Summer Institute: Holocaust and Genocide Education: Home

This guide was developed based on our many years of working with teachers and Holocaust survivors.

The Holocaust illustrates the depths to which humanity can sink, but it also illustrates the heights to which we can soar. This is an important time to focus on human stories of “light in the darkness” instead of on the darkness alone.

Teaching Holocaust history requires a high level of sensitivity and keen awareness of the complexity of the subject matter. The following guidelines reflect approaches appropriate for effective teaching in general and are particularly relevant to Holocaust education.

This material is intended to help teachers consider the complexities of teaching about the Holocaust and to deliver accurate and sensitive instruction.

Echoes and Reflections recommends the following "pedagogy-in-practice" principles for teachers to apply to their planning and implementation of a comprehensive Holocaust education program, allowing students to study this complex topic in a meaningful way and to ultimately apply what they have learned to their daily lives.

The ADL H.E.A.T. Map (hate, extremism, antisemitism, terrorism) is the first-of-its-kind interactive and customizable map detailing specific incidents of hate, extremism, antisemitism and terrorism by state and nationwide. This interactive map lets you read details on specific incidents, better understand tactics extremists use, compare activity by type and/or state and access and download raw data.

This mini-lesson will introduce you to the Pyramid of Hate, an ADL concept and activity that demonstrates how the seeds of bias, once planted, can grow quickly from biased ideas to discrimination and acts of violence.

Only a small portion of an iceberg can be seen above the waterline. Similarly, understanding someone's identity is limited by what we see on the surface. This mini lesson explores the concept of identity and the importance of going "below the waterline" to challenge and avoid stereotypes and identity-based bias.

This mini-lesson will introduce you to the Pyramid of Hate, an ADL concept and activity that demonstrates how escalating levels of attitudes and behavior grow in complexity from biased ideas to discrimination and acts of violence.

The foundation of any lesson, unit, or course should rest on a clear set of rationales (Totten and Feinberg, 2001). A strong rationale provides focus and promotes understanding of the Holocaust as a complex historical event. Additionally, a strong, well-thought-out rationale provides structure and context for difficult curricular decisions.

Through Dimensions in Testimony, students and educators can ask questions that prompt real-time responses from a pre-recorded video of Holocaust survivors- engaging in virtual conversation, redefining inquiry-based education.

Kurt Klein, who emigrated from Walldorf, Germany, to the United States in 1937, recalls how Nazi policies and propaganda affected his life at school.

Alfons Heck recalls how he became a high-ranking member of the Hitler Youth. He talks about the importance of peer pressure and propaganda to Hitler's ability to recruit eight million German children to participate in the "war effort."

Curated clips of Jewish Holocaust survivor, Kurt Messerschmidt.

Curated clip of Jewish Holocaust survivor Margaret Lambert.

On the eve of WWII, the interwar Jewish world was creative and complex, a rich mosaic, full of change and hope for the future. Within a decade, most of Europe would be conquered by Nazi Germany. By 1945 two out of every three of these Jews were silenced forever. The sights and sounds of this video are those of the Jews of Europe before the Holocaust. In their own words, through their diaries, letters and notebooks, and through their family films.

Alice grew up in a small village in Czechoslovakia. She was the middle of three daughters in a well-to-do, close-knit family. Her parents were religious and active in the Jewish community. After the German annexation of parts of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, antisemitism became more pronounced. Alice's uncle, a businessman who had moved to Great Britain, helped her parents arrange to send Alice and her two sisters on a Kindertransport (Children's Transport) to Britain.

Kindertransport (Children's Transport) was the informal name of a series of rescue efforts between 1938 and 1940. These rescue efforts brought thousands of refugee children, the vast majority of them Jewish, to Great Britain from Nazi Germany.

US President Franklin Roosevelt called for an international conference in 1938 to discuss the growing Jewish refugee crisis intensified by the German takeover of Austria.

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators. The Holocaust was an evolving process that took place throughout Europe between 1933 and 1945.

The Evian Conference Between 1933 and 1941, the Nazis aimed to make Germany judenrein (cleansed of Jews) by making life so difficult for them that they would be forced to leave the country. By 1938, about 150,000 German Jews, one in four, had already fled the country.

Holocaust survivor Sol Messinger describes his experiences attempting to emigrate from Germany to Cuba in 1939 aboard the ship the M.S. St. Louis.

Steps to immigrate to the United States.

The history of the Holocaust is complex and vast. While The Holocaust Explained is not able to cover every aspect of Holocaust history, it does seek to aid understanding and help learners to navigate through the sequence of events. This timeline aims to take readers through the main events preceding, during, and following the Holocaust.

Curated clips of Edith Collver, Anthony Marreco, and Jack Robbins. All participated in some way in the Nuremberg Trials.

Oppression, Antisemitic laws, the Evian Conference, Kristallnacht, Roma, disabled people, political prisoners, homosexuals, lesbians, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Black people.

The shadow selves of American history often don't leave much of a photographic record, but sometimes there are just a few shards of proof and reminders of what has happened.

Image.

Through their control of cultural institutions such as museums, under the Reich Chamber of Culture the Nazis created new opportunities to disseminate anti-Jewish propaganda.

How did the United States government and American people respond to Nazism? This video summarizes how to bring the Americans and the Holocaust exhibition into the classroom.

This lesson is designed to help students better understand American responses to the Holocaust within the socio-economic and political context of the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. It promotes historical thinking and media literacy skills through research and analysis of primary source documents (i.e., historical newspapers) on microfilm or in digitized collections.

At the outset of World War II, Denmark did not resist German occupation. Deeply ashamed of his nation's leaders, fifteen-year-old Knud Pedersen resolved with his brother and a handful of schoolmates to take action against the Nazis if the adults would not. Naming their secret club after the fiery British leader, the young patriots in the Churchill Club committed countless acts of sabotage, infuriating the Germans, who eventually had the boys tracked down and arrested. But their efforts were not in vain: the boys' exploits and eventual imprisonment helped spark a full-blown Danish resistance.

Rudolf Vrba, 81, one of a handful of prisoners to escape from Auschwitz during World War II and the co-author of the first eyewitness report detailing the extent of the atrocities there, died of cancer March 27 at a hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia.

In 1933, Brown-shirted Nazis swarmed into local church leadership elections and installed new “German Christian” leaders. While a minority of Protestant churches resisted, forming the anti-Nazi “Confessing Church”, most were effectively compromised. Active, organized resistance to the Nazi state would not erupt until June, 1942, when a group of Munich students began an 8-month leafleting and graffiti campaign that would end with their arrest and execution.

In June 1940, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul-General in Bordeaux, France, issued life-saving visas to thousands of Holocaust refugees in defiance of his government’s direct orders – an action for which he paid a heavy personal price. In June 2013, filmmaker Semyon Pinkhasov followed a group of visa recipient families, along with members of the Sousa Mendes family, as they embarked on a pilgrimage retracing their families’ footsteps of 73 years earlier. They were “searching for Sousa Mendes” – looking for traces and clues of a lost history in an effort to understand their personal pasts. Pinkhasov interweaves the testimonies of the “searchers” with compelling documentary footage and insights from experts to tell this little-known story.

With fascism rising across Europe, Jewish refugees were seeking to flee the continent and the Nazis. In June 1940, Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes defied official orders in order to do what he could to help them, issuing potentially life-saving visas. He was punished for his efforts. This is the story of the unsung hero.

Curated clips of those rescued on the Kindertransports.

Dr. Victoria Barnett speaks about German pastor and Nazi opponent Martin Niemoeller.

The Trunk of Tolerance project is a program that offers interested teachers the opportunity to borrow free materials on teaching the Holocaust from the Jewish Federation of Greater New Bedford.

“Survival is having children even if they hate you,” Art Spiegelman wrote in his notebook in 1985, while still working on his two-volume comics masterpiece, “Maus,” which would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize. Subtitled “A Survivor’s Tale,” “Maus” recreated the horrors of the Holocaust — as experienced by Art’s father, Vladek, and mother, Anja — casting Jews as mice and Germans as cats. But it also explored the difficult relationship between tetchy skinflint Vladek and his resentful son with touching and discomfiting honesty.