From 1928 to 1939, the Nazi-funded Anglo-German Academic Bureau based in Gower Street, London, organised student and teacher exchange visits between Germany and the UK[1], ostensibly to build up a new friendship between the younger generations of both countries, but in reality to spread Nazi Party propaganda.[2] Part of this scheme included exchange visits between boys from British public schools [3] and boys from German Napolas, a group of highly militaristic boarding schools established by the Nazi party where the uniform was that of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend).
On 23rd December 1935, Mr John Bell, the Headmaster of St Paul’s School, London, spoke at the Headmasters’ Conference in praise of the Napolas and the Anglo-German exchange visits. In his speech, Mr Bell explained that the exchange visits were encouraged by the German authorities who were ‘extremely keen that there should be understanding and sympathy between the boys of Germany and the boys of Great Britain… for they had a sincere admiration for the British public schools’, adding that he ’did not think they had any political axe to grind in wishing for close contact between the schools of this country and their own.’ He said that several exchange visits had already been made between St Paul’s School, Rugby, Tonbridge, and Kingswood School in Bath, and, in describing the Napolas, he said that their main object ‘was to ensure that the boy was loyal to his country and was prepared to do anything on behalf of his country, and that he should be prepared by a most rigorous course of physical training which called for great hardship. It was a Spartan life’.
The Rev. Mr K.J.F. Bickerstaff, Headmaster of Felsted School in Essex, also spoke to the conference about a visit he had made to the Napolas in August 1935, saying that although the military side was strongly emphasised the schools were not pagan in their outlook. He also felt that ‘friendship between the boys of these schools and our schools would produce better understanding between the two nations in the next twenty years’, adding that ‘if they had had similar exchanges twenty years before the Great War he believed that the war might perhaps never have taken place.’[4]
In April 1935, the first Anglo-German camp was held in England at Bryanston School in Dorset.[5] Arranged by Herr Joachim Benemann of the Anglo-German Academic Bureau with the permission of the Headmaster of Bryanston Mr T.F. Coade, thirty German boys and thirty English boys took part in a three week camp in the school grounds. They spent each morning doing ‘useful labour’ (they cut away half a small hill to make room for bicycle sheds) and the rest of the day playing games, hiking, and taking part in lectures and discussions.[6] Mr Coade was so impressed by Herr Benemann that in January 1935 he had arranged for him to give a speech at the Young Public School Masters’ Conference at Harrow.
Herr Benemann was also on the staff of the Hitler Youth and was later suspected with wanting to integrate the organisation with the British Boy Scouts.[7] It is perhaps therefore not surprising that on 5th April 1935 Herr Benemann arranged for the German boys at the Bryanston camp to visit Dorchester to meet the 5th Dorchester Troop Boy Scouts (Mill Street Mission). While in Dorchester, the German boys also visited Max Gate, the home of Thomas Hardy, and Herr Benemann laid a wreath at the German memorial in Fordington cemetery, over which he made the Nazi salute and afterwards made a speech saying that ‘Germany’s youth nowadays is ready… not only to keep good friends with everybody, but to co-operate with you as closely as possible to do everything we can to help understand other nations and to help in keeping the peace in the world.’[8]
Later that same year in July 1935, ten German boys (aged between 15 and 19) from Napola NPEA Oranienstein and their Headmaster Herr Friedrich Lübbert[9] visited ten English public schools[10], including Rugby, the Henry Thornton School in Clapham[11], Kingswood School in Bath, St Paul’s School in London, and Sherborne School in Dorset. A swimming tournament was arranged at every school the German boys visited, which allowed them to demonstrate their physical prowess over over their hosts. At Rugby School on 3 July 1935 the German boys (Peters, Schneider, Linn, Panten, Lange, Gerricke, Ritter) swam against the school team and won every event except the diving[12], and on 20 July 1935 at Kingswood School in Bath they won every event except the under-water race.[13]
On the 17th July 1935, the German boys and Herr Lübbert visited Sherborne School where a swimming tournament was arranged in the School’s outdoor pool (now the site of the Pilkington Laboratories). At the start of the tournament the German boys lined up along the edge of the pool and gave a solemn ‘Heil, Hitler’[14] before proceeding to beat Sherborne in nearly every event, winning by 25 points to 5! The German boys came first and second in all of the races, except the 50 yards which was won in 28 seconds by Stanley Robinson (Abbey House 1931-36) with Michael Yeo (The Green 1934-38) coming second.[15][16]
During their visit to Sherborne, the German boys were taken on a tour of the School and expressed ‘very great interest in everything they saw’. They also met the History Sixth[17] and answered questions ‘on the scope and intention of Nazi Germany’s aspirations.’[18] The Headmaster A.R. Wallace described the visit as ‘extraordinarily valuable, first of all from an educational point of view, and secondly in helping to strengthen the friendly relations between our own boys and those of the rising generation in other countries.’[19]
The German boys spent the night at Lyon House where they took part in community singing and played the banjo and concertina. The housemaster A.H. Trelawny-Ross, who was also a keen supporter of the Boy Scout movement,[20] described them as ‘charming fellows’ with ‘no frills about them’, although he did wonder whether all German schoolboys were so big and thought they might be over-developed for their age.[21]
Meanwhile, the British newspapers were reporting that Roman Catholic children in Germany had been banned from wearing uniform or badges denoting membership of a religious organisation, from marching with music, hiking in the woods and sleeping in tents, and that Jewish schoolboys had been banned from visiting youth hostels with German schoolboys.[22]
Relations between Sherborne School and Germany however remained cordial. In Michaelmas term 1936, Herr Heinz Brack joined the School’s Modern Language department.[23] Although born in Berlin he had grown up in Magdeburg, and in October 1935, possibly with the support of the Anglo-German Academic Bureau, he enrolled at the University College of the South-West in Exeter. Brack came to Sherborne School in September 1936 with the personal recommendation of one of the School’s Governors and the Principal of the University College, Professor John Murray (1879-1964), and taught at Sherborne intermittently over the next three years. However, in September 1939 he was arrested in Sherborne under suspicion of working as a Nazi agent collecting information about Germans living in Dorset and spent the remainder of the war at the Tatura Internment Camp (no.1) in Victoria, Australia.[24]
While working at Sherborne School Brack did not try to hide his admiration for the Nazi regime. On 5th October 1936 he was invited by Sherborne Rotary Club to give a talk at the Digby Hotel about the Hitler regime in Germany, with particular reference to the New Youth Movement.[25] His talk evidently proved so popular with the Rotary Club audience that he was invited to return three weeks later to answer questions from members.[26]
Heinz Brack’s first term at Sherborne overlapped with the last term of Peter Perrins, a pupil in The Green who in May 1936 joined the Youth Section of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Peter was a keen supporter of the BUF and by the end of the year had enrolled into the Youth Section six other members of his House. Peter’s activities obviously attracted Brack’s attention and in October 1936 when attending a meeting in Sherborne of the local branch of the League of Nations Union (LNU)[27] Brack approached Peter saying ‘You are too much of a realist for the idealists.’[28] It may also have been at Brack instigation that in the summer term of 1937 the Anglo-German Academic Bureau donated four books to the School’s library.[29]
Exchange visits between German and English schools continued throughout the 1930s. In March 1937 a group of German boys from NPEA Oranienstein and Stuhm visited England to play football matches against a number of public schools, including Charterhouse, Eton, and Shrewsbury. Their visit to Charterhouse School[30] was arranged by Mr G.A. Rowan-Robinson[31] and included a visit to Madame Tussaud’s in London where they inspected waxwork models of Hitler and Mussolini.[32] At Eton College[33] they were shown the birching block, the tuckshop and the tap, before beating the Eton’s football team by 3 goals to 1.[34]
However, not all the Anglo-German exchange visits ran so smoothly. In April 1936, a party of 27 boys from Strand School at Brixton Hill, South London, went with their teacher on a walking tour in the Black Forest, near Freiburg, Germany. The visit ended in disaster when the group was caught in a blizzard and five boys aged between 12 and 16 died.[35] The German Reich arranged for the return to England of the boys’ bodies, each of which was accompanied by a wreath made of evergreen and pine cones tied with a red and white ribbon bearing the Nazi swastika and the inscription ‘To our English comrades.’[36] In 1938 the Engländerdenkmal (Monument to Englishmen) was erected at Schauinsland by the Hitler Youth in commemoration of the boys who had died.[37] The story of what happened to the school party is now the subject of a play by Pamela Carter – ‘The Misfortune of the English’, a production of which was staged in June 2022 at The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond and starred Old Shirburnian actor Hubert Burton (Lyon 2009).
Rachel Hassall
School Archivist
References:
[1] Panikos Panayi, Germans in Britain Since 1500 (Bloomsbury Continuum, 1996), p.141.
[2] Christopher Andrew, The Security Service 1908-1945 (Kew, Public Record Office, 1999), pp.123-124.
[3] ‘Nazi Germany’s elite schools used British public schools as model’, a review of Dr Helen Roache’s The Third Reich’s Elite Schools (OUP, 2021).
[4] ‘Contact between German and British Boys. Public Schools Scheme of Exchange Visits’, The Scotsman, 24 December 1935.
[5] ‘German Boys in Dorset. First Anglo-German Camp in England. Digging Holiday’, Western Gazette, 5 April 1935.
[6] ‘German Boys in Dorset. Holiday Camp with British Lads. Establishing Firmer Friendship and Better Understanding’, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 29 March 1935.
[7] Ian Harvey, ‘In 1937 Young Nazi “Spyclists” Traveled Around Britain for Reconnaissance’, War History Online, 6 March 2018.
[8] Joanna Davis, ‘German friends. The Hitler Youth invited to Dorchester’, Dorset Echo, 1 May 2021.
[9] SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Friedrich Lübbert was the NPEAs Head of Physical Education. See Tim Mueller, ‘From Racial Selection to Post-War Deception. The Napolas and de-Nazification’, a thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies, McMaster University, September 2016, pp.53-54.
[10] ‘German Schoolboys at Bath’, Bath Chronicle, 27 July 1935.
[11] ‘A party of German schoolboys is on a visit to the Henry Thornton school, Clapham’, Norwood News, 5 July 1935.
[12] ‘German boys visit Rugby School’, Rugby Advertiser, 5 July 1935.
[13] German Schoolboys at Bath’, Bath Chronicle, Saturday 27 July 1935.
[14] A.B. Gourlay, A History of Sherborne School (2nd ed., 1971), p.215n.
[15] The Shirburnian, November 1935, p.239.
[16] Stanley Robinson (Abbey 1931-36) and Michael Yeo (The Green 1934-38) went on to join the armed forces. Stanley Robinson joined the RAF and in January 1939 was killed when his Blenheim crashed on Sykes Moor in Derbyshire during a training flight. Michael Yeo served as a Sub-Lieutenant in the RNVR and was killed in action on 17 July 1943 when HM MTB 316 received a direct hit from the Italian Cruiser Scipione Africano in the Straits of Messina, near Reggio di Calabria, Italy.
[17] Members of the History Sixth at Sherborne School in Trinity term 1935 were E.G. Hodgkinson, A.W. Young, A.S. White, H.S. Walker, B. Humphreys-Davies, P.A. Francis, J.C. Hutchinson, A.J.G. Crocker, C.W.A. Murray, W.J. Eldridge, J.R. Peters, and R.S. Llewelyn.
[18] A.B. Gourlay, A History of Sherborne School (2nd ed., 1971), p.215n.
[19] Head Master’s Report to the Governors, October 1935.
[20] A.H. Trelawny-Ross, Their Prime of Life. A Public School Study (Winchester, Warren & Son Ltd., 1956), pp.93-94.
[21] A.H. Trelawny-Ross, Lyon House letter year ending July 1935.
[22] ‘Ex-Service Funds Grabbed. Crippling Blow at Catholic Youth. Black Weekend for Jews’, Daily News (London), 27 July 1935.
[23] The Shirburnian, November 1936, p.479.
[24] Rachel Hassall, ‘Heinz Brack, temporary German master, and Nazi spy?’, Sherborne School Archives website.
[25] Western Gazette, 9 October 1936.
[26] ‘The Rotary Luncheon’, Western Gazette, 30 October 1936
[27] The League of Nations promoted international cooperation and peace and was seriously undermined on 25 October 1936 when Italy and German formed the Rome-Berlin Axis, linking the two Fascist countries.
[28] Undated latter from Peter Perrins, The Green, Sherborne, to Robert Saunders, District Treasurer, BUF: Robert Saunders papers, University of Sheffield Library Special Collections and Archives, ref. MSS 11/A2/327(2).
[29] The Shirburnian, July 1937, p.103. Additions to Sherborne School Library presented by the Anglo-German Academic Bureau: Kurt Ihlenfeld, Preussischer Choral, Johannes Haller, Die Epochen der Deutschen Geschichte, H.L. Oeser, Deutsches Land und Deutsches Volk, Edmund Schilling, Altdeutsche Musterzeichnungen.
[30] ‘German schoolboys visit Britain’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 3 March 1937.
[31] G.A. Rowan-Robinson was a master at Charterhouse School and was the author of ‘The training of the Nazi leaders of the future’, International Affairs, vol.17, issue 2, March-April 1938, pp.233-250. During the Second World War he served as a Captain in the Intelligence Corps in North Africa for which he was awarded an OBE.
[32] The Scotsman, 3 March 1937.
[33] ‘German schoolboy as guests of Eton. Football, tea and talk’, Gloucestershire Echo, 5 May 1937.
[34] ‘Germans beat Eton’, Belfast News-Letter, 5 March 1937.
[35] ‘Five British Schoolboys perish in German. Black Forest Tragedy’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 18 April 1936.
[36] ‘Blizzard victims. Bodies of 5 schoolboys reach London. Wreath from Hitler’, The Scotsman, 23 April 1936.
[37] ‘English Calamity’, Wikipedia (accessed 28 April 2022).
See also:
- Online resources for Sherborne School and the Second World War
- Herr Brack: temporary German master – and Nazi spy?
For further information about the Sherborne School Archives please contact the School Archivist
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