In the early morning of May 26, 1935, some residents of the eastern German city of Brandenburg an der Havel awoke to shouts of “We Want Our Kaiser Back” and “We Want Back the Black-White-Red” emanating from the dormitory of the storied and elite Prussian secondary school, the Ritterakademie am Dom zu Brandenburg.Footnote ¹ A small number of students had thrown an illegal party during which, emboldened by alcohol, at least one student had called for the restoration of the monarchical order, to the audible delight of others present. Informed of the night's events on the following Monday, school authorities quickly investigated the matter and decided that the episode represented neither a genuine act of political subversion nor a reflection of possible “reactionary” attitudes held by the students. The utterances were instead an act of foolishness (Dummheit) committed by immature pupils, the consequence of the more serious and perennial problem of students' drinking parties, concluded the Ritterakademie administration. In response, school principal Georg Neuendorf punished several older pupils by removing them from their position atop the student hierarchy and revoking several privileges. He also wrote to all parents of students boarding at the Ritterakademie, asking them no longer to send their sons money, food, and alcohol. Satisfied with his response, the principal ended his report on the incident to his superiors in Berlin, the Oberpräsidium of Brandenburg Province, by noting optimistically that the episode would be of pedagogical use in the continued “Nazification” of the school.Footnote ² In what must have seemed to those involved to signal the end of the affair, regional authorities approved of Neuendorf's actions three days later, concluding that the drunken utterances were a “foolish youth's prank” (dumm[es] junge Streich).Footnote ³

Interest in the matter, however, did not disappear. Around the same time that Neuendorf was questioning pupils who lived in the dormitory in order to identify those responsible, news of what happened had made its way to Gestapo officials in Potsdam, and local Nazi officials had begun soliciting statements from witnesses. State and party interest in the Ritterakademie quickly grew in the following days and weeks, expanding in scope from the local to ultimately the national level and from the narrow purview of state administrators to that of national educational and Nazi Party leaders. By the early fall, queries from the Brandenburg Province Oberpräsidium into the political attitudes of the teaching staff and the pupils hinted at the storm that soon broke over the school and its supporters. State and party deliberations led Nazi officials to conclude by early October that the institution was a bastion of “reactionary” and “anti-Nazi” sentiment that undermined the Third Reich's educational mission. On October 17, 1936, the Reich Education Ministry authorized the Oberpräsidium to shut down the Ritterakademie.Footnote ⁴

The efforts of the Reich Education Ministry and the Oberpräsidium, however, met with substantial opposition from an imaginative, organized, and very committed opponent, a group of largely Prussian aristocrats whose ranks included former students, parents of current pupils, and their influential friends. Led by the head (Kurator) of the foundation that controlled the Ritterakademie, manorial estate owner (Rittergutsbesitzer) Wilhelm von Goertzke, and later Rittergutsbesitzer Hans von Rochow, these aristocrats fought to preserve the institution's traditional educational mission, the transmission of those “durable, transposable dispositions, … practices, and representations” that constituted the Prussian aristocratic habitus.Footnote ⁵ As this article will show, the aristocrats struggled to prevent the closing of the Ritterakademie because the institution played a crucial role in inculcating young men with the core values of the Prussian aristocracy. Proper models of behavior and ways of thinking to be transmitted to these youths were, above all else, those connected to the aristocracy's traditional and still extant, though greatly diminished, leadership role in German society. Much more important than the school-leaving certificate (Abitur), the goal of the Ritterakademie education was the formation of an aristocratic “character” that prized tradition, piety, simplicity, family, duty, self-denial, and modesty and rejected supposed bourgeois norms such as materialism and intellectualism. This unique institution was to instill in the boys a physical, moral, and intellectual hardness, self-confidence, and self-control that would, theoretically, allow them to assume their natural positions of leadership on the landed estate, in the corridors of power, or on the battlefield.Footnote ⁶ These Prussian aristocrats believed the Ritterakademie, especially with its boarding facilities (Alumnat), provided the boys with the proper socialization that could not be found in the Hitler Youth organization or in the state schools. The system of “self-government” and “self-education” that lay at the heart of the Ritterakademie experience rested on a traditional structuring of the student population and its daily activities that struck not a few Nazis as profoundly anachronistic and antithetical to the racially determined egalitarianism of the Third Reich. According to a baroque hierarchical division of the students—from the lordly “senior” to “betraute,” to “unbetraute,” and the lowly “ulx,” older students enjoyed many privileges but were responsible for ensuring the smooth running of the dormitory and the extracurricular education of the younger pupils. A small group of students—the seniors led by the First Senior (primus omnium, or P.O.)—had the right to enforce discipline by means of corporal punishment. New and/or young students, who it was believed needed to learn to obey before they could lead, were responsible for following the older students' commands. The hierarchy of rights and duties served as a highly effective structure to transmit ideas and values. Whether regarding the significance of completing chores, the importance of behaving honorably toward one another, or the correctness of mentally distancing oneself from most of German society, younger pupils learned from the older boys how to think and act. It was this system that the Nazis ultimately sought to destroy and that the mostly aristocratic alumni, parents, and pupils struggled to defend. As of May 1935, the Nazi state determined the content of German pupils' formal instruction, and the influence of the NSDAP was felt in practically every aspect of the German school experience. Prussian aristocrats in Brandenburg and elsewhere, having largely shielded aristocratic educational institutions such as the Ritterakademie against the reforms and attacks of the Weimar Republic, sought to continue to do so in the Third Reich. The conflict was thus not about where the boys would learn—in the Ritterakademie school or the local public Gymnasium—but who would ultimately determine the content and form of their education. Men such as von Goertzke and Nazi Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube were, in short, fighting over the hearts and minds of the next generation of Prussian aristocrats.

With so much at stake for both groups, the struggle over the Ritterakademie was not a quick affair but in fact lasted almost as long as the Third Reich itself. Over the course of nine years, the National Socialist opponents and the largely aristocratic supporters rallied allies, debated and adopted various offensive and defensive strategies, and celebrated both hollow and real victories. Nor was the quarrel limited to those directly involved in education. A number of institutions such as the Wehrmacht, the Reich Ministry for Church Affairs, the Party Chancellery of the NSDAP, as well as prominent individuals such as Hermann Göring, were pulled almost immediately into the conflict. The aristocratic supporters of the Ritterakademie, for example, sought to recruit powerful protectors to help to fend off the assault by certain Nazis, ultimately even seeking to make Plenipotentiary for the Implementation of the Four-Year Plan and Hitler's chosen successor Hermann Göring the Ritterakademie's formal patron. The struggle over the Ritterakademie was from the beginning much more than a local matter involving a few rowdy pupils.

This article will examine the still generally unexplored and insufficiently understood topic of the relationship between the Prussian aristocracy and the Nazi state. Although scholars such as Stephan Malinowski, Heinz Reif, and Eckart Conze have recently shed light on aspects of this relationship and, by doing so, have called scholars' attention to its importance, their contributions represent a starting point, elements of which necessitate further investigation and even revision.Footnote ⁷ The aristocrats' sustained efforts to preserve the Ritterakademie, for example, substantiates our broader understanding of the aristocracy's gradual social, political, and economic marginalization in the modern era. The story of the Ritterakademie from 1935 to 1945 also shows, however, that the belief that the German aristocracy rallied around the Nazi state and party until shortly before the Third Reich's end is at best an incomplete conclusion. As Malinowski, Conze, Sven Reichardt, and Jonathan Petropoulos have convincingly argued, real affinities between the German aristocracy and the National Socialists existed, manifested in a shared hatred of “Marxists” and Jews, for example, as well as in common activities such as participation in the NSDAP, SA, and SS.Footnote ⁸ Prominent aristocrats such as the princes Philipp and Christoph von Hessen turned to the Nazi party for salvation from republican policies that threatened the nobles' wealth and power. This union, forged in common fears and hatreds and the usefulness of one for the other, endured for the entire prewar period and was rent asunder during World War II by a small number of conservative elites, as the historian Theodore S. Hamerow writes, “because of differences over policy or method, not over principle.”Footnote ⁹ Such conclusions are based on the actions and attitudes of German aristocrats in the Weimar Republic and very early days of the Nazi dictatorship. They are also the result of a narrow focus on a small number of individuals operating on the national stage. Extending the temporal horizon of the analysis to include the entire Third Reich and focusing on those aristocrats active not at Wilhelmstrasse but in communities such as Brandenburg an der Havel reveals a very different picture. The struggle over the Ritterakademie demonstrates that the large degree of support for Nazism among the aristocracy resembled more a fragile marriage of convenience than a sturdy union of two groups whose shared values functionally trumped their political, social, and economic differences. Once the common enemy of the “Weimar system” was gone and as the Nazi state asserted itself in areas that the Prussian aristocracy sought to preserve—especially control over the content and form of the elite youths' education, broadly understood—cooperation with the National Socialist state deteriorated and, as seen here, broke out into conflict. And yet the Ritterakademie's supporters were clearly not seeking to topple the Nazi government; nor were they struggling to prevent the nazification of German schools. Goertzke and his allies schemed, maneuvered, pleaded, cajoled, and threatened in order to preserve the special function of one school, the Ritterakademie.

What is the historian to make of this remarkable and consciously limited rejection of the totalizing claims of the National Socialist state and party? What is the significance of this ten-year episode of aristocratic opposition to certain Nazi education reforms? For the Prussian aristocracy? For our understanding of the Nazi state? Above all else, the aristocratic struggle to preserve the Ritterakademie is a powerful display of Eigensinn. A concept traditionally associated with those lacking significant status or power—most famously, industrial workers—Eigensinn behavior is a fundamental element of the complex relationship between Prussian nobles such as those in Brandenburg and the Nazi regime. Taking the concept from the factory shop floor to the drawing rooms of manorial estates liberates us, for example, from the erroneous conceptual model of Germans' behavior in the Third Reich that consisted, in the words of Alf Lüdtke, of the “either-or of obedience or resistance.”Footnote ¹⁰ Applicable to both individuals and groups, Eigensinn activities are characterized by their ambiguity, signaling neither outright rejection nor explicit support; they are the consequence of an individual's or group's efforts to create some distance—often temporary—from those in power. Lüdkte identified one important goal of Eigensinn behavior as “to be yourself [‘bei sich’ zu sein] in your own space.”Footnote ¹¹ In practice this often took the form of preserving one's traditional rights and prerogatives, defending the “space” in which one “self-realized,” often in the face of attempted encroachments by those in power.Footnote ¹² As will be seen here, Prussian aristocrats such as Kurator Wilhelm von Goertzke engaged in a ten-year campaign to preserve the Ritterakademie, a literal and metaphorical space in which uniquely Prussian aristocratic modes of thought and behavior were transmitted to the next generation. At the same time, Goertzke and his allies were neither working to reform the entire German educational system nor did they consciously and explicitly seek to overthrow the Nazi regime. As in the case of industrial workers in the Third Reich, the Eigensinn activities of the Prussian aristocrats demonstrated the “simultaneity of possible behaviors” in the Third Reich that, in the end, did not threaten the regime.Footnote ¹³

Examining a display of aristocratic Eigensinn is significant for several reasons. The utility of this concept is clearly not limited, as has been the case traditionally, to individuals or groups considered to be on the margins or at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchies. Under the conditions of the Nazi dictatorship, the very wealthy and the socially well-connected found themselves needing recourse to modes of behavior that scholars in the past have identified in the very asymmetrical relations between a ruler and his peasant farmers or factory owner and his workers. The widespread political, economic, and social changes ushered in as part of the “Nazi revolution” represented an important acceleration of the erosion of the traditional foundations of aristocratic privilege and power. The Eigensinn behavior of Prussian aristocrats here was thus the natural expression of, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler has argued, a group that had been undergoing a displacement from their traditional position at the center of social, political, and economic power since the French Revolution. The struggle over the Ritterakademie represented an important stage in this noble decline. If the Nazis won, the Prussian aristocrats—wealthy but no longer economically dominant, socially prominent but no longer exclusively making up the “upper ten thousand,” and almost entirely shut out of the regional and national centers of power—would lose the ability to reproduce itself, to ensure the Prussian aristocracy's continued survival by passing along core values to the youth. Having already devolved from a “privileged, traditional ruling caste” to “regional elites in the service of the state,” the German aristocracy in the Third Reich was confronted with the possible next stage: its devolution out of existence.Footnote ¹⁴ Finally, analyzing the aristocrats' use of Eigensinn helps us understand more fully the relationship between the Prussian nobility und the Nazis. The struggle over the Ritterakademie demonstrates that the nascent scholarly consensus—that, first, the National Socialists and German nobility allied with one another by 1933 out of a variety of motives, and that, second, the lengthy prewar honeymoon that followed was ruined principally by Germany's deteriorating military situation after 1942, whose ultimate expression was the July 20 attempt on Hitler's life—is incomplete. The dynamics of the relationship were instead more fluid, more ambiguous, and included not only the intentional support for the regime, stemming largely from a shared hatred of Marxism and democracy, displayed by many aristocrats, as Malinowski and others correctly show, but also the organized and sustained rejection of the Nazi state's intentional encroachment on the aristocrat's traditional control over the form and content of their sons' education. Although both Nazis and Prussian aristocrats valued “character” over intellectualism, for example, and although both may have advocated educational programs that “steeled” the youth's body, the struggle over the Ritterakademie revealed that much more was at stake. Goertzke and others were, above all else, struggling to preserve their right to transmit the aristocratic “spirit” to the next generation. In this sense, the conflict was, contrary to Larry Eugene Jones's conclusions, about more than just differences of policy—here educational policy—but was in fact about core principles.

The Initial Campaign, 1935–1937

Local and regional Nazi officials were not satisfied with the Gestapo's decision, made as early as June 15, 1935, to consider the matter of the drinking episode at the Ritterakademie officially closed since it was only a “foolish youth's prank.”Footnote ¹⁵ In early July the Brandenburg an der Havel NSDAP chapter brought the episode to the attention of the region's Gauleiter, Wilhelm Kube, noting that the offenders were “chiefly members of the aristocracy” and that the matter had not been resolved to the satisfaction of local Nazi officials.Footnote ¹⁶ They also identified the alleged seriousness of the matter:

Having directly heard of the affair himself, Gauleiter Kube agreed with the Brandenburg chapter, and he instructed the Oberpräsidium to open a new investigation.Footnote ¹⁸ Neuendorf was ordered to provide his superiors with a detailed evaluation of conditions at the school and Alumnat, including political assessments of the pupils and their parents.Footnote ¹⁹ Neuendorf complied but his guardedly optimistic response did very little to assuage regional officials' concerns, however. The school principal acknowledged in his report that “lacking is a teaching staff that can offer mainly on the basis of its attitude the prerequisites to develop the National Socialist spirit in the school.”Footnote ²⁰ An equally important influence on the pupils, and especially on those living in the dormitory, was the parents, yet some of these, stated Neuendorf, were active and passive opponents of the Third Reich whom the state and party would not likely win over to National Socialism. Despite these pedagogical deficiencies, there was genuine and growing support for Nazism among the institution's pupils. He concluded:

The report failed to reassure Brandenburg's Oberpräsidium of either the current or future political reliability of the Ritterakademie's pupils, even though Neuendorf, a member of the Nazi Party since April 1932, had openly sought to “Nazify” the school from the moment of his appointment as principal in spring 1934.Footnote ²² On the orders of the Oberpräsident, he revisited the issue in early February 1936. By now, however, his optimism had faded considerably, and his assessment was much more comprehensive and critical. Efforts to change the Ritterakademie's “spirit” in the fall and winter had elicited strong resistance from the pupils, alumni, and parents, and relations between them and the principal had deteriorated markedly. He now more sharply criticized the traditional attitudes and customs found at the Ritterakademie. “Everything is,” wrote Neuendorf, “trapped in a sense of tradition that is guarded over for its own sake, even though real values are no longer or never were expected to derive from it.”Footnote ²³ Adherence to tradition had resulted in, for instance, pupils “learning” that it was permissible for them to lie to teachers and school officials, although acts of dishonesty among themselves were severely punished by the student leaders. Similarly, pupils felt they could and should defend their privileges by any means possible. A trainee teacher who lived in the dormitory and who was perceived by the students as seeking to curtail their traditional degree of autonomy was the victim of a concerted effort to drive him away from the Ritterakademie. To take another example, after two students were expelled for “low morals,” other pupils not only did not censure them as outsiders might have expected but instead sent them off in the traditional, honor-filled manner of “pummeling them out” (“den üblichen ehrenvollen Abschied durch hinausprügeln”).Footnote ²⁴

Nor were the guardians of tradition limited to the current pupils; in fact, as Neuendorf informed the Oberpräsidium, the parents and Ritterakademie alumni were the primary forces working against the transformation of the school along National Socialist lines. He complained that “there is here not the slightest hint of understanding for the educational tasks required by the National Socialist state.”Footnote ²⁵ According to the principal, parents and alumni spread falsehoods and rumors about him after he implemented reforms such as the banning of care packages from home; they claimed that he did not understand the pupils or that he intended to turn the school into a “scholars' academy” (“Gelehrtenschule”). The principal wrote:

Although Neuendorf concluded that his reforms would in time transform the Ritterakademie's “spirit,” as later events show, his prognosis fell on the deaf ears of Nazi officials in Berlin.

Despite the success of the Ritterakademie principal in keeping the official alumni association in the dark regarding his correspondence with the regional authorities, concerned former pupils and other interested parties nevertheless turned to one another in order to find a solution to what they considered the real problem: the fundamental unsuitability of Georg Neuendorf leading the tradition-rich, elite Prussian school. Interested alumni were deeply dissatisfied with what they viewed as the principal's inability to govern the institution, accusing him, for example, of not really understanding the pupils and therefore administering the school in a manner that alternated between excessive lenience and severity.Footnote ²⁷ Identifying both the heart of the matter and the likely seriousness of the situation, one association member noted in February 1936, “the worst is that [Neuendorf] is a 150-percent Nazi who will, should he not be able to remain principal, turn the tables and maintain that the Ritterakademie is a bulwark of Junkerdom and reaction and must be closed down.”Footnote ²⁸ Making the possibility of dismissing him even more difficult, as the alumni knew, was the fact that Neuendorf was especially well connected politically.Footnote ²⁹ Nevertheless, alumni officials tried to convince him to quit; in early March 1936, the aged Kurator Wilhelm von Goertzke asked him to resign, something the principal refused to do.Footnote ³⁰ Unable to rid themselves of him this way, they sought to control, and possibly even improve, the situation by appointing a new Kurator, a younger advocate who would be more willing and able to defend the Ritterakademie against the National Socialist principal and others. Although the alumni eventually succeeded in welcoming a new Kurator, they failed to force out Neuendorf and, more ominously, to anticipate that more powerful individuals were beginning to take an active interest in the school.Footnote ³¹

State concern regarding the Ritterakademie could possibly have remained limited to investigations and intergovernmental discussions had a second episode of alleged subversive and reactionary sentiment in mid-1936 not convinced fence-sitters such as Georg Neuendorf to move against the school while at the same time also strengthening the determination of ardent local and regional Nazis to destroy the Ritterakademie. From the denunciations of two current pupils, the Oberpräsidium learned in late summer 1936 that some students had allegedly mocked and cursed the March Reichstag election at a meeting of the Ritterakademie's Hitler Youth group. According to Holge von H., the First Senior and Hitler Youth leader stated in front of all assembled that “the election was a swindle.” Another pupil maintained the First Senior expressed himself in a “completely reactionary” fashion, announcing that the election was “rigged.” Both students also denounced more generally the student self-administration in the dormitory, claiming that such a system led to both moral improprieties (“sittlichen Vergehens”) as well as violent and destructive chaos.Footnote ³²

Called to account by the Oberpräsidium, Neuendorf gave the regional authorities a lengthy report in which he strongly condemned the Ritterakademie and its “spirit” and thereby effectively bolstered Nazi officials' commitment to destroy the institution. Although Neuendorf made clear that Berlin had received incomplete and faulty information about both the recent episode and the background of the two denunciants that together minimized the episode's significance, his discussion of the exceptional—and therefore possibly subversive—culture and traditions and, more damaging, his now deeply pessimistic assessment of the possibility of “Nazifying” the Ritterakademie made matters much worse. The traditional system of pupil “self-administration”—in which the seniors, in exchange for special privileges, kept the other pupils in line by means of, among other things, corporal punishment—was a necessary evil, he argued; without it, school officials would not be able to maintain a modicum of order in the school and the dormitory. Yet his attempts at reforming the system—including abolishing the right of the older students to punish the younger pupils physically—led to a battle of wills between him and the pupils that, he believed, had finally revealed the institution's true nature. Acts of vandalism and disobedience were common manifestations of pupils' willingness to challenge his authority and that of some of the other teachers, especially if the students believed their prerogatives were threatened. “The form and content of dormitory life, so goes the refrain, are to be determined by the pupils, and the principal is to operate within the designated boundaries. Should he not do so, the pupils' anger is directed at him, too,” wrote Neuendorf.Footnote ³³ Since the principal sought to reshape the institution along National Socialist lines, he emphasized two aspects of the current situation to his superiors. First, the attitudes and behavior of the pupils not only were not checked by parents and alumni but were in fact affirmed and validated by the very adults the pupils most admired and respected. Second, those involved most deeply in challenging his authority and reforms were of “noble lineage.” According to Neuendorf, such aristocratic boys, with the support of their parents and active alumni, refused to conform to common standards such as respecting private property and the rule of law. It was this realization—acquired gradually over the course of twelve months—that explained his loss of optimism regarding the possibility of “Nazifying” the Ritterakademie. “The longer I work here,” despaired the principal, “the clearer it is to me that I am tilting at windmills [einem Kampf gegen Windmühlenflügel führen].”Footnote ³⁴ That his earlier optimism had disappeared entirely can clearly be seen in his concluding remarks: “One should close the Ritterakademie since it, in this form, no longer has a right to exist.”Footnote ³⁵

Upon receiving the principal's report, regional education officials began in fall 1936 to redirect their energies away from investigating the Ritterakademie and toward working to close it down. In a first and crucial letter to the Reich Education Ministry in this matter, the Secondary School Department of the Oberpräsidium argued its case for shutting the school's doors.Footnote ³⁶ Acknowledging Neuendorf's exemplary political attitude and actions, remarking even that he was awarded the position because of his political reliability, regional education officials noted that his efforts to reform the school had succeeded whereas his efforts to transform the dormitory had failed. Expelling pupils of questionable moral character, combining the Alumnat leadership positions with those of the Hitler Youth chapter, banning care packages and drinking parties, and placing a teacher in the dormitory at night might have been appropriate responses but they nonetheless failed to change the allegedly reactionary nature of dorm life. The reason for this, regional education officials concluded, was the continuing influence of the alumni and parents on the pupils. The alumni especially believed that they could determine the educational nature of pupils' experiences in the dining halls, dorm rooms, and on the playing fields, preserving the traditional forms and customs that included the system of student self-administration that relied on corporal punishment. As a result, the Ritterakademie pupils stood apart from the teachers and school administrators, resisting any attempts to change the form and content of their school experience. The Oberpräsidium official concluded:

The simplest form of such intervention, argued the Secondary School Department, was for the Reich Ministry to use a ministerial decree issued in July 1935 that set up a framework by which the supposedly counterproductive competition among schools for qualified pupils would be solved by closing down superfluous, or so-called “inferior” (lebensschwach), schools. Since the number of pupils at the Ritterakademie appeared to have decreased markedly in the previous two years, officials believed the school no longer served the community's educational needs and wrote a letter in 1936 to the Oberpräsidium that ended with an explicit request for permission to close the Ritterakademie.Footnote ³⁸ Less than three weeks later, the Reich Education Minister consented, authorizing the Oberpräsidium to shut the doors of the 230-year-old school.Footnote ³⁹ Wasting little time, regional authorities notified the school and its legal representatives such as Kurator Wilhelm von Goertzke of the minister's decision in late October 1936.Footnote ⁴⁰ As the Regierungspräsident in Potsdam found out on October 31 in his capacity as the state representative of the foundation (Domstift) that oversaw the school, the Ritterakademie was to close at the end of the school year, in April 1937.Footnote ⁴¹ It seemed at this point as if the Nazi state was on the verge of forcibly shutting the doors of a venerable institution that had for more than two centuries educated the sons of Prussian large landowners and officers.

The Ritterakademie's supporters refused to accept the Education Minister's decision, however, and vigorously pursued several defensive strategies intended to compel authorities to pardon the institution. Possibly drawing on previous experience or simply aware of the pronounced polycratic situation of the Third Reich, the Kurator and other supporters sought to recruit a diverse collection of powerful people to lobby Nazi state and party officials. The school's defenders turned first to the Potsdam Regierungspräsident. In a letter dated November 7, 1936, von Goertzke refuted the claim that Brandenburg an der Havel had too many high schools for too few pupils; in fact, the city's ongoing transformation into a center of armaments production as well as a garrison city augured a future spike in the number of school-age children. Moreover, closing the school would injure the local economy in the form of lost wages and revenue and the likely future expense of constructing a new school to accommodate Brandenburg's rapidly growing population. The Kurator ended with a plea that the Regierungspräsident support “with all his strength” the school's continued existence; “people all over talk about the famous school Eton,” he concluded, “why should a similar structure that already exists be dissolved?”Footnote ⁴² Von Goertzke followed up days later, very possibly at the Regierungspräsident's request, with an important additional justification for allowing the school to remain open: the Ritterakademie had produced a number of alumni who had served the German state and people in the past with distinction as generals, statesmen, and even reformers.Footnote ⁴³ Such a two-pronged approach—emphasizing the economic consequences and the record of distinguished, patriotic alumni—was also used to enlist the aid of Germany's Reich Minister for Religious Affairs. In two letters in late fall 1936, Minister Hanns Kerrl pleaded that the Oberpräsidium spare the Ritterakademie because of its role in producing numerous famous alumni such as the Prussian war hero General Adalbert von Bredow and the well-known Nazi Old Fighter, Minister of Parliament, and S.A. leader Dietrich von Jagow as well as in educating the ever growing number of pupils in Brandenburg.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Minister agreed to issue a directive stating his support for the Regierungspräsident's proposal that the school be preserved; such a gesture could help, von Goertzke concluded, “though not by much.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Realizing their still weak position vis-à-vis influential Nazis in the Education Ministry and elsewhere dead-set on closing the Ritterakademie, the Kurator and others sought to mobilize more powerful individuals and institutions in their cause. Given the historically strong connections between the school and Germany's officer corps, a natural ally was the military. By December, Ritterakademie supporters were feeling out contacts in the Wehrmacht as they debated the possibility of it taking control of the school. Possible arrangements included a sweeping reorganization that would have formally transformed the school into a military academy (Kadettenanstalt) subordinated to the army as well as a less complicated plan that would have maintained the institution's legal autonomy but had officers who were “unfit for service” (“nicht voll dienstfähig”) serve as teachers.Footnote ⁴⁶ The negotiations with the Wehrmacht quickly went nowhere due to a lack of serious interest by the military in the matter and the concerns of von Goertzke and others that such a move would result in serious legal and financial difficulties for the school.Footnote ⁴⁷ Growing desperation led the school's supporters to try as late as February 1937 to recruit the Gauleiter of the Kurmark, but Kube's successor, Emil Stürtz, refused to meet with the Kurator and the school's former long-serving principal.Footnote ⁴⁸ The attempt to interest the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, Hermann Göring, in the Ritterakademie's preservation represented a fantastic and not particularly promising move. Although von Goertzke and his allies had discussed for weeks the idea of appointing Göring ceremonial head (Dechant) of the foundation that oversaw the school, an office that had been held in the 1920s and 1930s by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, the Kurator made the proposal in a letter in early March, just weeks before the anticipated closing of the school doors. A “soldierly personality” such as Göring could, wrote von Goertzke, “take the Ritterakademie under his protection, lead its soldierly and state-political spirit into the new era, and preserve what the old Prussia had created.”Footnote ⁴⁹ We do not know on what grounds Göring refused the appointment but can surmise that waving before a Nazi Old Fighter such as Göring the possibility of maintaining in some form an institution so indelibly marked by seemingly anachronistic, and in the eyes of some of his comrades politically dangerous, values was probably not the most effective sales pitch.

At the same time that they scrambled to secure a powerful protector in the Nazi bellum omnium contra omnes, von Goertzke and other involved alumni pursued a second course of action, more prosaic but no less important and ultimately much more effective: convincing committed opponents of the legal and economic complications related to closing the Ritterakademie. Having concluded by December that the Oberpräsidium was “absolutely resistant” to discussing the general question of whether the school should be shut down, the institution's defenders began to make the claim that such an action would result in a substantial new financial burden on the state.Footnote ⁵⁰ The dissolution of the Ritterakademie, for example, would release certain manorial estate owners of the old Kurmark from their legal obligation, codified in the nineteenth century, to subsidize the institution. As explained to the Reich Education Minister in a December 1936 letter, such subsidies covered the payment of teachers' wages and benefits, pensions for former teachers, and expenditures for the families of deceased teachers. These costs would have to continue being paid even if the Nazi government went ahead and closed the school. Nor were the amounts trivial; the estate owners contributed more than 30,000 RM to the 1936/1937 budget, for example. In exchange for paying such subsidies, the Rittergutsbesitzer effectively guaranteed their sons would be admitted to the Ritterakademie.Footnote ⁵¹ Were there to be no institution to admit their sons, their obligation to contribute would also cease.

Whereas arguments regarding the patriotic nature of the Ritterakademie and even the potential economic impact on the local economy had fallen on deaf ears, the possible cessation of subsidy payments got the full attention of the Oberpräsidium. Officials in Berlin quickly set out to determine the validity of the defenders' claims. Revisiting an issue that had been examined in summer 1935, the Oberpräsidium evaluated the series of agreements between Prussian and/or German authorities and the Ritterakademie beginning as early as the mid-nineteenth century that established the pecuniary obligations of the relevant Rittergutsbesitzer and the state. Despite having determined the number of manorial estate owners who recently exercised their contractual right and received preferential treatment in their sons' admission to the institution, government officials could not reach a consensus on the larger issue regarding the continuing legality of the traditional arrangement, however. Whereas the men of the Oberpräsidium felt the estate owners would have to continue to pay regardless of the state's actions, officials within the Education Ministry believed the obligation was contingent upon the landowners' ability to place their sons at the Ritterakademie, leading some to caution against closing the institution. “In my opinion, it must be considered very carefully,” wrote one ministry official, “if, in the interests of state finances, one should renounce private funds for cultural purposes, which would be the consequence of the cancellation [of the estate owners' contributions].”Footnote ⁵²

The maneuverings of both Ritterakademie supporters and opponents came to a head in a March 20 meeting held in the offices of the Education Ministry that was to decide the time frame and other specifics of the institution's dissolution. The question of when the Ritterakademie would close was settled first as men from the Oberpräsidium insisted that the school shut its doors as soon as possible, effectively at the end of the school year in several weeks. According to plans developed in the Oberpräsidium, the pupils would attend the city's von Saldern Secondary School, enrolling in special classes to help them transition from the Ritterakademie's classical curriculum to the von Saldern's more modern one. Furthermore, the state would find positions for the teachers, transferring some to other Brandenburg schools. Kurator von Goertzke countered that the foundation that oversaw the Ritterakademie sought to preserve at the very least the boarding facilities that included the dormitory so that the “centuries-old tradition of the Ritterakademie” would not be destroyed completely. The lack of suitable and available housing options for pupils whose parents lived outside the city, he argued, necessitated keeping the Alumnat. He proposed that the boys live at the Ritterakademie and attend classes at the von Saldern Secondary School. Perhaps even more persuasive for the Nazi officials was von Goertzke's argument that preserving the dormitory meant that the manorial estate owners would have to keep subsidizing the pupils' education because the Ritterakademie—albeit in slightly different form—would continue to exist. Yet Nazi officials expressed serious concerns about maintaining the Alumnat, especially in light of the fact that events in the dormitory had started the process that brought these men to Berlin to determine the institution's fate. Oberpräsidium officials would agree to von Goertzke's proposals only on the condition that the necessary order be maintained, that the boarders not isolate themselves from their fellow students at the von Saldern Secondary School, and that care be taken to prevent the occurrence of similar subversive episodes.Footnote ⁵³ The acceptance of these terms—the Oberpräsidium's and the Kurator's—ended the meeting, thereby both seemingly resolving the matter that had put them at odds with one another since 1935 and also closing for good the school doors of the Ritterakademie.

It is easy to imagine the satisfaction the men of the Oberpräsidium and Education Ministry as well as other committed Nazis felt that spring as the Ritterakademie school officially closed. A “bulwark of anti-state subversion” and a site of “reactionary intrigues” had been liquidated. Instead of learning in an environment allegedly characterized by anachronistic structures that inculcated in them subversive values and ideas, the pupils would now more completely be educated into politically reliable members of the National Socialist racial community. Moreover, some such as principal Neuendorf surely relished the apparent defeat of those who had challenged his state-sanctioned authority; in the contest of wills over the school, he, as a representative of the state, had prevailed in the end, even if he had campaigned himself out of a job. Far less immediately imaginable is the deep satisfaction, even outright joy, felt by concerned alumni and parents at the outcome of this conflict that had begun more than twenty-one months before. “I am very happy,” wrote von Goertzke following the March meeting that decided the school's fate. “This is a weight off of my mind [and] I consider the solution perfect.”Footnote ⁵⁴ How could closing the schoolhouse doors and dismissing most of the teaching staff be considered ideal? The carefully crafted settlement left the Alumnat untouched. The significance of this far outweighed the fact that the school would no longer exist. Von Goertzke and others celebrated that spring because they knew the boarding facilities—and not the classrooms—were the site where the core traditional aristocratic Prussian ideas and values were passed down. Class solidarity, experienced by Neuendorf in one instance in the form of pupils' learning to lie to authority figures, was inculcated and also enforced in the young and recently arrived—the ulxe and unbetrauten—by their older and more socialized peers—the seniors and the betrauten—in the rooms, hallways, and playing fields of the dorm. The student hierarchy also instilled in the boys crucial leadership qualities, demanding that pupils first learn to follow and then, over time, empowering them to lead. Even the beatings administered by the seniors were a marker of the group's separateness from regular society; on at least one occasion, the parents of a severely beaten boy were quickly convinced that they should not press charges with state authorities and should instead redress their grievances by means of a sort of informal honor court. Unconventional attitudes regarding many allegedly bourgeois German norms, including the sanctity of private property, were cultivated among the pupils as the principal's complaints make clear. Even a highly sensitive topic such as homosexual behavior was treated differently within the Ritterakademie community. Unlike its criminal status in Nazi Germany, homosexual activity was unofficially tolerated as something that, to paraphrase the words of one father whose son was discovered masturbating another boy, was not uncommon and from which proper individuals (“tüchtige Menschen”) nevertheless developed.Footnote ⁵⁵ The food the pupils ate, for example, their living quarters, and their daily routine were designed to help “toughen” the boys physically, emotionally, and mentally as well as to teach them to rely on themselves and one another, all of which were facets of the core Prussian aristocratic values that the pupils' parents wished for them to learn. Nazi officials had not understood sufficiently that the dormitory was the real classroom and the system of living, playing, and getting along with each other, determined by tradition and enforced by the boys, was the real instructor. For this reason, von Goertzke triumphantly wrote to alumni and parents that “today I can make the joyous announcement that the continued existence of the Ritterakademie has been secured.”Footnote ⁵⁶ A new brochure advertising the institution made a similar point:

An article in the alumni newsletter expressed most clearly the supporters' feelings. “It turned out, however,” wrote the anonymous author, “that only our school was dissolved. Thus at least our second home, the institution that was the heart of the Ritterakademie, remains preserved.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Neither were such statements divorced from reality, nor was such optimism unfounded. As the probationary sports teacher Gerhard F. reported to the Oberpräsidium in December 1937, life at the Ritterakademie had not changed since the closing of the school; the traditional student hierarchy remained, and the seniors continued to keep the other pupils in line by means of corporal punishment. More worrisome, attending the public von Saldern Secondary School had not resulted in a fuller integration of the pupils into the community; they continued to consider themselves “Ritterakademists” who constituted a special group apart from their peers.Footnote ⁵⁹ That local Nazis could interpret such elitist attitudes as subversive can be seen in a report also sent in December. In it, an official expressed his dissatisfaction to the Oberpräsidium that at a recent Ritterakademie party, Hitler's portrait was taken down and placed behind a curtain; in its place, on display during the festivities, were portraits of three Hohenzollern rulers.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, around this time the recently appointed Kurator Hans von Rochow announced to the members of the Alumni Association, “we do not want to mourn unnecessarily because we have lost the school; instead [we want] to rebuild the institution with renewed energies in the old spirit, which had lost much of its strength in the past years.”Footnote ⁶¹ Although pupils would no longer be instructed formally in trigonometry or Latin in the institution's classrooms, the Ritterakademie's supporters could nevertheless claim that they had prevailed in their struggle with the Nazi state and party since they had preserved the more important educational facility, whose dining rooms, dormitory, and playing fields were the sites at which the sons of the Prussian land-owning and military elite deepened their exposure to core elements of the aristocratic habitus.

The Second Battle, 1938–1945

If the first campaign against the Ritterakademie consisted of the unsuccessful attempt to destroy the institution completely, the second phase of the conflict centered on efforts to place the Ritterakademie—now comprising only the Alumnat—under ever greater state control. Beginning in 1938, officials' concerns about the institution's enduring elitist and “reactionary” spirit resulted in a new course of action, the “nationalization” of the institution that would, they believed, once and for all put an end to subversive disruptions, begin to efface the traditional institutional culture, and lay the foundation for the genuine “Nazification” of the institution and its pupils. State control consisted of granting reliable local Nazi educators direct supervisory responsibilities over the Alumnat and its inhabitants, for example, and formally empowering regional authorities, arguably those most intent on destroying the institution, to alter partially the makeup of the community of boys. Opposing these measures were the same group of largely aristocratic alumni and parents who had earlier successfully blunted state and party intervention. Their means of defending their interests, however, changed. The boys themselves became a focus of such efforts. Parents sought to preserve the institution by ensuring that a sufficient number of the right kind of young men were enrolled, for instance. Once at the Ritterakademie, the sons of Prussian large landowners, officers, and senior civil servants actively worked to keep things as they had been before the school's dissolution. While attending the public von Saldern Secondary School and eventually living under the supervision of local education officials, the pupils struggled to safeguard, for example, the student hierarchy as well as the systems of “self-administration” and “self-education.” This second and final phase of the conflict between Nazi authorities and the Prussian aristocrats affiliated with the Ritterakademie ended with the de facto, though still not complete, destruction of the institution in 1944, more than nine years after local and regional Nazi officials began their campaign. Nazi authorities brought new, non-aristocratic boys into the boarding facilities and also formalized and secured further their control of the institution. And yet fragments of the traditional systems of “self-administration” and “self-education” were preserved by the shrunken community of aristocratic pupils; the student hierarchy, for example, continued to function, though unofficially. The Ritterakademie—as a special institution for the transmission of the Prussian aristocratic habitus—was finally destroyed as a consequence not of Nazi education officials' actions but of the fundamental war-related upheavals unleashed in 1945.

Realizing that earlier efforts had failed to neutralize the Ritterakademie, Nazi officials set out beginning in 1938 to destroy once and for all this “bulwark of anti-state subversion.” In a January letter, the Secondary School Department of the Oberpräsidium informed the Reich Education Ministry of several incidents that demonstrated that “the spirit that is developed at the school does not at all correspond to National Socialist principles.”Footnote ⁶² That the Ritterakademie newsletter allegedly recently impugned the academic rigor of the local public high school the pupils currently attended and that the institution's supporters purportedly were working “secretly” toward reopening the Ritterakademie school, among other things, led an Oberpräsidium official to conclude that the continued existence of the Alumnat had led again to deleterious developments (Unzuträglichkeiten). The solution, he argued, was for the Education Minister to shut the boarding facilities.Footnote ⁶³ The Education Ministry responded in two ways. First, the Nazi state finally cut off all financial support for the Ritterakademie in mid-1938. Since the nineteenth century, the Prussian and then German state had subsidized the institution's operating expenses; presumably the closing of the school and the continued disappointment with the institution's enduring “reactionary” character, however, convinced Ministry officials to abolish the subsidies, despite the protests of the Ritterakademie's legal guardians.Footnote ⁶⁴

Second, Nazi officials visited the Alumnat in fall 1938. Representatives of the Ritterakademie's two most implacable opponents—the Reich Education Ministry and the Brandenburg Province Oberpräsidium—inspected the buildings and grounds. Although much of the boarding arrangements met with their approval, they nevertheless strongly objected to the Alumnat's autonomous status in the city's educational landscape. That the Ritterakademie continued to lie outside genuine state control was for these Nazi officials the explanation for the various problems that continued to plague the institution, which presumably included the still incomplete “Nazification.” At the meeting with institutional supporters such as Kurator von Rochow that followed the inspection, the Nazi officials presented two options: either the Ritterakademie would shut its doors for good or it would place itself fully under the state's control. “The state cannot stand by and watch someone else support an educational institution independent of the public education system, possibly even working at cross purposes to it,” concluded the Reich Education officials. “The demand of a unified educational system no longer permits such independent boarding facilities, rather a relationship between school and dormitory must be established.”Footnote ⁶⁵ All present at the meeting, including the Kurator, agreed to give the state greater control of the Alumnat by, first, officially placing the dormitory under the supervision and control of the committed National Socialist principal of the von Saldern Secondary School, and, second, giving the Oberpräsidium the right to select a small number of boys to live in the dormitory. The first condition promised to increase the state's ability to monitor pupils' actions and attitudes inside the boarding facilities, while the second theoretically formalized the ability of Nazi officials to change the institution's character slowly by securing a small number of spaces in the dormitory for ideologically reliable pupils. Coordinating this closer relationship between the public educational system and the Alumnat would be the Oberpräsidium, to be designated as the Ritterakademie's official “advisor and supervisor.” In return for such seemingly significant concessions, the Ritterakademie would be permitted to continue to exist and would even receive a small subsidy to cover the cost of housing those pupils selected by the state.Footnote ⁶⁶

The guidelines issued by the Reich Education Ministry in November 1938 limited themselves to the inspectors' proposals. The Oberpräsidium now officially supervised and administered the dormitory, having in effect displaced the foundation that had controlled the Ritterakademie for centuries. The Alumnat head, for example, was now directly accountable to regional educational authorities, and the von Saldern Secondary School principal now had the right to inspect and evaluate the “educational” doings of the Ritterakademie. Potentially most threatening to the traditional “spirit” of the institution, the autonomy of the Alumnat to determine who could live in the dormitory was seriously undermined by the state's right to participate in the selection of a not inconsiderable number of pupils.Footnote ⁶⁷

Significantly, Ritterakademie alumni and supporters did not mobilize against the state's new push to take over the dormitory. Aside from at least one attempt to frighten officials with the threat of curtailing all manorial estate owners' contributions for the Alumnat's operation should the state withhold its traditional subsidies, letters of protest, for example, or requests for assistance from powerful National Socialists are curiously absent from the archival record. Resistance to state efforts to destroy the unique character of the Ritterakademie, however, had not ceased entirely. As the Gestapo noted in December 1941, the community of “noblemen, officers, and large estate owners” had responded to the state's increase in control over the boarding facilities by working to augment the number of “proper” boys living there. This strategy—which resulted in the number of pupils growing from twenty-three in 1937 to fifty-five in 1940—would plausibly blunt the potential impact of the ten boys placed in the dorm by the Nazi state.Footnote ⁶⁸ Of the fifty-four boys at the Alumnat in late 1942, forty (seventy-four percent) were identifiable as belonging to the traditional elite either on the basis of their name (which included a “von,” for example, a “Graf,” or a “Freiherr”) or from their father's profession as manorial estate owner.Footnote ⁶⁹ These pupils, very possibly having been “educated” about the institution and its special character by fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, and family friends who had attended, would help to ensure that traditional values continued to determine the character of life at the institution. Once at the Alumnat, they did not disappoint the institution's supporters. “A reactionary spirit still prevails in the Alumnat,” complained the Gestapo in 1941. “The attempt of the educators to reform the rules of the Ritterakademie was indicated to be unwelcome … [the head of the Alumnat's] influence is strongly curbed by the pupils' marked ‘self-education.’… The pupils form a unified community and let no one, including educators, participate in their communal life.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Most likely acting either with the explicit support or on the understood wishes of their parents and the alumni, the boys worked to undermine the changes “from above” and to preserve as much as possible of the Ritterakademie's traditional “spirit.” Seniors continued to sit atop a hierarchy of responsibilities and privileges, largely ensuring that the Alumnat ran “properly” by various means, including corporal punishment. In addition to the continued existence of a system of “self-administration” and “self-education” that had alarmed Nazi officials for years, the pupils refused to integrate themselves into the larger community; both at school and at Hitler Youth events, the pupils consciously separated themselves from their peers. As the report noted, the Ritterakademists even separated themselves from their classmates on the playground of the von Saldern Secondary School! As far as the Gestapo was concerned, the institution remained, as others had noted years earlier, “a bulwark of anti-state subversion”:

The Reich Education Ministry, compelled to inspect the Alumnat again as a result of the furor caused by the Gestapo report, reached many of the same conclusions. Earlier critics who had maintained that the Ritterakademie was incompatible “with the demands of a National Socialist education” and “absolutely reactionary” were not incorrect, the Ministry found. That the elitist parents were raising their sons according to anachronistic values is seen most clearly in the enduring traditions of the Alumnat. “All possible pedagogical successes that open up the boys to the views of the new era,” the report states, “are nullified by the incessant reactions of those affiliated with home.”Footnote ⁷²

Faced with a community of parents increasingly united and active in defense of their interests, the Reich Education Ministry nevertheless rejected the possibility of closing the Alumnat and instead called for several changes to be made. Most important was the need to effect a total change in the maintenance (Trägerschaft) of the Ritterakademie. Such a reform, however, would have to wait until after the war's end. Certain changes nevertheless needed to be implemented immediately. For example, the traditional hierarchy among the pupils—from senior to ulx—needed to be eradicated. More importantly, officials needed to ensure that the “unity” of the Alumnat with the public von Saldern Secondary School was secured; this would require local education authorities to exercise effective control over the dormitory. The Reich Education Minister did not issue a new directive for this purpose but instead instructed local officials to make certain that previous measures addressing this issue had been implemented fully. Reich education officials also concluded that the Alumnat's social homogeneity needed to be broken; the pupils needed to come from a much broader range of social groups than previously had been the case. Officials believed this goal could be accomplished by exchanging students with other boarding institutions or by creating more scholarship places at the Alumnat.Footnote ⁷³ By means of these measures, it was hoped, the institution would cease to be the bulwark of “reactionary” attitudes and actions that had vexed state and party officials since 1935 and would instead work with the public schools in training the next generation of National Socialists.

Such solutions, however, had little effect, and Nazi officials were forced to take more radical steps in the second half of World War II. In late 1942, von Saldern Secondary School principal Walter H., the committed National Socialist appointed by the Nazi state to supervise directly the Alumnat, perceptively identified the heart of the problem:

Preserving this “sacrosanct social order” meant that the parents and alumni had continued to work to ensure that an important educational institution such as the Ritterakademie would inculcate the boys with traditional aristocratic values at odds with those of National Socialism. He correctly noted that in the struggle between parents and Nazi teachers for the hearts and minds of the pupils, the parents had been able to “minimize” or even “nullify completely” the state's lessons. As a result, elitist pupils continued to pray regularly before meals but refrained from giving the so-called Hitler greeting. To counter effectively “the ‘feudal’ element,” as he put it, principal Walter H., echoing the recently expressed opinion of Brandenburg an der Havel's mayor, called for the complete takeover of the Alumnat by the state. Unless the issue of ownership was clarified, he believed, “those old ‘feudal’ powers that have stood and still stand behind the Ritterakademie” would continue to undermine seriously both recent education reforms and larger Nazi ideological projects.Footnote ⁷⁵

The lingering dissatisfaction with the situation at the Ritterakademie and the concomitant demand by various state entities for greater control over the institution merged by early 1943 with growing concerns regarding the overcrowding plaguing the city's schools to compel officials to consider replacing the institution with an entirely new public school. Although the growth of armaments production in Brandenburg an der Havel had already resulted in a population boom that forced authorities to build a large school in 1938 and the influx of people as a result of the war had compelled them to build another new school in 1942, overcrowding remained a problem. The Reich Education Ministry concluded in April 1943 that the “overfilling” of the “unusually small number of schools” demanded that the Ritterakademie be appropriated for a Continuation School (Aufbauschule) with boarding facilities it now proposed be built in Brandenburg.Footnote ⁷⁶ The current special community of pupils—composed largely from the efforts of aristocratic families—would be broken up and replaced with one entirely of the state's choosing. As both a boarding facility under the control of a private foundation and also a rare incubator for elements of the Prussian aristocratic habitus, the Ritterakademie would cease to exist. Preventing this from happening immediately, however, was the feud that erupted between two departments within the Education Ministry over the form of the future public school. The Inspectorate of German Boarding Schools (Inspektion der Deutschen Heimschulen) maintained that at least a third of the future student population at the school would come from outside the city and board at the institution; this would, in its opinion, require that the school be a Heimschule.Footnote ⁷⁷ Conversely, the Secondary School Department argued that the local demand for additional classrooms was so great that the future school would cater overwhelmingly to Brandenburg children. There would thus be no room for boarding so many pupils from the region.Footnote ⁷⁸ A tentative compromise was reached in June 1943; accordingly, the state would construct an Aufbauschule to serve Brandenburg's youth. Should local demand fail to fill two-thirds of the available dormitory places, officials promised to revisit the issue.Footnote ⁷⁹ Although the decision's impermanence indicated that important matters concerning the school had yet to be determined, it was clear that the Ritterakademie would almost certainly cease to exist in all meaningful forms save de jure.

The remaining elite pupils did not cede the dining halls and playing fields to the Nazi state and its pedagogical program in summer 1943, however. Education officials did not take control of the institution until August 1944. This delay of more than fourteen months was not the consequence of defensive actions on the part of the alumni or the pupils; Ritterakademie supporters were kept uninformed of Ministry discussions and decisions until shortly before the state took possession of the boarding facilities.Footnote ⁸⁰ The delay resulted instead from the obstructionism of the Wehrmacht. The German army had been using the former school building since 1938, and whereas the state confidently felt that the dormitory could easily be taken from the foundation that legally owned it, by force if necessary, convincing the German army to vacate the school building proved to be much trickier. Education Ministry officials as well as Brandenburg's Lord Mayor repeatedly but unsuccessfully lobbied the Wehrmacht. Not until July 1944, for reasons that are not clear from the archival record, did the Inspektion der Deutschen Heimschulen successfully arrange for the German army to give up the building.Footnote ⁸¹

Following the removal of the final significant obstacle, the state takeover of the Ritterakademie proceeded almost without complications. A brief flare-up of intra-ministerial rivalry threatened to break out after the Education Ministry Secondary School Department discovered that the Inspectorate had outmaneuvered it; not only had it convinced the Wehrmacht to release the school building but the state now also planned to create a Heimschule instead of an Aufbauschule. Again, defusing the situation was the agreement by all parties to postpone the final decision regarding the school's form until after the war.Footnote ⁸² In the meantime, the Inspectorate closed the Alumnat and brought in an SS building crew to make the necessary structural revisions. The Prussian government took formal possession of the buildings and grounds and was now responsible for the school and dormitory's basic expenses such as taxes, rents, and wages. As planned, all but twenty of the sons of “noblemen, officers, and large estate owners” were dispersed either to private boarding options in the city in order to continue attending the von Saldern school, or to entirely new Heimschulen located elsewhere since such “differently educated pupils did not belong” in Brandenburg's new school. Approximately forty students from the famous and recently evacuated Joachimsthal Gymnasium replaced them in the new dormitory funded and controlled by the state.Footnote ⁸³

In the final school year of the Third Reich, the Ritterakademie did and did not exist. Of symbolic importance was the fact that although the Prussian state now legally controlled it, the Ritterakademie was never formally dissolved; fearful of losing the manorial estate owners' subsidies that were still needed to cover pensions and other welfare obligations, German authorities refrained from legally terminating the Ritterakademie. As described by the Oberpräsidium, officials had closed the Alumnat and taken over all of the facilities as part of a “school reorganization.”Footnote ⁸⁴ More concretely, the infusion of new boys and the reopening of the school under new management did not mean that the institution's culture disappeared entirely. As one former wartime pupil reported in December 1945, elements of the traditional system of “self-administration” and “self-education” continued even after the Alumnat's dissolution. The allegedly anachronistic pupil hierarchy perservered; Hans von R., for example, and two others were, like many before them, “beaten in” (eingeprügelt) as the last three seniors.Footnote ⁸⁵ Similarly, the prohibited nighttime parties—such as the one in late May 1935—continued to take place, although under far less decadent circumstances.Footnote ⁸⁶ Nazi officials even continued to hear about allegedly subversive acts and attitudes. In December, the Oberpräsidium ordered the principal to investigate and report on purported utterances of a “religious oppositional” nature.Footnote ⁸⁷ The impact these remaining aristocratic pupils had—their ability to preserve the institution's traditions—should not be exaggerated, not because of specific Nazi actions but because of the chaotic situation in Germany in late 1944 and early 1945 that prevented even a semblance of normal school life from occurring.Footnote ⁸⁸ It is astonishing, nevertheless, that on the eve of the complete collapse of the Nazi state and after more than ten years of struggle, controversial vestiges of the aristocratic Ritterakademie remained. The final aristocratic pupils left the Ritterakademie for good in spring and summer 1945 preceding and, in some cases, following the shutdown of the entire educational system in Brandenburg an der Havel. Although several public schools used the buildings and the grounds in the postwar era, German boys never again lived, played, or learned at the Ritterakademie.Footnote ⁸⁹