Does How We Teach WW2 and the Holocaust in Schools Need to Change? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last Wednesday, I wrapped up my 10th grade history lesson on concentration camp liberation and was stacking handouts when Javi hung back by my desk, scuffing the toe of his cleats on the tile. He’s usually the kid who’s out the door before the bell stops ringing, so I paused. He twisted the hem of his faded Manchester United hoodie and said, “All this time we’ve talked about how evil all the Nazis were, and all Germans were on their side right? My grandpa was 12 in 1945, growing up outside Hamburg. His dad was a carpenter who never joined the party. He got drafted anyway, got sent to the Russian front. Do we just not talk about that?”
I’ve been teaching high school history in a public suburban district for 12 years. For the first 8 of those, I taught the unit exactly the way the textbook laid it out: timeline of WW2, key battles, then a 3-day block on the Holocaust at the end, statistics on how many people died, photos of liberation, end with a 40-year-old survivor testimony video, unit test. I never questioned it. It felt like I was covering the topic, checking the box.
Two moments changed that. First, three years ago, Lila, a junior in my AP section, stayed after after a lesson. She pulled out a crumpled photo of a young woman from her phone, said that was her great-aunt, who was 19 when she died in Auschwitz. “It just feels like she’s a number here,” she said. “Six million, right? That’s all we get. No one talks about what their lives were like before.” Then a year later, my own 8th grader came home from his social studies class, and when I asked what he’d learned about the Holocaust that day, he shrugged and said “Hitler was bad, Allies won. Can I have a snack?” He couldn’t name any group other than Jews that were targeted, couldn’t tell me how it happened step by step. It was just a distant story about bad people that happened 80 years ago, nothing to do with him.
I started making small changes the next school year. Instead of saving the Holocaust for the end of the WW2 unit, I wove it in starting with the first week. We open with short diary entries from ordinary people in 1933 Germany: a Jewish college student talking about losing her job, a Nazi schoolboy writing about his new uniform, a middle-aged shopkeeper writing about how he stopped speaking to his Jewish neighbor because he was scared of being labeled a sympathizer. I give kids 10 minutes to read them, then ask them to share one thing that surprised them. Almost every time, the first comment is “I didn’t know it happened so slow.” They expected it to start with concentration camps, not with a law that said Jewish people couldn’t work in government, or a boycott of Jewish shops that most people just ignored.
Back to Javi’s question. I told him I didn’t have a quick answer, that his question was actually the reason I’d changed how I teach this. The next day, I opened class with it, asked if anyone else had questions that hadn’t been answered. Half a dozen hands went up. No one had ever talked about how the US turned away Jewish refugees before the war. No one had talked about people who resisted in small ways, not just the big famous resistance groups. No one had talked about how antisemitism didn’t end in 1945.
I’ve heard the pushback, of course. Some parents and other teachers say adding this nuance softens the horror of the Holocaust, that we’re making excuses for people who went along with it. That’s a fair concern. I don’t let anyone pretend the Holocaust was anything other than a deliberate, systematic mass murder planned and carried out by people who chose to hate. But what I’ve found is that the old way of teaching gives kids the wrong takeaway: that this was something done by an entire nation of uniquely evil people, that it couldn’t happen anywhere else, that it’s over and done with. That’s not helpful when kids are seeing hate speech online, when they see groups targeted at their own schools or in the news.
What does this look like in practice for parents and teachers? It doesn’t require throwing out the entire curriculum or turning every lesson into a heated politics debate. For teachers, one small change I made is stopping one lesson early to look at two or three short examples of modern antisemitic posts online (nothing graphic, just the language) and ask kids what they see that’s similar to the language Nazis used in the 1930s. It takes 40 minutes, and it sticks with them way more than a list of dates.
For parents, if your kid comes home with a surface-level lesson, you don’t have to give a two-hour lecture. Just ask them, “What was the most surprising thing you learned this week?” That opens the conversation more than “Did you learn about the Holocaust?” If they have a question you can’t answer, don’t make something up. Say “That’s a good question, let’s look it up together on the USC Shoah Foundation website, they have lots of short survivor stories.” If your kid mentions a family connection like Javi’s, encourage them to bring it in to class if they’re comfortable, or just talk about it over dinner. There’s no rule that says all Germans have to be painted with the same brush, as long as you never minimize the atrocities that happened.
I still don’t get it right every time. Last month I rushed a lesson on the Nuremberg laws and forgot to connect them to modern rhetoric targeting marginalized groups, so I had to backtrack the next day. Some kids leave the unit still thinking it’s all just ancient history. But I’ve noticed more kids staying after class, more kids asking questions instead of just memorizing facts for the test.
Last week, Javi emailed me a scan of a letter his great-grandpa wrote to his brother after the war, where he talked about seeing prisoners on a march near where he was stationed, and how he was too scared to give them bread. We talked about it in class, off the lesson plan, and one kid said “I always thought I’d be the good guy if that happened, but that’s scary. What if I’m too scared too?” That’s the point, isn’t it? It’s not about getting a perfect test score. It’s about getting kids to ask those questions now, before they’re ever put in a position to answer them for real. I don’t have all the answers, but this messy, open approach feels a lot closer to what we should be teaching than the old check-box unit I used to do.
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