Background
Bernhard Rust was born in Hannover on 30 September 1883.
Bernhard Rust was born in Hannover on 30 September 1883.
Studied Germanics, philosophy and classical philology at several universities including Berlin and Munich.
Having his university studies completed Rust became a secondary school Oberlehrer (senior master) in Hannover.
During World War I he served as a Lieutenant in the infantry, winning the Iron Cross (First Class) and suffering a severe headwound which affected his mental stability.
One of the ‘Old Fighters’, Rust entered the Nazi Party in 1922 and was Gauleiter of Hannover-Braunschweig after 1925. In 1930 he was dismissed from his teaching post by the local republican authorities at Hannover - allegedly for interfering with a schoolgirl - but was nonetheless elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi deputy.
On 4 February 1933 Rust was appointed Prussian Minister of Science, Art and Education, following the Nazi seizure of power. His steadfast loyalty to Hitler was rewarded by his appointment on 30 April 1934 as Reich Minister of Education, a position which gave him control of German science, public schools, institutions of higher learning and youth organizations.
The mentally disturbed ex-schoolmaster, who presided over the spiritual shipwreck of German science and scholarship, himself committed suicide with the collapse of Nazi Germany in May 1945.
Though more moderate than the rabid ideologues in the Nazi student and teachers' associations, Rust nonetheless presided over the sabotage of Germany's intellectual life in the name of racial purity.
Among the consequences of the Nazi purge of the universities, which he ordered, was the loss of German world leadership in the natural sciences. Over a thousand dons - chiefly Jews, Social Democrats and liberals - were dismissed from the educational institutions of the Third Reich. They included world-famous scientists and Nobel Prize winners such as Albert Einstein, James Franck, Fritz Haber, Otto Warburg and Otto Meyerhof, as well as many other distinguished chemists, mathematicians, engineers and jurists. Nazi youth was henceforth to be educated in the spirit of militarism, paganism, anti-semitism and the cult of the perfect Aryan racial type.
In German schools and universities, Jews were presented as the hereditary enemies of Germany, a ‘chosen people' of criminals who endangered the existence of the Third Reich.
Quotations: ‘We must have a new Aryan generation at the universities, or else we will lose the future’.