Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi

In this dark Disney short (directed by the same guy who did Lady and the Tramp and Peter Pan) we see a young German couple take their newborn baby to be registered as one of 'Hitler's Children'. They have to prove their ethnic origin all the way back to their great-grandparents to authenticate the child's pure Aryan blood. One of Hitler's biggest mistakes is the fact that blue eyes/blonde hair is a recessive gene and is 3 out of 4 times dominated by dark eyes/hair.

The parents must choose a name for the child but can only take what is not already chosen from 'the list'. They choose Hans, which ends up being okay. Soon the child is in school and is taught warped versions of typical values. Hans is told of a fox hunting a rabbit. He takes sympathy on the poor rabbit and is ridiculed and tormented by his teacher and classmates. The lesson of 'only the strong survive' is brutally hammered into him.

And when Hans gets sick his parents are warned to cease all 'mollycoddling' and he better get well quickly. Hitler's children do no get sick and those who do are taken away and never heard from again.

More and more evil lesson and hailing the Fuehrer follow. Soon Hans is a grown man, marching in line with all the other soldiers. Neither of them are individuals. They are robots believing what Hitler wants them to believe. Doing what Hitler wants them to do. Saying what Hitler wants them to say. None of them know joy, happiness or laughter.

And soon Hans is dead. Sympathy is felt for the child within who died a long time ago.

It's alarming when you consider that this may feel far-fetched yet in today's society we are still reared and duped by lying world leaders. We still believe nonsense we read in tabloids and fear and xenophobia still overpower common sense.

A very chilling cartoon.

While most of Disney's cartoons are funny, this one was quite serious. It tells of how a boy named Hans is abducted into the Nazi way of life starting from kindergarten when he learns the familiar story of Sleeping Beauty only he learns the Nazi version of it where the wicked witch is democracy and Sleeping Beauty is German. I bet you can probably guess who the prince is. Later Hans is taught that the weak don't deserve to live and that Germans are the master race. I think Walt Disney depicts the evils of Nazism quite well in this short. The outside world was probably quite shocked about this when they saw it. An innocent child being brought up to be a Nazi who says nothing but what others want him to say, to think only the way others want him to think, and to do only what others want him to do. To top it all off, having to support Der Fueher (Hitler) and dying in battle just for him. Isn't that pathetic? The narrator says "By now Hans has completed his education. His education for death!" He was right about that too. This is quite a touching story and I think that everyone should get the chance to see it. Unfortunately this short is not "politically correct" enough to be aired on the Disney Channel or Toon Disney. I hope that one day Disney will show these rare cartoons on TV. You're probably wondering where I saw this cartoon. Well, I own a video of rare Disney shorts that I got from a collector.

This propaganda short directed by Clyde Geronimi for Walt Disney productions remains very impressive today.If it has been made for children,they must have had bad dreams in the night.

It begins with a curious treatment of "sleeping beauty" (which was transferred to the screen in 1959) :a beautiful prince (guess who) kills the wicked witch (democracy) ,wakes the princess (Germany) from her slumber and breaks the spell.

Then at school you are taught that ,like in the nature,only the strong survives .

When you are a young man,your only role is to become a strong soldier ,to be just a part of a machine .In the last pictures,the soldiers look like robots marching on to war.

This cartoon is not legend:it is fact .Just have a look at a sequence of one of Leni Riefenstahl's movies .

Forget anything you may have come to expect from Disney if and when you see this short. There is nothing cute here. The animation is excellent, is very grim and stark and very chilling. It is the most deathly serious animated short I have seen produced by a studio based in the United States. The only one I've ever seen that may match it is Balance, a German short made almost fifty years later. Education For Death is a short you won't easily forget once you've seen it and it's a shame that The Mouse hasn't seen fit to release it on a DVD along with things like Victory Through Air Power, Der Fuehrer's Face, Reason and Emotion, New Spirit and other works Disney made as a part of the war effort during World War II. An excellent production that deserves to be in print and seen. Most highly recommended.

Short animation flick follows the early years of 'Hans', who has the bad luck of being born in Hitler Germany. He's brainwashed into becoming a nazi, and ultimately dies at the battlefield, as thousands of his fellow Germans did.

With first viewing you think Disney's thought on nazi-Germany (which is portrayed as a fat, ugly and gullible woman) is a bit too simplistic and one-dimensional, but in the end, when you think of it, it's more of a sad story about the young kid than one of hatred towards the nazi's.

The animations are amazing and the content (with what we know how) grim, dark and scary. Hard to rate this, but I'll give it a 7/10. Be sure to catch this if you can.