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Narrative structure and point of view
The balance between textual sources and visual materials (ranging from 50 to 70
percent) and authored texts (ranging from 30 to 50 percent), in combination with a very
wide variety of types of documentary sources (including posters, photographs, cartoons,
drawings, contemporary and post-war testimonies, letters, speeches, interviews, film
stills, reports and diary extracts), ensures that multiple perspectives are represented.
Types of argumentation are generally based on causality. The moral bias of the narrative
is one of decline and intensification in all three books, with the exception of a marginal
element of hope in a letter addressed to the UN in T1, which evokes the education of
people to ‘become more human’. Of particular note is the representation of subjectivities
of authors and readers. All books address the reader as ‘you’ and the authors of T3 present
themselves as ‘we’. The narrator of T2 is detached, whereas those of T1 and T3 articulate
clear judgemental standpoints. Judgement is expressed unambiguously in terms of
‘dreadful slaughter’, Hitler’s hating Jews ‘insanely’, ‘brutally murdered’ victims, the ‘full
horrors’ of the regime, ‘hellish’ conditions in ghettos, and ‘totally discredited Nazism’.
At the same time, authorial points of view are complemented by multiple perspectives
(presented via a variety of document types and quotations of historians, protagonists and
wartime organizations) which ensure that pupils are encouraged to add their own points of
view, based on evidence, to those presented in the books.
Didactic approach
T1 and T2 contain didactic question boxes on every page, and T3 contains several exercises.
These require pupils to analyse sources and fulfil comprehension and discussion tasks, or
to perform role play (T2). T1 and T2 also set a number of ‘second order’ tasks requiring
pupils to consider why textbook authors choose not to print atrocity images, for example,
or to assess the utility of different types of sources as evidence. In contrast to such
invitations to rationalize the process of historical enquiry, pupils are also invited to read
and empathize with different protagonists’ perspectives via testimonies of members of
the Hitler Youth (T1), of a German railway worker, and with the (imaginary) experiences of
grandchildren of a kindertransportee and of Oscar Schindler (T2).
National idiosyncrasies
These books focus on how the Holocaust happened, what caused ordinary people to
become killers, why the Nazis committed mass murder and who was responsible. The
culpability and responsibility of broad sections of the German population, whether the civil
service, the police force, the army, industry or ‘ordinary’ people, is a constant theme which
is presented methodologically in relation to the debate over Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s
Willing Executioners. This approach to understanding mechanisms of responsibility may
in fact represent an attempt on the part of textbook authors to supplant the traditional
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