Teach Holocaust from the prospective of a German soldier?

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But the Nazis didn't take regular people and twist them into obedience for a week, though you do have a fair point in mentioning these experiments.
My grandparents were born a few years before the "Machtergreifung" in 1933, and they spent their childhood and early teenage years in a bizarre Disneyland of propaganda, in which they were taught their current culture had a direct connection to knights and chivalry and also the Roman empire. And someone (the "international Jewry") was out to destroy this more than two thousand year old culture,undermining it with bolshevik ideas. You know, cultural Bolsheviks, (not to be confused with cultural Marxists).
What I'm trying to say is: my grandparents really believed this stuff, because it was what the school-books said.

A very bad idea, just like:

• Teaching black history from the perspective of a Klansman would be a bad idea.

• Teaching Constitutional Law from the perspective of Donald J. Trump would be a bad idea.

• Teaching democracy from the perspective of Kim Jong Un would be a bad idea.

• Teaching pedophilia from the perspective of a convicted child molester would be a bad idea.

I can't blame your grandparents for having blind faith in a doctrine that's conditioned from childhood.

Did you know when the common folk learned the Americans and Russians were days from entering Germany there was mass bonfires where nazi memorabilia, certificates, awards, pictures and photos were burned so that no trace of nazism was present when allied soldiers marched into Germany.

German soldiers who were captured all fell into line with the same story that they were obeying orders and knew nothing about the horrors of Nazism. Cognitive dissonance came easy when years of belief was concealed in order to survive.

That would be like teaching the experience of villagers from the perspective of vampires

I think I saw that study. Wasn't it the one where they were told you use electric currents on people and they was being told to turn the voltage up higher and higher and most (if not all) of the people involved were actually compliant.

Or the experience of the Frankenstein's monster from the perspective of those same torch-bearing villagers.

I get what you're saying now Fnord and cyberdad. Like from the perspective of the witch hunter.

It's fascinating how we do hear stories from the actual victims of this type of thing but very rarely from the perspective of the perpetrators.

Maybe it's because once they have caused all of their destruction and the party's over they are so riddled with guilt that they cannot face the truth of what they have done, let alone talk about it.

Why not, though? To be fair, the film is silly.

But in the book, the creature does kill Frankenstein's family members and he sets out to kill it. And Frankenstein is the narrator. (And the book is written as a letter recounting Frankenstein's story, as whitnessed by an arctic explorer).
And it does give the creature's perspective, too, as a central part of it.

Also: what's wrong with a soldier's perspective? I mean, a literal infantry soldier, like my grandfather, nearly starving in the Russian winter as a fifteen year old.
It always sounded like an absolutely awful experience.

There are some fantastic soldiers stories from ww2 but I've never heard one from the perspective of a nazi soldier.

With the pedophilia you are dealing with a massive age appropriate question.

When you ban stuff you only make kids more curious about it. They will feed their curiosity from bad sources. Arming their brains with facts gives society a chance to counter the stuff they get online.

What was mentioned in the article linked in the OP bears repeating teaching the holocaust from the perspective of a German soldier is not necessarily the same as feeding them Nazi propaganda. We were taught what Nazism was and why it was so appealing to the German population. We were also not shielded from consequences of that ideology, the films showing the liberation of the camps with the emaciated people and hundreds of bodies being bulldozed into ditches.

On the other hand the history of racism was sanitized. Lincoln freed the slaves, the bad guy racists came back until the good guy anti racists civil rights people with help from the north made things better. Nothing about the lost cause mythology(klansmen perspective) nor consequences of that perspective of thousands killed in pograms by klansmen and other like minded terrorists, nothing about how influential and popular the klan was up here in Yankee country during the 1920s. If we were not so ignorant about those things Trumpism would not have taken root as much and we would have been prepared to counter it earlier and counter it smarter.

It must be noted we were kept ignorant for the purpose of keeping as much racism around as possible. The current “woke” push to keep us ignorant is for the purpose preventing as much racism as possible. Same mistake.

There's too much info there for my tiny brain to absorb.

I mean I'm thinking that you could have made two or even maybe three separate threads out of this.

I can see how all this does connect somewhere down the line for you op. But it's just not working for me.

I'm getting that maybe history needs to be taught in schools from every angle so that people have a fair account of things.

I mean I'm not really upto scratch on woke anyway.

Are you saying that not educating people on the truth is making us more woke and that in turn is preventing widespread racism.

So is wokism a good or a bad thing op?

Stepping into the minds of madmen just to see the world from their perspective, it's kinda frightening.

I am saying that the woke want to keep certain things from being taught for the purposes of preventing racism but keeping people ignorant will have the opposite effect.


It is frightening, that is the point.

I can actually see that wokeness could be detrimental in certain areas. I mean you cannot and should not rewrite history by leaving certain important information out of people's education.

I'm thinking that in 10,20, or 50 years time there will be things that just won't ever be written about or talked of ever again.

I've thought this for a while.

I mean we're in 1984 territory here. Just deleting things out.

I can honestly see that this is the way we are going.

Not sure if any of this is relevant to your thread ASpartOfMe. Apologies if it is not.

I do think there is value in trying to understand the worst of humanity. It can help us avoid repeating horrible mistakes. We should also help our children and young people learn to think critically and come to their own conclusions, which will mean that they need to learn to discard bad conclusions.

That being said, it should be apparent that when we teach history of awful events, we should be sympathetic towards victims and not towards perpetrators. The Holocaust is not a complex situation, nor is it one that is distant enough to feel appropriate for casual discussion. I recently came across the exam paper I completed in Year 8 history (taught to 12-13 year olds) where I was asked to give an opinion on whether Mary I or Elizabeth I was a better monarch, and then the same comparison for Elizabeth I and Henry VIII, with marks being awarded for how well you supported your view rather than what the view was. That seems like the sort of thing that would be appropriate for helping children think critically and form opinions. American? Ask them to write about whether they prefer James Madison or James Monroe. French? Ask them about the Jacobins vs the Girondins. Don't go asking them about the Holocaust, or whether slavery was a good thing. Those aren't topics which lend themselves to balance - there is a very clear right and wrong.

Jackson vs. Lincoln would be a better comparison.

Saying you want to teach the Holocaust from the POV of a German soldier is simply ignorant. You could teach the experience of a typical German during that whole period, it would make good parallels with the US during the period of Trump's dominance over US politics. Das Boot was a film about German sailors during WWII and nobody had any problem with that.

BTW regarding the OP, I see zero downside to teaching kids about white privilege, it's highly appropriate. Why would anyone object to that?