Facing Today reflects Facing History and Ourselves’ primary goal: to honor history in the particular and allow for universal connections that are timely and relevant. Its framework of history and ethics guides our search for current websites, articles, films, and blogs that reflect universal themes such as identity, membership, historical legacy, and civic participation. These themes are represented in Facing History and Ourselves’ primary resource book, “Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior,” and in our organization’s Scope and Sequence [9]—a journey of discovery about connections between history and today. Each Facing Today post is linked to related Facing History materials, including study guides, videos, and lessons. As educators it is our challenge to help students make the essential connections between history and the world today without encouraging facile comparisons or simple parallels between the past and the present.
Revealing the Young Bureaucrats Behind the Nazi Terror
Facing History and Ourselves’ core resource book “Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior [10]” examines the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust with a focus on the moral and ethical questions behind people’s choices.
On Thursday, May 6, the new Topography of Terror museum [11] opened in Berlin “at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters,” Der Spiegel writes [12]. The museum, “designed to highlight the role of the perpetrators, those managers and bureaucrats who from their Berlin offices administered mass murder across Europe,” displays index cards with the details of some of the 7,000 former employees of the SS paramilitary group members and Gestapo secret police force—employees who “worked at the very epicenter of the Nazi terror regime.” Der Spiegel notes that the employees at this “most historically contaminated place in Berlin”—the “headquarters for the Third Reich’s brutal repression”—were not what we think of today as stereotypical Nazi war criminals [13]. The employees were “ambitious university-educated men, aged around 30 and more likely to be ideologues than technocrats,” working their way up the career ladder. After the war, most of them “simply faded away into the background.” Just 16 of the 7,000 “former employees of this terror headquarters” faced prosecution, and of the 16, only 3 were eventually convicted.
- Unlike the nearby Holocaust Memorial, the Topography museum is meant to “highlight the role of the perpetrators.” Who were the perpetrators that the museum is highlighting? What was their role? What do you think we can learn from the stories of the perpetrators?
- The Guardian writes [14] that the museum, which was the Reich Main Security Office, “was the most feared address in Berlin.” What significance, if any, does this add to the museum?
- Der Spiegel explains that the employees were “ambitious university-educated men, aged around 30 and more likely to be ideologues than technocrats.” How does this influence the way you understand who is responsible for the Holocaust?
- How do you explain that only 3 out of 7,000 employees who “worked at the very epicenter of the Nazi terror regime” were convicted for their crimes?
- Topography of Terror museum director Andreas Nachama, a rabbi and a historian, is quoted in the Guardian as saying that “ ‘our aim is to show the topography of how the Nazi-initiated terror was implemented and how both the Nazi party and state institutions merged together. . . . It holds lessons about the workings of other dictatorships as well. . . . The Pinochet dictatorship in Chile or the military junta in Argentina.’ ” How might the history of how “the Nazi party and state institutions merged together” hold lessons about the workings of other dictatorships, such as the Pinochet dictatorships in Chile or the military junta in Argentina? Facing History and Ourselves’ resource book "Stitching Truth: Women’s Protest Art in Pinochet’s Chile [15]” covers much of this history.
- The preface to Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior includes a letter written by a Holocaust survivor that a school principal shared with his teachers on the first day of school. It reads:
Dear Teacher:
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians.
Infants killed by trained nurses.
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
So I am suspicious of education.
My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters,
skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.
What is the message of the letter? How might education help children become more humane? What do you
see as the relationship between the letter and the bureaucrats whose stories are highlighted at the
Topography of Terror Museum?