Possible Applications of a Unit on the Holocaust to the Nevada Social Studies Standards
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/>

 

Civics

Content Standard 1.0: Rules and Law: Students know why society needs rules, laws, and government.
Content Standard 2.0: The U.S. Government: Students know how the United States Constitution and the government it creates.
Content Standard 3.0: National and State Government: Students can explain the relationship between the states and national government.
Content Standard 4.0: The Political Process: Students describe the roles of political parties, interest groups, and public opinion in the democratic process.
Content Standard 5.0: Citizenship: Students know the roles, rights, and responsibilities of United States citizens and the symbols of our country.
Content Standard 6.0: State and Local Government: Students know the structure and functions of state and local governments.
Content Standard 7.0: Political and Economic Systems: Students explain the different political and economic systems in the world.
Content Standard 8.0: International Relations: Students know the political and economic relationship of the United States and its citizens to other nations.
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..

Economics

Content Standard 1.0: The Economic Way of Thinking: Students will use fundamental economic concepts, including scarcity, choice, cost, incentives, and costs versus benefits to describe and analyze problems and opportunities, both individual and social.
Some examples in studying the Holocaust and Europe of World War II: 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 .

Geography

Content Standard 1.0: The World in Special Terms: Students use maps, globes, and other geographic tools and technologies to locate and derive information about people, places, and environments.
Content Standard 2.0: Places and Regions: Students understand the physical and human features and cultural characteristics of places and use this information to define and study regions and their patterns of change.
Content Standard 3.0: Physical Systems: Students understand the physical and human features and cultural characteristics of places and use this information to define and study regions and their patterns of change.
Content Standard 4.0: Human Systems: Students understand how economic, political, and cultural processes interact to shape patterns of human migration and settlement, influence and interdependence, and conflict and cooperation.
Content Standard 5.0: Environment and Society: Students understand the effects of interactions between human and physical systems and the changes in use, distribution, and importance of resources.
Content Standard 6.0: Geographic Applications: Students apply geographic knowledge of people, places, and environments to interpret the past, understand the present, and plan for the future.
Content Standard 7.0: Geographic Skills: Students ask and answer geographic questions by acquiring, organizing, and analyzing geographic information.
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.

History

Content Standard 1.0: Chronology: Students use chronology to organize and understand the sequence and relationship of events.
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 and the United States. 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.
Content Standard 2.0: History Skills: Students will use social studies vocabulary and concepts to engage in inquiry, in research, in analysis, and in decision-making.
 
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.

The study of the Holocaust includes complete understanding of the geography of Europe, of the chronology of events from the first racial laws of the Nazi regime to the implementation of the death camps; a chronology of events from racial attitudes inthe United States as the war broke out, to the inaction of the United States Government, to the immigration of survivors to the United States.

In a study of the Holocaust the basic tenants of Christianity and Judaism should be understood. These both come into the story as a student studies the issue of anti-Semitism. Music and the arts of the perpetrators and victims can help students understand the cultures of the people of Europe at the time of the Holocaust.

Analysis of Nazi racial doctrine and how it moved to the Òfinal solutionÓ is to be made.

Analysis of Nazi economic practices and its use of slave labor is to be understood. The technological, industrial mind set of the Nazis is to be viewed by the student as it led to the industrialized murder factories located in eastern Europe.

The shift of the center of Jewish culture from eastern Europe to Israel and the United States as a result of the Holocaust is to be understood.

Content Standards 3.0 through 7.0
These standards are content periods. A study of the Diaspora of the Jews could fit several of the content periods.
Content Standard 8.0: Twentieth Century, a Changing World: 1920 to 1945: Students understand the importance and impact of political, economic, technological, and social changes in the world from 1920 to 1945.
The Holocaust fits here. SeeGrade 12: 8.12.8 "Describe the causes, course, and effects of the Holocaust...."
Content Standards 9.0 and 10.0.
These are content periods. The effects of the Holocaust fall into these periods including 10.12.3 that deals with human rights.