YMMV / Education for Death

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• Fair for Its Day: While the short film has a fairly enlightened message about how the enemy nation are victims of their own government, its stereotypical depiction of a Brawn Hilda and lack of overt discussion of Nazi antisemitism are things that wouldn't hold up today.
• Funny Moments: The whole scene with Hitler and Princess Germany provides probably the only form of comic relief in the entire short, due in large part to Hitler being portrayed in full Adolf Hitlarious fashion and visibly struggling to get the very plus-sized Princess Germany on his horse.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The narration frames the scene in which Hitler drives away the witch of democracy and awakens a personification of Germany as a distorted Nazi version of Sleeping Beauty, but "Ride of the Valkyries" playing in the background, the Brawn Hilda outfit of Germany, and the fact that Germany is singing all indicate that the segment is actually a parody of Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung operas, in which the German hero Siegfried awakens the valkyrie Brunhilda from a magical sleep.
  • Hans's parents are given a passport with a page to record the names of up to 12 children. During Nazi Germany, Aryan women were expected to bear many children in order to make the nation strong. A woman could receive an award called the Mother's Cross for bearing and raising enough healthy children.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Nazi regime was even worse in Real Life than depicted in the movie. The closest we get to acknowledging their antisemitism was that the list of banned names just happens to consist of ones of Jewish origin and Hans having blond hair and blue eyes, i.e. Aryan (although it's more like they were invoking the Phenotype Stereotype), along with the narrator briefly mentioning the belief.
  • The end of the cartoon shows an adult Hans as a soldier in the Wehrmacht and implies that he dies in battle. In real life, the Nazi regime resorted to using Child Soldiers as Germany was invaded in 1945, just two years after the short was released. This, combined with the fact that Hans would have been twelve at the oldest in 1945 to be born under Nazism, paints an even more disturbing picture of his fate...
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During the classroom scene, the teacher demonstrates the concept of survival of the fittest with a fox and a rabbit. Could also be Harsher in Hindsight in that Zootopia also deals with a racial divide and social outcasting...
    • Then there's the other movie where a young Nazi boy is criticized for showing mercy to a rabbit.
  • A rewritten version of Sleeping Beauty is used as an in-universe example of Nazi propaganda. Disney would later produce their own full-length version of Sleeping Beauty in 1959.
• Moral Event Horizon: What the German state puts the children of Germany through.
• Realism-Induced Horror: What makes this possibly the darkest Disney production is that the evil of the film doesn't come from anything supernatural: the Nazis and their brainwashing were real-life things.
• Spiritual Predecessor: The final sequence of adult Hans and his fellows marching feels a lot like the marching hammers in the animated sequences of The Wall, which was made four decades later.
• Values Dissonance: Some aspects of this film are off even by 1940s standards, as it makes no explicit mention of the antisemitism of Nazism, which wasn't by any means a secret at the time. The closest we get are some small-coded hints such as Jewish names being on a list of forbidden names for German children.
• Values Resonance: As a Wartime Cartoon, this one has aged remarkably well. It realistically depicts how innocent children of the time were indoctrinated by the Nazi regime (along with sympathetic parents afraid of it all) without resorting to stereotypes, and paints an unfortunate picture that shows not just how Germany truly was at the time, but also how bad it could have been. It also resonates with modern audiences who are painfully aware of the dangers of present day hate groups that follow the Nazi party's example, as well as the consequences of politically motivated information and upbringings. Finally, the important virtues mentioned in the cartoon are "laughter, hope, tolerance, [and] mercy", things that will always be important to have.
• The Woobie: Hans, where do we even start:
  • For one he was brainwashed into the Nazi regime at such a young age and during that scene with him showing empathy for the rabbit, it seems like he was broken to tears declaring the rabbit too weak to live.
  • His fate is even more horrifying with the Reality Subtext later on, while the Nazi regime didn't last long enough for a child to grow into an adult under it, Nazi Germany DID use child soldiers at the end of the war.

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