_Germany's Future Leaders The Ordensburg, or castle, at Sonthofen in
Upper Bavaria, which was dedicated to German Youth by Herr Hitler this week, is a remarkable monument to National Socialist ideas of education and leadership. And as a means to producing the Nazi leaders of the future, it is evidence of National Socialism's faith in its own permanence. Sonthofen will be one of the four institutions which will crown the system of educating talented children for political leadership. At the age of 18, after six years of education at the expense of the party in an Adolf Hitler School open to children of all classes, selected pupils will be apprenticed to a trade or profession. This will be followed by 21 years of military service, after which the elite, 1,000 young men who have proved their characters and abilities, will each year enter the first of the four institu- tions and pass through each to the last and most difficult. The curriculum will consist in various forms of physical cul- ture, in the development of character, and in the cult of pagan heroes and the patron saints of National Socialism. Christian teaching will be forbidden ; the course will end with six months' instruction in political and moral principles. The plan is above all reminiscent of the means by which religious orders have recruited their leaders ; but it means to give Germany a ruling class not of saints or philosophers but of heroes and athletes.
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