Abstract
The personal and societal devastations wrought by the genocidal actions of individuals remain confounding to psychologists. As instructors aim to increase students’ engagement in global concerns, courses that address the often confusing interplay among prejudice, mass persuasion, human aggression, and prosocial behavior seem to be well placed to reduce these ambiguities. With previous examples in the teaching literature scarce, this article describes a new course on the psychology of genocide through an interdisciplinary blend of historical and psychological evidence of the single worst episode of genocide in human history: the Holocaust. Course themes and topics, readings and assignments, and recommended audiovisual supports provide a useful framework for future application of this new course in the psychology of genocide.
The 20th century was a century of genocide (Mann, 2005; Totten, Parsons, & Charny, 2004), and the Holocaust (or Shoah) is situated at the very center of this century. As the living memory of the events of the Holocaust fades away, the significance of teaching the history and psychology of the Shoah becomes increasingly important. Some authors have suggested that our current generation of students is poorly equipped (e.g., Misco, 2009) and even resistant (Lindquist, 2006) to discuss the underlying factors that continue to make genocide possible around the world. Others have also called for a deepening of social science students’ historical thinking because they often lack an understanding of individual decisions contained in the Holocaust or their knowledge lacks nuance or is often incomplete, biased, or cursory (Howe, 2004; Short, 2003).
Recently, the internationalization of the curriculum in psychology has emerged as a foundational objective (APA, 2007; Howe, 2004). Likewise, creating psychologically literate citizens (i.e., students who can apply complicated psychological theory and findings to other disciplines) is another primary outcome identified for the future of the discipline (McGovern et al., 2009). Embedded in such objectives is also the desire for increased engagement with the global community, both past and present. A particularly effective way for learners to transcend geographic and cultural boundaries may lie in coursework in the psychology of genocide. The necessity of teaching the Holocaust to modern students, what one Holocaust educator calls a “democratic imperative” (Misco, 2009, p. 15), ideally leads from understanding and knowledge to prevention. And ultimately, the prevention of future genocide requires an elaboration of the risk factors for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism (Staub, 1992; Woolf, 2008). The discipline of psychology is uniquely positioned to contribute to prevention through research findings challenging the culture of violence (e.g., collectivism as a deterrent to intergroup violence; see Newman & Erber, 2002), nationalism (e.g., activation of “us–them” thinking and intergroup conflict theory; see Myers, 2009), and controlled media (mass persuasion inciting violence as a means of conflict resolution; see Pratkanis & Aronson, 2001) typically found in genocidal societies, most notably, Nazi Germany.
Genocide is a coordinated plan to annihilate the individual lives of a targeted national group through disintegration of the institutions of culture, economics, language, religion, and destruction of other essential foundations of personal security, liberty, and dignity (Totten et al., 2004; Waller, 2007). As the most comprehensive example of genocide in history (Friedlander, 2009; Mann, 2005), the Holocaust is justified as a subject worthy of investigation and understanding, most notably because the scourge of genocide has not faded from human experience and historians and psychologists alike continue to struggle to explain the causal factors (Bergen, 2009; Engel, 2000; Woolf, 2008).
There have been but a few attempts to blend historical and psychological literatures in the teaching of the Holocaust. In one of the first efforts to employ an interdisciplinary approach, Solkoff and Allen (1978) taught the Holocaust focusing on such themes as authoritarian personality analysis, the psychology of violence, analysis of the behavior of camp inmates, and the psychology of survivors. This course was heavy on the Freudian interpretation of perpetrator motives and actions. Another teaching resource, excellent in its breadth of treatment, approached the Holocaust from a psychological perspective, employing history essentially as a backdrop to psychological themes but without incorporating the history into a meaningful interdisciplinary framework (Woolf, 2001). In addition, there is only a cursory listing of course requirements and support materials used in the course and the required texts come from secondary, interpretive sources. The last course example, from Albrecht and Nelson (2001), combining the disciplines of psychology and public health, emphasized how the Holocaust represents the extreme end of biased discrimination (a “continuum of hate”; p. 290) that begins with prejudicial thinking processes, is manifested and reinforced through oppressive language and rhetoric, and, undeterred, leads to mass killing. One example of this emphasis was presentation of Nazi hate speech and persuasion tactics to mobilize crowd emotions and to escalate active persecution of marginalized groups across Europe. However, Albrecht and Nelson limited their teaching of the Holocaust to the themes of social prejudice and oppression, survivor psychology, and the altruistic behaviors of rescuers. Because of this narrow focus, many aspects regarding the interplay between historical factors and psychology went unexplored.
Of the related studies that have evaluated teaching rationale, only a few have investigated the effect of participation in university-level Holocaust courses. Researchers have identified positive attitude changes regarding anti-Semitism and increased tolerance toward minorities (Gordon, Simon, & Weinberg, 2003), and others have documented positive shifts in students’ interpretations of the consequences of the Holocaust. Specifically, students shifted from a particularistic to a more universalistic interpretation of the Holocaust (Lazar, Litvak-Hirsch, Bar-On, & Beyth-Marom, 2009). This means that subjective student perceptions emphasizing the “uniqueness of Jewish suffering” evolve into more universal interpretations emphasizing the power of situational forces common to all human beings. Lazar and colleagues (2009) also found that with an interdisciplinary focus, these students developed a more reflective, sophisticated understanding whereby they could place themselves in the context of the Holocaust (e.g., projecting oneself into the role of victim, perpetrator, bystander, or rescuer).
In light of this earlier work, it is apparent that the sociohistorical context of the discipline of psychology (Ritchey & Bott, 2010) points to teaching the Holocaust as a fundamentally cross-disciplinary endeavor (Howe, 2004; Petropoulos & Roth, 2005; Solkoff, 2001; Totten & Feinberg, 2001). In fact, Weiten (2008) and Myers (2009) have shown that psychology as a discipline is intimately informed by anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and history, and all these disciplines contribute an essential foundation through which psychological research is applied. For example, recent scholarship in Holocaust studies that integrates the psychological perspective with the traditional historical one has advanced our understanding of some of the causal factors of the Holocaust in significant and novel ways. Notable examples include explaining the complex situational dynamics that can turn victims into brutal victimizers of their long-time neighbors (Gross, 2002) and how ordinary individuals can succumb to genocidal thinking and behavior (Waller, 2007). In fact, the realization that the components necessary for the destruction of European Jewry are interwoven among the shared histories of World War II and the Holocaust provides a necessary starting point for joining psychology with history pedagogically. Restated, without World War II, there would be no Holocaust (Stone, 2006). For instance, German control of large numbers of people in Eastern Europe and the identification of the “enemies” of the German state combined under the cover of war for the implementation and normalization of mass murder on a scale not previously seen in human history (Bergen, 2009; Lindquist, 2006; Mann, 2005; Petropoulos & Roth, 2005). Therefore, the necessity of the war to the Holocaust must then be reflected in any efforts to teach about the Holocaust, and this factor is largely absent or underemphasized (e.g., students’ consideration, narrowed to the period between 1933 and 1945, typically lacks attention to antecedents and legacies) in the few extant interdisciplinary courses on teaching the Holocaust through a psychological lens (Albrecht & Nelson, 2001; Lazar et al., 2009; Solkoff, 2001; Solkoff & Allen, 1978; Woolf, 2001).
To address some of the shortcomings in the aforementioned teaching literature, I created a new collaborative specialty seminar in the psychology of the Holocaust. I also offer an update and extension of two of these earlier works (e.g., Albrecht & Nelson, 2001; Woolf, 2001) with a new set of emphases and essential readings. I take advantage of new resource materials including a recently advanced comprehensive explanatory model of genocide (Waller, 2007) and the availability of primary source material taken from archival evidence only recently accessible to scholars and educators (Desbois, 2009; Gross, 2002; Hochstadt, 2004). To the best of my knowledge, this interdisciplinary seminar represents the first complete attempt to blend Holocaust and genocide studies literatures with an interdisciplinary approach systematically merging the disciplines of psychology and history.
Course Structure, Readings, Themes, and Topics
Course Structure and Readings
Created for the fall 2010 semester, the psychology of the Holocaust genocide course was team taught with a colleague in history as a cross-listed elective open to all students in both the history and psychology departments at our university. Populated exclusively with upper-division students, the course met three times a week for 50-min sessions during a 15-week semester, and lectures and topic areas were divided evenly between the coprofessors. Future versions of the course will be taught over an 80-min session twice a week as this will afford more time for in-depth discussion of complex topics than is currently allowed. Four primary course readings were required for the course: (a) Doris Bergen’s (2009) book, War and Genocide, a highly readable and concise overview of the Nazi expansionist war and related genocide; (b) This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Borowski, 1992), a powerful fictionalized account of the brutality of the Auschwitz death camp (a literary treatment told through first-person testimony of a deputy kapo in the infamous Kanada sonderkommando [Rees, 2005] responsible for unloading the prisoner transports); (c) Neighbors (Gross, 2002), the vivid eyewitness account of the uncoerced massacre of the entire Jewish population of Jedwabne, Poland, by their ethnic Polish neighbors on a single summer day in July 1941; and (d) The Holocaust by Bullets (Desbois, 2009), the first definitive account of the murder of more than 1.5 million Jews and other “undesirables” by Nazi mobile killing military units and their auxiliaries across the Ukraine from 1941 to 1944 through painstaking reconstruction of events using forensic evidence, eyewitness testimony, and recently available archival material. Respectively, these main sources met four principal genres set forth by the coinstructors: a brief core reader on the interrelated history of the war and Holocaust, memoir literature, psychological analysis of perpetrators, and modern primary research on collaborator and bystander behavior.
Supplemental required readings consisted of collections of primary historical documents (Hochstadt, 2004; Klee, Dressen, & Riess, 1996; e.g., postwar testimonies by witnesses to Nazi euthanasia and extermination actions, propaganda speeches and artifacts, resistance memoirs, and bystander confessions, among many other documents) and several chapter-length excerpts from Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Waller, 2007) and The Psychology of Good and Evil (Staub, 2003), both seminal readers from the discipline of psychology for presenting complementary models of comparative genocide, with the Holocaust as the prime example of ethnic cleansing and genocidal actions. These readings were interspersed throughout the course according to the relevant topical theme. Select core concepts from general psychology that correlate with the required readings include the power of the situation (e.g., Stanford Prison Experiment; Zimbardo, 2004), conformity and obedience to authority (Milgram, 1974), influence and social persuasion (group influence and propaganda; Cialdini, 2001; Pratkanis & Aronson, 2001), cognitive psychology and memory (e.g., malleability of survivor and witness memory; Loftus, 1979), learned helplessness (e.g., victimization; Myers, 2009), social cognition (e.g., learning perpetration by participation, blaming the victim, moral disengagement and dehumanization; Bandura, 1999; Waller, 2007), bystander apathy and the diffusion of responsibility (Bar-On, 2001), prejudice and cognitive dissonance (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2010), and many others.
Structure and Themes
We recommend using two specific structures to organize the course: chronological, because of the fact the course elaborates historical events that occurred in real time, and the social psychological. For the latter, we chose four overarching patterns including social thinking (e.g., attribution theory, dissonance, heuristics, power of roles on behavior), social influence (e.g., propaganda and mass persuasion, conformity, group influence, and social control), social relations (e.g., prejudice, aggression, altruism, and conflict resolution), and applied concepts (Aronson et al., 2010; Myers, 2009). Blending the history of the Holocaust also means creation of a complementary set of themes that served as the foundation of the course outline. We chose the chronological pattern in which each theme required 1–2 weeks. Accordingly, six major course themes emerged after careful study of the associated literature (Berenbaum & Peck, 2002; Engel, 2000; Friedlander, 2009; Hilberg, 1992): (a) Origins of the Holocaust (including precursors such as anti-Semitism, nationalism, imperialism, and World War I), (b) Persecution and Emigration (rise of the Nazi regime, creation of the racial state, and ongoing use of propaganda), (c) Toward Genocide (outbreak of war, perpetration, and collaboration), (d) The Nazi Death Camps (ghettoization and the “factories of death”), (e) Fighting Back (rescue and resistance), and (f) Aftermath and Remembrance (justice, memory, and memorialization).
Essential Readings by Course Topics
We also created an essential supplemental reading list organized by the six aforementioned course themes (see letters denoting each theme) and their associated topic areas: (a) general overview of the Holocaust and World War II, with related preconditions of anti-Semitism, consequences of World War I and interwar German history, and the murderous legacy of European colonialism encapsulated in the Herero genocide of 1904 in southwestern Africa (Bergen, 2009; Engel, 2000; Friedlander, 2009; Hilberg, 1992; Mann, 2005); (b) Nazi propaganda, conformity, and mass persuasion (Herf, 2006; Pratkanis & Aronson, 2001); (c) “ordinary” perpetrators and collaborators (Browning, 1992; Rhodes, 2002; Sereny, 1983; Waller, 2007), “life unworthy of life,” examining the T4 euthanasia program and the subsequent Nazi extermination policies (Berenbaum & Peck, 2002; Lifton, 2000), and collaborators and bystanders (Barnett, 2000; Gross, 2002; Hilberg, 1992; Staub, 2003); (d) “the architecture of death,” examining creation of the ghettos and the universe of camps, with emphasis on Mauthausen (Austria) and Auschwitz (Horwitz, 1990; Lanzmann, 1985; Rees, 2005), and the psychology of the genocide victim (Gourevitch, 1998; Hilberg, 1992; Staub, 2003; Waller, 2007); (e) the altruism of rescuers and resisters (Block & Drucker, 1992; London, 1970; Oliner & Oliner, 1988; Staub, 1992; Tec, 1986); and (f) the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the plight of the displaced persons, and the moral ambiguities of remembrance (Petropoulos & Roth, 2005; Stone, 2006).
Required Assignments, Supporting Materials, and Activities
Required Assignments
Course assignments included two essay-style exams, a book review, a small-group presentation (limited to no more than four self-organized students), and a final written research paper completed at the close of the course which required students to integrate their command of the Holocaust literature with a personal interest area. We included detailed rubrics in the syllabus and emphasized careful consideration of the interdisciplinary nature of their chosen paper topic. The book review project allowed students to choose a relevant book, pending professor approval, outside of the course reading list but that could serve as a catalyst for the research paper project or in-class presentation. The book choices ranged from memoir and biography to character and historical analyses. To illustrate, this assignment could offer students interested in social psychology the chance to explore the concept of the just-world phenomenon (Myers, 2009) through a biographical analysis of the motivations of neighbors denouncing neighbors who were harboring Jews. For the small-group presentation (lasting 50 min), students presented an assigned topic and led their colleagues in meaningful discussion. The topic list, designed to coincide with the course outline included Anne Frank, the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the rescue at Le Chambon, surviving the ghetto, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. One memorable student contribution for this assignment included an exceptional presentation of memoir and historiography of “Surviving the Warsaw Ghetto” where students infused their own voices of narration into a powerful audiovisual account of the suffering endured by Polish Jews as the Nazi killing machinery eventually closed in around them. As an alternative to research papers, we also recommend a service learning project. One option is to ask students to address present-day parallel factors to those they have been learning about (e.g., racism, stereotyping, group pressure, etc.). This type of project requires considerable planning but holds great promise as a crystallizing learning experience. Examples might include volunteering at community resource centers for survivors and children of survivors or, for study-abroad programs, an international service learning option involving the restoration of Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe.
Supporting Materials
The audiovisual resources available to the teacher of the Holocaust are myriad. We employed numerous documentary and popular films illustrating the relationship of World War II as pretext to genocide. Two related films, exceptional in their historical accuracy (e.g., use of rare archival footage) and in their emphasis on interviews with contemporaries of the time, included the companion BBC video series Nazis: A Warning from History (Rees, 1997) and Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State (Rees, 2005). Ever a source of primary documentation, Nazi propaganda films, speeches, and posters produced by the Reich ministry of propaganda (e.g., Der Ewige Jude and Jud Suss, readily available on YouTube) also frequented in-class presentations, and these media represent the epitome of persuasive messaging in the social psychology of persuasion (Pratkanis & Aronson, 2001). Most notable among all of the Nazi propaganda produced is Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1935), probably the purest form of propaganda documentary film ever created (Simpson, 2008). Triumph of the Will documents the proceedings of the 1934 National Socialist Party’s political rally at Nuremburg, Germany, and illustrates in the most vivid terms the ideology and methodology underpinning the rise of the Nazi government ahead of the apocalypse yet to come in Europe in the late 1930s. We also required an evening viewing of one popular film, Conspiracy (Pierson, 2001), which is the acclaimed dramatization of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference that authorized the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Furthermore, a particularly powerful in-class viewing experience was the brief (32 min) but highly commended French archival film on the death camps, Night and Fog (Renais, 1960).
Before one class lecture on Nazi eugenics, euthanasia programs, and camp experimentations, we also required viewing of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) online exhibit titled “‘Deadly Medicine’: Creating the Master Race” (USHMM, 2010a). This online exhibit is exemplary in its illustration of the complicity of psychiatry and clinical psychology in the genocidal actions of German authorities. Finally, another outstanding resource in the teaching the psychology of the Holocaust includes the USHMM “Voices on Antisemitism” podcasts (USHMM, 2010b; e.g., two podcasts of special consideration: Helen Jonas, servant to notorious SS camp commandant Amon Goeth, and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel addressing victimization, Holocaust memory, and the ongoing trials of Holocaust denialism). Of particular note is the significant overlap of these latter two resources in illustrating the psychological concepts of research ethics, developmental influences on identity formation in trauma victims, and the merger of the role and the person (Myers, 2009).
Activities
Activities designed to illuminate concepts in the psychology of the Holocaust are abundant. Foremost in our students’ memories was the speakers’ series that accompanied the course. On separate occasions, the class hosted guest speakers with direct experience with genocide. These lecturers were a particular highlight of the course: a husband–wife pair of child Holocaust survivors from Hungary and a local retired GI/medic who served in the U.S. Army and was a witness to Nazi murder across Europe through the liberation of concentration camps near the close of the war. These events were open to the campus community as well. Regrettably, these types of events are quickly dwindling as an opportunity, but there are creative ways to preserve the content of such visits. One example includes students creating their own video or audio podcasts of interviews with survivors and archiving these interviews in the campus library for future use. Finally, remembrance ceremonies can be integrated into the course as well, particularly around international genocide commemoration days in April of each year.
For instructors wanting to teach lessons in individual responsibility, topics involving resistance and ghetto uprisings, war-time partisans, and the White Rose student resistance movement in Germany (Berenbaum & Peck, 2002) are well matched with activities that allow students to create visual (i.e., maps, photos) and document-based (i.e., diaries, letters, memoirs, poems, and songs) portfolios that could be used in class. Similarly, students can create a photographic timeline of events, applying course concepts to the unfolding of historical events. For example, students could create a scholarly sourced website outlining the origins and consequences of bystander apathy during the Holocaust. In a similar vein, the use of social media (e.g., Facebook, “Second Life”) shows boundless potential as a classroom supplement to experience current events related to prejudice, group conflict, and social influence. Other typical activities include in-class debates (e.g., “Should the allies have bombed Auschwitz?”), creation of modern propaganda posters for contemporary issues (e.g., “war on terror,” HIV/AIDS, school bullying), and class visits to local and regional memorials to the Holocaust.
We also encourage instructors to seek every opportunity to blend more imaginative disciplines with the psychology of the Holocaust (art, music, literature; e.g., one poignant example includes the art created by captive children in the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia; see Volavkova, 1993). Such interaction with the life stories of people caught up in genocide should also include those left behind after genocide has occurred. We include a letter-writing exercise that facilitates in-class dialogue on the sensitive issue of reconciliation, a key concept in conflict resolution sections of social psychology and peace studies courses (see Bar-On, 1995). As homework after the section on memorialization of the Holocaust, students write a letter to a descendant of a Nazi perpetrator as if they were a descendant of a Holocaust survivor. Students then share these letters in class as discussion starters.
Finally, exercises where personal stories are infused throughout the course can be powerful in communicating the firsthand experiences of victims. The course readings pertaining to memoir are especially well suited to these exercises (e.g., Borowski, 1992; Tec, 1986). The scale of the loss associated with the Holocaust demands that instructors use personal stories to accompany the events (Misco, 2009). Students trying to grasp the magnitude of human suffering and loss often experience detachment, making the course content difficult to cognitively comprehend (Lindquist, 2006). For instance, an absorbing in-class exercise that elucidates the depth of suffering experienced by victims involves students tracing the steps of a refugee (wartime and postwar), guided by the descriptions provided by Block and Drucker (1992). A leading resource for addressing these personal stories is the book Holocaust Testimonies (Langer, 1991), a profound summary of the human costs suffered by Holocaust survivors, some 1,400 in total.
As a closing remark, there is one caveat worth noting: We advise against using experiential in-class exercises because these tend to diminish the reality and complexity of the events and may cause unintended emotional response in learners (Totten & Feinberg, 2001). For instance, instructors should be very cautious with role-playing as it creates the potential for inappropriate reenactment of events from this period of history. More bluntly stated, experiential activities are more likely to be offensive than worthwhile as learning activities (Lazar et al., 2009).
Final Reflections and Recommendations
One of the most engaging and rewarding courses we have ever taught, the interdisciplinary course on the Holocaust received high marks from the students. End-of-seminar student course evaluations (n = 29) were rated very highly. The respondent group (20 women and 9 men) consisted of 16 psychology majors and 13 from history. Based on a scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), students reported that they enjoyed the course (M = 4.59, SD = 0.73) and that they learned a great deal (M = 4.68, SD = 0.56), that the assignments assisted them in grasping course concepts (M = 4.45, SD = 0.73), that the instructors were knowledgeable (M = 4.91, SD = 0.29), and that the instructors created an environment that stressed collaboration and collegiality (M = 4.77, SD = 0.52). Responses to open-ended questions further revealed strong support for the interdisciplinary format and expanding the course to an 80-min session. One student commented, “I was able to discover perspectives I had not thought of as possible explanations, and was taught how to apply them to the course material.” Furthermore, a majority remarked that the course afforded them the chance to challenge intolerance and racism and that we all have shared responsibilities as part of this common human family (Short, 2003). This course also challenges students to consider their place in the world by fostering humanistic goals of tolerance, caring about the affairs of others, and promotion of inclusiveness and sensitization to indifference (Misco, 2009; Staub, 2003).
In future versions of this course we will require portions of Newman and Erber’s (2002) edited volume Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust early on as an important primer to the social psychology of the Holocaust as many students reported that they lacked familiarity with some of the crucial foundational aspects of psychological theory and research. As is the case with many integrative courses, the psychology of the Holocaust is best placed as a capstone course within the curriculum as it represents a culmination of topics typically presented early in the discipline. Moreover, we highly recommend a team-teaching approach with history as the essential supporting discipline to psychology, especially for those instructors with minimal knowledge of historical forces and events. The coteaching approach is not essential though because of the numerous background materials provided in this article and in other sources (Lindquist, 2006; Totten & Feinberg, 2001).
Several challenges exist in teaching this course. The subject material has the potential to be emotionally overwhelming. We gave great care to presenting more graphic and disturbing content with considerable sensitivity and repeated advance warning. We maintained an open-door policy for students wanting follow-up conversation and processing of the course materials. We also reiterated multiple times the availability of the campus counseling service should students find themselves unable to move beyond any emotional distress.
Students and instructor alike also noted that greater effort needed to be given in this course to more fully integrating the history and psychology of our studies. At the conclusion of the course, we realized that instructors from differing disciplines often have rather different guiding theoretical assumptions and different teaching styles. For instance, history often relies on nomothetic assumptions, whereas psychology often draws from idiographic suppositions. And given that few guiding frameworks exist by which one could create a course such as this (Gordon et al., 2003), the need to better unify the course became apparent at the end of our class. One simple solution is to blend the natural linear (history) and thematic (psychology) approaches of each discipline more intentionally in the structure of the course outline and lectures.
Alternatively, this course could be collapsed and presented as a module to core courses in social psychology, abnormal psychology, and personality theory. For example, in social psychology courses, one could address the major themes of social identity, aggression, and prosocial behavior by elaborating and applying the psychological findings taken from analysis of perpetrators of genocide (Browning, 1992; Staub, 2003), bystanders (Barnett, 2000), and the motivations and behaviors of rescuers (Block & Drucker, 1992; Oliner & Oliner, 1988). In abnormal psychology, posttraumatic stress reactions are well illustrated in the findings relating to victimization during the Holocaust (Friedlander, 2009; Hilberg, 1992). And in a personality course, factors pertaining to unconscious, trait, and humanistic factors in personality development are uniquely explained via the literature on perpetrator and collaborator behavior. For example, using this evidence, we refute the widely held notion that only exceptionally “evil” people (e.g., motivated by unconscious drives or some inborn flaw) are capable of genocide and that cruelty correlates more with very particular patterns of social interaction than it does with characterological or idiosyncratic tendencies of the perpetrators themselves (Bauman, 1989).
Ultimately, we ask our students to conceptualize the Shoah not just as a “Jewish concern” but as one that all of humanity must face (Woolf, 2008). We also espouse the idea that the underlying and essential value of such a course is human welfare (Staub, 2003). Finally, we advocate for understanding the dangers of apathy, silence, and indifference as essential contributing factors to the genocidal crimes committed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators (Barnett, 2000).
The very essence of an interdisciplinary course on the Holocaust requires that one wrestle with the aggression and altruism evident in humanity. Individual choices cumulatively led to the Nazi genocide, and when students recognize, as they did here, that perpetrators, victims, and bystanders alike are independent human beings who are capable of exercising moral judgment, they move that much closer to prevention, albeit incrementally. Staub (2003) reinforces this aspiration by stressing that the value of self-awareness and information is most profound when exercised in the transformation of the bystander. In sum, the diminishing loss of living memory of the genocides of the twentieth century, particularly the Holocaust, stands as a stark reminder that we as educators must carry on the moral imperative of teaching the causes and consequences of genocide.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
A sincere debt of gratitude to Dr. Joel Davis, colleague in history at Concordia University and cocreator of this course. Portions of this article were presented at the Powell and Heller 2011 Holocaust Conference at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington, March 2011. A course prospectus for an identical study-abroad module in the social psychology of the Holocaust and the genocidal legacy of National Socialism (course titled “Explaining Evil: Vienna and Hitler’s Genocide,” taught in the fall 2011 semester in Vienna, Austria) is available from the author.
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.