Here's another take on exposing children to the disturbing images and rhetoric in My Book of Bible Stories and Learn from the Great Teacher. I'm pretty certain that the WTS's publications contain similar rhetoric to what was contained in the Nazi comic books. I'll need to search the CD ROM, but I'm sure we can find something to support this similarity.
From The Lucifer Effectby Philip Zimbardo (most well-known for his Stanford Prison Experiment from 1971)
Nazi Comic Books
Hitler’s “final solution” of genocide of all European Jews began by shaping the beliefs of school children through the reading of assigned texts in which Jews are portrayed in a series of increasingly negative scenarios. At the end of these lessons in civics or geography, we see the “reasonable” discriminatory actions that Germans should take toward Jews.
This educational propaganda was intentionally designed to create a dehumanized conception of Jews among students by means of providing them with required texts that were colorful and visually told provocative narratives. Students from primary school through High School read these books.
The originator of this idea was Julius Streicher, the editor of a weekly newspaper, Das Sturmer, “The Storm Troope,” that spread anti-Semitic propaganda to the general public in Germany. The “facts” presented in his newspaper (for adults, parents, and soon-to-be recruited Nazi SS perpetrators of destruction) were carried over into these school books. Streicher sought to create a perception of Jews as a sub-human race that was a threat to the national state of Germany. The idea was for this total indoctrination of these beliefs in the minds of the young and the old to such an extent that they came to have a conviction about the inferiority of Jews and the need to eliminate the threat they posed to the purity and superiority of the Aryan race.
The use of stereotyped conceptions of Jews as lecherous old men seducing young Aryan women, of dirty Jewish butchers, unscrupulous Jewish lawyers, hard-hearted Jewish landlords, rich Jewish business men and their wives ignoring the poverty around them, all combined to create a hate-filled image of Jews. In one of these comic books, after providing such “evidence” of the despicable nature of Jews, three conclusions are provided: kicking their children out of German schools, prohibiting them from using public facilities, like parks, and then expelling them from the country. Those “reasonable” consequences that Nazis should create for Jews foreshadows the more sinister ones of putting them all in ghettoes, then transporting them to concentration camps, and finally enacting the “final solution” of attempting mass genocide of the entire Jewish population.
Other comic books were in the guise of Geography lessons portraying different races of the world in the traditional stereotyped poses, and illustrating the dramatic comparison between handsome, strong Aryan men and weak, ugly fat Jewish men. Other images show Jews as vermin, as insects carried on the back of the devil.
Another aspect of the process of creating dehumanized images of Jews in the minds of the German populace was later in the process of their destruction to show pictures of their naked bodies, gaunt from starvation, sickness, and overwork in such ways that it was easy to dissociate them from the rest of humanity, to make them look sub human in ways that no other peoples have been.
My access to these Nazi comic books was provided by my colleague and friend, Professor John Steiner, who after having survived 3 years in Nazi concentration camps, started a long-term project of interviewing hundreds of his former tormentors.
In addition to simply viewing the images and probably listening to their teachers discussing and explaining them, the children were required to copy the text as practice in penmanship. It was yet another form of indoctrination.
