The Last PowerPoint: Teaching World War II with the Holocaust
It’s the end of the unit on World War II. A slide with a bar graph or chart with the clear title, “World War II Deaths,” illuminates the darkened room. Color-coded bars mark out “civilian” and “military” deaths by country. There’s the Soviet Union with its civilian bar stretching all the way past 20 million, China falling just short of that, Germany at about eight million killed, Poland with five or six million, and so on. Or perhaps it’s organized by “Casualties as Percentage of 1939 Population,” with smaller nations, like Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, and Latvia all showing a loss of more than 5% of their pre-war populations. Maybe there’s an asterisked footnote indicating that some of those deaths were victims of the Holocaust, but that’s a discussion for a different lesson or different unit or perhaps not a subject of discussion at all.
As a historian of Germany, I get the PowerPoint slide with its cold numbers and asterisked footnote (or lack thereof). Grappling with the tremendous scale of the tragedy that was World War II is difficult for historians, let alone for high school students. A graph or chart is one of the easiest ways to approach the subject. But, I argue, it’s not sufficient. By lumping Jewish, Roma, disabled, and other victims of the Holocaust into the total civilian deaths, this kind of slide elides the intentional nature of those deaths. Yet by separating the Holocaust from the rest of the history of World War II – segregating “war” from “genocide” – as often happens in secondary classrooms, the chart also loses the fact that mass murder was part of the Nazi military project.
Too often, I fear, educators think of World War II and the Holocaust as two different historical events – related but not historically the same. In that narrative, the murders of Jewish people happened at the same time as World War II but were the result of some other process. But that narrative is historically inaccurate. World War II in Europe and the Holocaust are the same conflict, the same historical event, and their histories must be carefully and intentionally intertwined in every history course (world history, European history, U.S. history) from the very beginning.
This integration can be done at many levels. For example, in many classrooms the origin of World War II is taught as “World War I: Redux” or “World War I: Rematch.” This interpretation emphasizes the unresolved issues of the first world war and the inadequate peace settlement, which gave rise to a “natural” repeat of the World War I’s nationalist, imperialist, and economic causations. The most glaring flaw in this version is that it makes World War II seem inevitable, unavoidable. It emphasizes the ways in which the Treaty of Versailles punished Germany, thus naturally creating discontent among the German population; this discontent, in turn (according to this version), left many Germans receptive to the hateful agenda of the Nazi party.
It is true that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis capitalized on the disaffection of the German (and Austrian) citizenry regarding the outcome of World War I. But Hitler led his nation into the European War with eyes wide open and with clear racist and racialist intent. Nazi ideology demanded that the German Volk reassert their racial domination of the continent and, eventually, the world. To do so, the Volk had to conquer sufficient living space, Lebensraum, at the expense of Europe’s Slavic populations in Poland and the Soviet Union. According to Hitler, the necessary Lebensraum would allow the Volk to flourish and establish a thousand-year Reich. As early as the 1920s, the future Führer stressed the necessity of another world war to achieve these goals. From the establishment of Hitler’s government in 1933, Germany’s foreign policy strategy was set. The invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 represented the long-awaited and central geopolitical goal of expanding the Reich for the German Volk.
Furthermore, Nazi ideologues articulated an encompassing worldview in which the German Volk had been victimized by the world’s Jews. They believed that it was Jews who had manipulated the world into World War I, Jews who had used their control over the markets and socialist parties to betray Germany causing its defeat, and Jews who had connived to weaken Germany through a traitorous peace settlement. It was the Jews who ran the Soviet Union and the Jews who pulled the strings of the Western democracies. It was they who sought to keep Germany humiliated and prostrate.
Historians of the Holocaust identify the period leading up to Operation Barbarossa, the codename for the invasion of the Soviet Union, as the moment when Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and other leading Nazis finally decided they could pursue their wildest fantasies of exterminating the Jewish people while pursuing Lebensraum for “real” Germans.
In other words, using a Holocaust-based understanding of the origins of World War II introduces a much clearer explanation of the war’s origins that goes well beyond the idea that it was an outgrowth of World War I. It introduces broader explanations for why the Germans, led by Hitler, started a global war and a continental genocide. It also adds nuance and complexity to the story.
Connecting ideology and geopolitics also allows teachers to engage critical thinking skills and help students move beyond an understanding of war as organic and constant. It introduces the importance of circumstance and contingency in historical events. For example, the success of the Nazis in Germany supported the ascent of another fascist movement, the Iron Guard, in Romania. Under the Iron Guard’s leadership, Romania entered World War II and engaged in its own slaughter of Jews starting in 1941. However, as the fight turned against the Axis in 1942-43, Romania’s dictator, Ion Antonescu, stopped the deportations of Jewish Romanians to ease negotiations for a separate peace with the Allies. The Holocaust’s nominal end in Romania was linked not to a direct Allied invasion of Romania but to the interconnection between military outcomes and racial violence.
Finally, integrating the Holocaust and World War II in secondary classrooms transforms those classrooms into more empathetic spaces. Without a doubt the Holocaust and its horrors give many educators pause. It can be daunting to take on a topic with such emotional and metaphysical weight.
But, I argue, it’s the difficulty of the Holocaust that makes taking it on all the more necessary. For too many students World War II is the fighter planes, the tanks, and the battleships. Limiting the war’s history to disembodied uses of technology and strategy or focusing on the “universal” experience of battle actually preempts any engagement with its most extreme villainy. Integrating the Holocaust humanizes the history of the conflict. There is no end of resources for teaching the personal stories of the Holocaust, for telling the stories of courage and violence. When we teach our students about the “ordinary Germans” who helped carry out Hitler’s murderous intention and the courageous survivors, then we show them the complex humanity at the core of historical events.
World War II occupies a central place in the American historical imagination. It stimulates interest and sits at the chronological and figurative center of America’s twentieth-century history. These same tools apply in a U.S. History classroom as well as a World or European History classroom. What would it mean to integrate a social, cultural, racial understanding of the war in Europe into the curriculum? How does the story of the American Home Front change if we start asking questions about anti-semitism and what Americans knew about the Holocaust even as we discuss Rosie the Riveter and War Bonds tours?
Introducing the Holocaust to teaching about World War II in both World History and US History classrooms opens up a broader approach to teaching the war in ways that make for better history and better pedagogy. It is the right thing to do: it’s historically more accurate, pedagogically more illuminating, and fundamentally more human. And it is achievable. Great resources can be accessed at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, at the Centre for Holocaust Education in the United Kingdom, and from Facing History and Ourselves (I use them all in my teaching).
Introducing a more expansive lens will open more space for student development and create more rewarding teaching. It also creates a timely opportunity to introduce discussions about mass violence, genocide, and the Holocaust into your teaching. Let’s transform that last PowerPoint slide into a story about humanity (even if it’s a depressing story) instead of a graph of casualties.
Additional Resources
Echoes & Reflections: A partnership among the ADL, USC Shoah Foundation, and Yad Vashem
11 Tips for Teaching the Holocaust to Middle and High School Students: A helpful guide from the Montreal Holocaust Museum, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has its own
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Educational Materials: The IHRA is a cooperative of 35 member countries that combats Holocaust denial and antisemitism
Educational Materials from Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum and Remembrance Center
Houston Holocaust Survivor Video Testimony: Many other local Holocaust museums also collect and share testimony from local survivors; for example, the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center preserves survivor experiences as Profiles