Do Germans Learn About Hitler

Teaching Nazi By to German language Youth

June ix, 1995

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June 9, 1995

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In the serenity of the Konrad Adenauer High School, no i has to fret about the kinds of things that worry Americans on campus, like guns or drugs, because such things practise not happen here, said Heinz Wilms, a history instructor.

Since January, though, he has been nudging his 10th-grade form of sixteen-year-olds to confront something much more momentous than school-yard discipline: the historical progression from Hitler's rise to power in 1933 to the Holocaust.

It is a grade, Chapter 6 in a standard High german history text, that challenges Germany's young to come to terms with the burden of a collective past far more than cruel and destructive than teen-agers anywhere else in the world are obliged to contemplate.

And it is part of the attempt by a postwar generation to explain why the past must non repeat itself to those who volition one day run Europe'southward economic and political powerhouse. The effort, some educators argue, has visibly faltered in the wave of attacks on foreigners and the ascent of neo-Nazi groups since the Berlin Wall brutal in 1989.

However, in interviews with students, both in Bonn and in a comparable high school in what was once East Berlin, a clear impression emerged that while many immature Germans sense no personal guilt for a by generation'south crimes, they experience a responsibility to thwart any revival of their history'southward racism, anti-Semitism, militarism and nationalism.

At the aforementioned time, though, they share a nagging worry that their own history hampers what they say should be a justifiable sense of pride in their own nation'due south achievements.

"The Americans can put their flag out in their own lawn, and no i says anything, but if we did that nosotros'd be accused of being Nazis," said Christian Kreutz, a sixteen-yr-old student at Konrad Adenauer.

Stefan Bohm, in the sometime East Berlin, commented: "You can't say: 'I'yard proud to be a German.' Beethoven was a German, also, only everything now is seen through the Second World War."

Some seemed uneasy with or skeptical at the Government's line that the end of the war in Europe, 50 years agone in May, offered nearly Germans a liberation from Hitler's tyranny considering, some students say, most Germans took part in what happened, 1 way or another.

In the effort to escape the Nazis' centralization of ability, the authorities of the various federal states took responsibility for postwar education, so there is no single standardized curriculum for educational activity modern High german history. Just in 1991, the federal Authorities's educational-monitoring agency urged that the Nazis be subject area to an "intensive and thorough treatment" in schools and that "the memory of the Holocaust is kept live."

In West Deutschland during the first postwar decades, Mr. Wilms said, history books were written past Nazi-era teachers, and the urge to repress the by was widespread.

The new text seems to offer a fuller picture. And the chapter on the Nazi era and the Holocaust, taught to 16-year-olds, enjoins them to ask: "Who knew what? Who participated and who kept their distance and in what ways were people's dealings and convictions affected past the National Socialist arrangement of dominance?"

The answers seem to offering a broad indictment: "Membership of the Nazi Political party promised influence, professional security, a career." While those who said after that they had joined merely to protect themselves and their families, the school volume tells young Germans, the reality was that past joining the party, Germans "strengthened the party and the dominance of the Nazis."

No effort is made to disbelieve the Holocaust or the role played in it by private Germans, the Nazi regime or German industry. Part of the chapter chronicles the chemic behemothic I. G. Farben'due south establishment of a co-operative called I. M. Auschwitz, near the death camp in German-occupied Poland -- a mill making artificial rubber that used army camp inmates as laborers and sent them to the gas chambers when they weakened.

"Every student in Germany must tackle this theme," Mr. Wilms said. "No ane can say they didn't know."

They are taught that the Nazis came to power on the wings of economic plummet and humiliation at Germany'southward defeat in the First World War. They are taught about Hitler's race laws. They are taught that their forebears killed six million Jews. But they likewise acquire that this was history, with a European and a German context, not personal guilt.

"Nosotros cannot do anything near it -- it was our grandparents that did it," said Barbara Schuler, a 16-year-one-time student at Konrad Adenauer High Schoolhouse, in suburb of Bad Godesberg. "Simply we should non forget information technology."

For virtually Germans, education about the war begins at home, in sometimes painful encounters. "If you lot inquire your grandparents if they supported the regime, you lot don't get an respond," said Matthias Fink, a scholar at the same school.

Not surprisingly, a group of 17-year-olds in the Hans und Hilde Coppi Gymnasium, named for anti-Nazi resistance fighters, in the less flush Karlshorst district of the former East Berlin had dissimilar experiences to recount.

In the delineation of the one-time Communist education system, said Daniel Hadrisch, a 17-year-sometime, the East Germans, "were all anti-Fascists" while the Nazi mantle "was given to the West Germans."

Their teacher, Roswitha Quiram, was more forthright. "I don't have a bad conscience," she said. "I don't run into myself equally responsible. Simply I would be responsible if it happened again."

Mr. Wilms, the teacher in Bonn, said that "each twelvemonth, I take a grouping of students to Auschwitz." On one occasion, he said, his group of young Germans was insulted by a grouping of young Israelis. "My group was very upset," he recounted. "They said, 'What'due south that got to exercise with us? We can't help it.' "