228776e

SPAIN
The sample
The sample consists of one history textbook (T2) and four history and social studies textbooks
published between 2008 and 2011 and designed for use by pupils aged sixteen studying in
state and private schools. All textbooks deal with the Holocaust over between three and six
pages in sections devoted to the Second World War, with the exception of T2, which places
the Holocaust in a section entitled ‘Fascism and Nazism’. T1 contains a subsection devoted
to ‘Genocides, Deportations and Other Consequences of War’, and T4 contains a subsection
called ‘The Concentration Camps’.
Scale
The textbooks generally do not date the Holocaust clearly. Neither does T1, for example,
provide information about dates or places in captions to photographs. T2 and T3 frame the
event between 1933 and 1942, while T2 also mentions the November pogrom of 1938. The
textbooks generally locate the event in Germany and Europe, while links to other locations are
made as follows: to fascism in Italy (T5), to the bombed cities of London and Berlin (T3) and to
Europe generally in maps of events of the war (T4) and of camps in Europe (T5). T2 links the
Holocaust to Spain by printing and explaining a photograph of Spanish Republicans who were
imprisoned in Mauthausen, to Europe on the basis of a map of the locations of concentration
camps, and to the world generally by featuring a map depicting the sites of other genocides.
Protagonists
All of the textbooks focus on Jewish victims, while T1 also lists ‘Slavs and other ethnic and
religious groups, Gypsies, Jehovah’s witnesses, homosexuals, trade unionists and persons
with congenital diseases’. T5 mentions ‘communists and democrats’, T3 ‘political opponents’
and ‘delinquents’, and T2 ‘Latinos’. None of the textbooks deal with Jewish history before
1933 or after 1945, except indirectly via a reference to the numbers of refugees fleeing Europe
from 1932 in T2. T2 also prominently features exiled Spanish Republicans imprisoned in
Mauthausen. Hitler features in all textbooks, and T2, T4 and T5 place particular emphasis
on the personal influence of Hitler and his ideas on the event, if not as a central cause of the
event. The additional mentions of Himmler in T1, of Mussolini in T4 and the Nuremberg Trials
in T3 largely ascribe responsibility for the event to the Nazi elite. German bystanders are
mentioned in T2, while German resistance features in T1 and T5, as does the collaboration
of people in territories occupied by Germany in T5. Images represent approximately equal
numbers of victims and perpetrators, while T2 and T5 feature Hitler, the latter combining
Hitler’s biography with Nazi ideology derived from Mein Kampf.
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