228776e

URUGUAY
The sample
The sample contains one history textbook published in 2009 and designed for fifteen-yearold
pupils studying history. The textbook is divided into sections devoted to global history,
Latin American history and the history of Uruguay. It deals more specifically with the
Holocaust in a section entitled ‘The World 1930-1945’, within which further sub-chapters
are called ‘Racism and Other Forms of Discrimination’, ‘Fascism, Francoism and Japanese
Nationalism in the 1930s’ and ‘The Consolidation of Nazism’. One page is devoted to the
Holocaust, while its context is treated over a further fifteen pages.
Scale
Although the section addresses world history from 1930 to 1945, the Holocaust is explained
only as a short-term phenomenon without connections to this broader period. It is qualified
spatially as a German event in a section called ‘Great Germany’ (Gran Alemania), with
further references to the sites of camps in Auschwitz, Treblinka and Dachau (which is the
subject of one photograph).
Protagonists
Perpetrators are presented as ‘Paramilitary Nazi Forces’ (Fuerzas Paramilitares Nazis)
within a text box, while the SS and SA are described as ‘violent groups’, alongside the
Gestapo, the industrial middle class, the military, the Hitler Youth, the Nazi regime and
the ‘totalitarian’ state. Rudolf Höss is quoted in order to explain the camp system, while
Hitler features prominently on the basis of a quotation from Mein Kampf and because
responsibility for perpetration is largely ascribed to him, as in the phrase ‘Hitler considered
Jews, Slavs and Gypsies to be inferior groups, although it was against the first group
that he applied a policy of persecution and destruction’ (p. 137). The term ‘Der Führer’ is
incorrectly translated into Spanish as el conductor (the driver). In addition to Jews, Slavs
and ‘Gypsies’, the textbook defines Anne Frank inaccurately as an ‘opponent of the Nazi
regime’ (p. 140), and refers to ‘fifty-five million war victims, of which six million were Jews’
(p. 145). Neither the role of the Allies nor collaborators nor Jewish life before 1933 or after
1945 is mentioned. Bystanders are alluded to in a caption accompanying a photograph of a
passer-by in front of a broken shop window following the November pogrom, which states
that attacks on shops had ‘not provoked overt rejection among the German population’
(p. 137).
Interpretative paradigms
The Holocaust is defined in terms of racial violence (with reference to the work of Olivier
Wieviorka, p. 127), genocide, destruction and Auschwitz, while neither the terms Holocaust
nor Shoah is used. Types of killing are treated in detail, while central aspects of historical
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