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Ernst Streicher seized his son by the right wrist and shot his arm out too, father and son fused in parallel fealty.
    “Sieg heil!
    “Sieg heil!
    “Sieg heil!” Fritz shrieked, until his voice went hoarse.
    *    *    *
     
    The Jungvolk had expanded on that early experience.
    “Aryan purity,” Fritz was told by his first leader, a multi-chinned fat man who taught the boys through class examples, “is the new religion of our Germany.”
    For each lesson, he ordered one of the ten-year-olds to strip off his Young Folk uniform and stand naked before the class. Then, with a ruler and calipers, he took physical measurements to ensure that no subhuman features tainted the boy’s blood.
    “Guido von List,” the fat man said the day that Fritz was assessed. “He’s the occult philosopher who proved that mystical Aryans were the sole founders of culture and civilization. We—the Nordic and Germanic people—are the most noble of all Aryans, so God’s will is that we keep our bloodline clean.”
    The Nazi fingered Fritz’s hair as if it were spun gold.
    “Consider this boy, the blondest in our pack. We know that he is Aryan from the purity of his features. Hair so blond that he blinds us out in the sunlight. Eyes so blue that they match the clearest sky. And as we measure his body …”
    With intimate touches, the fat man applied his ruler and calipers to Fritz’s head, torso, limbs, and genitals.
    “… we find appropriate shapes and dimensions.”
    The teacher turned and pointed to a picture on the classroom wall, a Nazi rendition of the crucifixion of Christ. The Savior hanging on the cross had Nordic features, the portrait an icon of SS Christianity.
    “Know the swarthy Jew for what he is, Young Folk. Jesus died an Aryan martyr to save the world from Jewish influence. That’s why dirty Jews killed him. Now the Jews are on the rise again. So God has sent us the führer as our new messiah to rescue Germany. Worship Hitler. Keep our race pure.”
    To illustrate that point, the teacher had taken his Jungvolk on a field trip to a Nazi institution for Germans afflicted with physical or mental defects. Led by a limping doctor in a crisp white lab coat, Fritz’s pack had toured the wards. Hunchbacks, men with club feet, people who swore vociferously for no apparent reason … the cells were a virtual freak show of Untermenschen .
    “Subhumans,” the doctor said, “disgrace our race. An able-bodied Reich must not be crippled by their burden. The way to protect ourselves from their inferiority is to nip it in the bud. Human dignity demands that they be sterilized.”
    Gazing out the window at the pure white snow, ten-year-old Fritz had wondered if that was the answer to all subhumans.
    To Jews …
    To Gypsies …
    To queers …
    To Slavs …
    There were so many Untermenschen!
    *    *    *
     
    The Hitlerjugend built on what Fritz had learned in the Jungvolk.
    Wearing a different uniform—the same one he wore today—Fritz had studied the difference between Jewish and German physics. Science held a special fascination for him because of his father’s role as the keeper of Nazi secrets at Dora-Mittelbau, the concentration camp that Streicher and his sons called home.
    “Jewish physics,” his new instructor told him, using Hitler’s term for Untermenschen science, “has no place in the Third Reich. It is a plot by world Jewry to suppress our German physics of quantum mechanics. In the theory of relativity, by the Jew Einstein, we see the workings of an alien mind bent on world domination and the enslavement of the German race.
    “That, you must fight,” snarled the instructor, glaring at the Hitler Youth through a pair of glasses so thick that his eyes resembled oversized fish in undersized glass bowls.
    “Professor Johannes Stark! Honor that name. The Nobel Prize-winning head of the Nazi state organization for scientific research, Stark declared his allegiance to our führer as early as 1924.