A Froebel kindergarten: play, washing-up and potties, 1937

Children build with wooden blocks, a girl dresses and hugs her doll, five teachers watch, children wash the dishes and a toddler cries on the potty.

In a room with patterned curtains and a folding screen, small children build towers of large wooden blocks; a girl with a big bow in her hair dresses her doll and hugs it tight; five young teachers in aprons sit on a bench along the wall while boys push toy trains along a low table. In a tiled washroom a girl with plaits dries plates as a boy in a white apron washes up at the sink, and a row of toddlers sits on potties against a radiator until one of them bursts into tears.

Friedrich Fröbel coined the word kindergarten in 1840 and wanted children to learn through play and through the real work of the household. The city of this kindergarten is not established; the party's welfare organisation, the NSV, was taking over more and more kindergartens from churches and private associations.