Comic Book Depiction of Hitler Draws Bad Review From German School Officials : Education: Critics of the teaching tool worry that the drawings trivialize the country’s Nazi past.

In 15 years of teaching high school, Hermann Nink had never seen his students so eager to learn.

“They were always asking if we could continue the instruction even after our time was finished,” recalled Nink, who teaches ethics and German in the southwest town of Worms. “It was a wonderful experience.”

Thousands of teachers in classrooms across Germany had expected to share that experience this semester.

But strenuous objections to Nink’s startling teaching tool--a glossy comic book depicting the life of Adolf Hitler--may make that impossible.

A top federal education official has expressed outrage over the book’s illustrations, saying they could win Hitler new admirers among impressionable 15- and 16-year-olds. The Israeli Embassy has also voiced concerns about the book’s propriety.

“I was horrified and shocked when I saw it,” said Wolfgang Arnold, vice president of the Federal Center for Political Education.

The criticism has thrown the unconventional textbook’s future into doubt and raised new questions about one of the most difficult and delicate subjects in democratic Germany: how to confront the horror of the Nazi past in a way to ensure that generations of postwar Germans never forget--or repeat--it.

The question has gained new urgency amid a chilling surge in neo-Nazi sentiment since German unification three years ago.

“This debate is very typically German,” said Solveig Weber of the Reading Foundation, a nonprofit organization that wants to distribute the comic book to schools. “We still have so many problems dealing with this dark side of our history.”

The foundation and the comic book’s author, Friedemann Beduerftig, defend the work as a vital new approach to educating youths about an important historic period many of them know little about.

Opponents, however, worry that the drawings trivialize the era or, much worse, glorify it, and should be replaced by more conventional texts.

“The fact that a totally new teaching method is being sought means old concepts are being challenged,” said Hartwig Bierhoff, spokesman for Parliament President Rita Suessmuth and a former teacher who has been asked to review the comic book. “That is always a very difficult path, but especially so with such a touchy subject. The Nazi era is still the center point of the history of our people, and it will always be.”

The comprehensive, 200-page volume is part of a sheaf of “youth-friendly” materials about the Third Reich compiled by the Reading Foundation, which allowed Nink and a small sample of other teachers to test the textbook.

It traces in colorful--and sometimes horrific--detail Hitler’s legacy, beginning with his birth to “a loving housewife” in Austria and ending with his suicide and “utter failure” 56 years later in Berlin.

The comic was deemed a huge success in three dozen sample schools, particularly since teachers have long bemoaned the dearth of contemporary materials for youngsters interested in the Nazi era.

A packet of supporting materials for teachers--which took more than three years and $300,000 to prepare--provides explanatory pamphlets, posters and a computer game about resisting right-wing extremism.

The federal center had ordered 5,000 copies of the Hitler packet, but distribution has been put on hold. Arnold said he would prefer tossing the copies in the garbage, but the decision has been put off until a panel of experts can review the materials and make recommendations.

“This is not to say that new ways in education should not be pursued,” Arnold said. “They must. But mistakes can happen--and this is one of them.”

He pointed to collages showing Nazi troops slaughtering foreigners, a victorious Hitler being cheered by enthusiastic crowds and army tanks with Nazi banners rolling toward their next conquest. Although the book also contains sketches depicting Hitler’s failures and ultimate defeat, Arnold said the risk is too great that students--and perhaps some far-right teachers--will choose to read it selectively.

The Israeli Embassy has also expressed fears about the “potential for misuse” of the graphic illustrations, many of which depict Nazi atrocities against Jews.

One drawing shows a smug Hitler surrounded by smiling, blond Germans; at the bottom of the page, a desolate Jewish family appears in black, the father bemoaning his son’s lost future.

“With comics, someone could always change what is written in the bubbles and then misuse it,” spokesman Ilan Mor said. “We felt the need to draw this to the attention of officials.”

But in a letter to the Reading Foundation, well-known Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal expressed enthusiastic support for the comic book, saying it was well-suited for “the television generation.”

The foundation has also received letters of endorsement from Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Richard von Weizsaecker.

“One still cannot do enough in this field and should not shy away from any path that promises to serve the goal of a wide understanding” of the Nazi period, Von Weizsaecker wrote.

Weber said the Reading Foundation was well aware of the potential misuse of the materials--more than 20 historians and educators were asked to review the comic book and help compile the accompanying packet--but teachers encountered no problems when the book was tested over the last three years.

Beduerftig, who has also written a two-volume scholarly history of the Third Reich, said it is important to present students with a true assessment of the Hitler period--one that does not sidestep the issue of his immense popularity and rise to power.

“Many Germans have a fear of images of Adolf Hitler,” Beduerftig said. “They think that they are too startling and that we shouldn’t look at them. But we must look at them. Otherwise we will never really grasp what he was all about.”

But Arnold said it is important not to use public funds to distribute something that he said could become a handbook for neo-Nazis.

“There are pictures in there any (far-right) youngster would love to hang on his wall,” Arnold said. “We cannot allow that.”