Should Children be taught about the Holocaust?

I think the 'difficulties' that some people have, and I include myself, is that historical events should not be the subject of  legal sanction. Some people will try to revise history as a political and/or racial imperative, but some people will try to keep history free from revision for exactly the same reasons. It would be like making British history as generally perceived to be in the 1960s the legal position that must be adopted as the truth. This would outlaw much of the research, and indeed much of the political revisionism, that has occurred since that time as new research, information and interpretation has happened. History is not a collection of facts, they are the base building blocks of the edifices that are constructed and sometimes they are indeed follies.

I think it depends what they are taught.

The bollocks story on ‘The Ascent Of Man’ can go straight down the toilet and must be replaced with the fact that the camps housed white german political opponents of Nazism, blacks, gays and Roma Gypsies as well as jews.

The fact the BRITISH invented Concentration Camps is fine but only if it is made clear they were created to imprison white dutch Boer Terrorists …

You are of course right. Events within living memory are frequently talked about by those who experienced them. Film and drama tends also to popularise these events when so many living people recall them. But as the generations age and pass on, so living memory gradually diminishes until the events recede into the history books. And this is what makes history so important lest we ever forget.

When I was a young lad in the 70s I had older relatives who could remember -  and who fought in - the First World War, let alone the Second. There were loads of people around who could remember the Second World War at the time, most of them still young enough to be part of the working population. Some didn't like to talk about it but others never missed an opportunity to do so. In school I had a Jewish classmate who lost relatives in the Holocaust. At the age of 18 in 1983 I worked alongside a German guy who had been here since the war and married an Englishwoman. He was brought here as a prisoner of war having been captured near the end of the war in Western Germany, though he had also fought on the Eastern front. Since his home town of Dresden had been utterly obliterated by us, and the remaining ruins were stuck in East Germany he had no desire to return home. 

It was not entirely uncommon down here in the Southwest to encounter in Cornish or Devonian towns and villages residents with discernible cockney accents, evacuated here from London and who never went back, perhaps because they lost their families.

The war was frequently talked about by those who had memories of it, including occasionally one or two who fought on the other side.

Now most of them are gone, the remaining few in their twilight years. But such is the passage of time. I well remember the Falklands War of 1982, being 17 at the time. Those who fought in it were not a lot older than me for the most part. Now even many of these are approaching retirement age. 

This is why when  events no longer live on within living memory - especially such appalling ones as the Holocaust - it is important that they be taught in schools. Some might have dubious agendas of a kind that makes them find this unwelcome. Holocaust deniers for example. It is because such charlatans exist that makes it all the more important that we teach kids the truth.

i’ll spell it out for you, i already have in two posts here. The decision to create a holocaust memorial day was smeared with the apalling giving of airtime to the chief rabbi to publicly declare the killing of jews by the germans was more important, and more special, than the killing of any other ethnic group at any time in history.

That’s the problem right there.

That because no one is alive to remember they imprisoned political prisoners.

No one is alive to remember they gave not a shit about blacks.

No one is alive to remember how they treated the moral deviants of the weimar republic’s cafe society.

Fortunately old men like me today had as children the letters their fathers received from their grandfathers who left Germany and went to Rhodesia when they saw and realised, long before 1939, what was going on and wanted no part of it, blonde and blue eyed aryan as they were.

But there are not many of us left. And my middle brother had dad’s stamp collection with those letters and i don’t know what he’s done with it. And he can’t remember either.

This thread has unsurprisingly mutated from a quite focused discussion of the inclusion of the Holocaust as a compulsory topic, in fact the only compulsory topic in the KS3 ntional curriculum on history, to a discussion of the Holocaust itself. Since the historiography of the latter is effectively ‘frozen’ and has been for a number of years now there seems little point in participating in yet another debate about it. It’s all been said and there’s nothing new to add. In my view, anyway, the historical events themselves have ceased to be of much interest, far more interesting are the contemporary cultural-political aspects of how the Holocaust has become a foundational elements of Western culture.

That said I think there are two questions on the table.

The first relates to the process by which the H came to a compulsory topic for 13-14 year-olds, while the second concerns the bigger picture of why, how and when it became embedded in Western culture. The first can be dealt with with quite quickly, which I will attempt to do next.

Why not?

The Bomber Command monument didn't exist until 2012 by which time most of the survivors from the war had passed away.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't honour those men.
What they did was vital.