Teaching about Perpetrators and the Hidden Curriculum

Kofi A. Annan wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times, titled “The Myth of Never Again.” In his Op-Ed, Annan recognizes that teaching the history of the Holocaust is not enough to prevent genocides from occurring. This is made clear by the fact that they keep happening: Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, to name but a few. In this regard, teaching the history of the Holocaust serves two purposes; first, to teach what happened during the Holocaust, and second, to be used as a platform to teach about other genocides. The Holocaust can serve this double role because it is such a unique event in world history. (Annan, 1). The Holocaust satisfies all the elements that make up the criterion needed to differentiate between atrocities and genocide, unlike many of the other genocides that fall short in one way or the other. To this point, I agree with Kofi A. Annan 100 percent!

Moreover, Annan poses a great question, he writes, “But if we want to prevent future genocides, is it not equally important to understand the psychology of the perpetrators and bystanders — to comprehend what it is that leads large numbers of people, often “normal” and decent in the company of their own family and friends, to suppress their natural human empathy with people belonging to other groups and to join in, or stand by and witness, their systematic extermination?” (Annan, 1). Again, I could not agree with him more and we are not alone. Christopher Browning, Raul Hillberg, and Peter Hayes each take a shot at doing just that.

In Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve police battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland, Browning takes up the cause of trying to find out what motivated the Nazis to commit the horrors cited throughout the Holocaust. The book is a case study that follows the action of a Reserve Police Battalion in Poland. While the book covers many subjects, Chapter 7: Initiation to Mass Murder: The Józefów Massacre, reports the responses of the men when their orders changed from deportation to execution. The details of their new assignment spread throughout the unit like wildfire. Men who did not know the orders wanted to participate, while those who were informed envied the ignorant. Major Trapp gave his men the opportunity to abstain from the operations (executions). When the men felt that it was acceptable to abstain, more of them did. The men of Police Battalion 101 saw their commander struggle with his orders. Major Trapp openly wept at the idea of executing innocent people. Trapp was guilty of the executions at Józefów before they even happened. There was plenty of evidence that the Policemen were shooting people in the streets but most of the men denied it out of guilt. The men refused to shoot infants and small children, and many purposefully missed. There were officers like Captain Hoffmann that wanted his men to carry out the orders of executing Jews with enthusiasm. All the while, he himself did not participate. Alcohol was used to anesthetize the men from their actions. Most of the policemen could not grasp their orders until it was too late. When opportunities arose for the Policemen to refuse or abandon their duties, many did so. The Policemen were free to be excused from their detail by more than one commander. Men with submachine guns missed their targets at point-blank range. They were too nervous to carry out their orders. The men often said that they were not “strong enough” to carry out what needed to be done. The Police Battalion leadership had to rotate their men for effectiveness. The men were incapable of murdering people for extended periods of time. The leadership, who did not participate, were able to be colder and more calculated in their execution strategies. The men committing the executions needed very specific and detailed instructions. Even with detailed instruction, men often missed their marks, either deliberately or due to revulsion; the men stated as “nerves” or “weakness.” Even those who were able to carry out the executions of men were often incapable of shooting the women and children. Many men simply could not continue the executions, they needed to be relieved of their duty and replaced. The expectation was that every man had to shoot, but none of them could for lengthy periods of time. They used any excuse including “smoke breaks” to get away from their detail. There were few men that were capable and even eager to conduct the murders, but that was not the case for most. Peer pressure was a strong motivating factor; one that cannot be overlooked. (Browning, 55 -66).

Christopher Browning continues by sharing accounts of specific men who requested to be relieved from duty. Some of these examples come from the Reserve Policemen: Hans Dettelmann, Walter Niehaus, August Zorn, George Kagler, and Franz Kastenbaum. After one reads Browning’s discoveries on these men, there appears to be a pattern or at the very least, a revelation to be made. Hans Dettelmann asked to be relieved from his duty, stating he had a “very weak nature.” Walter Niehaus, a cigarette sales representative, requested to be reassigned after he shot one elderly woman. Niehaus told his commander that his nerves were “totally finished.” August Zorn was so upset with the cruelty that he purposefully missed his targets. The act of murder made him sick and he was relieved by the first sergeant. George Kagler was able to conduct the executions until he had a conversation with one of the victims. From then on, Kagler could not continue. Franz Kastenbaum admitted that he purposefully shot for the trees instead of his targets. Afterward, he ran away and vomited in disgust. The men left the forest as soon as they could, leaving the Jews goods unpilfered. After the executions, the Policemen chose alcohol over food. The men chose to not speak of the actions they committed. These perpetrators were also victims, in an unusual way. (Browning, 66-69).

Browning’s investigation of the people on the ground shows us that the perpetrators were not as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen described in his book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. In no way is there an attempt to excuse the Nazis for what they did, but to think of them as monsters is a mistake and that kind of rhetoric sets the “hidden curriculum” to teach our students that the Nazis were somehow especially evil. To serve Annan’s purpose of teaching the students about genocide prevention, we must instruct the students about the realities of the perpetrators and their motivations. Browning shares with his readers a chilling revelation that personally changed my life, when I read it, years ago. Following his case study of the Polish Police Battalion, he wrote:

“I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader— both were human— if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive”

(Browning, xx).

In short, the Nazis were humans and so are we. Statistically speaking, more people would have been perpetrators than supporters. This kind of honesty and realization is what is need to prevent future genocides. Browning’s case study also shows us the bottom up approach to genocide. The men did what they did out of loyalty to one another along with peer pressure and propaganda. These men had difficulty fulfilling their duties because they were actually on the ground doing it.

Raul Hilberg illustrates how there were distinct and compartmentalized roles in the Final Solution. The further one was from the actual killing, the less burdened by the guilt they were. In Hilberg’s book, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933 -1945, Hilberg reveals that all parts of German organized life played a role in anti-Jewish work.The anti-Jewish work began with segregation by removing Jews from ordinary life with careful consideration of the economy and the German populace. The Nazis took precautions to avoid upsetting the perpetrators in their work to maintain and escalate productivity. They did this with a bureaucracy that includes departments like the Reich Chancellery, the Interior Ministry, the Economics Ministry, and many others. Adolph Eichmann, who served the Reich Security Ministry’s main office is famously known as a “desk Nazi.” His actions killed far more people than any of the men mentioned by Browning, yet Eichmann claimed to have never felt guilt for his actions. Eichmann was removed from what he was doing and so it was easier to do it. (Hilberg, 20-26).

In contrast, Werner Dubois, a guard at the Sobibor death camp, knew that even if he did not kill the Jews directly, he was responsible. “On trial before a German court in the early 1960s, he made the following statement about the administrative role of a functionary: ‘I am clear about the fact that annihilation camps were used for murder. What I did was aiding in murder. If I should be sentenced, I would consider that correct. Murder is murder. In weighing the guilt, one should not in my opinion consider the specific function in the camp. Wherever we were posted there: we were all equally guilty. The camp functioned in a chain of functions. If only one element in that chain is missing, the entire enterprise comes to a stop.” (Hillberg, 26).

Peter Hayes provides explicit details that verify how the Nazis were able to do what they did in his book, Why: Explaining the Holocaust. Specifically in Chapter 4 titled “ANNIHILATION: Why This Swift and Sweeping?” Hayes presents the facts surrounding the efficacy of the Nazis in their pursuit of the final solution. We know that the Final Solution was largely improvised and there were aspects from the bottom up as well as from the top down. This is made clear by many examples, but a lot can be learned from the statistic, “Three-quarters of the nearly six million victims were killed within only twenty months, from June 1941 to February 1943, and half of the total victims died within only the last eleven months of that time frame,” (Hayes, 114). In other chapters, Hayes describes how the Nazis were emboldened to prioritize the Final Solution, but in Chapter 4, he describes how once the mechanisms needed for large-scale murder operations were in place, then maximum carnage ensued. There was a progression to how the murder was conducted, it started with a euthanasia program to kill “useless eaters” and “life unworthy of life,” (Hayes, 118). Then the Nazis shot Jews in the woods (as described by Browning), afterwards, there were gas vans, and ultimately, the death camps. (Hayes, 114 -174). In many ways, Hayes describes Dr. Gregory Stanton’s “Ten Steps to Genocide,” they are as followed: Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, and Denial (10 Steps to genocide). Hayes continues by describing how the Nazis would use the Jews to conduct arduous tasks, especially ones that involved direct contact with the deceased and physical labor. In fact, Hayes describes the Nazi economy as being dependent on Jewish labor in the camps and through enslavement (Hayes, 160 -175). “Hitler had favored slaughtering all the camp inmates and blowing up the sites, but the leaders of the WVHA, the SS economics division, who had been put in charge of jet aircraft as well as V-rocket production, wanted to hold on to the labor supply as long as possible, and Himmler hoped to keep some Jews alive as a bargaining chip with the Allies” (Hayes, 173). The Nazi command wanted to keep their Jews because they needed the labor and they needed to protect their men from as Browning put it, “Overexposure.”

Through Browning, Hilberg, and Hayes, pieces of a greater puzzle are revealed. Education has nothing to do with the actions committed by the perpetrators of the Holocaust. They knew what they were doing but they did it anyway. The higher command used elaborate bureaucracies to compartmentalize the genocide and the Nazis recognized that Ordinary Men, were unproductive when they faced their victims directly. To increase production, the Nazis created systems to facilitate the murders that were less “hands-on.” Many of the Nazis were very educated, education has very little to do with the perpetrators or their motivations.

Returning to Annan’s assertion that Holocaust educators have failed their students because our teachers are not properly educated and skilled. While it may be the case that our teachers are underperforming, I cannot agree with Annan on his diagnosis of the problem at hand. Annan inadvertently describes the “Hidden Curriculum,” when he identifies what teaching the Holocaust is supposed to do. The writers at https://www.edglossary.org/hidden-curriculum/ describe the hidden curriculum as: “the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended lessons, values, and perspectives that students learn in school. While the ‘formal’ curriculum consists of the courses, lessons, and learning activities students participate in, as well as the knowledge and skills educators intentionally teach to students, the hidden curriculum consists of the unspoken or implicit academic, social, and cultural messages that are communicated to students while they are in school” (edglossary, 1). For this apparent reason, Annan means well but is mistaken. The job of an instructor is to teach the “formal” curriculum. In other words, the teacher’s job is to teach the formal curriculum. While the lessons about the history of the Holocaust are not designed to mention racism in the United States, human rights violations in China, or one’s civic responsibilities, the student is “supposed” to come to these realizations themselves. If the students do not come to these conclusions, that is not a failure on the part of the educator. The student and the educator are responsible for the coursework that is related to the lessons that are instructed.

Annan concludes by questioning the intentions of teaching the Holocaust. In this regard, Annan is conflating two separate goals. The first goal of teaching the Holocaust is to actually teach what happened and the second is a form of activism; a call to action to set the students on a path to never allow the horrors of the Holocaust to repeat themselves. Both objectives are admirable, but they are two vastly different things. That is why our educators are failing to perform this task. A teacher’s job is to instruct the lessons of the curriculum to his or her class. As our working definition of the hidden curriculum reveals, there are “unintended” values and perspectives that come with these lessons. That is and has been the case with any subject that one can choose through our history curriculum. Take the following for examples: The history of the American Revolution teaches students that when the government is tyrannical, it is the obligation of the citizens to revolt; the history of Manifest Destiny teaches students that the United States was built on white supremacy; and the history of World War II teaches students that the United States is the savior in WWII. In none of these examples, do the teachers actually vocalize these perspectives that students often adopt from their coursework. The students are left to come to these conclusions on their own. A skilled professional educator will check in with the students to make sure that they are not harboring perspectives that are antithetical to their coursework. The instructor’s job is to teach critical thinking skills, not morality. It seems like Annan is conflating activism/morality with instruction. Activism and morality are not within an educator’s skillset or responsibility. For this reason, I would suggest that the history of the Holocaust should be taught by historians and genocide prevention should be taught by trained and informed political scientists: these are separate classes. There may be the case that one educated professional can serve both roles. These two separate classes have differing objectives, that I believe overwhelm and distract both the teachers and their students; not to mention the time restrictions.

As previously stated, education and morality are not the same thing. The Nazis were some of the most educated people on earth. While I support the demand for education, there is no proof that education prevents atrocities. A killer knows that murder is wrong. The same way a thief knows not to steal. What is being asked for is beyond education. Our teachers are being asked to teach World War II, the Holocaust, Genocide prevention, and humanitarianism within the same class period. No wonder Annan thinks the teachers are failing. I suspect that we would have better outcomes if these classes were either given more time or separated and instructed by specialists for their respective disciplines.

As an aside that is not academic at all, I am reminded of the 1990 film Robocop 2, in which Alex Murphy (Robocop) was reprogrammed to value environmentalism, nutrition, and community service on top of his duties to protect the citizens of Detroit. The result leads to Murphy reading Miranda rights to a corpse and lecturing children; “Bad language makes for bad feelings.” Despite Murphy’s impaired state, he had the good sense to alert his partner saying, “I am having trouble.” I think if we continue to overburden our educators with added responsibilities, they, like Murphy, will have “trouble” carrying out their prime directives. Scene from Robocop 2.

References

Annan, Kofi A. “The Myth of ‘Never Again.’” The New York Times, June 17, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/opinion/18iht-edannan.html.  

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary men: Reserve police battalion 101 and The final solution in Poland. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2017.

Hayes, Peter. “Chapter 7: ONLOOKERS: Why Such Limited Help from Outside?” Essay. In Why?: Explaining the Holocaust, 259–99. W.W. Norton and Company, 2018.

“Hidden Curriculum Definition.” The Glossary of Education Reform, July 13, 2015. https://www.edglossary.org/hidden-curriculum/.  

Hilberg, Raul. “Chapter 2: The Establishment.” Essay. In Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933 -1945, 20–26. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1992.

Red Lion Movie Shorts. “RoboCop 2 (1990) – ‘I Am Having Trouble’ Scene (1080p) Full HD.” YouTube, January 18, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SuzPrBdqg4&ab_channel=REDLionMovieShorts.

Stanton, Dr. Gregory. “Genocide Watch- Ten Stages of Genocide.” genocidewatch, 2023. https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages.