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Eichmann. The phrase ‘The German state persecutes…’ effectively personifies the state
in T3 (140). T2 and T5 contain an equal number of images of perpetrators and victims,
whereas T1, T3 and T4 feature mainly perpetrators. Resistance is depicted as political
resistance in T1 and T4, and as Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto uprising in T2.
Unusually, the ‘women of the Rosenstrasse’ (gentile wives of Jewish men who protested
about and prevented the deportation of their husbands in Berlin in 1943) feature in T4 and
T5. Anne Frank plays a central role via photographs and quotations from her diary in T1, T2
and T5. Individual or state bystanders are not mentioned.
Interpretative paradigms
In addition to the terms ‘Holocaust’ (T1, T2 and T5) and ‘genocide’ (T1, T3 and T4), authors
employ the terms ‘extermination’, ‘killing’, ‘massacre’, and ‘Jewish genocide’. More
significantly, T2 and T5 offer an analysis of terminology and descriptive definitions of the
event as the ‘systematic persecution and destruction of European Jews by the Nazis and
their collaborators between 1939 and 1945’ (T4, 204), and as ‘the Nazis’ systematic plan of
destruction during the Second World War’ (T5, 166). The term ‘National Socialism’ is not
used in T4 or T5. All authors explain the Holocaust in comprehensive historical terms in the
context of the Second World War and as the culmination of radicalized state violence, with
reference to a wide range of documents. T3 is less thorough, and addresses the Holocaust
in a thematic box under the heading ‘Germany under National Socialism’. The motives of
perpetrators are described largely as ideological and antisemitic (in T1, T2 and T4), while
T3 has recourse to social psychology, explaining ulterior motives for atrocities in terms
of popular dissatisfaction following economic crisis and a sense of racial superiority. T5
focuses primarily on a discussion of existing explanations of motives, referring to Zygmunt
Bauman’s critique of modernity, Hannah Arendt’s study of Adolf Eichmann and the
suspension of ethical values. All authors define the aims of perpetrators as the expansion
of ‘living space’ (Lebensraum); in addition to the destruction of the Jewish population (T1,
T4 and T5) and racial superiority (T2 and T3). T4 also suggests the political aim of quashing
opposition via indoctrination. Other aims include economic, political, ideological and
territorial factors, while T3 confines its explanation to social psychological reasons, and T2
introduces elaborate historical explanations of the Holocaust in terms of either irrationality
(referring to Daniel Goldhagen’s identification of antisemitism among German people) or
rationality (referring to the works of Adorno, Arendt, Horkheimer and Todorov). In addition
to applications of historiographical paradigms derived from the works of Arendt, Bauman
and Goldhagen, all authors except those of T1 refer briefly to totalitarianism. However,
T4 and T5 associate totalitarianism not with Stalinism and Nazism, but with similarities
between Nazism and Italian Fascism. In T2 and T4, personal experiences of victims of
the Holocaust are explained in historiographical terms (with reference to Anne Frank) as
‘the return of the subject in historiography’ (T2, 216), and as ‘history from below’ (T4, 171).
Comparisons of different genocides are offered in all textbooks except T4. The Holocaust
is compared particularly with the Armenian genocide in judicial terms (T2) and in terms of
technology and administration and human responsibility, while T3 compares the Holocaust
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