Methodological considerations in teaching about the

Holocaust

Samantha guides fellow students through a classroom Holocaust Museum, Yom Hashoah, 2008.

On a door frame on the Prinsengracht, across from the Anne Frank House,Amsterdam, April 18, 2007.

Photo by Robert English

Define the term

“Holocaust.”

Translation from page 25: A German CelebrationThe children have no school today. They march to the meadow.

There they drill. Guenter, Peter, and Juergen run, others are throwing.Oh, how far! Everyone wants to win. The winner gets a certificate. After nine,

the fires up on the mountain will shine.

Cubs and ChicksChildren’s Book, Germany 1935.

Four Gypsy children pose for a photograph (probably in the town of Rivesaltes), circa 1939-1942.

Do not teach or implythat the Holocaust was

inevitable.

German women and youth attending a Reichsparteitag (Reich Party Day) rally at the Zeppelinfeld in Nuremberg raise their hands in the Hitler salute.

SS General Reinhard Heydrich, Germany, date unknown

Avoid simple answers to complex questions.

Published in 1903 in Russia, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” claimed there was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. This is a copy of the German version, released in 1920.

Allied delegates in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles witness the German delegation's acceptance of the terms of the Treaty Of Versailles, formally ending World War I.

Versailles, France, June 28, 1919.

Strive for precision oflanguage.

View of the kitchen barracks, the electrified fence, and the gate at the main camp of Auschwitz (Auschwitz I).

A map of the Westerbork transit camp.

One of the two milk cans in which portions of the Ringelblum Oneg Shabbat archives were hidden and buried in the Warsaw ghetto.

Strive for balance in establishing

whose perspective informs

your study of the Holocaust.

Austrian Nazis and local residents look on as Jews are forced to get on their hands and knees and scrub the pavement, March -April 1938.

Hans Scholl (left), Sophie Scholl (center), and Christoph Probst (right), leaders of the White Rose resistance organization. Munich, Germany, 1942.

Avoid comparisons of pain.

A man stops to help two destitute children on the street in the Warsaw ghetto, summer of 1941.

Jewish refugee children, part of a Children's Transport (Kindertransport) from Germany, upon arrival in Harwich. Great Britain, December 12, 1938.

Do not romanticize history.

Mauthausen survivors cheer the soldiers of the Eleventh Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army one day after their actual liberation.

The last known photograph of Anne Frank.

Contextualize the history you are

teaching.

Five Jewish children play together in the resort town of Krynica, Poland, 1938.

Child survivors of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, stand behind a barbed wire fence, 1945.

Translate statistics into people.

Three brothers build sandcastles at a beach near Bologna. 1924, Bologna, Italy.

Mrs. Henny Simon is named Colchester, Connecticut’s first “Scholar-in-Residence, September 9, 2008

Photo by Kristina Histen for the Rivereast News Bulletin

Make responsible methodological choices.

Railcar from USHMM exhibit.

Chart illustrating the transmission over three generations of the genetic traits for blue and (dominant) brown eye coloring, taken from a set of slides produced to illustrate a lecture

by Dr. Ludwig Arnold Schloesser, director of education for the SS Race and Settlement Office, on the foundations of the study of heredity.

A detail of the "You Are My Witnesses" wall in the Hall of Witness,U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.