How to approach the history of genocide with high school classes? The educational team of the Memorial has written, with teachers, a set of operational advice to the attention of teachers in middle and high schools.
Addressing the Shoah in class, whether in middle school or high school, is never trivial. For many teachers, and their perception seems legitimate to us, this episode of the Second World War is a particular moment in our contemporary history. The number of victims, the very nature of these: men, women, children, young people, old, sick or well, etc., the way they were murdered, the administrative and industrial machinery that made possible what seems to be beyond our comprehension, All this gives the course on the Holocaust a dimension whose
Overshadowed, even ignored during the 1970s and 1980s, teaching about the Holocaust has now taken up a place in the classroom, which is at least essential, making this course often a highlight of the year. This is precisely where the problem arises:
Should the teaching of the Shoah be made a deliberately emphasized teaching, charged with an emotion understood in relation to the other chapters discussed during the year, or should it...Does he integrate it into the logical and chronological continuity without making it a particular moment of the year in history class?
The tragic dimension of the Shoah and the questions that arise from it do not seem to allow us to approach this teaching like any other.
However, we believe that precautions must be taken to avoid certain pitfalls.
© Florence Brochoire
The teaching of the Shoah can and should appeal to emotion, to the affective, but these do not provide the material for a history course. Settling for the emotional is not history. For example, listening to the testimony of a survivor of the death camps cannot be used as a lesson on the Shoah for middle and high school students, but it is very useful and informative in addition.
Reading poignant testimonies of hidden children, tragic stories of Polish ghettos, survivors whose family has disappeared can only come in support work but does not seem to us to be the heart of a course on the extermination of the Jews.
However, these writings can be used by the professor as a pretext for putting them into perspective in the context of the overall project that was the Holocaust.
Indeed, it seems to us that the teaching of the Shoah should not be limited to a course on morality, in the moralizing sense of the term, which would come down to a guilt-inducing "never again".
In fact, the Holocaust is a historical event and must be addressed as such. It is then a matter of making the students understand that extermination is
The course must call on precise knowledge. Thus, the vocabulary must be fair and mastered. The professor must, for example, be careful with the use of executioners' words and systematically use them in quotation marks; the use of terms concerning the various camps (internment, concentration, death centers rather than extermination) must make it possible to emphasize the differences in treatment between the populations being transported there.
The professor must also emphasize the vocabulary used by the Nazis themselves, as well as that concerning the Jews which aims to dehumanize them, its scope and its trivialization, than that concerning the murder of millions of people, which aims to conceal the horror and scale of the crime of which the Nazis were aware.
© Florence Brochoire
The professor, it seems to us, must insist on the late decision of the "Final Solution" (late summer-autumn 1941) and link it not only to the progressiveness of the anti-Semitic discourse and violence but also to the war in the East against "Judeo-Bolshevism". Thus, the massacres perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front cannot be forgotten (1.5 million deaths by shootings).
The speed of execution should also be highlighted. Thus, the teacher can show students, using the example of France, that between March 27, 1942 (date of the first convoy from France to Auschwitz) and September 30, 1942 (convoy no. 39), half of the Jewish victims who left France had already been deported; three-quarters of them were arrested on 7 December 1943 (convoy no. 64). We can consider that between March 1942 (the beginning of Operation Reinhardt) and November 1943, three-quarters of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust died. In 1944, 434,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau over a period of seven weeks (from 16 May to 9 July 1944).
The professor may also insist on the coincidence of the actions carried out by the Nazis: thus, on 16-17 July 1942, the Winter Velodrome Roundup took place in Paris; on 22 July, the great deportations from Warsaw began, which lasted until September, (during which 300,000 people were sent to Treblinka and murdered). Between these two dates the decision was taken to build the four large crematoria at Birkenau by Himmler himself.
The teacher may also, drawing in particular on the work carried out by the historian Christopher Browning, reflect with the students on
In order to properly situate the Shoah in history, the teacher can, if the students directly or indirectly ask for it, carry out a quick comparative work. This should make it possible to better qualify the Shoah, to better identify its specificities but also its uniqueness, and not, of course, to sweeten or relativize it:
Address quickly, for example,
Whatever the courses and their content, it seems to us that teaching the Shoah requires a thorough knowledge of the subject and the questions it raises.
