| dc.description.abstract | This project investigates the engagement of American educators with the meaning of Nazism and the atrocities of that regime between 1933 and 1964. It demonstrates that teachers, administrators, those in the textbook industry, parents, and educational activists increasingly associated Nazism with the murder of the Jews while simultaneously emphasizing state centralization and police power as the signifiers of that system. This resulted in two primary ways that Americans used presentations of Nazism to make statements about America and advocate for their own political and ideological stances.
To many, the Nazi regime became an analogy for teaching the danger of governmental power—often described as totalitarianism. If centralized power represented the threat, then the assault on the Jews served as the warning of what such a system would result in. The consequence was that even while educators emphasized the murder of the Jews, they downplayed antisemitism and stressed political calculations as the cause. Propaganda, national educational programs, anti-racism education, desegregation, and forced bussing all signified the same forces that had taken control of Germany. The danger of allowing the government to enforce such policies recalled images of extermination camps.
Other educators emphasized the racial ideology of the Nazis and connected it to bigotry in America. Domestic forms of discrimination presaged fascistic ideals among Americans. These educators deemphasized the specificity of Nazi antisemitism in their linkages of it to American discrimination in favor of a more generalized discrimination. They believed that racial and religious bigotry, support for segregation, and the burning of Black churches all evidenced fascistic forces in America. They imagined concentration camps and genocide when they considered the risk of allowing discrimination to fester in the United States.
By the 1960s, when educators began to emphasize the need for education which taught specifically of the Nazi atrocities, the mental categories by which they would interpret that event had already been set. When American teachers of the 1970s taught Holocaust education, they did so with these preexisting interpretations. Holocaust memory was built of the component parts of how earlier Americans had interpreted and represented Nazism and the atrocities of that regime. | en |
