Possible Applications of a Unit on the Holocaust to the Montana Standards for Social Studies
A Color Key: Blue:  A link to the USHMM teacher’s guide web page. Black: Directly quoting a state’s social studies standard. Red:  The correlation of studying the Holocaust to the standards. Brown:  Other information.		If a secondary teacher would decide to teach a unit on the Holocaust, it would be highly recommended to first read "Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust" created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which can be found at <http://www.ushmm.org/education/foreducators/>

Content Standard 1--Students access, synthesize, and evaluate information to communicate and apply social studies knowledge to real world situations.

The teacher who teaches a unit on the Holocaust has an opportunity to make the period of the that time come alive with the real stories of people who survived, who did not survive, who were victims, who were rescuers, who were bystanders. The resources are readily available and multiple. The best is a survivor to speak with students if one willing to present to students is available. Video sources are plentiful. Written sources are plentiful.

In the study of the Holocaust, multiple sources are available for the teacher to direct students toward. Questions of how and why, questions of interpretation such as who did what, who knew what when, questions of reactions of victims, etc . all can be formulated with the vast availability of primary sources and secondary sources that range from personal testimony of survivors, to photographic archives, to diaries and memoirs, to the records of the period, to the arts and literature, to historians interpretations.

Content Standard 2--Students analyze how people create and change structures of power, authority anad governance to understand the operation of government and to demonstrate civic responsibility.

 
The Holocaust can be incorporated into a study of government in order to demonstrate how the development of public policy can become directed to genocidal ends when dissent and debate are silenced.

Inclusion of Holocaust studies in a government or a history course helps students: compare governmental systems; study the process of how a state can degenerate from a democracy into a totalitarian state; examine how the development of public policy can lead to genocidal ends; examine the role of Nazi bureaucracy in implementing policies of murder and annihilation; examine the role of various individuals in the rise and fall of a totalitarian government; recognize that among the legacies of the Holocaust have been the creation of Human Rights organizations and declarations.

Inclusion of a study of the Holocaust into a U.S. history or a U.S. government course can encourage students to:
•examine the dilemmas that arise when foreign policy goals are narrowly defined, as solely in terms of the national interest, denying the validity of universal moral and human priorities.
•understand what happens when parliamentary democratic institutions fail.
•examine the responses of governmental and non-governmental organizations in the United States to the plight of Holocaust victims.
•explore the role of American soldiers in liberating victims from Nazi concentration camps and killing centers.
•examine the key role played by the U.S. in bringing Nazi perpetrators to trial at Nuremberg and in other war crimes trials.
•understand the consequences of mass murder. Example: The attitude of the United States government to the anti-Semitism before 1939; the inaction and actions of the United States government during the war; the immigration of survivors to the United States in the post war period.

Holocaust studies require the knowledge of and use of maps: The chronology of war fronts, the location of the various types of camps, the transportation systems, etc. . The maps of camps are needed to understand how they operated and for what purpose. The maps of ghettos are needed to understand the events that occurred in the ghettos. The Holocaust created unnatural environments. Students will become aware of how humans modified and responded to the horrors they faced: racial laws, ghettos, camps.

In Holocaust Studies a complete understanding of the chronology of events is an absolute must. One must take the student back to the origins of anti-Semitism, the development of racial theories in all corners of the world including the United States. The time line of events in the 1930s and 1940s is to be completely understood. If a teacher centers in on an individual's story in the Holocaust, the context of that story in time is a must. If a teacher assigns research to a specific person or event, the context of the time is to be understood. The Holocaust is one of the major events of the modern period that has its effects on world, United States, and Montana. The event must be fully analyzed to comprehend that effect from what it did to the culture of the Jewish peoples, to the culture of Europe, to the impact on the United States and the state of Montana. (Also see Standard 1 above.)

Students are faced with the economics of the Nazi regime and their wartime production. This included mass use of slave labor. Questions of transportation of war supplies and human transportations to death camps are to be faced. The economics of the ghettos and the death camps themselves serves an example of what happens when civilized morals become warped. The policies of governments in the post World War I, Versailles Treaty era can show students how the economy in Germany led to the rise of Hitler .

A look at the anti-Semetism within this nation and in Europe before 1939 is to be compared and studied. The actions of a government and society that carried out genocide is to be studied. The consequences of the mass murders in the post 1945 world is to be realized: from the founding of the United Nations, to the Declaration of Human Rights, to the center of Jewish culture no longer in East Europe, but now in Israel and the United States.