Jewish Foundation Helps Teachers Learn How to Teach the Holocaust

[NNN0LHI]

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBQHLA0WAE.html

<snip>
In one seminar, Robert Jan van Pelt, a professor at the University of Waterloo and the author of several books on concentration camps, posed this question: Why did the death camps use gas for mass murder?

"Shooting," he noted, "is a perfectly fine way of killing people."

Guns, in fact, were the weapon of choice when mobile death squads began the first large-scale massacres of Jewish families in the Soviet Union in 1941. Why switch to stationary camps and gas chambers, which were less efficient?

The answer, van Pelt suggested, may have been that Nazi leaders were concerned that the relentless killing of women and children up close with a rifle would exact a psychological toll on German troops.

Gas "allowed those who took part in the operation to remain clean," he said. "The issue is not how someone could kill, but how they could continue to do it."

[Behind the Aegis]

1. Good!

Hopefully, students will learn of the travesty visited upon millions of people, like them. I am amazed at the ignorance surrounding the Holocaust. I hope they will also teach that this travesty was played out on a number of people, with Jews being the primary target and how anti-Semitism played a huge role in its being allowed to continue for so long.

[TwentyFive]

2. They teach - but do we learn?

When the voters returned Bush to office, you have to wonder what people were thinking. Did voters want a better, more fair and just society? Certainly not! Bush voters were motivated by fear, hate and greed....very similar emotions to pre-WW2 Germany.

[neonplaque]

3. do they learn

"Bush voters were motivated by fear, hate and greed....very similar emotions to pre-WW2 Germany."

Indeed.

'Those who don't learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.'

[no_hypocrisy]

4. That's a good start. But keep going.

How about teaching about the political, economic, and societal circumstances that allowed Hitler to be DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED to office, only to take Germany from a nascent and faulted democracy into a totalitarian fascist state? How about the examination of the organization of the Third Reich and how nearly every aspect of the lives of German citizens were supervised by the local, regional, and national governments, not to mention neighbors and even one's children?

[Daphne08]

5. I agree, and here's the latest assault on the rights and

personal freedoms of the citizens of the U.S.
Oh, this has happened before, and there was documented abuse.

Last paragraph of news story:

"The last time the military got heavily involved in domestic surveillance, during the Vietnam War era, military intelligence kept thousands of files on Americans guilty of nothing more than opposing the war," Healy said. "I don't think we want to go down that road again."


Military Expands Homeland Efforts
Pentagon to Share Data With Civilian Agencies

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/05/AR2005070501669.html

[oscarmitre]

6. It's a good analysis

In retrospect we're overwhelmed by the cruelty and inhumanity of events such as this. Revealing this sort of thinking somehow reinforces the fact that these things really did happen and that human beings were and are capable of doing it.