National Socialist German Student Association (NSStB)

The National Socialist Student Association (NSStB) was founded by two law students at the University of Munich in early 1926 with the goal of influencing the student body in the spirit of National Socialism. To this end, students of National Socialist persuasion were to be grouped together at universities throughout the Third Reich, and the student councils were to be dominated through university elections. This association, which was structured according to the ‘Führer principle’ and agitated through journals and events, initially aligned itself ideologically with the Straßer wing of the Nazi Party, but ultimately did not entirely succeed. However, in the winter semester of 1929-30, it won high percentages of votes in the General Student Committee (AStA) elections at individual universities: In Erlangen it was 51%, in Würzburg 30%, but at the University of Munich only 18%. The National Socialist Student Association emerged as the leading political force in the organized student body even before Nazi rule began.

Not only after 1933, but even before, the National Socialist Student Association pursued the ‘cleansing’ of the universities of Jewish, socialist and communist students, initiated lecture boycotts and instigated fights at the lectures of ‘racially’ and politically undesirable university lecturers, such as the jurist Hans Nawiasky at the University of Munich in the summer of 1931. The National Socialist Student Association also asserted its power over student fraternities, all of which were eventually banned in 1936. In the same year, Gustav Adolf Scheel, a physician from Heidelberg, took over the newly created position of Reich Student Leader, and in 1938 he also headed the Reich Student Institute (Reichsstudentenwerk) and, from the summer of 1944 until the end of the war, the Nazi Lecturers’ Association.