Bedtime in the Third Reich: How children's picture books indoctrinated a generations

The youth of the Third Reich were hateful, loyal, and war-ready, but no child is born with these qualities. This study assessed how children's picture books in Hitler's Germany were used as an early form of indoctrination, laying the foundational assumptions that were later developed into the vitriolic hatred inherent in Nazism. Assessing both the iconographic and textual mechanisms present in the material, the research outlined the early cultivation of antisemitism, loyalty, and militarism in the youth. The work departs from reiterative propaganda theses, instead seeking to answer how the tenets of the Third Reich were initially conceived. Drawing on a corpus of both school readers and privately published picture books, it sought to identify trends in the material children were provided with across a broad cross-section of content. Ultimately, picture books formed but one part of these children's upbringing, one facet of a youth the Third Reich sought to dominate. Yet, the stories we read hold power, and in this, we see how the violence of Nazism was not always forged in flames, but in the quiet setting of a bedroom, as children were lulled to sleep.