The Shoah Memorial has no blueprint for teaching the history of the Shoah and in no way seeks to dictate any arbitrary teaching method.  Based on our own experience that we would like to share, we are simply offering some guidance on the ways in which the subject can be taught.

To talk about the Holocaust in class, in a secondary school environment, is not without consequence. For many teachers - and their way of thinking is in our own view entirely legitimate - this episode of World War II is a singular event in the history of our times. The number of victims, who they were: men, women, children, the very old and the very young, the sick and the healthy, etc., the way in which they were assassinated, the administrative and industrial machine that was constructed to accomplish what seems to be beyond human understanding, all of the above invests the lesson on the Holocaust with an emotional dimension which exceeds anything that students would have experienced until that time and anything that teachers have passed on to them during the course of that school year.

In the years between 1970 and 1980, teaching of the Holocaust was broached very superficially or not at all. It has now become a subject which may not be dominant but cannot be left aside, so that the class is often one of the most emotionally charged in any school year. That is in fact the problem. Should the Holocaust be taught as a subject which must be given particular emphasis, charged with an exceptional emotional content compared to other chapters taught that year, or should it be simply integrated in the logical and chronological continuity without singling it out from the rest of the course? We believe that the tragic dimensions of the Shoah and the questions it cannot fail to raise mean that the subject cannot be just one among others. However, certain precautions must be taken to avoid possible pitfalls.

History, not moral doctrine

Clearly, teaching about the Holocaust can and should call on emotion and play on feelings, but these are not in themselves the subject of a history class. To stop at emotions is not teaching history. For example, listening to the story told by a death camp survivor cannot be in itself, for secondary school students, the sole teaching of the Holocaust, but it is a highly useful and educational complement. Reading poignant accounts of what happened to children hidden from their persecutors, tragic tales of Polish ghettos or of those survivors whose entire families were annihilated, are all useful complements. We do not feel however that they should be the main subject of a class on the extermination of the Jews. Such writings can be used by teachers as supporting documents which help to give added perspective to the global objectives pursued by the Holocaust.

We feel that teaching the Holocaust should not become simply a course on ethics, a lesson on moral principles, which could be summed up as guilt-inducing injunction to "never again" embark on that course. In point of fact, the Holocaust is a historic event and must be seen as such. The lesson to be passed on to young people is that extermination is the ultimate phase in a process that the American historian Raul Hilberg outlined very clearly: definition, exclusion and spoliation, concentration and liquidation.

Using the right words

Precision is important.  The words used must be exactly right and they must be clearly understood.  For example, teachers must be careful when using the words adopted by the executioners themselves and systematically put them in quotation marks; expressions describing the various kinds of camps (internment or concentration camps, death camps rather than extermination camps) must help to underline the different treatments meted out to those who were detained.  Teachers should also emphasize the vocabulary used by the Nazis themselves, the way it was used to describe the Jews in terms that dehumanized them and the consequences of this, their attempt to give a mundane disguise to the horror and dimensions of a plan to assassinate millions of people, a crime of which the Nazis were well aware.

Speed and simultaneity

We feel that teachers should insist on the tardy decision of the "Final Solution" (end of summer-beginning of fall 1941) and connect it not just to the progressive nature of the violence and anti-Semitic speeches, but also to the war in the East against "Judeo-Bolshevism". The connection with the massacres perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen on the eastern front is worth recalling (1.5 million shot dead).
The swiftness of execution should also be highlighted.  Teachers can explain, using the French example, that between March 27, 1942 (when the first convoy left France for Auschwitz) and September 30, 1942 (convoy n° 39) half of the Jewish victims leaving France were deported and three quarters of them by December 7, 1943 (convoy n° 64).  Between March 1942 (start of the Reinhardt operation) and November 1943, three quarters of the Jews who fell victim to the Holocaust were dead.  In 1944, 434,000 Hungarian Jews were deported in the space of 7 weeks to Auschwitz-Birkenau (May 16 to July 9, 1944).
Teachers can also insist on the concomitance of Nazi actions: on July 16-17, 1942, the Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup took place. On July 22, the massive Warsaw deportations began and continued until September (during which time period 300,000 people were transported to Treblinka and assassinated). Between those two dates Himmler himself took the decision to construct four large crematoria in Birkenau.

Teachers may also wish, using as a basis the works of the historian Christopher Browning for example, to discuss with their class the all too human capacity to behave with an extraordinary lack of humanity, how commonplace are assassins and evil, blind submission to Law, obedience to authority legitimized by ideology and indoctrination, the strong inclination to conform with the pack, all of which can induce ordinary men to become assassins if circumstances lead them along that path.

Genocides in the plural

To put the Holocaust in its proper historical setting and if students seem to seek further clarification, either directly or indirectly, teachers could refer briefly to some pertinent comparisons. This would help to define the Shoah with more precision, to highlight its specific characteristics, its degree of singularity and of course to attenuate its impact or put it into perspective. A brief reminder, for example, of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994, can evidence some of the points in common between the claims of Nazi and Hutu leaders and their stated objective in both cases: exterminate an entire population, starting with the children. The rustic crudeness of the Rwandan genocide can be contrasted with the industrial professionalism of the European Jews' extermination.

In any event and from whatever angle, a lesson on the Holocaust requires a degree of expertise on both the subject and the issues it raises.