Artifact

The blood and honor youth knife was given to children as a reward, and was a part of the uniform in the Nazi youth program. The Hitler Youth program installed Nazi ideals and anti-Semitism within children at a young age, leading to adults who were fully loyal and support Nazi ideals. The reward helped instill the ideals and served as a reminder to the children about their loyalty to the Nazi regime. This anti-Semitism is exhibited in Maus when Art's dad, Spiegelman, is walking down the road, and some kids recognize and identify him as a Jew, and run towards their mothers, screaming for help, that the Jew was going to eat them. Spiegelman has to act like he's not Jewish and reassures the kids and their mothers that he won’t eat them. This fact that the mothers don’t apologize for the racist comment, but for mistaking him as a Jew instead shows how Hitler and the Nazis were able to plant the ideas into the population’s head. Jewish or not, Spiegelman would not have eaten them, because any civilized human being would not have cannibalized and eaten those kids. This shows the Nazi party's ability to convince a majority of the German and polish population that the war was caused by the Jewish population, and that they, the Jews, should be punished. The Jewish were seen as an inferior race, and often weren’t even seen as human. The public believed in these ideas, and were rewarded for believing in them. After the war, there were groups of younger German and Polish resistance that still held Nazi ideals that rebelled against the Allied troops. By teaching the Nazi ideals to the population when they were young, the Nazis were able to reinforce the ideas throughout their childhood so that the kids never forgot it when they were older.