The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas Read Online Free PDF Page B

mathematician. He showed me that there is nothing so complicated that it cannot be made simple, and the concept of reducing complexities later became a cornerstone of my teaching.’
    The experiment with private instruction was a success, allowing him to skip a year and pass the stiff entrance tests for the Junkerschule Elisabeth Gymnasium. He excelled at his new school and once again became accepted as a leader through athletics, particularly wrestling. A teacher took the class on extended trips into the mountains and entrusted Michel with half of the group.
    By this time, late 1930, the Nazis had become the largest party in the Reichstag, and Adolf Hitler’s extreme nationalism and declared anti-Semitism had been widely adopted. Michel’s classroom neighbour, who shared a desk with him, began to attend school in the full Nazi uniform of the SA Brownshirt movement. He covered the front of his school-books with elaborate patterns of linked swastikas. Michel responded by covering his with the Star of David.
    Despite the growing Nazi influence, Michel’s peers continued to follow him as a leader, the only Jew in the school. There was one other boy at school who, although born a Christian, was known to be the son of converts. ‘All the boys saw him as a Jew and picked on him, and whenever I saw it I stepped in to save him. I never talked to him, because I didn’t like him, but I stuck up for him. Personally, I never had any trouble. I was accepted because I was not a follower. In class if anything derogatory was said about the Jews by the teachers I stood up and challenged it. I was never a Jew who was kicked around.’
    It seemed to Michel that one of the major reasons for the advent of Nazism was the German educational system. It was designed to produce a highly educated elite, while neglecting the education of the proletariat who were expected to be subservient and deferential. ‘The Germans as a whole - the masses - had a very low self-image. This Minderwertigkeitsgefühl - literally “lesser worthiness” - expressed a class inferiority that was apparent to everyone. The maid would refer to her employer as gnädige Frau - “merciful lady” - and so on. All those who rose to power with Hitler had lived under and accepted Minderwertigkeitsgefühl . These followers who had resigned themselves to lives of the “less worthy” suddenly discovered overnight that they belonged to a new Aryan race of supermen.
    ‘And something else. The intellectual community as a whole was thoroughly prostituted and fell down on their knees before the Nazis. The failure of those with the intellectual power and moral conscience to stand up to Hitler greatly strengthened him. The masses saw the people they had always looked up to embrace Nazism. So Germany became a nation of cowards led by social misfits to believe they were a super race. And the phrase heard everywhere that dominated daily life was “Führer, befehl, wirfolgen Dir!” - “Fuhrer, you order and we follow you”.’
    In the election of 1932 the Nazis became the most powerful political party Germany had ever seen, and Hitler the most powerful leader. Although short of a parliamentary majority (the Nazis never polled more than just over a third of the vote nationally, although the party won forty-six per cent in Breslau) it was the largest party in the Reichstag with a membership of over a million, almost fourteen million electors and a private army of four hundred thousand SA Storm Troopers and SS Blackshirts - a force four times larger than the feeble national army. The Communists had polled six million votes, won a hundred seats in the Reichstag and had their own private army, the Red Front. There were pitched battles in the streets of the larger cities between Nazis and Communists, leaving many dead.
    The young Michel witnessed the violence and was repelled by the unprincipled manipulation and dictatorial tendencies of both political extremes. In the struggle for power