228776e

esistance. In addition to groups uniting workers, church members, and partisans and
their heroes, for example, Jewish resistance is addressed in T1 and T3 in discussion of the
Warsaw ghetto uprising. T2 focuses on cultural resistance in the form of desertion, refusals
to join the National Socialist Party or its youth movements, the spreading of critical jokes,
and inner or spiritual resistance. T3 focuses on all facets of German resistance, including
communists, social democrats, unionists, the attempted assassination of Hitler in 1944,
the White Rose group, the Kreisau Circle, and individual acts carried out by diplomats and
soldiers or civilians such as August Landmesser, who refused to raise his arm to greet
Hitler (see T1 and T3). The collaboration of Christian churches with the National Socialist
regime is addressed in all books except T5, while state collaboration is mentioned briefly in
relation to the Vichy regime in France (T2) and to the Ustasha and Arrow Cross regimes in
Croatia and Hungary, in addition to the collaboration and cooperation of members of fascist
movements in Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway (T3). T3 also briefly addresses the
reticence of many countries in admitting large numbers of Jewish refugees from mainland
Europe from 1938 onwards. Bystanders to the atrocities are also mentioned only in passing,
when the authors of T4 evoke the possible effects of photographs of massacres taken
secretly by German soldiers, and when the authors of T5 discuss the effects of soldiers’
testimonies about massacres when visiting their homes on leave. A section devoted to Anne
Frank features in T1, which also honours the resistance member Lissy Rieke.
Interpretative paradigms
The term most consistently used to describe the Holocaust in these textbooks is ‘genocide’
(Völkermord). Other terms include ‘Holocaust’, ‘Shoah’, ‘extermination of the “Jewish
race”’, ‘systematic murder of all Jews in Europe’, ‘mass extermination’, ‘industrial murder’,
‘systematic murder of civilians’, ‘murder of Jews’, ‘mass murder’, ‘“Final Solution of the
Jewish question”’, ‘factory-like mass murder’ and ‘terror’. Documents vary in type from
photographs, maps, caricatures, speeches, propaganda posters, drawings, laws, minutes
of meetings and witness and diary reports, almost all of which depict the activities or ideals
of perpetrators. The contents of all textbooks are comprehensive and largely adhere to the
stipulations contained in state curricula; the principal topics covered are the Nuremberg
Laws, the November pogrom, types of discrimination and humiliation, the ghettos,
shootings, gassings and deportations during the Second World War, and the Wannsee
Conference and the camps. The main focus of the relevant sections of T1, T2 and T3 is
not the Holocaust, but ‘dictatorship’ and the political evolution or survival thereof, as well
as everyday life under the dictatorship in Germany. Only T4 focuses more squarely on the
process of persecution and destruction, while T5 focuses on research about perpetrators
and the role of German people in the events. T4 presents the Holocaust within the context
of National Socialism while reserving a separate section for the Second World War,
whereas all other textbooks present the Holocaust within the context of the Second World
War and of National Socialism. Although the textbooks focus on perpetrators, they contain
few references to the motivations of perpetrators, which are described in T1 and T2 as
ideological and as ideological and careerist in T5, whereas T3 suggests perpetrators were
107