Holocaust: the facts

[Sweet FA]

We do too.

Hmm - have a look at the HET guidance...be interested to know your thoughts.

 

[purenarcotic]

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr is a good and gentle introduction to the concept and surrounding issues. It's the story of Judith's childhood as they went around Europe trying to escape the Nazis. I know it's used at primary level as I've seen it in lots of schools here. I would have been 9 or 10 when I read it.

 

[Sweet FA]

 

[Idris2002]

A colleague of mine had her seven year old daughters ask her why they never saw the German flag in Germany, when they'd often seen the Canadian flag back home in Canada.

Answering these questions meant talking to her kids about German history - and one part of German history in particular. So she looked it up on the net and it turned out that there's a lot of age-appropriate stuff for kids, in German at least.

 

[chilango]

Hmm - have a look at the HET guidance...be interested to know your thoughts.

I'll have a look. TBH it's not me who does it, but rather an HET trained English teacher. It's part of their English scheme of work rather a specific Holocaust unit. But will read the HET thing and come back to this...

 

[chilango]

View attachment 99506 View attachment 99507

Thanks.

We don't work with Primary age children, but I shall pass this on to the teacher concerned.

 

[danny la rouge]

bimble I think there's a lot of truth in this: "I don't think people find themselves confused about whether the holocaust happened or not because they are bad at the historical method, or are lacking in scientific rigour. They arrive at their position motivated by ideology, because they want to believe it didn't happen, to pursue some agenda. Denial is a means to an end not a mistake".

But.

Not everyone reading denial material is yet a denier. They might be credulous or unwary, for example empty-headed New Age crystal pendant wearers, with no tools to evaluate information. The way a lot of these deniers work is that they suck in those of a conspiracy mind-set and build stealthily from there.

When I was a teen, trying to understand the world, if you were exploring any subject you couldn't just turn on a computer. You had to buy a book from a bookshop or borrow one from the library. In both cases you needed to find those books. In the bookshop and library there was someone to advise you on a good book on the topic.

"What's a good book on ______ ?" And you'd get an answer. And once you'd read around the subject you could get a handle on whether the librarian or bookshop owner had good judgment.

Now, everything is all available right now at the flick of a switch. But it isn't sorted. The internet has no quality control. It's like the chapters of the best books in the world have been strewn across the floor along with the self published short print run ravings of a green pen pamphleteer, and nobody is going to help you decide which is which.

For that reason, I thought some pointers on critical thinking were worth including in the thread.

So that was my thinking. Because one of the things discussed (I think initially on the thread that this all came from) was yes, the faulty method of Holocaust deniers, but in many ways more importantly, the lack of understanding of the tools and how to use them among those who may be, or become, susceptible to their message.

 

[Sweet FA]

From HET & appropriate for the thread I think:

 

[bimble]

Yep, had a meeting with the head today & discussed your (and my/our obvs) concerns.

From HET:

great care is necessary when selecting suitable content for primary school students. The Trust very strongly believes that it is not appropriate for them to directly study the murder of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. In particular, the horrifying history of the Nazi extermination camps and other mass killing operations should be avoided."
...
"As highlighted above, teachers should ensure that activities and materials employed in the classroom are age-appropriate, in particular avoiding the use of graphic imagery and/or texts. It is sometimes argued that it is necessary to intentionally shock or upset students for them to appreciate the reality of the Holocaust. Such an approach is disrespectful not only to the memory of innocent men, women and children but also to the intelligence and emotional wellbeing of students, and potentially raises serious questions about child protection."

wow. that is very strongly worded advice. This is personal stuff but I can say from experience that this is probably based on real research they did amongst people who may have been exposed to such things too young. I now understand that my gran was not well, understandably, but her need to tell me in detail what she experienced has had a lasting effect, and if I'd been even a few years older I would have been much better able to cope with it. I think I was about 5 or 6 when she started telling me her memories.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

wow. that is very strongly worded advice. This is personal stuff but I can say from experience that this is probably based on real research they did amongst people who may have been exposed to such things too young. I now understand that my gran was not well, understandably, but her need to tell me in detail what she experienced has had a lasting effect, and if I'd been even a few years older I would have been much better able to cope with it. I think I was about 5 or 6 when she started telling me her memories.

My understanding of child development is that children are only really emotionally equipped to deal with thinking about this kind of stuff at age 10-11 at the youngest. At age 5 or 6, you still don't really have a full grasp of the difference between a made-up story and a real story. Clearly, your gran's case is quite separate from this, but in terms of educators, I don't actually see the point in teaching kids this age about the Holocaust. The important stuff you want them to understand won't be understood yet.

 

[Manter]

Anyone on twitter go and look at the St. Louis manifest @stl_manifest

A refugee ship was turned away from America in 1939. On a holicaust Memorial Day when Trump has proposed doing the same to thousands of Muslim refugees, this account has been tweeting the names and fates of the passengers. It has been going for 13 hours already- it is devastating

 

[likesfish]

Never understood holocaust denial the SS vetrans I met werent sorry in the slightest about wiping out the jews Just thought the camps were a mistake.
Anyone not prepared to kill Jews there and then wasn't a proper nazi having them shipped off to be killed humanely was just shirking your duty to the reich.
The British Empire didnt bother with camps and excuses they just let the unwanted starve to death on the streets and then blamed them for being feckless.
When the SS defend the British empire you know things have got bad

 

[brogdale]

Good stuff danny la rouge , for those interested in the UK state's relationship to the Holocaust, I'd recommend Louise London's "Whitehall & the Jews", which happens to be referenced in Rowan Moore's so-so Guardian piece about the choice of UK Holocaust memorial.

FWIW my choice of a memorial would be a statue of this scene that was played out at (the then) Croydon airport as Jews were detained upon landing, questioned and then deported back to their fate. Right outside the surviving airport buildings would be a fitting location IMO.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Already mentioned, but worth mentioning twice: The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedlander.

A harrowing, depressing, yet essential read on the topic.

 

[CrabbedOne]

I read Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning recently.

Snyder has much of how we see the holocaust as a bogus construction. Not mainly as a more easily deniable industrialised project of which many might not be aware. A somewhat disorganised racist pogrom foreshadowed by rather more efficient Soviet programs of elimination. It was carried out mainly by a manpower intensive method of shooting Jews over mass graves. Not so much the work of SS fanatics but ordinary German policemen, soldiers and complicit locals from the Nazi occupied Soviet empire. They included rather a lot of Communists and even NKVD officers. All fully aware of the Nazi Judeo-Bolshevik myth being nonsense but all too willing to accept a pardon for past sins that killing a Jew brought and of course the lavish perks of looted property. Finally a grimmer story of population engulfing complicity that neither suited post-war Germans nor the Soviet authorities as well as the elevation of the more clinical horror of Auschwitz did.

It's rather interesting on the role of Poland and the very real chance of a Nazi-Polish pact that Hitler hoped for at points. Polish support for Zionism often based on rather anti-semitic views and the origins of Israel. A place Poland's mundane Jewish problem could be exported to. Not something the British wanted as they worried far more about upsetting the Muslim natives of their vast empire.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I read Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning recently.

Snyder has much of how we see the holocaust as a bogus construction. Not mainly as a more easily deniable industrialised project of which many might not be aware. A somewhat disorganised racist pogrom foreshadowed by rather more efficient Soviet programs of elimination. It was carried out mainly by a manpower intensive method of shooting Jews over mass graves. Not so much the work of SS fanatics but ordinary German policemen, soldiers and complicit locals from the Nazi occupied Soviet empire. They included rather a lot of Communists and even NKVD officers. All fully aware of the Nazi Judeo-Bolshevik myth being nonsense but all too willing to accept a pardon for past sins that killing a Jew brought and of course the lavish perks of looted property. Finally a grimmer story of population engulfing complicity that neither suited post-war Germans nor the Soviet authorities as well as the elevation of the more clinical horror of Auschwitz did.

It's rather interesting on the role of Poland and the very real chance of a Nazi-Polish pact that Hitler hoped for at points. Polish support for Zionism often based on rather anti-semitic views and the origins of Israel. A place Poland's mundane Jewish problem could be exported to. Not something the British wanted as they worried far more about upsetting the Muslim natives of their vast empire.

Not a fan of Snyder. He let's his own values and preferences inflect what he writes, as evinced by "Bloodlands", "The Red Prince", etc. I read his stuff, but it can provoke enough eye-rolling to make your face ache!

 

[seventh bullet]

Thousands of Soviet partisans simply disappear.

 

[danny la rouge]

Nazis: a Warning from History is being reshown on the BBC. Episode one is on iPlayer at time of posting, and episode two is being broadcast on BBC 4 at 11pm tonight.

Nazis: A Warning from History - BBC Two

 

[porp]

Such a good thread.

I would add Victor Klemperer's diaries - I found these very moving when read a few years back.

 

[Idris2002]

Thousands of Soviet partisans simply disappear.

Holidaying on the Crimean riviera, no doubt.

 

[DotCommunist]

Such a good thread.

I would add Victor Klemperer's diaries - I found these very moving when read a few years back.

been meaning to get around to him after reading a lot of his entries in a War Diary anthology. His stuff was what told me they made them pay for the yellow stars. Un fucking believable.

 

[Raheem]

I'd put in a word for Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. Not really for children, because it would bore the pants off them. But I think it gives you a perspective on the Holocaust that you probably can't get any other way. The full-on horrible barbarity and mundanity of it and the shadow it left on Europe afterwards. It's an extremely depressing experience, but if you're hoping for anything else, you can't really be interested in the topic. The film has a slightly problematic Zionist thread running through it (it was secretly part-funded by Israel), and Lanzmann himself is quite an irritating presence (it's an early example of the "watch me as I go on my journey" school of documentary making). But it's incredibly powerful. No archive footage, so you don't get the comfort of putting the story into a box marked "grainy black-and-white history", and it's a film that can never be bettered from the point-of-view that probably no-one in it is still alive to be interviewed. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that it's nine hours long. But you can watch it an hour at a time.

Look for it on eBay.

 

[danny la rouge]

Shoah's had a couple of mentions already, on page one and two. But thanks for the review, Raheem.

Holocaust: the facts

Holocaust: the facts

 

[bimble]

I'll just put this here.
Watched 'The Eichman Show' a couple of days ago: A dramatisation of the filming of the court case in Jerusalem. It uses lots of footage of the actual trial, including witness testimony and Eichman's face as he listened to it. Worth a watch.

 

[Gramsci]

Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" covers the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder – review

He argues that a lot of the killing of Jews was not in camps but by shooting Jews near where they live. So the idea of industrialised murder that early histories emphasis is not correct.

The book covers a long time scale. Not just WW2. Also it's about Hitler and Stalin. The famine in Ukraine caused by forced collectivisation is included.

It also covers the deaths of all civilians in that period. It's not denying the Holocaust but putting it in context of the deaths on millions of other civilians in the period it covers.

 

[Idris2002]

Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" covers the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder – review

He argues that a lot of the killing of Jews was not in camps but by shooting Jews near where they live. So the idea of industrialised murder that early histories emphasis is not correct.

The book covers a long time scale. Not just WW2. Also it's about Hitler and Stalin. The famine in Ukraine caused by forced collectivisation is included.

It also covers the deaths of all civilians in that period. It's not denying the Holocaust but putting it in context of the deaths on millions of other civilians in the period it covers.

I met someone who'd studied under Snyder in Milan last summer. He spoke very highly of Snyder, but I have to say I am very, very sceptical of anything which appears to reduce the Holocaust to the level of 'just another bad thing that happened'.

The role of mass shootings in the crime may have been underestimated previously, but the emphasis on the industrialization of murder (intended to carry out the genocide of a people in their entirety, don't forget) is surely still correct.

As for his later book, mentioned earlier up the thread, I am again sceptical, because even if environmental factors play a role in the choice for the murder of an entire people, those factors are always mediated through social and political, and ideological, factors, and it is those latter factors which play the decisive role in the rise of 'genocide as an answer to a question nobody asked'.

 

[danny la rouge]

Hate at the Hilton: outcry as Holocaust denier David Irving gives secret Glasgow talk

"ONE of the world’s most notorious Holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathisers has been condemned for giving a secret talk in Glasgow on Friday about his vile career.

David Irving made a series of “disgusting” remarks about Jews at the event in the city’s DoubleTree by Hilton hotel. He also said that he liked living in the north of Scotland because it reminded him of the England he was born into, when “England was white”."

- Paul Hutcheon, Investigations Editor, the Herald / @paulhutcheon

 

[Sweet FA]

Has anyone read The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees?

 

[Gramsci]

I met someone who'd studied under Snyder in Milan last summer. He spoke very highly of Snyder, but I have to say I am very, very sceptical of anything which appears to reduce the Holocaust to the level of 'just another bad thing that happened'.

The role of mass shootings in the crime may have been underestimated previously, but the emphasis on the industrialization of murder (intended to carry out the genocide of a people in their entirety, don't forget) is surely still correct.

As for his later book, mentioned earlier up the thread, I am again sceptical, because even if environmental factors play a role in the choice for the murder of an entire people, those factors are always mediated through social and political, and ideological, factors, and it is those latter factors which play the decisive role in the rise of 'genocide as an answer to a question nobody asked'.

I haven't read Black Earth. Bloodlands also builds on earlier book of his The Reconstruction of Nations. The dark side of Nationalism in Eastern Europe.

The early histories of the Holocaust had several themes:

The industrialization of killing.
The banality of evil.
Resistance and collaboration.

The early histories saw the industrialization of killing as also a critique of progress. How technological progress led to loss of basic humanity. Leading to the banality of evil. Bureaucrats like Eichmann. Distanced from the killing process. (Hannah Arendt).

Later histories such as Snyder are not IMO trying to lower the importance of the Jewish Holocaust but take issue with the themes of earlier histories.

I think in Bloodlands he is also taking a critical look at history made in the Cold War which equated Stalinism and Nazism. Arendt later work verged on this.

In some ways it's more horrifying. As it was face to face killing. Nothing to do with industrialization.

On a separate note. Hannah Arendts banality of evil ( Eichmann) has been more recently been criticized. She based it on his trial. A recent biography suggests he was a committed Nazi. Was fully aware and supported the final solution. Not a bureaucrat who followed orders in the way seen in the famous Standford prison experiment.

 

[Gramsci]

Article on the recent biography of Eichmann.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/books/book-portrays-eichmann-as-evil-but-not-banal.html?_r=0

The historian Browning says Arendt was correct on a lot of people who went along with the murder of Jews. But she was wrong on Eichmann.