Possible Applications of a Unit on the Holocaust to the New Hampshire Curriculum 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/>

 

From the introduction of the K-12 Social Studies Curriculum Framework: Curriculum decisions, including overall organization, specific grade-level and course offerings, and methods, activities, and materials, remain the responsibility of local educators and school board members.

Civics and Government

Curriculum Standard 1. Students will demonstrate an understanding of the purpose of government and how government is established and organized.
Curriculum Standard 2. Students will demonstrate an understanding of the fundamental ideals and principles of American democracy; the major provisions of the United States and New Hampshire Constitutions; and the organization and operation of government at all levels including the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
Curriculum Standard 3. Students will demonstrate an understanding of the relationship of the United States to other nations and the role of the United States in world affairs.
Curriculum Standard 4. Students will demonstrate an understanding of the meaning, rights, and responsibilities of citizenship as well as the ability to apply their knowledge of the ideals, principles, organization, and operation of American government through the political process and citizen involvement.
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 t he 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

Curriculum Standard 5. Students will demonstrate the ability to analyze the potential costs and benefits of economic choices in market economies including wants and needs; scarcity; tradeoffs; and the role of supply and demand, incentives, and prices.
Curriculum Standard 6. Students will demonstrate the ability to examine the interaction of individuals, households, communities, businesses, and governments in market economies including competition; specialization; productivity; traditional forms of enterprise; and the role of money and financial institutions.
CurriculumStandard 7. Students will demonstrate an understanding of different types of economic systems, their advantages and disadvantages, and how the economic systems used in particular countries may change over time.
Curriculum Standard 8. Students will demonstrate an understanding of the patterns and results of international trade including distribution of economic resources; imports and exports; specialization; interdependence; exchange of money; and trade policies.
Curriculum Standard 9. Students will demonstrate the ability and willingness to apply economic concepts in the examination and resolution of problems and issues in educational, occupational, civic, and everyday settings.
In the study of the Holocaust 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 wrapped. 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

Curriculum Standard 10. Students will demonstrate the ability to use maps, mental maps, globes, and other geographic tools and technologies to acquire, process, report, and analyze geographic information.
Curriculum Standard 11.
Curriculum Standard 12. Students will demonstrate an understanding of land form patterns and water systems on Earth's surface; the physical processes that shape these patterns; and the characteristics and distribution ecosystems.
Curriculum Standard 13. Students will demonstrate and understanding of the impact of human systems on Earth's surface including the characteristics, distribution, and migration of human populations; the nature and complexity of patterns of cultural diffusion; patterns and networks of economic interdependence; processes, pattern, and functions of human settlement; and the forces of cooperation and conflict that shape human geographic divisions.
Curriculum Standard 14. Students will demonstrate and understanding of the connections between Earth's physical and human systems; the consequences of the interaction between human and physical systems; and changes in the meaning, use, distribution , and importance of resources.
Curriculum Standard 15. Students will demonstrate the ability to apply their knowledge of geographic concepts, skills, and technology to interpret the past and the present and to plan for the future.
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. T he 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

Curriculum Standard 16. Students will demonstrate the ability to employ historical analysis, interpretation, and comprehension to make reasoned judgments and to gain and understanding, perspective, and appreciation of history and its uses in contemporary situations.
Curriculum Standard 17. Students will demonstrate a knowledge of the chronology and significance of the folding story of America including the history of their community, New Hampshire, and the United States.
Curriculum Standard 18. Students will demonstrate a knowledge of the chronology and significant developments of world history including the study of ancient, medieval, and modern Europe (Western Civilization) with particular emphasis on those developments that have shaped the experience of the entire globe the last 500 years and those ideas, institutions, and cultural legacies that have directly influenced American thought, culture, and politics.
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.

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 New Hampshire. The event must be fully analyzed to comprehend that effect from what it did to the culture of t he Jewish peoples, to the culture of Europe, to the impact on the United States and the state of New Hampshire.

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 in the United States as the war broke out, to the inaction of the United States Government, to the immigration of survivors to the United States including New Hampshire.

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 "final solution" 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.