Don't make me laugh. Holocaust education (at least here in Europe) is about warning against the dangers of (racial) prejudice. Not about blaming the Germans. I think only the limited prejudiced mind of a racist/holocaust denier interprets the Holocaust as an accusation against the Germans.
I once made notes on the content of what is taught about the Holocaust as part of the standard curriculum in the US. I used them as the basis for a post or PM or something, which I can find. Here’s the gist:
To analyze the content of the curriculum I surveyed a few standard textbooks used in grades six through twelve. This is because textbooks largely make up or support the content of instruction in most school districts. Teachers, of course, stray from curriculum prescription, but, with the increasing role of high stakes assessments and of standards-based instruction in the US, straying from standard curriculum is less and less common. There is an imperfect but close correspondence between the contents of textbooks and what is actually taught in classrooms.
I looked primarily at content topics and quantity, not at perspective, framing, or other qualitative factors. I did this to estimate average exposure to instruction about the Holocaust.
For this exercise, I assumed that all students take a world history course in middle school and a social studies course each year; in fact, however, geography and state studies are very strong offerings in middle school, to some extent crowding out exposure to the Holocaust; therefore, my method necessarily overestimates student exposure to the Holocaust in the school courses.
A review of a typical grades 6-12 sequence of social studies textbooks shows a total of around 6,700 pages, of which teachers will certainly not cover the full sweep, maybe only two-thirds.
So assuming 4,500 pages taught, and assuming that every page on the Holocaust is taught, that is, none of the dropped material is on the Holocaust, it is possible to estimate a percentage of social studies instruction devoted to the Holocaust and an absolute time estimate for this instruction as well, assuming instruction and textbook mirror each other.
I counted an average of 20 pages on the Holocaust in the seven book sequence making up grades 6-12—or less than one-half of one percent of the total pages.
This figure is for the Holocaust broadly conceived, that is, under “Holocaust” I counted background on Nazi racial policies leading up to and including the exterminations and including the liberation of the camps and post-war trials.
Most of the books surveyed formally define Holocaust as the mass murder of Jews by the National Socialists, but they confuse the issue by implying that other crimes—Kristallnacht; Nuremberg Laws; murder of gays, Gypsies, the disabled, and Slavs—are part of the formal Holocaust, including this material under sections headed “The Holocaust.”
At any rate, this 0.5% of a student's time spent on social sciences and history devoted to the Holocaust, as we will see, also includes material on the 1930s, material on non-Jews, and so on.
With 186 days in a school year, the typical student will attend school something like 1,300 days, give or take, for grades 6-12. Let’s generously say a student makes it to school in his or her middle and high school career a total of 1,300 days, with zero absences, and does not drop out, as about 30% of American high schoolers do. One half of one percent of 1,300 days is 6.5 days, with each day having a 30- to 45-minute period of instruction for social studies. That is, a student will have about one period, or about 45 minutes, per year for coverage of the Holocaust, broadly conceived.
Maximum. And actually blended in with other coverage of WWII. A third of these days will be in 10th grade when students will read, if they bother, the equivalent of maybe two pages of this discussion forum on the Holocaust.
This coverage is lumpy, as noted above, with a tenth grade world history book containing almost a third of the pages counted for the seven grades 6 through 12. About 10% of American students drop out of school in the ninth grade and never reach the grade level where most of the Holocaust content is covered.
Looking in more depth at the tenth grade, we find that a typical textbook contains 1,220 page with just 6 pages on “the Holocaust,” enough material supposedly to sustain a 30- to 45-minute period of instruction—or maybe two such periods in this grade level. In one such tenth-grade book, chosen at random, the topics jammed into six pages include the following, in 36 paragraphs:
-* Profile of Wladyslaw Szpilman, Jewish pianist, survivor Warsaw ghetto (ghetto described only as a confined section of Warsaw into which Jews were forced) (4 paragraphs)
-* Nazi anti-Semitism (Versailles, Nuremberg Laws – defined in a short phrase as creating separate status for Jews, barriers to Jewish emigration during Depression years, Jews remaining in Germany by 1941) (4 paragraphs)
-* Jews of Europe coming under NS control in early war years (1 paragraph)
-* Ghetto, example of Warsaw, starvation (1 paragraph)
-* Concentration camps (not death camps), described as slave labor camps, sites for medical experiments and starvation (1 paragraph)
-* Mobile killing units in Poland and USSR, including Babi Yar (“nearly 35,000 Jews were murdered”) (2 paragraphs)
-* Death camps, explained as a way to stop leaving evidence of murder behind, Auschwitz cited, implication that Auschwitz had only killing camp (1 paragraph)
-* Victims, listing Jews (6 million dead), Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, the disabled, and the Romany (5 million “other” dead), Jews were “suffered the most under the Nazis” (2 paragraphs)
-* World reaction, little response from Allies, WRB, decision not to bomb railroads, “apathy and anti-Semitism” among Allies, discovery of camps (Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, implying the latter was a death camp) (8 paragraphs)
-* Document study - Leon Bass (Buchenwald liberator), Maximilian Grabner (Auschwitz Gestapo chief, confession), Herman Graebe (German eyewitness in Ukraine), Howard Elting (US official in Switzerland, Reigner’s report) (4 paragraphs)
-* Nuremberg trials, focusing on war crimes and mentioning Holocaust (1 paragraph)
-* Also, ¼ page photo of Buchenwald prisoners, head shot of Mengele, ¼ page photo of Wladyslaw Szpilman
-* Small graph on Jewish population in Europe, before and after the Holocaust
-* Sidebar on Ann Frank (3 paragraphs)
-* Forensics in history sidebar on discovery of Mengele’s body (focused on DNA match, short note on Mengele’s notoriety not mentioning Auschwitz and simply citing medical experiments, without details) (4 paragraphs)
Stepping back again to look at the span of grades 6-12, students will, in the books I surveyed, encounter Anne Frank and Babi Yar each on two occasions ; read three times about Auschwitz--on each occasion in a sentence or two or three; learn that Slavs, Gypsies, and the disabled were among the victims of the Nazis; and read the name Treblinka in passing as a death camp. They will learn that 6 million Jews were murdered by shootings, gassings, starvation, and labor.
Students will not, however, “learn,” as denier tracts would suggest they would, that 6 million Jews were gassed, that 4 million people died at Auschwitz, that victims’ bodies were used to manufacture soap and make lampshades, or that toddlers watched Hitler kill inmates in the KZs.
But neither will students learn about the Kommissarbefehl, murders of Red Army POWs or other war crimes (reprisals, etc.), the workings of the gas chambers, the contents of the EG operational situation reports, the differences between AR camps and Auschwitz (they won’t, in fact, learn about AR camps), the various uses of the camps making up the Auschwitz complex, Dora, the T4 or 14f13 programs, the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, the nature of Mengele’s medical experiments, or the debate between intentionalists and functionalists, although the coverage in each book has a distinct intentionalist implication. Readers will likely conclude that Bergen-Belsen and Dachau were death camps, that the Wansee conference ordered construction of gas chambers, that the events were neatly plotted out, that prussic acid gas poured from special wall vents in gas chambers at the death camps, and that the Third Reich attempted to exterminate all homosexuals.
The names Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, and Goering will not be encountered. Let alone Frank, Globocnik, Seyss-Inquart, Dannecker, Hoess, Lohse, Bach-Zelewksi. And so on.And so on.
Students will read more about Allied responses and the liberation of the camps than they will about the twisted road to mass murder, the structure of the mass murder program, and the actions and programs themselves.
Without analyzing the text in these books more deeply, one might conclude that an underlying problem with the treatment of the Holocaust in schools stems not from the overwhelming attention given it but rather from the very opposite: the brevity of coverage and thus absence of depth given to these events, which cause the authors and editors to truncate coverage, to make sweeping leaps and misleading statements, and to mention events without really describing or accounting for them. The content is frightfully thin. To give an example, one textbook has five sentences on the mobile killing operations in Poland and the USSR, all of them at a superficial summary level, while another belabors these actions for a full two sentences. Compare this to a typical discussion forum thread at Rodoh on, say, SK1005 or gassing facilities, or the “decision” for extermination of Europe’s Jews, and, well, you get the picture.
The books have errors and rely on a Manichaean approach, overwritten to boot—a bad combination, for sure, when few instructors in the US are well versed in the topic. The material is so skimpy that it doesn’t provide much of a basis for understanding, let alone critical thinking about, the content, an assessment of how events developed, or understanding of systems and structures and what they meant for people.
What I concluded from this is that Holocaust education in the US is almost non-existent, a condition which causes inaccuracies, and generally deficient coverage, --coverage that consistently does not make use of current scholarship--and, except for those who seek it out and obtain it through non-standard channels, most US students will not have anything resembling education in the Holocaust.
So when Clayton Moore spins a common denier meme like this
The purveyors of the Holocaust realized the Holocaust could become a cloak of invulnerability to criticism. Hence the required SCREAMING WHEEL heard in every school in the USA
it really makes me chuckle for his sheer audacious ignorance of the true state of affairs. We in the US do not as a matter of course educate public school kids about the Holocaust, whether for them to learn the history or to connect that history to issues involving racial bigotry.
