We want our German truth, which may look relative from the perspective of the moon, but which is alive and binding for us, and no other. [...] There is no 'free doctrine' for us [..., because] we will not put up with any doctrine that contradicts the national idea. We will one day expel all un-Germans from the chairs of our universities relentlessly and with iron determination.
Foundation of the National Socialist German Student Union (NSDStB)
At the beginning of June 1926, a handful of National Socialist students founded the "National Socialist German Student Association" (NSDStB) Berlin, and on 7 June the "University Section" was constituted with eleven members. By the end of the Weimar Republic, the NSDStB only had just over a hundred members at the university, who, according to the founding appeal, were prepared to "draw a sharp line of separation [... from] those who were supporters of the political and economic system now in power" through National Socialism.
Programme of the NSDStB
Programmatically, the NSDStB presented itself as the guardian of "working students" from humble backgrounds - with a social-revolutionary and anti-bourgeois gesture, it called for "the liberation of the exploited classes of the people who had been cheated by Marxism and disinherited by high finance". The Nazi students combined v?lkisch nationalism and virulent anti-Semitism with crude socio-political slogans. "Unemployment, hopelessness and the Judaisation of the universities etc. are the achievements of the last 13 years", they wrote in 1932. In the fight for a Nazi "national community", it was the students' "task to eliminate the differences between the working classes and 'bourgeois' academics through National Socialism". In fact, many of the Nazi student activists - such as Wilhelm Tempel, founder and Reichsführer of the Bund until 1928 - came from humble backgrounds.
In the debate with socialist and communist groups, the Nazi students advocated similar social and higher education policy demands, but always in favour of radical nationalist measures. The Bund was undecided about women's studies: female students had been organised in the "Working Group of National Socialist Women Students" since 1930, but were only given a marginal role.
Growing influence in the student body
The methods used by Joseph Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin since 1926, were particularly successful for the Nazi activists: he focussed on concerted large-scale events and provocation, thereby generating a great deal of attention. The Nazi students also benefited from this. Like the SA on the streets, they regularly caused riots and terror at the university. With their v?lkisch slogans and the radical anti-Semitic "Juda verrecke!" ("Perish Judah!"), the Nazi student allies were close to the ideas of many students, especially those who were corporatised. The dynamic revolutionary habitus made it attractive for many to join or vote for the National Socialist "Front of Awakening Germany". Despite changing "Hogruf" (university group leaders) and a small number of members, the Bund achieved ever greater electoral success at the end of the 1920s. From 1932, the NSDStB clearly dominated the student body at the university, and at Charlottenburg Technical University it won a huge majority of votes as early as 1930.
From 1933, the NSDStB played a key role in bringing the university into line and persecuting politically unpopular and "racially undesirable" members of the student body and university staff.
NSDStB's share of votes in student council elections
Voter turnout at Prussian universities has varied since the withdrawal of state recognition of the student body. Democratic, Jewish and left-wing student groups largely boycott the elections. The NSDStB list received "only" 27 per cent support in the 1931 election at Berlin University, and "only" 29.9 per cent in the 1932 election (national average: 32 per cent). However, democratic students pointed out that many of the candidates on non-National Socialist lists "were fascist in their whole attitude".