Methodological C id ti
Considerations
10 Guidelines to evaluate materials to use when teaching about the Holocaust.
Chadron Conference
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Rationale for Teaching the Holocaust
Why should students learn this history?
What are the most significant lessons students should learn from a study of the
from a study of the Holocaust?
Why is a particular reading,
image, document, or film an
appropriate medium for
conveying the topics that you
wish to teach?
.
Available RATIONALE
Time
Your knowledge
Nature of the course
2 class periods
learning
World History Standards
Available resources
What’s vital to you and your students?
Students’
abilities
Varied/
Sophomores
Home library USHMM web site, etc.
What’s vital to you and your students?
Consider content that……
•speaks to your students
•provides them with a clearer understanding of a complex history.
•challenges them to comprehend the magnitude of the Holocaust
RATIONALE
•The Holocaust was a watershed event, not only in the twentieth century but also in the entire course of human history.
•Democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained, but need to be appreciated, nurtured, and protected; democracy is fragile.
#1 Define the term “Holocaust”
The Holocaust was 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 – six million were murdered; Gypsies, the handicapped and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethic 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.
#2 Do not teach or imply that the Holocaust was inevitable.
Choices and decisions
•This boy forced to write
“Juden” on his father’s shop in Austria, March 1938.
•What were the choices of the Austrian citizens in the photo?
Nurses at Hadamar Institute
T‐4 Program
•What were the roles of the medical institutions and medical professionals?
•What were the choices made by these nurses?
Choices and decisions
Teachers
Judges Wearing swastikas
#3 Avoid Simple Answers to Complex Questions
Many factors that lead to the events of the Holocaust. For example . . .
Apathy
Nationalistic fervor
Propaganda &
charisma of Hitler
#3 Avoid Simple Answers to Complex Questions
How did Hitler come to power?
Students ask ….
• Why didn’t the Jews just leave?
• Why didn’t they fight back?
• How did the Nazis know someone was Jewish?
• Why was the perfect race blond and blue‐eyed, but Hitler had dark hair and eye?
Look at the many factors and events that made decision‐making Look at the many factors and events that made decision making difficult and contributed to the Holocaust
•Complex history often studied in simplistic terms
#4 Strive for precision of language
•Beware of making generalizations while attempting to explain the history of the Holocaust.
•Danger of generalizations ~ distort the factsDanger of generalizations distort the facts
•“Words that describe human behavior often have multiple meanings.”
• What are examples of generalizations?
• “All Germans were collaborators” ~ collaborator vs. bystander
• German vs. Nazi
Ghetto
Kovno ghettoLodz Ghetto
Warsaw ghetto
Concentration Camp
Novaky Labor Camp
Westerbork Transit Camp Auschwitz/Birkenau
Death Camp
Resistance
Armed Spiritual
Collaborator
Lithuanians, Ponary Forest, June 1941
Hungary’s Arrow Cross late 1944
On the morning after Kristallnacht local residents watch as the Ober Ramstadt synagogue is destroyed by fire. The local fire department prevented the fire from spreading to a nearby home, but did not try to limit the damage to the synagogue. [USHMM Photograph #04467]
Stereotypes
•Try to avoid stereotypical descriptions – it distorts historical reality.
Apology Letter From President
Obama
#5 Strive for balance in establishing whose perspective informs your study.
• Portray all individuals as human beings, capable of moral judgment and independent decision making.
• Examine the actions, motives, and decisions of the participants involved as belonging to these categories:
• Victims
• Perpetrators
• Rescuers
• Bystanders
Types of Sources
C t T i t
Look at the origin and authorship of all
materials
Court Transcripts
•Would the defendants be expected to tell the “whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
Chief Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz presents his case at the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1947.
Types of Sources
Military Reports
•Might the writer have changed the facts to changed the facts to please his superior?
Image from the Stroop Report prepared for
Types of Sources
Secret Archives
How much of the bigger picture would ghetto
p g
residents have known?
One of the milk cans that held the Ringelblum archives, a record of life in the Warsaw ghetto including descriptive reports, summaries of oral testimony, minutes of meetings, diary entries, newspaper articles, and German proclamations.
Source and Context of Information
• To make careful distinctions about sources of information, ask these questions
:• Why was it written?
• Who wrote it?
• Who is the intended audience? (bias, gaps, ( , g p , omissions?)
• How has the information been used to interpret various events?
• In summary, investigate carefully the origin and
authorship of all materials.
#6 Avoid comparison of pain
Persecuted….
Nomadic Roma (Gypsies).
Czechoslovakia, 1939
Helene Gotthold, German Jehovah’s Witness, and her children, 1936
The Blechner Family, Polish‐born German, 1932‐38.
Levels of suffering?
Rwanda
Trail of Tears
American slavery
#7 Do not romanticize history.
•Over-emphasis= unbalanced and inaccurate history
•Fact: Less than 1% of the entire population aided in rescuing Jews
•Balanced perspective
d f f t
and accuracy of fact are a must!
Oskar Shindler with a group of Jews he rescued
#7 Do not romanticize history.
#8 Contextualize history
Diversity of Jewish Life between the wars.
Time Context
Importance of placing event in historical context…
When did the event occur?
National Boycott Kristallnacht Invasion of Poland Final Solution Soviet Troops Beginning of WII implementation liberate Majdanek
1933 1938 1939 1942 1944
Where did it take place?
France?
Germany?
Poland?
Italy?
Netherlands?
Lithuania?
Romania?
Stories provide context
Yona Dickmann fashioned this aluminum comb from airplane parts after the SS transferred her from Auschwitz to forced labor in an airplane factory in Freiburg, Germany, in November 1944.
She used the comb as her hair, shaven in Auschwitz, began to grow back.
#9 Translate statistics into people
Ejszyszki Tower
USHMM
Show the person behind the statistics and the
diversity of each personal experience.
#10 Make responsible methodological choices
Nesse Godin
http://www.ushmm.org/educators/online‐workshop/personal‐
testimony/introduction
