Natsi-Saksan opetus-, tiede- ja kulttuuri-ministerinä toimi tohtori Bernhard Rust, joka oli aikaisemmin erotettu opettajan virastaan jäätyään kiinni suhteesta oppilaan kanssa.[1]
Natsiopetusministerinä Rust määräsi voimaan lainsäädännön, jonka mukaan oppilaiden ja opettajien tulisi tervehtiä toisiaan natsitervehdyksellä.
Myöhemmin Rust toimi kansallisen tutkimuskeskuksen johtajana, joka vastasi vankien käytöstä lääke-tieteellisissä kokeissa.
[Historioitsija Louis P.] Lochnerin mukaan Rust oli nuorena miehenä ollut vankina mielisairaalassa. [...] Armeijan tutkimus-keskuksen tohtori Georg Meyer väittää, että Rustin vaimo oli juutalainen.[2] —Bryan Mark Rigg
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[1] During World War I he [Bernhard Rust] served as Lieutenant in the infantry, winning Iron Cross (First Class) and suffering a severe headwound which affected his mental stability. [...] In 1930 he was dismissed from his teaching post by the local republican authorities at Hanover - allegedly for interfering with a schoolgirl - but was nonetheless elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi deputy. [...] The mentally disturbed ex-schoolmaster, who presided over the spiritual shipwreck of German science and scholarship, himself committed suicide with the collapse of Nazi Germany in May 1945. —Robert Wistrich, Who's Who in Nazi Germany, Macmillan Pub. Co., Inc., New York, (1982), "Rust, Bernhard", s. 262-263; Indeed, it seemed not to be his political activities against the State, whose employee he was, that led to his dismissal, but rather his nervous disorder, which was causing violent attacks of complete insanity at Increasingly short periods. Dr. Rust was forced to take longer and longer holidays at sanatoriums, and the State could not hold itself responsible for his ability as a teacher, even during the moments of comparative clarity in the Doctor's mind. —Erika Mann, School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis, Modern Age Books Inc., New York, (1938), s. 49; "1920-luvulla kouluopettaja Rust oli joutunut oikeuteen hyökättyään naisopiskelijan kimppuun. [Professori Edmund] Forster, joka kutsuttiin antamaan lääketieteellinen mielipide syytetystä, oli määritellyt Rustin psykopaatiksi." —David Lewis, The Secret Life of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Hanau Pub., Ltd., London, (1977), s. 74.
[2] Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military, University Press of Kansas, (2002), s. 287, v. 60. Rust was thought an idiot by many in the Nazi government. According to Lochner, Rust had been an inmate in an insane asylum as a young man. The Goebbels Diaries, 1942–1943, ed. and trans. by Louis P. Lochner (New York, 1948), p. 378 (Goebbels’s diaries must be looked at critically, since he wrote them in the hope of publishing them as an "Official Nazi document" in the future). Dr. Georg Meyer of the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Military Research Center) Potsdam/Freiburg claims that Rust’s wife was Jewish; Ksm. Rigg, s. 27.
