Students in Fred Whittaker’s class create a bulletin board display filled with pictures of themselves and similar pictures of Jews who died in the Holocaust. The project helps students make deep connections to the people lost in the Holocaust.

Over six million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. When we read that fact, it is hard to understand what it actually means. The scale of the tragedy is simply too overwhelming. It is only when we recognize that each one of those six million people was an individual—someone just like us—that we begin to understand.

Many of the photos we see of the Jewish people during the Holocaust show prisoners who are starving. But what did these people look like before the Holocaust? Did the children love their families and play with their friends? Did they go to school and ride bicycles?

Before undertaking this project, watch the video, Holocaust Pedagogy, in which Fred Whittaker introduces best practices in Holocaust education.

The three video collections here offer educators a detailed exploration of different ways to approach the topic in the classroom. Murals of the Holocaust describes a summer program that offers an art-integrated history course on Germany and the Holocaust. Juliek’s Violin focuses on three pieces of classical music, including music from the scene in Elie Wiesel’s Night where Juliek plays the violin in the concentration camp. Teaching the Holocaust explores how two middle school educators approach the teaching of Holocaust history to their students.

For over 20 years, a summer program for gifted adolescents at Western Kentucky University has offered an arts-integrated history course on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The course concludes with students working as a group to create a large mural on the Holocaust. In this way, students use the power of art to deal with their own emotions as well as to educate others. The murals from the past 20 years went on a traveling display in Kentucky to engage a broader audience in thought-provoking conversation on the topic. In this video collection, hear the stories of a Holocaust survivor and the son of a Holocaust survivor who are involved with the program, learn how students in the program decided on a theme for their mural, and learn how one teacher incorporates the arts into Holocaust history lessons.

The stories for this unit are about Holocaust camp guest-speaker experiences in the death camps during World War II. When making their presentations to high school students, most survivors were not able to stand for any length of time to make their presentations about their experiences because of their weakened physical condition. Moreover, in the late nineteen nineties, many were so old they had difficulty accurately recounting their camp experiences. When taken to lunch, Holocaust camp survivors ate only a special diet of soft foods because their digestive systems suffered massive damage from their daily two-hundred-calorie or less concentration camp food. On the presentation day, survivors made no more than one presentation due to the emotional hardships recounting their stories placed on them every time they told their stories. Their accounts of what they endured in the death camps inspired the author to write two fictional short stories.

The rise and fall of National Socialism is one of the most intensively-studied topics in European history. Nevertheless, after more than half a century, popular views of Nazism in the media and among the public remain simplistic-essentialized by equal parts fascination and horror. Adolf Hitler, for instance, is often portrayed as an evil genius of supernatural ability; while the Nazi state is similarly imagined to have held absolute power over every aspect of its subjects’ lives. Such characterizations allow ordinary Germans to be portrayed as helpless victims of Nazism, ensnared or coerced into submission by forces beyond their control. Another popular characterization is that German culture itself is fundamentally flawed - that all Germans were basically Nazis at heart. This schema conveniently erases the manifestations of fascism in other Western nations, and allows Americans and other Westerners to reassure themselves that the horrors of Nazism could never emerge in their own enlightened national cultures.

This is a PBL for students to learn about the Holocaust and also think of ways as a nation to prevent another mass genocide from ever happening.

The first in a series of units and lesson plans from Echoes and Reflections. The web page includes embedded links to videos, note-taking sheets, maps, and other handouts. 

The Stages of Genocide Toolkit contains six case studies of historical genocide:• Armenian Genocide• Genocide in Cambodia• Genocide in Guatemala• The Holocaust• Genocide of Native Americans in the United States• Genocide in RwandaThese specific case studies were chosen for their wide geographic range and their place in modern historical chronology. It is important to note that these genocides are not the only examples of genocide that one can find throughout history, nor do the authors of this toolkit consider them to be “worse” or more important than those that are not included in this toolkit. We believe strongly that there is no place for a “hierarchy of suffering” in genocide education. Additionally, these summaries are not meant to be comprehensive histories of each genocide. They were written to align with Dr. Gregory Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide and as such, there are many historical details that are not included in the summaries.

These profiles contain text of state legislation about the teaching of the Holocaust, and Holocaust-explicit History/Social Studies and English/Language Arts state content standards. Also provided is contact information for state departments of education.

The purpose of this lesson is to help students develop their paraphrasing and summarizing skills. Focusing on the I do, We do, You do method, the lesson is collaborative between teachers and students. Objectives:paraphrase information in a nonfiction textconnect like ideas and combine sentencescreate a summary of a piece of nonfiction edit writing for mechanics, usage, grammar, and spelling errorspublish a summary Approx. Time: one week

“You don’t ever expect to be hauled out of your house, marched into a gas chamber, and be choked to death,” says Irene Fogel Weiss.

Yet, that is exactly what happened to most of her family in the summer of 1944. Irene was thirteen at the time, and by several twists of fate, she survived.

“There is a life force in all of us that you just want to live another day,” she says. “Let’s survive this. We have to survive this.” Irene shares her story of survival with hundreds of high school students every year. In this program, we listen in on her presentation to Woodson High School students as she shares a personal account of the events that lead to the Holocaust. She discusses her life as a child in Hungary, the changes she witnessed as the Nazis took power, and all manner of degradations imposed on the Jewish people.

Teaching About Armenian Genocide-13 Minute Video LinkArmenian Genocide Webinar- 22 Minute Video Link The video and additional resources available in the Oregon Open Learning Hub of the OER Commons can be used to support the implementation of Oregon's SB 664 Holocaust and genocide studies.  For additional information, please see the ODE Social Science webpage on Holocaust and other genocides.

Secondary educators across Lebanon County, Pennsylvania developed lesson plans to integrate the Pennsylvania Career Education and Work Standards with the content they teach. This work was made possible through a partnership between the South Central PA Workforce Investment Board (SCPa Works) and Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13 (IU13) and was funded by a Teacher in the Workplace Grant Award from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry. This lesson plan was developed by one of the talented educators who participated in this project during the 2018-2019 school year.

Teacher Jeremy Howard takes a history lesson about the Holocaust and makes it personal. By showing students video testimony of survivors and how prejudice can lead to eventual genocide, they not only learn what events led up to the Holocaust, but question themselves as to what they would have done in similar circumstances. It is a lesson about personal responsibility, the meaning of empathy in today's world, and choosing to do the right thing in their daily lives.

Working in small groups, students read and discuss Elie Wiesel's memoir "Night" and then take turns assuming the teacher role, as the class works with four different comprehension strategies.

The United States Congress established the Days of Remembrance as the nation’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust and created the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a permanent living memorial to the victims. This video describes the Holocaust, Days of Remembrance, and why we as a nation remember these events. It is intended for both organizers and for general audiences.

Anne Frank’s life is turned upside down when the war begins in the Netherlands, and she has to go into hiding in the Secret Annex. This lesson introduces students to Anne Frank and the history of her time. The students study and discuss Anne Frank’s life through interactive assignments, a video, and a timeline. They learn more about the Secret Annex, the lives of the people in hiding, the helpers, and Anne’s diary.