A Broader Holocaust Curriculum

It is my prediction that unless current curricula take a broader, more universal turn, gentiles will rebel from introducing the topic, viewing its introduction as special pleading of one religious/ethnic group.  While Yad Va Shem's historian, Yehuda Bauer, may insist that the Holocaust is uniquely Jewish, and must focus solely on Jews, arguing that no other religious/ethnic group was served such a death warrant, as a matter of practical strategy, the Holocaust must be integrated into a larger context of racism, the Nazi era and its crimes against other peoples, and the denial of human rights.  Holocaust education should become part of humane, anti-genocide, human rights education, not an isolated unit, set apart from the social studies, history or literature curriculum.  If not, Holocaust studies introduced in middle and high schools will be seen as intrusive by the teachers, and as a side show by the students.  Also minority students will protest that others have suffered too, perhaps even more so.  For these reasons, this writer has developed a curriculum which includes student materials and a teachers' guide which tries to incorporate a broader perspective.  What follows is not a linear description of the lessons, but a selective one based on the curriculum "The Holocaust, Nazi Era and American Political Principles."  With the current discussion on values, I believe it is very important to emphasize basic principles of American law developing out of the US Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court.  These principles have been incorporated in human rights declarations.  Therefore, the lessons on the Nazi era and Holocaust not only show what was wrong with Nazi actions, but how American democracy views such actions.

The first lesson contrasts the Hitler Youth with the American Boy Scouts.  The material is taken from the 1937 Hitler Youth Manual and the 1937 US Boy Scout Manual.  The students discover that large groups of Germans were excluded from the Nazi organization - Jews, part Jews, Gypsies, and the physically deformed or handicapped.  Hitler Youth was not a vehicle for personal growth, but indoctrination for the state, promoting blind obedience, militarism, racism, hatred of non-Germans, and the cult of Hitler worship.  The Boy Scouts reflected American values of fellowship, good character, help for the less fortunate, inter-ethnic and international friendship.

Student material follows with lessons on Nazi book burning and their education for hate.  It illustrates the desire of a totalitarian regime to dominate the minds of its citizens.  The book burning is political correctness to the extreme.  Snippets from Nazi textbooks illustrate the contempt for so called "non-Aryans."  Two Supreme Court decisions illustrate American legal principles.  Near vs. Minnesota forbids no prior restraint (censorship) of the press while Pierce vs. Society of Sisters permits parochial and private education, underscoring that the child is not a "creature of the state."

The lesson "The Perversion of Medicine" introduces the student to Nazi eugenic laws or "racial hygiene," as they dubbed it.  It tries to correct what this writer believes is a defect in the teaching about the Nazi period - the need to emphasize the biological/racial underpinning of Hitler's Reich.  This aspect is sacrificed in favor of the political repression features discussed at length in most courses.  Also, many curriculum guides on the Holocaust go deeply into Christian antisemitism marking it as the engine that drove anti-Jewish persecution.  But it was really European racist assumptions, the Aryan myth and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that was the warrant for genocide.  Selections bring out the sterilization of the "Rhineland Bastards," those mulattos the issue of French colonial troops and German women whom Hitler abhorred.  Included is the T4 or Nazi forced euthanasia program which was the precursor of murder of "useless eaters" and Jews in the concentration camps.

The lesson on "The 1936 Olympics" illustrates that international sports events are not politically neutral.  Nations ignore human rights abuses to participate.  The material points to the dilemma faced by Olympic officials and athletes regarding participation.  A composite news report relates Jesse Owens' victories and Hitler's chagrin at the Black athlete's victory.  This lesson coupled with the Rhineland Mulattos, material tries to relate the Nazi era to Afro-American interests.

The readings that follow are part of most Holocaust curricula - Nuremberg race laws, Kristallnacht, ghettoization and concentration camp internment.  However, the Supreme Court cases attached show what American political liberties were violated.  In contradistinction to the Nuremberg race laws was the reasoning in the Wong Kim Ark case where the US court affirmed the Fourteenth Amendment and restored full rights of citizenship to a Chinese baby because he was born on American soil - a principle perhaps not fully appreciated by some in southern California.  Material on Kristallnacht brings to light aryanization of Jewish business, a fact not often brought out.  In contrast, the decision in the Yick Wo Case illustrates that in American jurisprudence, not only the law must be fair to all, but the application of the law must be administered fairly without prejudice.

The lesson on "Spiritual Resistance" follows "Jewish Resistance" and deals with Jehovah's Witnesses and the White Rose.  The documents direct the students to Nazi repressive tactics against other religions and shows the student-reader that not all Germans were Nazis - that there were dissenters to the murderous dictatorship coming out of religious idealism.  These dissenters were willing to suffer death.  In contrast to Nazi oppression, in the middle of the most furious battles of the war the United States Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia vs. Barnett (1944) that children of Jehovah's Witnesses need not salute the American flag:

With the establishment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945-1946) the students recognize the Allied motives of placing Nazi crimes on record.  Genocide was recognized for the first time as a "crime against humanity."  The court reaffirmed and expanded the fundamental rules of international conduct and brought to justice the leading Nazis for their violations of international law.  Students must evaluate 29 types of culpabilities in an exercise called "Assessing and Defining Responsibility."

Instruction on the "United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights" serves as a summary lesson which wraps up all the others.  The students are made aware of the meaning and scope of human rights.  They are to return to previous lessons and discover which human rights were violated by the Nazis.  It is suggested that the class review the American Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution for similarity and borrowings in the UN Declaration.  The teacher is strongly encouraged to have the students develop an ongoing scrapbook of news articles illustrating denial of human rights in the world.

This curriculum has adaptability and integratability to the traditional high school program.  Teachers of world, European and American history and political science can use the material without the lessons seeming alien or tangential.  A most central problem in this strife-ridden world today is religio-ethnic hate.  This instruction with its emphasis on human rights and the horrors of racism is a small step in combatting this perennial defect in human nature.  In a way, it is a payment of debt to the victims of the Third Reich.

Dr. Philip Rosen, Director
Holocaust Awareness Museum of Delaware Valley
Gratz College

Chechnya and Genocide Groznyi and the 50th Anniversary of Auschwitz

A cloud of massive destruction hangs over Groznyi, the capital of Chechnya, the home of a small ethnic Muslim people seeking to disengage from what they consider is oppressive Russian rule.  The ferocity of their resistance against the might of the Russian Federation brings to mind the heroic Jewish resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, against the Wehrmacht in spring 1943.  The 1994-5 Winter War presently being fought in the northern Caucasus is - if seen in context - a war of ethno-survival in the face ethno-destruction.

Motivating the entire Chechen people is the memory of Stalin's 1944 order to deport the Chechen nation en masse in cattle cars to Central Asia.  As a result of this policy, over one third died: some failed to survive the inhuman rigors of the brutal deportation; as many died from exposure once dumped in the alien regions of the distant steppes.  The others, the survivors, lived determined to survive and to return.  Permitted to go back to their ancestral homes a decade later on orders of Nikita Khrushchev, who was trying to undo some of the worst crimes of Stalin (who had died in March 1953), the Chechens rebuilt their nation, nourished and haunted by the memories of their exile that had almost led to their extinction.  Slowly and painfully they nourished the revival of their language, religion, and ethnic customs in the shadow of their recent trauma.  For the next forty years, the Chechens endured a more benign Russian-Soviet colonialism, but one by no means free from violence: their lives suffered numerous indignities, including systematic Soviet Russian prejudice that imposed collective stereotypes upon them, branding them as "bandits," "criminal gangs," and "terrorists."  What the Russian failed to understand was that in Chechen eyes, these actions were seen as forms of political resistance, even revenge, the only outlet for some protest against their mighty imperial rulers.  To Chechens  these "crimes" were a continuation of the much revered decade-old resistance  in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against the Empire.

Finally in 1991, as the Baltic republics announced their independence, followed by trans-Caucasian and Central Asian ones, and culminating in the peaceful dissolution of the USSR in December of that year, the Chechens also announced their independence from the Russian Republic, except that no one took them seriously, everyone assuming the Russian Federation was a legitimate political territorium.  It was not; and the Chechens said as much.  In order to complete their national revival since 1954, they now called for statehood, for complete sovereignty. 

For three years, Moscow refused to recognize the Chechen claim until President Boris Yeltsin launched his December 1994 assault, a military expedition supposed to last forty-eight hours; it is now (at writing) in its tenth week.  It is a war he cannot win, anymore than the one the Germans "won" against the ghetto in Warsaw.  Each Chechen death will be a martyr; each Russian prisoner taken a victory.  Every day will be a proof of the legitimacy of the Chechen cause and the bankruptcy of the Russian statist policy.  No less than the struggle of the Jewish fighters was an existential one, so is and will be the fight of the Chechens soldiers, except they are also defending their country, recalling images of Masada, if it comes to that in the end.

As Russia escalates the war, its annihilist potential becomes that much the realer.  As Moscow's determination increases in the face of Chechen intransigence and refusal to capitulate, the danger of an escalating ethno-destructive war comes to the fore.  Block by block, a major city is being razed; district by city district its remaining inhabitants are being killed; village by village refusing to cooperate with the Russian military, the Chechens landscape is being razed.  Thousands of civilians, especially children - the next generation - are dying from bombs, rockets, shells, bullets, fires, lack of medical help, shelter and food, while the world watches, disinterested or passive bystanders. 

The Jewish agency has managed to evacuate some Chechen Jews via North Ossetia, which the refugees reached on foot via Ingushetia.  But the rest of the world, including Jewish organizations, remain largely mute in response to the daily images of destruction of an entire people, seemingly more concerned about the petty politics of how or how not to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the "liberation" (See Forum 1/3) of Auschwitz.  There is a terrible irony here! Will teachers of the Holocaust recognize it?  Is this the morality the Jewish ghetto fighters fought for in Warsaw?

Henry Huttenbach