After viewing archival film footage documenting Jewish life in Nasielsk, a small town in Poland, before the German invasion in September 1939, students explore how the community changed during the Nazi occupation that followed.
By examining true personal stories, told through short animations, students learn about unique individual experiences within the historical context of the Holocaust. This activity contains an extension to examine the role of artifacts in understanding history.
The Rohingya, a religious and ethnic minority in Burma, went from being citizens to outsiders and became the targets of a sustained campaign of genocide. By exploring the online exhibition Burma’s Path to Genocide students learn how government policies and the proliferation of hate speech led to genocide of the Rohingya. Rohingya are still at risk of genocide today.
Students will examine photographs taken in and around the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and killing center in 1944 and engage in photo analysis techniques to deconstruct the photographs.
This lesson provides a method of assessing what students know and how they think about the Holocaust. Through interacting with a range of historical photographs and images, students generate questions that can then lead to more productive lesson planning.
Students study examples of diaries written by young people during the Holocaust, particularly examining the ways in which Anne Frank, the most famous diarist of the Holocaust, thought about her audience while writing.
Students will examine Holocaust-era diaries as both historical and as deliberately-created literary texts, and will understand how the Holocaust affected the lives of the individuals.
Students will examine Anne Frank’s diary as both a historical and a deliberately-created literary text, and will understand how the Holocaust affected the lives of the Frank family.
Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, has become a standard text used in many classes to both teach about the history and human impact of the Holocaust. This lesson will help teachers and students understand the fuller historical context of the events described in Wiesel’s writing.
This lesson is a case study examining Nazi Germany and the United States during the 1930s, at a time when racism and eugenics were enshrined in law and practice. Students will examine the national and historical contexts in which racism manifested in the two countries, and explore how the pseudoscience of eugenics as well as concerns about "racial purity" found its way into the laws of the United States and Nazi Germany.
Watch videos and read articles about the Holocaust and the conditions that made it possible.
