Archives 1949-1950
4th year of the school’s existence
On Monday, October 21, 1946, a new American high school opened. It was one of six high schools that opened in the fall of 1946, not in the United States, but in Erlangen, Germany, a small town approximately 15.5 miles north of Nürnberg, one of Germany’s most historic cities. This school was named Erlangen American High School.
On Monday, September 6, 1947, this American high school opened its doors as Nürnberg (American) High School, in a new location, 19 Tannenstrasse in Fürth, a town approximately 6.5 miles from the Nürnberg Hauptbahnhof.
In the fall of 1949, NHS began its third year in the building at 19 Tannenstrasse and its fourth year as an Army dependent school.
The doors of NHS were to remain open for 49 years until the school closed in 1995. In that year thousands of Nürnberg High School alumni had to face the fact that their school was gone. But it lived on in their memory, and these alumni have bonded together to preserve their high school friendships and their memories through the Nürnberg Alumni Association.
This electronic archive of the 1949-50 school year is an attempt to preserve the history and memories of the fourth year. In the files that you can link to from this page, you can read how these students adjusted to attending a small American high school tucked away in a corner of Fürth, Germany, while the West Germans continued to dig out of the rubble of their destroyed cities. As the school year was ending, in far away Korea the Korean War was beginning.
Here you can see the students engaged in the typical activities of high schools in the States. Their school newspaper is now in its fourth year. Their yearbook is once again combined with those of six other American dependent schools in Germany. With only around 120 students in grades 9-12, they play in and win the championship of a three-school 6-man football league. Competing against all of the dependent schools in basketball, NHS finishes second in the season-ending tournament. Extra-curricular activities are pretty much limited to school dances, of which there are many. The dorm students present a musical comedy, “Step Lively.” The high school curriculum compares favorably with those in the United States. The study of German continues to be a very popular elective class, though neither the school newspaper nor the yearbook report any interaction with the native populace.
If you find anything here that you believe to be historically inaccurate or know of something that can be added to these files, please contact me.
Bob McQuitty, NAA historian/archivist