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Chapter 1
What was the Holocaust?
If we are going to be teaching about the Holocaust it seems imperative that we understand exactly what we mean by the word ‘Holocaust’. From where does its use originate and does it have the same definition and connotations for everyone? If we are to teach about the Holocaust then it seems important that we as practitioners know exactly what we are referring to; after all, if we are confused about what we mean by the word, there seems little hope of our students grasping it. As with so many areas of the Holocaust – and perhaps especially Holocaust education – there is little consensus, and practitioners ought to know where the key areas of contention lie in formulating an accurate and appropriate definition.
Before doing this, it is worth acknowledging that there is by no means any agreement on whether or not the word ‘Holocaust’ is the most suitable term to use. Etymologically, ‘Holocaust’ derives from the Greek Holókauston, meaning whole burnt sacrifice, and carries with it religious implications whereby animals were offered as sacrifices by fire. This suggests that the murder of the Jews was some form of martyrdom or voluntarily offering, which is highly problematic to say the least. Consequently, the Hebrew word Shoah (meaning ‘catastrophe’ or ‘calamity’) is generally preferred, especially among Jewish and Israeli audiences, not least because it does not carry with it any religious implications. In addition to Shoah, other terms have been employed to challenge and replace the word ‘Holocaust’, such as Churban Europa, meaning ‘European destruction’ and in ultra-orthodox communities the term Gezerot tash–tashah (the Decrees of 1939–45) are sometimes employed. Despite this, the popularity and common usage of the term ‘Holocaust’ means that it seems unlikely to be replaced globally outside of specialised or scholarly use.
Specific words and phrases connected to the Holocaust are naturally very significant and should only be employed when one wants to convey their precise meaning. Alas, it seems that some practitioners use terminology reminiscent of the euphemistic code which the Nazis utilised to disguise the extent of their operations against the Jews. The phrase ‘Final Solution’ is characteristic of that and should not simply be considered as an appropriate synonym for the Holocaust. The ‘Final Solution’ was a specific shift in policy by the Nazi regime at some point between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1942, which was the culmination of other attempts to answer what they referred to as the Judenfrage or Jewish question. Similarly, terms such as ‘extermination’ were employed to de-humanise the victims and teachers should take care that they do not inadvertently do so in their classrooms. It seems much more appropriate to talk about the murder of the Jews than their extermination.
Teaching about defintions
When teaching the Holocaust I often start by asking my students to define the Holocaust in fewer than fifty words. While this works very effectively for older students, many children within younger classes are not familiar with the term and may not be able to define it. Very often, however, they are aware that the Nazis persecuted and killed the Jews and other groups during the Second World War. Consequently, those who have not come across the word Holocaust are asked to describe how the Nazis treated people they did not like. If pupils have no background knowledge whatsoever, then it is necessary to teach some of the key content first and encourage pupils to establish a definition at a later point in the course.
The answers in Box 1.1 are taken from year 9 (ages 13 and 14) students in comprehensive schools in London and Oxford, UK.
Box 1.1 What was the Holocaust? Some student definitions
The Germans felt strongly that all Jews were bad and that they should be destroyed. This movement was known as the Holocaust.
(John, aged 13)
Nazis thought the gypsies, Jews, blacks and disabled people were a waste of space and should be executed.
(Leonie, aged 13)
Hitler, the leader of the Nazis, hated blacks, Jews and gypsies.
(Kabir, aged 14)
Encouraging students to produce their own definitions helps to highlight the preconceptions that they hold. It also enables them to understand that legitimate differences of opinion can exist, although students also need to be aware that not any definition is correct or appropriate.
As demonstrated in the examples above, it is often common for adolescents to write about black people being victims of the Holocaust. It was undoubtedly the case that black people within Nazi-occupied territory (including black prisoners of war) were sometimes subject to isolation, persecution, sterilisation and even murder. Interestingly, far fewer students refer to Poles or Soviet prisoners of war – two groups which suffered several millions of deaths at the hands of the Nazi regime during the Second World War.
When students do define the Holocaust, the range of answers that are read back highlight to the class the wide range of definitions that have been produced. Very often they fall into three broad categories:
- The Holocaust was the murder of various groups such as Jews, communists, homosexuals and prisoners of war.
- The Holocaust was the persecution and murder of the Jews by the Nazis.
- The Holocaust was the murder of the Jews by the Nazis.
These three types of responses highlight two controversial questions which those who attempt to define the Holocaust must answer. The first of these is, Who should be included in the definition? The second is, When did the Holocaust take place? Needless to say, both of these questions are connected and how one answers the first of them will certainly influence how one deals with the second. For example, if one were to include the murder of disabled persons in a definition of the Holocaust, then the Holocaust might start in 1939 when the Nazi regime introduced their child ‘euthanasia’ programme. However, if the compulsory sterilisation of those with hereditary diseases was considered a part of the Holocaust then the date would have to shift back to as early as 1933. Similarly, the year of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany would also be considered the start date of the Holocaust if the definition only applied to Jewish victims but included persecution and state-sponsored discrimination in addition to murder.
How the Holocaust is defined can have a number of important implications both inside and outside of the classroom. The issue has increasingly taken on a political significance and the historical, semantic and even pedagogic arguments on both sides can often be driven by particular agendas. As a practitioner, there is some flexibility on how the Holocaust is defined, although it seems helpful that students recognise that there is no universal consensus. It also seems important that you know both why you have chosen to define it in such a way and what the potential implications may be of opting for such a definition. The teaching guidelines of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) – an intergovernmental body of thirty-one countries – are particularly helpful in this regard when they state: ‘a clear definition of the term Holocaust is essential. Many teachers apply this term in a very broad sense to encompass all victims of Nazi persecution. Yet most historians of the period use a more precise definition’ (IHRA 2014a).
This statement is supported by a national survey of trends, perspectives and practice in Holocaust education in English schools, conducted by the Holocaust Education Development Programme (HEDP) (now called the Centre for Holocaust Education) in 2009. The study, which was conducted on over 2,000 practitioners teaching various subjects, found that when given seven definitions to choose from, over 50 per cent of respondents believed that the Holocaust was ‘the persecution and murder of a range of victims perpetrated by the Nazi regime and its collaborators’. Conversely, fewer than 10 per cent of the sample defined it as ‘the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators’ (Pettigrew et al. 2009: 62–63), which as discussed below, is the definition used by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington DC. Interestingly, the HEDP study analysed the relationship between teachers’ definitions and three other factors: the subject they taught, their experience of teaching the Holocaust and their knowledge of the Holocaust. The research concluded that ‘a teacher’s knowledge has more of an impact on how they understand the term “the Holocaust” than either their subject background or their prior experience of teaching in this area’. Moreover, the greater the knowledge, the more likely they were to reject a broad definition in favour of recognising ‘the specificity of the targeting of European Jews’ (ibid., 68).
It can be beneficial – and certainly thought-provoking – to encourage one’s students to think about the difficulties and implications of defining the Holocaust and for them to be aware of the lack of consensus among teachers. The ‘Defining the Holocaust’ worksheet aims to facilitate this by providing a number of events which might or might not be included in a definition. This can be adapted or developed on the basis of the students’ definitions. If, for example, they believe that the Holocaust only began after systematic mass murder commenced in 1941, then did the thousands of Jews who had starved to death in the ghettos of Poland before this date not die in the Holocaust? Moreover, if students include those who died on the death marches, does that include British prisoners of war who perished on the torturous journeys west? If so, should Britons who died in the Blitz also be included, as they too died as a consequence of Nazi aggression? The objective of such questioning is not to make their definitions watertight and certainly not to compare the extent of suffering, but rather to encourage them to see how problematic and difficult it is to define the Holocaust and to understand why there is such a divergence of opinion.
Established definitions of the Holocaust
Rather than create your own definition, it is often helpful to use one that has already been established by one of the major institutions involved in Holocaust remembrance and education. As the IHRA guidelines intimated, most historians use a precise definition and this is typically reflected in the examples of many of the leading Holocaust museums and organisations. The USHMM states on its website that:
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators … During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived ‘racial inferiority’: Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.
(USHMM 2014)
No doubt a great deal of care and attention took place in articulating this definition. The museum has defined the Holocaust itself as the ‘persecution and murder’ of Jews, thus including all aspects of antisemitism which pre-dated the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the commencement of systematic mass murder. While stating that it was Jewish deaths which constituted the Holocaust, other groups are not excluded nor marginalised as they are included in the paragraph. Nevertheless, the targeting of ‘other groups’ occurred ‘during the era of the Holocaust’, not as a part of the Holocaust itself. Consequently, the USHMM have been able to maintain the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust but ensure the inclusion of other groups, which helps them to fulfil their broader goals of confronting hatred, preventing genocide and promoting human dignity rather than simply remembering Jewish deaths and tackling antisemitism. A more generalised set of aims seems more appropriate for an organisation which receives tens of millions of dollars each year in federal funds in a contemporary and multicultural America. Yet at the same time, the narrower definition of the Holocaust maintains the Jewishness of the phenomenon, which is likely to be welcomed by the Jewish community.
There are both similarities and differences between the definition used by the USHMM and that employed by Yad Vashem – the official memorial and national museum to Holocaust victims in Israel:
The Holocaust was the murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. Between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, Nazi Germany and its accomplices strove to murder every Jew under their domination. Because Nazi persecution of the Jews began with Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933, many historians consider this the start of the Holocaust era. The Jews were not the only victims of Hitler’s regime, but they were the one single group that the Nazis sought to destroy entirely.
Like that of the USHMM, Yad Vashem’s definition also draws a distinction between ‘the Holocaust’ and the ‘Holocaust era’. However, it does this to distinguish between the periods of mass murder and of persecution, rather than between Jewish and non-Jewish victims. Both definitions also draw attention to the role of collaborators. Experience suggests that many students are not aware that the Holocaust was also perpetrated by those who chose to collaborate with the Nazi regime, and it is helpful if practitioners include this often-forgotten group in their definition. It is noteworthy that while Yad Vashem acknowledges that ‘the Jews were not the only victims of Hitler’s regime’, they seek to explain why they adopt a narrow rather than a broad definition, stating that the Jews were ‘the one single group that the Nazis sought to destroy entirely’. The focus of Yad Vashem is exclusively on the fate of the Jews, while the USHMM includes educational resources and exhibitions on non-Jewish victims as well as post-Holocaust genocides. The geo-political context is likely to be influential in this regard, seeing that the USHMM is operating within a secular rather than a Jewish state.
While it may be helpful for teachers to adopt an institution’s definitions or at least be influenced by them, it is also important that they understand some of the practical and political reasons for their definitions.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust – the government-funded charity which promotes Holocaust Memorial Day – adopts the following definition:
Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews. This systematic and planned attempt to murder European Jewry is known as the Holocaust.
(HMDT 2014)
Again, it is only Jewish victims included in this definition, which commences in 1941 and therefore excludes Jewish deaths during Kristallnacht as well as those who perished in the ghettos before this date.
Why do defintions matter?
There are a number of reasons why the definition of the Holocaust that is chosen really matters, and it is probable that it will have significant implications on many aspects of one’s teaching. Ultimately, how we define the Holocaust determines what we mean when we say we are teaching the Holocaust or that we are engaged in Holocaust education. For some practitioners, therefore, they may believe that when they are teaching the treatment of communists and political opponents or the persecution of the disabled they are teaching the Holocaust. Others would argue that they are not.
Definitions impact on content choices
Teaching the Holocaust involves making i...
