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SOUTH AFRICA
The sample
The sample contains five history and geography textbooks published between 2012 and 2013
and designed for pupils between the ages of fourteen and fifteen. The books in the sample
are structured in remarkably similar ways, in line with the national curriculum of 2013. All
of the textbooks treat the Holocaust over two to four pages in the first sections of the books,
which are entitled ‘Rise of Nazi Germany and World War II (1919-1945)’, and each contain
a unit called ‘World War II: Europe’ and a further subsection about ‘Extermination Camps,
Genocide, the Holocaust and the “Final Solution”’. Only T3 differs from this pattern insofar
as the relevant subsection is called ‘Genocide, the Holocaust and the “Final Solution”’.
Scale
The Holocaust is presented as a European and world phenomenon. Maps are provided in all
books except in T3. However, these inform readers primarily about Europe as a geopolitical
entity during wartime rather than about the Holocaust. T1, for example, shows a map of
‘German-occupied Europe in 1944’, while the maps in T2 and T4 represent distinctions
between allied and axis countries and the borders of Europe in 1938 respectively. All books
likewise refer to the sites of camps. The ‘mass murder of Jews by the Nazis’ is dated in
T1 from 1933 to 1945 (p. 43), while T2, T3 and T4 associate the Holocaust more precisely
with the intensification of persecution from 1941 to 1942 (T2), with reference exclusively to
1941 as the moment at which the ‘final solution’ was instituted (T3). By contrast, T5 defines
successive periods from 1938 to 1941 and from 1942 to 1945.
Protagonists
All textbooks refer to perpetrators as ‘Nazis’ or ‘the Nazis’, but also focus on individuals such
as Josef Mengele (T1), Heinrich Himmler and Hitler (T3 and T4) or on the SS (T2). Victims
are similarly identified primarily as ‘Jews’ or ‘Jewish’, but also (in T5) as ‘German Jews’
(p. 124). T4 and T5 refer exclusively to Jewish victims, while T1 lists several groups including
disabled people, intellectuals, political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
and Roma, and even addresses the concept of ‘the other’. T2 pays particular attention to
‘non-Jewish’, including black, victims, and T3 to Jews and other ‘“undesirables”’ (p. 119)
generally. Jewish history before 1933 and after 1945 is depicted only in other sections of
the textbooks. All textbooks name the numbers of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, while
T1 and T2 also provide numbers of other victim groups and of ‘non-Jews’ respectively. All
textbooks likewise treat the topic of resistance by presenting the White Rose resistance
group, the Confessing Church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Anne Frank and the Warsaw ghetto
uprising. Although no references are made to the failure of the Allies to intervene in the
atrocities, the ambivalence of their role as liberators of the camps and as discoverers of the
horror there is addressed in T1, T3 and T4.
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