13. Teaching the Holocaust to children
When American (and British and Russian) troops first uncovered the extent of the death camps in Nazi Germany, the battle-hardened veterans were stunned and sickened by what they found. Men who had fought across Europe couldn’t fathom the evidence before their eyes. Later, films of the camps and the vile scenes stunned audiences around the world. Clearly, the extent of the Holocaust in Europe during World War II is not for young children. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) does not recommend teaching about the Nazi death camps prior to the sixth grade. Even at that level, the museum notes on its website that children may empathize with some individual accounts, such as Anne Frank’s, but “they often have difficulty placing them in a larger historical context”.
The USHMM warns teaching the Holocaust at any level “requires a high level of sensitivity and keen awareness of the complexity of the subject matter”. Though the event took place in Nazi-occupied Europe, its ramifications on American history are profound. German defendants at the Nuremberg Trials cited American eugenics programs of the 1920s and 1930s as a justification for some of their own. They also cited American laws restricting the citizenship rights of American blacks in the Jim Crow south, as well as the doctrine of “separate but equal” as similar to the antisemitic laws prevalent throughout the Nazi era. The complexity of the Holocaust and its impact on American history are best left to the junior and senior years of high school, presented with expert guidance and authoritative sources.