228776e

so-called euthanasia programme, passive resistance, resistance among young people and
German citizens, Jewish resistance and state repression of such resistance. The same
textbook even addresses the ambivalent role of the special units or ‘Sonderkommandos’.
Interpretative paradigms
The event is defined variously as the ‘Holocaust’, the ‘mass murder of the Jews’, as a ‘Nazi
genocide’ during which Jews and non-Jews were ‘exterminated’. The authors of T3 also
define the events as ‘human rights violations’, and the authors of T1 explain that, ‘The Nazi
tried to eliminate the Jews people [sic] … by brutally murdering them in concentration
camps’ (p. 160). T1 does not provide a comprehensive historical narrative of the event,
focusing instead on racism, which it illustrates by means of portraits of Hitler and Darwin
side by side in order to emphasize the roots of modern racism in social Darwinism. T3,
by contrast, provides a comprehensive historical narrative of the events while focusing
primarily on ideology derived from the Nuremberg Laws, types of persecution and killing
and details of the camps. While both books cite Hitler as a driving force and primary cause
of the event, T3 not only underscores the scientific legitimisation of racism with reference to
social Darwinism and the eugenics movement, but also the influence on history of Hitler’s
character as a ‘fascist dictator’ (p. 172) and ‘aggressive politician’ (p. 31) and of his personal
wishes. He is said to have wished to ‘allow only “true” Germans to live in Germany’ (p. 182)
and to ‘“cleanse” the Aryan race of bad genes and what he saw as a financial burden to
society’ (p. 194), to have ‘believed passionately in the ideas of “pure blood” and different
“races”’ (p. 194), and to have believed in the fact that German people belonged to an ‘Aryan
“master race”’ (p. 194); likewise, references to his ‘obsessive antisemitism’, his ‘hatred of
Jewish people’ as ‘the most dominant theme of his political career’ and as ‘a key part of
the Nazi ideology’ (p. 195) all testify to a personalization of the causes of the Holocaust. In
addition to Hitler’s racism, and his personal wishes and decisions, T1 lists ideology and
scapegoating generally among the causes of the Holocaust. T1 also likens German Nazism
to Italian Fascism since they are both said to be characterized by a lack of democracy and
freedom, the widespread use of propaganda and violence, a ‘ruthless’ security apparatus
and ‘hatred of communism and democracy, and of particular groups of people, e.g. Jews
and black people’ (p. 154). By contrast, T3 underscores the difference between Nazism and
Fascism by associating the former with an ‘empire, based on the principles of the purity of
blood, and on the ideas of race science’ (p. 172). Among the few references to memory and
commemoration in relation to the Holocaust are the observations in T3 that the White Rose
resistance group is ‘honoured all over Germany today’ (p. 200). Concurrently, T1 states that
the genocide of the Herero in Namibia has been commemorated with a memorial stone and
an official apology on the part of the von Trotha family, and that the Cassinga massacre of
1978, in which South African soldiers attacked Namibians, is still present in the minds of
contemporary Namibians. The wide range of images include two to three photographs of
Hitler in each book, a photograph of corpses and a drawing of soldiers beating Jews in T1,
and a propaganda poster and an image of ransacked shops after the November pogrom of
1938 in T3.
121