine work.Footnote ⁸⁴ In 1936, the students put together a memorandum complaining about the quality of their education. They then refused to go to work and retired to a local inn. In response, Koch shut the school for several days, revoked vacation privileges, and implemented a curfew.Footnote ⁸⁵ The local NS-Studentenbund leadership supported the students in their opposition to Koch, further challenging his authority.Footnote ⁸⁶

Students expressed frustration that their course of study and degree did not bring the expected career opportunities. The designation of “colonial college” (Hochschule) by the RMdI in 1925 and the Diplom received by graduates raised these expectations, but many were disappointed that they could not qualify for civil service work.Footnote ⁸⁷ These concerns led to a second mutiny in 1938, when the students, with the support of local Nazi Party student leaders and the Kreisleiter, refused to work and went instead to the nearby Ludwigstein castle (Jugendburg).Footnote ⁸⁸ Again, students felt that their education was inadequate to prepare them for appropriate opportunities after graduation. The winter semester of 1938, for example, apparently began with only two full-time teachers, and many lectures had to be canceled or replaced by lectures on beekeeping and sport.Footnote ⁸⁹ As a report from April 1939 would later explain, Koch lacked the expertise to run the school because he “saw the primitive training [now offered at the school] as the appropriate preparation for DKS students to be future colonial settlers.”Footnote ⁹⁰

These events led to heated discussions among members of the DKS's board, and, in January 1939, Koch was put on leave of absence.Footnote ⁹¹ The leadership of the DKS was divided into two positions, Schulleiter (principal) and Geschäftsführer (managing director). A recently retired teacher became Schulleiter and Koch remained as Geschäftsführer. The school's board confirmed Koch's removal as Schulleiter in February 1939, and removed him from his position as Geschäftsführer in June 1939. Koch's employment contract could not be cancelled until September 1943 for legal reasons, but World War II interceded and Koch was away on military service after 1939.Footnote ⁹²

Both Koch and Körner faced questions about their ability to run the colonial schools. For Koch, these questions centered on his relationship with the students (often supported by local Party officials) and accusations of past financial impropriety, despite his relatively early association with the Nazi Party. Körner's opponents in Schleswig-Holstein complained about their own lack of control over the school, articulating this as a question of political reliability, despite Körner's support from Party and state offices in Berlin and Munich. Ultimately, while DKS students complained about the inability of their education to fulfill their professional ambitions, Körner's support for the KFR's contributions to Nazi colonialism in eastern Europe meant that KFR students would find new opportunities, demonstrating the role of gender in the colonial schools' trajectories.

Gender and Race at the Colonial Schools

Central to the colonialists' narrative of German colonial accomplishments was the ability of Germans to cultivate and extract resources from the overseas colonies. These territories had not provided much economic value to Imperial Germany, yet, during the Kaiserreich and after the loss of the colonies, colonialists described the overseas empire as a vital source of raw materials necessary for the German economy and industry.Footnote ⁹³ Given the relatively short period of formal colonial rule, colonialists also emphasized the great leaps that German colonists had supposedly achieved in infrastructural development and agricultural production in the colonies.Footnote ⁹⁴ The supposedly exceptional abilities of Germans also extended to science, in particular medicine, and the training students received at the DKS would, it was hoped, prepare them to continue this heritage of German technical prowess.Footnote ⁹⁵

Drawing on a rhetoric of mastery and domination, these values were, in many ways, implicitly masculine. Coverage of the school, such as Lieberenz's short film, highlighted this mastery, emphasizing DKS students' physical prowess, discipline, and joy in their work.Footnote ⁹⁶ Such depictions remind one of contemporaneous imagery, such as the youth encampment scenes in Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will.Footnote ⁹⁷ The tradition of German colonial technical ability could fit neatly into the regime's vision of a Nazi masculinity. But, as seen in the schools' curricula, much of the education and many of the desired characteristics of KFR graduates were similar to those at the DKS. The gendering of KFR students therefore inspired more explicit and sometimes critical discussions. These debates fit into a longer history of the negotiation of a colonial femininity, but now took place against the backdrop of the Nazi regime's attitudes toward women, a backdrop that would become increasingly important during World War II.

The overseas colonies (and the KFR) provided women with opportunities to fulfill traditional gender roles, as well as perform activities outside of these constraints, as demanded by life in the colonies. The Kolomädel had to expand her sphere of action while still demonstrating her ability to fulfill traditional roles. This dilemma had also plagued women involved in the colonial movement before 1919. Scholars have shown that patriotic organizations in the Kaiserreich provided women with an avenue for public activism while still insisting upon their femininity, often through the politicization of domesticity.Footnote ⁹⁸ As Agnes von Boemcken, the chair of the Women's League from 1932 to 1936, and a member of the KFR's board of directors, declared in 1930, “We women, we German women, want to prove that it is not governments and peoples who can take or give colonies as they see fit, but rather that they are built up and preserved through quiet, unobtrusive work; that the German wife and mother will be victorious in spite of all treaties and international agreements.”Footnote ⁹⁹

At the KFR, women's roles as wives and mothers stood ambiguously alongside those of domestic workers and colonial pioneers. As seen in von Boemcken's statement, these roles were not only complementary, but also mutually constitutive. The chance to live out the role of the courageous female colonial pioneer and a desire for adventure attracted some students.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A 1983 history of the school written by one graduate emphasized, for example, the KFR's training as a form of emancipation that provided students with self-confidence, independence, and expanded possibilities.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Körner acknowledged that the highest calling for a woman was Hausfrau and mother, but admitted that not every woman would fulfill these roles. The school thus prepared women for two futures: “for future German wives and mothers—and for a vocational training as advanced [möglichst gesteigert] as possible.”Footnote ¹⁰²

The Kolomädel, with her seemingly limitless abilities, could be perceived as threatening to traditional gender roles. In 1940, for example, a journalist for the Schleswig-Holsteinische Landeszeitung sarcastically questioned the need for men in the colonies, given the capable Kolomädel: “I asked the director of the school the same question that every reader is now asking themselves: where is the man on the farm, who, at least here at home, wears the pants?”Footnote ¹⁰³ The reporter's answer was that the colonial man was in the fields all day or in the next town selling the harvest. This rhetorical exchange expressed concern about the Kolomädel's ability to fulfill her role as a wife, given her training in skills traditionally reserved for men. In an article that appeared in 1937 in Westermanns Monatshefte, Körner described letters he had received from Germans abroad asking if he really thought that German settlers would be happy “to be served coffee early in the morning by an Amazon clad in gym pants and armed with a spear (Wurfspeer)”—an image that mirrored a scene in Lieberenz's 1937 short film showing KFR students throwing javelins.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ That, Körner argued, was not the goal of the KFR. The graduates who went overseas “will someday become wives and mothers, and they will, first and foremost, safeguard the Germanness of the next generation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In the same year, Pester Lloyd, a Budapest German-language newspaper, published a piece titled, “The Amazons of the Third Reich.” After describing the school, the author asked what would happen to these girls if Germany did not regain its colonies. The school's headmistress (presumably Körner's wife, who also taught at the school) laughed and replied, “Every one of our students is already as good as married in advance. German farmers, who have recently bought property in East Africa, Togo, Cameroon, and South-West [Africa], write to us and reserve a wife for themselves from among our pupils. The girls need only to choose from among the photos.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Both the letters to Körner and the Pester Lloyd article draw on the image of the Amazon as an exaggerated figure who defied women's traditional limitations. This choice of imagery is particularly significant, given that these women were preparing to go to places that were imagined to be as exotic and strange as the mythical Amazon women.

Students did not confront a colonial racial “Other” at the KFR, yet the Kolomädel was still consciously constructed as a racialized subject in Nazi Germany, beginning with the Aryanization of the student body. In this sense, the KFR resembled other institutions in Nazi Germany that, under the pressure of Gleichschaltung, restructured society along racial lines. Yet, the KFR, as an institution with an autonomous heritage within the colonialist movement, also drew on an older history of race relations. Colonial racism in Germany and the colonies had sparked debate and legislation that, in some ways, presaged Nazi policies of racial segregation. Concerns about “racial mixing” between German settlers and colonial subjects had, for instance, resulted in bans on interracial marriages in Southwest Africa, East Africa, and Samoa.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet, the colonialist movement after World War I also emphasized the supposed benevolence of German colonialism, epitomized by the loyal Askari.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The school's internal and public reports and prospectuses hardly discussed relations between graduates and non-Europeans. Körner's 1935 report briefly mentioned such future interactions, but only to explain that training in laundry and housecleaning were not emphasized because it was natives who did this work overseas.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This omission contrasts with the emphasis that KFR graduate Ruth Medger later placed on German-African relations in her 1940 book, So fand ich Deutsch-Ostafrika. Beobachtungen und Erlebnisse einer deutschen Kolonialschülerin. “The future farm women must know everything,” Medger explained, “and, even when their main work will later be to direct the natives, it is good that they have done once what they will later order others to do. The Blacks notice whether one is master or not of the work [they] are asked to do.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Medger also advised learning local languages, because “work that one cannot correctly order [others to do] must be done oneself; a Negro who one cannot understand cannot be instructed.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The section of her book titled, “A Day in the Life of the Hausfrau,” for example, contained a drawing of an African man cleaning kerosene lamps—with no women, African or European, in sight.Footnote ¹¹² The disjuncture between Medger's focus on directing servants and the KFR's emphasis on students' own work highlights the flexibility of the imagined world that the KFR created for its students: they prepared for work overseas, predominantly in Africa, but their education scarcely incorporated local populations. Their education was practically grounded in colonial life, but, at the same time, rooted in Germany.

The KFR's reports and prospectuses did not extensively discuss the graduates' relationships with colonial populations, but one can nevertheless find numerous references to life in Africa amid short verses and humorous stories about each of the students and teachers in the memory booklets that the students compiled to commemorate their time in Rendsburg. The latter, for example, described the KFR as “the African colony in Europe” and themselves as “Koloneger.”Footnote ¹¹³ Imagining themselves in Africa—in fact, as Africans—meant existing in a space beyond the constraints of Germany, a kind of liberation that reflected the image of the Kolomädel. The idea of Africa proved alluring to KFR students, even if many would ultimately not go overseas.

At Witzenhausen, by contrast, students encountered non-German students at the school and at least one African employee. In a critical May 1939 report on the school, for example, Walther Böhmer mentioned a student from Bolivia and a teacher who was married to a Greek woman.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It is nevertheless difficult to ascertain how many foreign students attended the DKS during the Third Reich, although Eckhard Baum mentions a member of the British Union of Fascists and several exchange students from fascist Italy in his hundredth-anniversary history of the DKS.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Böhmer was not bothered by the presence of the Bolivian student in 1939. In fact, he expressed concern that the mistreatment of this student by the teacher with the Greek wife would have negative repercussions abroad. He was clearly more worried about the presence of a “morally inferior Askari” who worked at the school, and about the fact that this “creature” (Kreatur) apparently “embraced (umärmelt) German girls and women on public dance floors.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ This “Askari” may have been the Swahili instructor who had appeared in a 1937 Frankfurter Volksblatt photo-essay with the caption, “Swahili lesson. A Greek student and a Negro (Neger) from German East Africa at the blackboard.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ According to Baum, the “Askari” in Böhmer's account was Franz Selemann, who had been born in East Africa and come to Germany before World War I as a naval officer's servant. In 1927, he began working as a porter at the DKS and died in 1939 in Witzenhausen at the age of fifty-three. Contradicting Böhmer's account, Baum claims that Selemann had officially been banned from dancing after 1934.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Writing to the RMdI in June 1939, the new director, Georg Boss—a botanist who had taught in Swakopmund, Southwest Africa, from 1931 to 1937—brushed off Böhmer's complaints as “much exaggerated.” In South Africa and Southwest Africa, where a sharp racial barrier existed, Boss averred that the employment of an “Askari” in such a position would not have been possible. But, he retorted, “Herr Böhmer cannot transfer these conditions onto Germany so easily. If German women and girls really danced with an East African, then it is they and not the Askari who are to blame. I myself cannot see anything aggressive or offensive in the behavior of this man.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Such a statement in the Third Reich in 1939 is astonishing. It is unclear from the sources whether Boss expressed this view as a more general rejection of Nazi racial policy, but his comments were clearly out of synch with the reality of life in Nazi Germany by that time. His defense of Selemann was nevertheless an affirmation of the colonialist narrative of the “loyal Askari,” which, as Sandra Maβ has shown, was central to the construction of a German colonial masculinity after the loss of the colonies.Footnote ¹²⁰ Former colonial subjects appeared, often in Askari uniform, at numerous colonialist events in the Third Reich.Footnote ¹²¹ Colonialists saw their presence as a continuing declaration of loyalty and as the physical embodiment of Germany's supposedly benevolent colonialism, which, as mentioned earlier, was intended to refute the Allies' charges of brutality.Footnote ¹²² Selemann's presence in Rendsburg would have been unimaginable because of the doubled racial and sexual threat that observers like Böhmer felt he would have posed. But in Witzenhausen, Selemann's presence allowed DKS students to experience the “heroic German soldier”/“loyal Askari” racial binary so central to memories of the colonial past.

The sense of colonial mastery that the DKS and the KFR sought to foster in their students required them to demonstrate a broadly defined capability that, for KFR students, took them, at times, beyond the accepted limits of female behavior. Possessing such capabilities and such mastery was also racially defined and used to create racial hierarchies. While this relationship of German and racial “Other” often centered on military service in the colonialist narrative, it was not ultimately a model from the colonial past that would prove applicable for DKS students during World War II.

War and the Limits of Gendered Colonial Education

The beginning of World War II brought a realignment and radicalization of priorities that affected the colonial schools as well, and its outbreak in 1939 marked a change in the fate of both schools. In particular, the war heightened the gendered difference between them. DKS students were eventually drafted into military service, whereas KFR students contributed to the war effort through the roles that the Nazi regime defined for women, i.e., in factory work and in the work of “securing” the Germanness of occupied eastern Europe. In the end, only the colonial education at the KFR had direct value for the expanding Nazi continental empire.

After years of unrest related to Koch's directorship, the DKS board of directors and authorities in Berlin decided to make several changes at the school. In August 1939, supervision was transferred completely to the Ministry of Science, Education, and Culture (Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung), which announced plans to transform the DKS from a college (Hochschule) into a technical college (Fachschule). The DKS would now offer its graduates the title of “state-recognized Koloniallandwirt.”Footnote ¹²³ Reinhard Köster took over as director in April 1940 and helped to draft a new curriculum. A two-year apprenticeship would replace the apprentice year, and discussions between the RMdI and the KPA anticipated expanding the school grounds (at an estimated cost of 2.8–3.0 million RM) to accommodate 250 students.Footnote ¹²⁴ The RMdI would also ensure that Witzenhausen—along with Rendsburg, which was already under its patronage—would remain the only state-supported colonial schools.Footnote ¹²⁵

The transformation of the DKS into a Fachschule reflected the optimistic expectations of both colonialists and the Nazi regime in the early days of the war, when victory seemed assured. With the fall of France in June 1940, and an anticipated victory in the Battle of Britain, which began later that summer (and would, if successful, have meant the defeat of both of Germany's main colonial rivals), the reestablishment of a German overseas empire appeared imminent. Many of these reforms did not take place, however, because of the increasing toll that the war took on the DKS. The school was able to hold lectures during the first two years of the conflict, though with decreasing attendance as its current and prospective students entered military service.Footnote ¹²⁶ The 1940–1941 winter semester began with 102 students, but ended with only 18; the others had all been drafted.Footnote ¹²⁷ Some of the buildings were requisitioned to serve as a military hospital, and the DKS ceased operations completely in the fall of 1944.Footnote ¹²⁸

By contrast, the war expanded the KFR's opportunities. The school prepared graduates to maintain the “Germanness” of a community imagined as hermetically sealed off from the local population—a prospect that now also matched the vision of Nazi planners for the occupied eastern European territories. KFR graduates were cut off from emigrating overseas during the war, but a vast new terrain of colonization opened in eastern Europe and the KFR quickly incorporated this new area into its mission. In part because of the school's new responsibilities and state support, yearly enrollments increased during the war from 60 in 1940 to 122 in 1941, and to a record 201 in 1942.Footnote ¹²⁹

During the war, eastern Europe emerged as an additional colonial space in the KFR's promotional materials. After 1940, Körner introduced the subject “Eastern Questions” (Ostfragen) and, after 1943, added Russian language instruction.Footnote ¹³⁰ The January 1943 prospectus stated that graduates were “given preference” (bevorzugt eingesetzt) for work overseas “or in territories with similar duties (for example, the East), and especially in the colonies,” and that many graduates were already working in the Eastern territories (Ostgebieten).Footnote ¹³¹ A new prospectus from May 1944 boasted that graduates were working as “settlement advisors” to relocated ethnic Germans, “as leaders or coworkers in the [NS-Volkswohlfahrt program] ‘Mutter und Kind’…, [and] as ‘German Landfrauen’ on the land administered by the SS” in eastern Europe.Footnote ¹³²

The integration of the eastern European colonial mission into the KFR's traditional overseas colonial mission was complete by June 1944. The one-page prospectus, reduced from eight pages in the prewar years, succinctly stated the school's mission: “Until the war, the only mission was to provide competent helpers to German farmers and plantation wives overseas. During the war, preparation for the East came to the forefront. Both assignments are closely related, not mutually exclusive.”Footnote ¹³³ This statement clearly reflected the Colonial Society's earlier assertion that Africa and eastern Europe were “not mutually exclusive but, rather, complemented each other.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Colonialists expressed this idea more adamantly after the war began, but still maintained their focus on the overseas territories. Unlike the colonialist organizations, however, the KFR seamlessly made the transition from advocating the colonialist agenda of overseas empire to furthering the Nazi regime's war of European territorial expansion.

In a February 1944 letter to the RMdI, Körner commented on the realignment of the KFR. “The goals of our school are naturally tied to the direction of the Reich's settlement policy,” he explained, “The East pushes itself more and more clearly to the fore. Under these circumstances, it seems to me to be an anachronism to focus a school entirely on Africa.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Körner saw this new focus as an addition to, rather than a replacement of, the school's original overseas mission. The RMdI seconded this view in an April 1944 memo which stated that, given contemporary developments, the “orientation of the school's work to the Eastern Front is approved and will be continued, without thereby completely abandoning the colonial idea and colonial education.”Footnote ¹³⁶ The school's promotional material did not remark on this transition beyond incorporating these new duties into the mission statement—thus suggesting further that this shift did not require an ideological change but was instead a pragmatic response to altered circumstances.

The KFR found a new arena for the Kolomädel at a time when the Nazi regime was mobilizing women as racial warriors. Nazi women's organizations such as the BDM, the ANSt, and the NS-Frauenschaft sent women to work among ethnic Germans in the occupied Eastern territories. As Elizabeth Harvey has shown, Nazi efforts to create a “new order” in the East relied upon domestic culture and the family, endeavors largely carried out by women.Footnote ¹³⁷ In the Eastern territories, which were in the process of being “cleansed” of local populations, these women secured the “Germanness” of those ethnic Germans relocated to these territories, and KFR graduates were to support this aggressive and expanding colonial regime by applying their training to this new colonial space. In January 1943, for example, the Ministry for Science, Education, and National Culture discussed the requisition of a KFR teacher with Körner and the district government in Schleswig. The correspondence did not indicate any local resistance to the requisition of the teacher but only concern that a suitable replacement be found for the school.Footnote ¹³⁸

The requisitioned KFR teacher may have been “Frieda Hagen,” who served as the director of the school for village advisors in Kreis Zamosc (in the General Government) from December 1943 until the end of the war.Footnote ¹³⁹ As a child, Hagen had read Volk ohne Raum, Hans Grimm's 1926 bestseller about colonial Africa, and dreamed of becoming a farmer's wife in Africa. She worked at a women's agricultural college from 1932 to 1938 and began teaching agricultural topics at the KFR in 1941.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ After she was told in 1942 that Germany's “colonies no longer lie in Africa but in the East,” Hagen was asked to establish a school for village advisors in District Lublin in the General Government.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In an interview with Elizabeth Harvey in the 1990s, Hagen explained that she had been given this opportunity because she was the “only young and active” staff member at the KFR (Hagen was twenty-seven in 1942).Footnote ¹⁴² In addition to the work of Hagen and RKB graduates in the occupied East, the Reichsführung SS and the Krakow office of the NS-Volkswohlfahrt invited Karl Körner to visit the General Government in February 1944 for the purpose of inspecting possible workplaces for KFR graduates and implementing, together with the Reichsführung SS, a training course in one of the training homes created jointly by the SS and the KFR.Footnote ¹⁴³

This close cooperation with the regime's activities in the East—and Himmler's consequent protection—were central to the school's continuing existence after 1941. In fact, the KFR remained the last active colonialist endeavor after 1943, when the rest of the colonialist movement was shut down after Goebbels's declaration of total war. RMdI correspondence mentions Himmler's satisfaction with the work of KFR graduates in eastern Europe. For example, Ministerial Director Ernst Vollert reported to the RMdI in October 1943 from Prague that Himmler had “personally and repeatedly recognized that the girls had done an excellent job in their Osteinsatz (Eastern service).”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ So great was Himmler's gratitude, in fact, that in May 1944 he sent two hundred bars of chocolate and a pound of fudge to the Rendsburg school.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ More important, it appears that Himmler even actively intervened to keep the school open. In December 1944, District Administrator (Landrat) Hütteroth in the RMdI wrote to inform the Party Chancellery that Himmler had personally decided against shutting down the KFR, a decision seconded by Goebbels (as Plenipotentiary for Total War), General Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment Fritz Sauckel, and Minister for Science, Education, and National Culture Bernhard Rust.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Himmler's protection could not completely shield the Rendsburg students, however, as the German army retreated and the country prepared for total war. The RMdI mobilized KFR students in 1944, ordering a quarter of them to work on a rotating basis in armaments factories and another fifty to work in military hospitals during their medical semester in Hamburg.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As the Allied armies advanced into Germany in 1945, shortages and bombing raids further disrupted the students' schooling. The winter 1945 semester ended on April 15, but some students remained at the school because they had lost their homes and could not find lodging elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The British Army occupied the building on May 8, 1945, disbanded the school on political grounds, and requisitioned it to house refugees. The remaining students found housing in the town and would leave Rendsburg by October 1945.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

The Value of a Colonial Education after 1945

The KFR and the DKS had both emphasized the cultural and technical aspects, respectively, of the overseas colonial project since their founding, and found that they could continue to do so in the Third Reich. When the war ended in 1945, however, the schools faced a new world. Would the core of the colonial education offered at the KFR and the DKS continue to have value in a divided and decimated postwar Germany, with overseas colonialism now decidedly off the political agendas of both West and East Germany?

The KFR remained open until the very end of the war, continuing to exist until 1945 in its marginal position: part of the colonialist movement, but outlasting all other colonial agitation; not a Nazi Party institution, yet supporting the regime's eastern European policies. This marginal position framed memories of the school after 1945 for both former students and others. As late as 1963, the Rendsburg city council received letters asking whether the KFR still existed and what had become of its teachers and director.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The expectation that the school would still exist reflected its apparent disassociation, in the minds of these writers, from Nazism. At the site of the former main school building (demolished in 1977 when the canal was widened), former students planted an oak in 1983, and, in 2005, the mayor of Rendsburg dedicated a plaque to commemorate the school. The Schleswig-Holsteinische Landeszeitung article on the oak tree planting omits any mention of the school's activities in Nazi Germany.Footnote ¹⁵¹ An article on the plaque dedication acknowledged the students' training for both the colonies and the Nazi East, yet the article—titled “Colonial School ‘has earned it’”—quoted Rendsburg's mayor, who spoke of the “worthy memories” of the school.Footnote ¹⁵²

Just as gender expectations had played a role in shaping the history of the KFR under Nazism, they continued to do so in shaping this postwar memory. Whereas domesticity had been politicized since the turn of the twentieth century through women's colonialist activism, colonial domesticity was similarly depoliticized after 1945 as “just” women's work outside the male public space shaped by Nazism. Based on her discussions with former students and their efforts to have the school officially commemorated, Dorothea Siegle has concluded that former students' “misgivings regarding their colonial mission do not exist—even forty years after the end of the Colonial School. Their own relationship to the colonial past remains unreflective and euphemistic.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Tink Diaz's 1991 documentary about a gathering of KFR alumnae conveys the same impression.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The continuity of a narrative about women's role as bearers of German culture abroad not only helped the KFR align itself with similar Nazi ideas between 1933 and 1945, but also allowed KFR students to withdraw from this alignment and claim a “non-Nazi” identity after 1945—with no qualms about larger issues of race and colonialism.

The DKS's Nazi-era legacy and involvement in the regime's occupation of eastern Europe was much less central to its identity, which included a thirty-five-year history before 1933. Witzenhausen therefore had less of a burden to overcome. The DKS, largely dormant during the war years, created a new profile for itself after the war. Discussions about reopening the school began in the late 1940s and included many of the same individuals who had worked at the school before the war. In 1955, the school received 100,000 deutschmarks from the Bonn government to reopen.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Reporting on the plans for the former DKS, the Niederhessische Zeitung approved of resurrecting the school's past mission to put German knowledge and skill to use for the benefit of the world: “Specialists for tropical and subtropical agriculture are required in many countries in the colonies, i.e., specialists like those trained in an outstanding manner at the Colonial School. May we finally succeed in our goals in the future.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The perception of German technical and scientific prowess proved tenacious, even as the colonial ambitions that had previously accompanied this narrative largely disappeared.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Erasing the tendentious years of Koch's leadership and of the Third Reich more generally, Der deutsche Kulturpionier's inaugural postwar issue in 1949 harkened back to Fabarius' vision for the school.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Renamed the German Institute for Tropical and Subtropical Agriculture in 1956, the school is now affiliated with the University of Kassel and supports research on sustainable rural development in “countries in the process of industrialization,” in particular technology development, resource management, and organic farming practices.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

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The KFR and the DKS were part of attempts by German colonialists to claim space for themselves and for overseas colonial aspirations after the loss of administrative control over Germany's overseas territories in 1919. The continued existence of the DKS, and the establishment of the KFR, in a Germany without colonies articulated colonialists' belief that Germany would soon reclaim these territories, a belief that linked the colonial ambitions of Imperial and Nazi Germany. During the Third Reich, the colonial schools in Rendsburg and Witzenhausen bridged the past and the present. They retained much of their pre-1933 curricula and overseas mission, but presented their traditional conceptions of colonialism and their institutional structures as emblematic of the new Nazi order. In the conflicts surrounding their directors, for example, both the colonial expertise of the past and the political reliability of the present were needed. The schools were caught within the time warp of the colonialist movement in the Third Reich: advocating the future recreation of the past empire, while kept in a constant state of expectation in the present. Only the KFR resolved this conundrum by actively participating in the colonization of eastern Europe. The DKS's vision of technical colonialism proved less fungible on the whole, but it ensured, ironically, the continuing existence of the school in its new formation, one devoid of any trace of the Nazi colonial project.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The cultural conception of the German colonial project fostered in Rendsburg, by contrast, assured the KFR protection and longevity during the Third Reich—but also allowed graduates to disassociate themselves from Nazism after 1945. The prospect of overseas colonialism continued to resonate in a Germany without colonies through the 1940s, giving the cultural and technical training for future colonists offered by the DKS and the KFR value before, during, and—nostalgically and apolitically—after the Third Reich.