Education Quote by Alfred Rosenberg

A “step of several generations” is the giveaway: this isn’t policy talk, it’s a time horizon for cultural conquest. Rosenberg is sketching a slow-motion coup against the Church’s authority, swapping a centuries-old moral framework for a racialized, mythic “Germanic value” system that the Nazis could script, police, and weaponize. The phrasing pretends patience and inevitability, as if history itself requires the exchange. That rhetorical move launders coercion into destiny.

The line also reveals a tactical realism inside an otherwise feverish ideology. Rosenberg understood that you can seize a state in a year, but you don’t repossess people’s consciences that fast. Churches organize community life, mark birth and death, teach obedience, and claim an authority that competes with the Party’s. So the Nazi project can’t just outlaw belief; it has to out-educate it, reframe it, and eventually make it feel antiquated. “Education” here isn’t neutral schooling. It’s the total environment: youth organizations, curricula, rituals, art, even the vocabulary people use to describe virtue.

Historically, this sits in the Nazi regime’s broader effort to de-Christianize public culture without provoking mass backlash, especially in a Germany still densely shaped by Protestant and Catholic institutions. Rosenberg, a chief ideologue rather than merely a “soldier,” helped supply the intellectual alibi: Christianity as foreign, weakening, “un-German,” while “Germanic” becomes an elastic brand for obedience, hierarchy, and racial belonging. The subtext is chillingly pragmatic: if you want permanence, don’t just win elections or wars. Breed a new moral common sense and wait.