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RARE THIRD REICH PRE-WW2 COLOR ILLUSTRATED NAZI SCHOOL BOOK

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This is a rare, heavily color illustrated Nazi schoolbook called Rhein-Ruhr Fibel, which translates as Rhine Ruhr Primer. This 7-1/8 x 9-3/4 inch 90-page hardcover pre-World War II school book was produced to teach young German children from the industrial Ruhr and Rhein areas of Germany the alphabet, letter combinations, counting and how to use words in a sentence using beautiful color illustrations by Else Wenz-Dietor. The text by Josef Urhahn is in Fraktur and in Sütterlin Schrift and is filled with subtle and not so subtle National Socialist content.

What is unusual about this school book is that in the back there are seven black & white pictures of Adolf Hitler with high-ranking Nazis as well as HJ boys, on unnumbered pages. They are attributed to Presse-Illustration Hoffmann in Berlin and accompanied by text about Der Führer. These pages are often missing in examples of this book we have seen offered for sale, and they were removed from later editions of the Rhein-Ruhr Fibel.

There are riddles and page 79 (above left) is about Unser Führer which ends with three choruses of Sieg Heil.

The well-done illustrations depict young children playing, helping with the harvest, pets and wild animals, hiking with Opa, proud HJ boys with a Hitler Youth flag, using the telephone, baked goods and candy, scooters with swastika pennants (left), a Nazi policeman directing traffic, marching SA men carrying a Standarte (below), Santa Claus, Christmas trees and toys, the doll doctor, sledding, praying before bedtime, Jungvolk, etc.

Above, spring flowers for Adolf Hitler on his birthday.

This book also has pages with local content such as the Leo Schlageter monument in Düsseldorf, the Schwebebahn or suspension railway in Wuppertal, and even the origins of black coal, appropriate for a Nazi school book from the coal producing industrial Ruhr area.

This fine illustrated Nazi school book was printed and published by L. Schwann in the city of Düsseldorf. It is undated but was probably produced in the late 1930s, just before the start of World War II.

Ursula Dujon was the original owner of this rare example of Rhein-Ruhr Fibel and her name is beautifully handwritten inside the front cover and stamped on the title page, next to another name stamp.

In order to make the pictures as large as we could and show the content of the images in the best possible way, we have cropped each page to eliminate the white margins at the edges. In some case this minimized the finger prints that are common on the outer open edges of the pages in German children’s school books of the period.

Considering it is an approximately 85 year old school book, it is in quite nice used condition. The hardcovers have some edge wear and there are a few light repairs to some of the pages (carefully done with glue, not tape). This original pre-WW2 Nazi school book has no odor.