Understanding and Teaching Holocaust Education

Paula Cowan, Henry Maitles, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781473919341, 9781473919334
• eBook ISBN: 9781473988026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

The Holocaust is a controversial and difficult teaching topic that needs to be approached sensitively and with an awareness of the complex and emotive issues involved. This book offers pragmatic pedagogical and classroom-based guidance for teachers and trainee teachers on how to intelligently teach holocaust education in a meaningful and age-appropriate way.

Key coverage includes:

• Practical approaches and useful resources for teaching in schools
• Holocaust education and citizenship
• Holocaust remembrance as an educational opportunity
• How to explore the topic of anti-semitism in the classroom
• Exploring international perspectives on holocaust education

1 Introduction

Learning Objectives

• To provide a general background to, and current contexts of, Holocaust Education, remembrance and research
• To demonstrate the complexity in defining the Holocaust
• To discuss the different meanings of antisemitism
• To provide authors’ definitions of the Holocaust and antisemitism
• To provide an outline of the following chapters

It is now more than fifteen years since 46 government representatives, including 23 heads of state and prime ministers, attended the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (2000), and discussed the importance of Holocaust Education, remembrance and research in the twenty-first century. Their discussions led to the Stockholm Declaration, which recognised the unprecedented nature and magnitude of the Holocaust, and that this should never be forgotten. Committed to this Declaration, the intergovernmental organisation, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), formerly known as the Task Force for International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, is committed to encouraging the political commitment of governments to support education, remembrance and research of the Holocaust and to fostering international co-operation in this area by developing multilateral partnerships amongst its member countries. Before the establishment of this organisation in 1998, the Holocaust was principally of interest to people who had obvious connections to it; the IHRA brought about a shift in expectations that conveyed the relevance and remembrance of the Holocaust to a far wider international audience.

One approach to impacting on collective memory is the establishment of an annual day of Holocaust Remembrance. Prior to the establishment of this Day, Holocaust remembrance had, since the 1950s, been principally commemorated by Jewish communities and individuals worldwide on Yom HaShoah. Established in the UK in 2000 and adopted by the United Nations in 2006, Holocaust Remembrance (or Memorial) Day, which falls on 27 January (the date, in 1945, of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau), has contributed significantly to Holocaust Education in schools, colleges, universities and in other institutions such as prisons, libraries, and corporate organisations. Today the Holocaust is remembered and taught in a wide range of innovative and engaging ways, in different languages by people of different religions, cultures, and ethnicity. This provides sound evidence that the Stockholm Declaration’s objectives continue to be taken seriously.

Yet the politicisation of the Holocaust is not beyond criticism. For example, Peter Novick (1999) accused the US government of hypocrisy when former US President Bill Clinton spoke of the lack of help given to victims of the Holocaust, at the opening of the state-funded United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC in 1993, but as Head of Government did not intervene to stop the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. In the UK, Mark Levene (2006) criticised the intentions of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to establish a national Holocaust Memorial Day. Levene claimed that this was an attempt to bring together shared Western values after the Cold War, conveniently avoiding the UK’s failure to prevent recent genocides and the controversies of providing financial support to genocidaires, most notably Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of Kurds were murdered in Iraq.

Similarly is the recognition that in the early twenty-first century while Holocaust Education and remembrance has been developing worldwide, there has been little intervention from world states and the United Nations with regard to the ongoing genocide in Darfur which, to date, has claimed the lives of some 400,000 people, and displaced nearly three million since 2003. While questioning the agendas of governments and political leaders is healthy, these agendas do not necessarily negate governmental contributions to developing Holocaust Education and remembrance. The authors’ experiences of learning about the Holocaust in Scotland in the 1960s, 70s and 80s were that it was very infrequently taught in schools. Even students who chose History as one of their subjects, and studied the Second World War, found that their programme focused on the causes of the War. Students who studied Judaism in Religious and Moral Education programmes were more likely to learn about the Holocaust and did so, though from a religious and/or philosophical perspective, i.e. without the assurance of a historical foundation. Hence an understanding of the Holocaust for generations of young Scots was heavily reliant on individual personal interest that occurred outside schools. We, the authors, therefore share the Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer’s view (2002) that the contribution of politicians to the Holocaust Education effort is necessary. In the UK, governmental support in the form of subsidising the national Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony and resources for schools and wider communities to support this (see for example DfEE, 2000; LTS, 2000, 2002b; Gathering the Voices, 2012) has impacted on Holocaust Education and remembrance across the country. Our research findings demonstrate that Holocaust Education has the potential to impact on young people’s values and attitudes towards minority groups (Maitles et al., 2006). Today’s young people are tomorrow’s politicians and government officials. It is possible that by applying an open and engaging attitude to Holocaust Education, the next generation of politicians and government officials will be better equipped than their predecessors to address topics of prejudice and genocide.

The Process of the Holocaust

It is now more than seventy years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a place that was inconceivable eighty years ago but today has become synonymous with evil and the worst example of man’s inhumanity to man. Archive footage and images of the Holocaust are hard for people, irrespective of their age and/or heritage, to digest. Similarly, words such as annihilation and extermination may not be commonly referred to on Holocaust Remembrance Day, or in a classroom, yet are important in understanding the destructive process of European Jewry.

Hilberg (1985) categorised six sequential stages of the Holocaust process:

1. definition
2. expropriation
3. ghettoisation
4. mobile killing units
5. deportation
6. death camps

The definition of Jews was achieved through the Nuremberg Laws (1935) which deprived German Jews of their citizenship. Prior to this, antisemitic legislation had been passed (1933–34) in Germany restricting the number of Jewish students in German schools and universities, and Jews from working in the medical and legal professions. Also, confiscation of Jewish property and possessions began at this time and continued until 1945. Although Jews were forced to emigrate, expansion of the Third Reich in central and western Europe, and the unwillingness of countries to open their doors to Jews, together with immigration policies that did not allow massive immigration to Palestine, meant that they found it increasingly difficult to leave Germany and German-occupied countries. Jews were initially deported to ghettos as an interim arrangement before their deportation to camps. One year before the discussion and finalising of the ‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ at the Wannsee Conference (1942), the systematic annihilation of Jews had already begun, with mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, murdering more than 1.3 million Jews in the newly German-occupied Soviet Union. As effective and efficient instruments of the ‘Final Solution’, the death camps were killing factories that were designed to exterminate Jews. They were fitted with gas chambers and crematoria, and employed techniques of mass production. It is worth noting that commanders of the Einsatzgruppen included Dr Otto Rasch, an intellectual with two PhDs, an economist and lawyer, Otto Ohlendorf, and that Dr Josef Mengele (who had a PhD in physical anthropology in addition to an MD) was one of 23 German doctors at Auschwitz. This summary serves to highlight the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust.

The above summary explains the following question that we were asked after presenting a paper at a national educational research conference on senior school students’ responses to visiting the camps at Auschwitz. One member in the audience commented that the questions in our research about the impact of the visit on students’ understanding of the Holocaust, genocide, the Second World War and human rights were deeply flawed as ‘understanding’ was too subjective. He explained that irrespective of what he read, or what he saw, because of its complexity, he could never really understand the Holocaust. He claimed that if he could not understand this, how can we, or anyone else, expect school students to do so? We argued then, as we do so in this book, that it is precisely because of the complex nature of the Holocaust, this ‘ungraspable nature of the Holocaust’ that Ruth Gilbert refers to (Gilbert, 2010), that not only should teenagers study the Holocaust in their junior and senior years, but that Holocaust learning should also begin at primary school. We also argued that the Holocaust is not the only complex area of learning in a school’s curriculum. Teachers may consider child obesity, and the current treatment and plight of refugees, to be equally difficult to understand. While we are resolute in this issue, it is worth reflecting that if this audience member is correct, then what can the purpose of Holocaust Education and remembrance possibly be?

The Holocaust led to the adoption of the term ‘genocide’ (1944), the UN General Assembly’s declaration of genocide as a crime under international law (1946), the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), and the establishment of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (1950). Our opinion is that Holocaust Education and Holocaust remembrance can help learners, young and old, understand the past, as well as contribute to their understanding of the historical event that has become known as the Holocaust. While it is inappropriate for young learners to study each of Hilberg’s stages, we consider that teachers should have this understanding and that it should inform their teaching. Feedback that we have received from teachers suggests that teacher knowledge and pedagogy are serious barriers to teaching the Holocaust. As the title of this book suggests, our focus is on teacher pedagogies and practice. Readers who would like to develop their knowledge of the Holocaust should refer to our suggested Further Reading texts at the end of this chapter.

Defining the Holocaust

The literal meaning of the word ‘holocaust’, a ‘burnt offering’ or a ‘sacrifice by fire’, is problematic, as these biblical connotations suggest that the genocide of the Jews, under Nazi rule in what has become known as the Holocaust, was a sacrifice, which it clearly was not. A sacrifice can be a loss of something one gives up usually for the sake of a better cause. The connotation that the murder of European Jews could be explained by achieving a ‘greater good’, or a better society, is repugnant. This is one reason why the word ‘Shoah’ is often preferred, and has been adopted in several countries such as Israel and France. Meaning ‘catastrophe’, this word conveys a sense of the horror and devastation that ensued. Yet the murder of European Jews was not a catastrophe in that it was not a natural occurrence, a tsunami or an earthquake, that humans could not foresee or control. This man-made catastrophe could have been prevented. We (the authors) will adopt the usage of the capitalised word ‘Holocaust’ as this is the word that is commonly used in the UK, where Holocaust (not Shoah) Memorial Day is annually commemorated, and where the Holocaust (not the Shoah) is included in the school curriculum in England.

The central aim of this book, as its title suggests, is to support teachers and educators in their teaching of the Holocaust in schools. One of the first pieces of advice offered by the IHRA to teachers is to ‘define the term Holocaust’ (IHRA, n.d.), yet this presents challenges as definitions are influenced by cultural and historical narratives. While the Holocaust was a catastrophe for Jews, it is also considered by many Muslims, and in particular Arab Muslims, as a catastrophe for Palestinians, which they call the Nakba. Many Palestinians consider that the Holocaust led to the displacement of nearly one million Palestinians as a result of the United Nations approving the establishment of the State of Israel in 1947 (Werbner, 2009). Other historical sources provide different definitions.

The IHRA provide the following two definitions on their website.

Definition 1

The Holocaust refers to a specific genocidal event in twentieth-century history: the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims – 6 million were murdered; Gypsies, the handicapped, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.

(From the Imperial War Museum, London)

Definition 2

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 discrimination against 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 only group that the Nazis sought to destroy entirely.

(From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, USA)

It is hardly surprising that these definitions are strikingly similar as they are both historically accurate. They agree that the year when the Holocaust began was 1933: not 1939 when the Second World War began; not 1941 when the mobile killing squads began wiping out entire Jewish communities; and not 1942 when the implementation of the Final Solution was agreed. The above definitions also agree on the number of Jews murdered, acknowledge that the perpetrators or victimisers were Nazis (or Nazi Germany) and their collaborators, and that Jews were the primary victims. Aside from obvious age-appropriateness issues in teaching this to young learners which can be challenging for teachers, there are significant differences between these definitions.

Definition 1 identifies the main groups of people who were targeted by the Nazis and their collaborators; definition 2 acknowledges the murder of other groups of peoples but only names the Jews. This clearly emphasises the distinctive treatment of the Jews, although some may consider that this marginalises the treatment meted out to many other victims. Definition 1 also includes the term ‘state sponsored’ to emphasise that such actions and behaviour were national policy. Another difference is their conveying the genocidal nature of the event. In definition 1 this is the first feature of the Holocaust to be brought to the reader’s attention, and the point is made explicitly. In contrast, this point is made at the end of definition 2 where the genocidal nature is described but not labelled as such. Of the two, we prefer Definition 1 as we consider Jews to be the major victims of the Holocaust and that the systematic and barbaric way in which they were treated is crucial to understanding and teaching the Holocaust. This does not diminish the persecution and murder of other groups of victims but serves to understand the tragedy of what has become known as the Holocaust.

One aspect of the Holocaust which is overlooked in Definition 1, and not as well documented as the Jewish genocide, is the genocide of the Roma and Sinti (sometimes referred to by others as Gypsies). Also referred to as The Forgotten Genocide, it has taken decades for this genocide, also known as Porajmos, to be recognised, with scholarly estimates of 220,000–500,000 Romani people murdered. The nature of this genocide, like all genocides, was distinctive but similar to that of the Jews: they were systematically persecuted when the National Socialists came to power in 1933; defined by the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Nature of Holocaust Education
• 3 Citizenship and Holocaust Education
• 4 Antisemitism
• 5 The Complexities of Holocaust Remembrance
• 6 The Importance of Language
• 7 Pedagogy
• 8 Teaching the Holocaust in Primary Schools
• 9 Classroom Teaching Approaches
• 10 Learning from Auschwitz
• 11 Epilogue
• References
• Index