Anyone teach the holocaust?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090015/plotsummary

One of the definitive movies about the Holocaust.

.... six million Jews were killed in order to justify the Nuremburg Trials?  I think a whole lot more Germans got away with crimes than were ever tried.

If memory serves me correctly, the number was actually 6 million Jews out of more than 14 millions total murders inflicted upon other (civilian/non-combatant) peoples: gypsies, Russians, Poles, etc., and including many other "undesirable" Germans who did not meet Hitler's strict Aryan standards.

I have a copy of the film, Death Camps, which was made at the time of their liberation, by Allied troops.  It is often grainy, frequently jerky and shot mostly in black & white.  I find it hard to believe that it was faked in any way.
Especially since it also shows soldiers bringing the neighbours from the towns into the camps to see close up what they had been living nextdoor to

I was teaching WWII to my Senior students at the same time that the news came out about ill-treatment/torture by US soldiers was being reported at Abugraib.  We were looking at reports/movies of the Nuremburg trials when the first excuses were being given.  "I was only following orders" rang just as hollowly false in 1990s as it did in 1950s.

Okay, okay, I don't want to start an argument here!

I showed them Life is Beautiful because not because I wanted to talk about the holocaust per say, but I wanted to show them a fun film with a larger meaning. These kids are minors, and my class of 76 students is only attended by 5-15 a week, and I've been showing them movies they haven't been enjoying lately, so I wanted to show a "romantic" film, but I wanted something that had meaning beyond romance. So that's why I chose it. The students loved it, laughing and gasping in all the right spots. Also, there were many tears at the end of class which I've never seen with them before.

Also, the class is about western culture. That's why I want to discuss the holocaust with them. No matter what you believe about the holocaust, it was one of the worst wars in the modern western world and deserves discussion in a western culture movie class.

Of course I could just skip it all an play Hanukkahs games with them all night.

Borkya, I most humbly apologise for being so far off-topic.  I do know better.  I'll just take myself away and perform a self-flagellation

I showed them Life is Beautiful because not because I wanted to talk about the holocaust per say, but I wanted to show them a fun film with a larger meaning. ...

Also, the class is about western culture. That's why I want to discuss the holocaust with them.

Were you able to put it in context of the rest of Jewish history? Did you talk about the Poles, gysies etc who were also sent to the death camps?  Without context it also becomes meaningless as part of western culture.

Maybe one could consider... the Chinese Holocaust.... Rape of Nanking.........December 13th 1937.

How many of our kiddies know about that?
Ask them........and it's a goddamned shame that they DON'T know about it!!

Every single one of them will know about the Rape of Nanjing - good heavens it is how they justify on a yearly (or more frequent) basis their hatred of the Japanese!!

And if you talk to them about the "Chinese Holocaust", ask them for the histories of their parents and grandparents - they know.  They know as family members, they know as local citizens.  What they don't do here is to say out loud how bad it was, how extensive, how reprehensible because of current political powers.

Quote from: Lotus Eater on December 12, 2009, 12:36:55 AM

Student seem to read The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school - many of them know it, or at least know about it.

To be perfectly honest, I think this has been somewhat discredited in latter years.
I'd be very cautious about "teaching" anything about the holocaust.........especially since most of what we know is regurgitated hearsay - a point of example being, the Nazi Shrunken Heads...........shown to be obtained from Africa sometime during the early 19th C....

As it happens, whatever 'discrediting' being done of Ann Frank's diary is the work of people who have a severe case of cranial/anus interaction disorder. A close friend, and world recognized scholar on Anne Frank (Dr. L. Nussbaum), would soon put that remark in the dust bin where it belongs. I haven't the time or patience. The suggestion that our evidence regarding events in Europe during WWII is largely composed of hearsay does not merit a response. Read something besides Stormfront.

I once had an Auschwitz survivour give a speech in my elementary school. The nicest, little old lady, reminded me of my grandmother...we all thought she would bore us to death...two hours later there was not a single one of those jaded, cynical teenagers who were not crying...My great grandfather was in the Resistance and went down to Germany to help Danes get back from Dachau and Bergen-Belsen...He only spoke about it once. All he said was that what he had seen there had caused him to lose all faith in mankind.
When it comes to the Holocaust, I think history was very much written by the victims, not the victors. If you doubt me, just visit Auschwitz, I did when I was 18...and then try to leave that place without tearing up or feeling that somehow you just got a trifle bit closer to unmitigated evil than is good for you. As for hearsay, I think the movie shot by Allied soldiers when coming to the death camps speaks for themselves...
Fun activites for Holocaust...aside from making an effigy of Dr. Mengele and beating it with a stick, I can't think of any.