Guidelines for Teaching

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1. Define the term ‘Holocaust’

Guideline:

The Holocaust refers to a specific genocidal event in twentieth-century history: the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims—6 million were murdered; Gypsies, the handicapped, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.

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• Welcome and Introduction
• Before you start teaching
• 1. Define the term ‘Holocaust’
• 2. Contextualize the history you are teaching
• 3. Translate statistics into people
• 4. Strive for precision of language
• 5. Avoid simple answers to complex history
• 6. Just because it happened does not mean it was inevitable
• 7. Try to avoid stereotypical descriptions
• 8. Strive for balance in establishing whose perspective informs your study of the Holocaust
• 9. Make careful distinctions about sources of information
• 10. Do not romanticize history to engage students’ interest
• 11. Be sensitive to appropriate written and audiovisual content
• 12. Select appropriate learning activities
• 13. Reinforce the objectives of your lesson plan
• 14. Avoid comparisons of pain
• Topics to Teach
• Sample Lessons
• Conclusion

• Guest Lecture: Dr. William Meinecke Jr. discusses the topic "Nazi Ideology and Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution."

• Personal Testimony: Nesse Godin, a survivor of the Siauliai ghetto in Lithuania, the Stuffhof concentration camp, four labor camps, and a death march, shares her memories.