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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The sample
The sample contains five textbooks covering either American (T1, T2 and T3) or world (T4
and T5) history published between 2010 and 2013, and designed for pupils between the
ages of fifteen and eighteen studying in state schools. The sample is heterogeneous insofar
as, with the exception of T1, these textbooks present the Holocaust not chronologically but
thematically, whereby the event is often fragmented in separate sections. Only T1 contains
a section devoted wholly to the Holocaust. The Holocaust is treated in a section called ‘War
Again in Asia and Europe’ in T2, in sections called ‘Refugees from the Holocaust’ and ‘The
Last Days of Hitler’ in T3, in a section called ‘Extermination Camps, the Implementation of
Mass Murder, the Question of Responsibility’ in T4, and in sections called ‘The Context of
Atrocities’ and ‘The Shift to Ideological Conflict’ in T5. The scope ranges from half a page
in T2 to eight pages in T1.
Scale
All the textbooks name key dates of the Holocaust. In all books the event ends in 1945,
while its beginning is named as 1942 in T1, the late 1930s in T2, 1938 in T3 and T4, and 1939
in T5. T1 inaccurately dates the ‘final stage’ of the ‘Final Solution’ to 1942, and T4 dates
the Wannsee Conference inaccurately. Maps showing the locations of camps in T4 and T5
clearly associate the Holocaust with the geography of Europe; T5 also contains a list of
countries, indicating the numbers of Jewish victims in each of them. Further spatial and
temporal information extends the scope of the events and/or their causes and effects to
nineteenth-century Europe and America (with reference to Jewish emigration to America
in T1 and T3), to twentieth-century America (with reference to Jewish refugees from the
Holocaust in T1 and T2), to the creation of the state of Israel in T1, T2 and T4, and to
universal Jewish history, with reference to Christian antisemitism, in T4 and T5. T5 places
the Holocaust in a context alongside other genocides and atrocities, where the authors
claim that the atrocities committed under the rule of Stalin and Mao Zedong ‘equalled or
excelled in scale anything the Nazis did’.
Protagonists
Perpetrators are referred to as ‘the Germans’ (T1, T2, T4), as ‘the Nazis’ (T1, T2 and T4) and
‘the Fascists’ (T2), as ‘German Nazis’ (T3) and as the personified subject ‘Germany’ (T4). T1
also names ‘doctors’, ‘officials’ and ‘guards’, while some books also name the individuals
Goebbels (T3), Heydrich and Eichmann (T4). Images of Hitler in the general sections
covering the Second World War (six in T1, one in T3, and two in T4) tend to personalize
historical causality, while T1 and T4 additionally ascribe the cause of the Holocaust to
Hitler in statements such as ‘Hitler began implementing his final solution in Poland with
special Nazi death squads. Hitler’s elite Nazi “security squadrons” (or SS) rounded up
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