Teaching the Holocaust

w W»W f)^ Volume LII No. 1 January 1997 £3 (to non-members) Unhealthy An ongoing debate among Jewish, and other, pedagogues appetite ifty years after the Fuehrer's Teaching the Holocaust Fdeath the German public's appetite for hough the Holocaust now figures as a topic in 1914 was such a calamity that it could be de Hitleriana remains the National Curriculum, and the Imperial scribed as the collective mental breakdown of dismayingly keen. War Museum will soon have a permanent humanity. In its wake came horrors - especially in Right now whole T exhibit, disagreements about the value of 'teaching Russia and Germany - which only ended with the forests are being cut the Holocaust' remain. deaths of Hitler and Stalin. Since then there has down for the been, at least in the West, resumption of moral-cum- Austrian historian Critics divide into two groups: those who oppose material progress - hand in hand with ever wider Brigitte Hamann's such teaching on pragmatic grounds, and 'philo tome entitled sophical' opponents. availability of education. Of course, the picture is far Hitler's Vienna The 'pragmatists' point to the psychological bur from uniformly white, but on looking into the pock (Piper Verlag). den acquaintance with the facts of genocide might ets of darkness one finds that the likes of Le Pen, The book acquaints impose on growing children (not least Jewish ones). Haider or Zhirinovsky are borne along the resent readers with a The 'philosophers', on the other hand, reject the ment of the under-educated. It is in the selfsame philosemitic young assumption that education can inculcate morality as 'constituency of the ignorant' that Holocaust de Adolf, who only fanciful pie-in-the-sky, and quote the number of nial flourishes. Surely it is up to the schools to try took up Jew-baiting PhDs and classical music aficionados in the upper and remedy such defects. in imitation of echelons of the SS. So much for the philosophical objections to teach Lueger. This slant ing the Holocaust. To the 'pragmatist' objectors places Hamann In recent years the sceptics have also been able to among the argue that the substantial amount of Holocaust our answer must be that if children can be exposed 'functionalist' teaching undertaken in postwar Yugoslavia signally to the horrors of the Somme and Hiroshima without historians who see failed to inoculate that particular society against the becoming traumatiscd, they should not remain igno antisemitism merely horrors of ethnic cleansing. rant of Auschwitz. The Holocaust, after all, carries a as a ploy rather than In thus setting the moral value of education at more wide-ranging warning to a world still mired in the mainspring of the naught, the sceptics are - perhaps deliberately - racial conflict and fanaticism than any other calam Fuehrer's thinking. throwing out the baby with the bath-water. What ity in human history. (And as for the danger of Not that they leave out of account is the fact that any educa Jewish pupils perceiving their past only in terms of such diverse tional system operates as part of a specific national lachrymose martyrology, successive generations of interpretations of culture. And national consciousness matters hugely. Israeli schoolchildren have not taken noticeable Hitler's motives The .SS officers with doctorates had been educated harm) D need concern non-historians. by the sort of schoolmaster Heinrich Mann depicted What matters rather in Professor Unrat. In the interwar period Nazi sup more is the port at German universities even exceeded that Germans' continuing among the population at large; whereas Mosley fascination with that gained a following in F'ast London and Liverpool, phosphorescent icon but none at Oxford or Cambridge. (In further con of evil, compounded trast to Germany, French schoolteachers provided by the fact that the electoral base for Georges Clemenceau, who Hamann's young published Zola's defence of Dreyfus). While it may Adolf vaguely be true that education failed to live up to the grandi prefigures David ose expectations of Renaissance humanists or the Irving's old one (who had nothing to encyclopedistes, its value - even as an inculcator of do with the Final morality - should not be gainsaid. Solution). Attempts The fact that by 1914 Europe had become a much at humanising Hitler more civilised place than a hundred years earlier is render a disservice to surely in large measure due to the spread of edu democracy D i cation. Inmates of the I </J: ^'^(•ffo, /''-(/ AJR INFORMATION JANUARY 1997 and undertook lecture tours of Germany, Profile where her second major book, Grosse und Verhdngnis deutsch-jiidischer Existenz, was published. A hundred years Eva was widowed in 1964, having given up her Wiener Library post somewhat of plenitude earlier. In retirement she continued her in n this country everyone who reaches volvement with the Leo Baeck Institute their hundredth birthday receives a and other causes close to her heart. More I greetings card from the Queen in recently she has become housebound, but recognition of that rather amazing feat. In still receives, and enjoys, our journal. Eva Reichmann's case congratulations are We salute this remarkable centenarian due not only because she will turn a - a living link with the generation of the hundred on 16 January, but also - and founding fathers of the organised refugee above all - on account of her life's work. community: Dr Alfred Wiener, Rabbi Leo Eva, nee Jungmann, was brought up in Baeck, Robert Weltsch, Werner Rosen- Oppeln, Silesia, around the time that Leo stock and (the sadly missed) Hans Baeck - a lifelong friend - started his Reichmann. D RG rabbinical career in that town. After at Eva Reichmann tending a Hohere Tochterschule she completed her studies with a doctorate at the couple came to the UK. Eva used the ATRIBUTE FROM THE Heidelberg, where the university offered enforced leisure of her early London years LEO BAECK INSTITUTE her an assistant lectureship. However, she to research the roots of German On her 100th birthday the London Board rejected a career in academia, which antisemitism; the resultant PhD thesis be of the Leo Baeck Institute pays tribute to might have offered glittering prizes in came the book Hostages of Civilisation Eva G Reichmann, who has been con Weimar days. Instead, she elected to work (1950) published in Germany as Flucht in nected with it since its foundation and is in the less ratified atmosphere of the Jew den Hass (1956). now the only surviving member of the ish community, heading a department of By this time she was Director of Re Institute's founder generation. the Central Verein, and editing the maga search at the Wiener Library, while Hans, Eva Reichmann has contributed immeas zine Der Morgen. a co-founder of the Leo Baeck Institute, urably to German-Jewish historiography The advent of the Nazis engendered a served as Vice-Chairman and Chairman and we are proud of our association with heavier work load amid much personal of the AJR during its years of postwar this remarkable woman and great scholar. suffering. Eva's husband, Hans Reich growth. We send her our warmest wishes D mann, was incarcerated at Sachsenhausen She herself contributed to several vol Professor Werner E Mossee Dr Arnold Pauclier concentration camp, and after his release umes issued by the Leo Baeck Institute Chairman Direaor students. "He loved Hitler and Hitler survived this period. Lost battle loved him back - like a son", according In Gitta Screny's view, Speer was mul itta Sereny, author of the to Sereny. tiply guilty and should have been hanged. controversial biography of As an architect, Speer developed Hit Responsible for the use and abuse of G Hitler's chief architect and ler's plans on a grand scale. When the seven million slave labourers and hun Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer, then Minister of Armaments and Muni dreds of thousands of deaths, it was explained that while she detested all that tions was assassinated. Hitler immediately inconceivable that he should be absolved he stood for and had not the slightest named Speer as his successor, despite few of responsibility - though his deputy was wish to meet him, after having done so relevant qualifications and no experience executed! she "grew to like him". However, Sereny of such an immense task. In fact, Speer Sereny believed that Speer "wanted to remained convinced that Speer was an proved exceptionally able and greatly in find the strength to admit to guilt" - antisemite, as indeed were many Germans creased war production. though only for the murder of Jews. This and Austrians. Speer claimed that it was only in Octo may explain her book's subtitle 'His At a lecture organised by the Wiener Li ber 1943 that he found out about the Battle with Truth', but more convincing brary, Gitta Sereny faced an audience mass genocide of the Jews and was ill for is Speer's daughter's unequivocal belief: many of whom were Holocaust survivors. five months. While there remains contro "Of course he knew". Ms. Sereny defended herself against any versy over the exact meeting at which the At Nuremberg, and then in Spandau, suggestion that she had humanised Speer, extent of the 'final solution' to the Jew Speer appears to have built and perpetu and robustly refuted accusations that she ish question was fully revealed to him, ated a myth about himself that continues had fallen under the spell of this highly in any supposed ambiguities would by then beyond the grave. If so, he is not entitled telligent, knowledgeable and suave have been stripped away. to it - history's judgement should be survivor of the Nuremberg Trials, despite In the last six months of the regime harsh, not lenient.

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