# How to teach the Holocaust in a world shaken by wars? **Date de l'événement :** 27/01/2026 * Publié le 27/01/2026 ### Date 27/01/2026 ## Chapô **On the occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, historian Agnieszka Wierzcholska reflects on the contemporary challenges of the transmission of knowledge about the Shoah. Drawing on her research and teaching experience, she underscores how rigorous historical understanding remains essential to counter distortion, political instrumentalisation and misleading or superficial analogies.** ## Corps du texte I often go for a walk on January 27th, through the steles of the Holocaust-Memorial in Berlin. January 27th is the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp by the Red Army, and it was the date chosen by the UN in 2005 to **commemorate the mass murder of 6 million European Jews during the Second World War : International Holocaust Remembrance Day**. The life stories of Cyla Regenbogen, Gizela Lamensdorf or Nachum Grzywacz – and other Jewish victims of the Holocaust whom I “encountered” in my research – come back to me then. Some of them survived and left testimonies; others I met and interviewed; and still others left only a small paper trail in the archives — the only remaining evidence of their lives on Earth. In the capital of the country of the perpetrators, in the city center, right next to the most prominent symbols of German statehood and history, nearly two hectares of land were carved out to memorialize, reflect upon and mourn the Jewish victims of Hitler’s Germany, and to warn future generations.  **As a scholar and teacher of the Holocaust**, I encountered many students that had an idea about the Holocaust, but often lacked detailed knowledge of how it unfolded: what exactly happened when and where, what was the extent of the crimes in different regions, how it was perpetrated by whom and in what broader context. Acquiring knowledge, especially when it comes to the history of mass violence, is challenging, exhausting, and time-consuming. But **knowledge shields us from Holocaust distortion, from political instrumentalization and from the pitfalls of false and superficial analogies** that become increasingly common today.  Last year, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) released an _Index on Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness_, exposing a **global trend in fading knowledge of basic facts about the Holocaust**. In this study, 20% of French adults responded that they had not heard or weren’t sure if they had heard of the Shoah prior to taking the survey. 46% of the 18-29 year olds professed such ignorance. However, in all countries surveyed, over 90% of the respondents stated that Holocaust teaching is important. The desire to learn about the Holocaust and the decline of knowledge about it stand in stark contrast.  Holocaust education in schools and universities is not self-evident. When Raul Hilberg, today considered the doyen of Holocaust studies, decided to write his PhD about the mass murder of Jews during World War II – at that time the term Holocaust was not yet in usage – his advisor Franz Neumann strongly discouraged him. Himself a German Jew who fled the Nazis and wrote about the Nazi state, Neumann warned Hilberg that with such a dissertation topic he would never find an academic appointment. **Researching the Holocaust was considered academic suicide then**. And indeed, it took Hilberg five years to find a publisher for the _Destruction of European Jews_. The book finally came out in 1961 and became a seminal contribution that laid the foundations for future Holocaust research. Hilberg’s book translations into German and French appeared only 20 years later - in the 1980s.  **In Germany**, often regarded as the leader in coming to terms with its difficult past, the **first university chair for Holocaust studies has been established 2017** – at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main. A few years earlier, in 2013, the Center for Holocaust Studies was created as a branch of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. In Poland, the Centre for Holocaust Studies at the Polish Academy of Science created in 2003 by Barbara Engelking became one of the most prolific institutions to advance research on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe but their fixed budget is extremely small.  The diffusion of knowledge and research on the Holocaust is not as widespread as one might assume at first glance. The establishment of Holocaust education is the effect of a constant effort of committed researchers and tireless educators. It is an achievement, although far from perfect, that will fade if we don’t consciously maintain it, defend the field, engage in it and enlarge it. When Hilberg wrote his book, he was **primarily interested in the perpetrator apparatus, the German bureaucracy, and the process of extermination**. He claimed his book was not about Jews, and for a long time perpetrator research dominated the field. The voices of the victims were neglected; they were considered by many scholars as too subjective, too traumatized, and therefore unfit as evidence for constructing objective knowledge.  However, the lack of their integration into Holocaust narratives caused epistemological imbalances—some topics were given far less attention, and the reactions of Jews, their agency, and resilience were overlooked. Saul Friedländer therefore called for an integrated history of the Holocaust. He saw it as one of the key challenges for historians to establish a framework for interpretation that would integrate the policies of the Nazi perpetrators, the attitudes of German and European societies, and the fate of the victims into a single narrative. The **testimonies of the victims**, when recognized for their importance, shed light on yet another pivotal issue: they told us about the attitudes and the behavior of the surrounding non-Jewish population and their role in the Holocaust. The term bystander – coined first by Hilberg in 1992 – was largely used for groups that could neither be categorized as perpetrators nor victims. However, in light of the newest studies **the term bystander proves to be misleading**, a euphemism really, since it obfuscates the reality of how the surrounding non-Jewish populations were implicated into the murder of Jews, how they were drawn in the process of destroying Jewish communities by the Germans, how they were able to profit from the Holocaust. This leaves many European countries – were they allies, collaborators of, or themselves occupied and terrorized by Nazi Germany – with the difficult question of coming to terms with their own difficult past. Difficult in the sense that, as Saul Friedländer put it: _“Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews (some of the Christian churches declared that converted Jews were part of the flock, up to a point); to the contrary, many social constituencies, many power groups were directly involved in the expropriation of the Jews and eager, be it out of greed, for their wholesale disappearance. Thus Nazi and related anti-Jewish policies could unfold to their most extreme levels without the interference of any major countervailing interests.”_ 1 The process of collective reflection and historical reappraisal of one’s own implication in the Holocaust is being worked through in different societies at different paces. The issue remains, nonetheless, continuously subjected to **political instrumentalization and collective denial**. In Poland, Holocaust distortion and even, as Jan Grabowski put it, “white washing the Holocaust” became the official policy during the rule of the Law and Justice party in recent years. But let us not fool ourselves, this is not just a Polish problem – it’s a transnational one. Holocaust distortion, flawed analogies, and antisemitism are on the rise. What does it mean to teach the Holocaust today? Students are growing up in a world shaken by wars. The postwar order —and even the value systems of democracies, which are increasingly failing to protect minorities — seem to be crumbling. Uncertainties lie ahead. Therefore, **teaching the Holocaust becomes an even greater imperative but faces a variety of challenges.** Holocaust educators in different parts of the world describe these challenges depending on their region and their own positionality, whether in the US, Israel, Poland, or Germany. Yet, our concern remains teaching about what it takes for a "Zivilisationsbruch" -- a civilizational rupture or breakdown, as Dan Diner called the Holocaust -- to happen and what its consequences look like. This is our responsibility, and transmitting very concrete knowledge about it is our tool.  Note : 1\. Saul Friedlander, _The Years of Extermination.  Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945_, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2007, p. XXI. **Licence :** `#CC-BY-ND (Attribution, Pas de modification)` ### Thématique `#Géopolitique` **Langue :** `#Anglais` --- ### Navigation pour IA - [Index de tous les contenus](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/llms.txt) - [Plan du site (Sitemap)](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/sitemap.xml) - [Retour à l'accueil](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/)