The Holocaust: Range of Responses

About This Lesson

In the last lesson, students learned about the atrocities the Nazis committed during the Holocaust, the experiences of many who were targeted for murder, and some of the ways those imprisoned in the ghettos and camps resisted. In this lesson, students will continue this course’s historical case study by deepening their examination of human behavior during the Holocaust and considering the range of choices available to individuals, communities, and nations in the midst of war and genocide. 

Students will read firsthand accounts in which perpetrators, bystanders, upstanders, and rescuers describe their choices during this period of time and reflect on both the reasons behind their actions and the consequences. Students will grapple with questions about how circumstances of time and place played a role in the choices available to people, and they will reflect on why some people decided to help—in both dramatic and subtle ways—while others stood by or even participated in the atrocities that occurred.

Course Essential Question

How can learning about the choices people made during past episodes of injustice, mass violence, or genocide help guide our choices today?

Guiding Questions

• What choices did individuals, groups, and nations make in response to the events of the Holocaust?
• What factors influenced their choices to act as perpetrators, bystanders, upstanders, or rescuers?

Learning Objectives

• Students will analyze, discuss, and explain the range of choices available to individuals, groups, and nations during the Holocaust and explore the possible motivations and reasons for decision-making in this time of crisis.
• Students will recognize that the range of choices available in the 1940s was not as wide as the range available in the decades before the outbreak of war, but that despite these constraints, many upstanders and rescuers still chose to take action and help people targeted by the Nazis.

Lesson Plan

Day 1 

Activity 1: Reflect on the Influence of Stories

Explain to students that they will continue their study of the Holocaust by learning about stories of people who were perpetrators and bystanders as well as those of people who took risks to help and rescue those targeted by the Nazis. Begin by having students respond to the following question in their journals:

• What does it take to intervene to try to save someone from violence and injustice? When do you think it is necessary to do so? When might it be dangerous or unwise? Explain your thinking.

Students can respond in an activity based on the Think, Pair, Share strategy, or you can facilitate a whole-group discussion.

Activity 2: Provide an Overview of Bystanders and Resisters during the Holocaust

In the short video Facing History Scholar Reflections: Bystanders and Resisters (05:11), Paul Bookbinder discusses the range of choices people made during the Holocaust. In the next activity, students will be reading about some of the individuals he highlights in this video.

Share the 3-2-1 analysis prompts below with students, and then show the video. Students will listen for information that addresses the prompts and then respond to them after viewing the video.

• Identify three acts of rescue or resistance you learned about from watching the video.
• Identify two debates among scholars that Bookbinder mentions about the choices groups made in response to the Holocaust.
• Think of one question the video raises for you about perpetrators, rescuers, or resisters.

Review the possible answers to the first two 3-2-1 prompts, and then ask students to share some of the questions they wrote in response to the third prompt. If you record their questions on chart paper, you can refer back to them over the course of this two-day lesson to see which ones get answered and if any need to be added.

Activity 3: Analyze Specific Choices People Made

Remind students of some of the dilemmas and choices they have analyzed in past lessons, including the following:

• The choices Germans made during the Weimar Republic that either strengthened or weakened democracy
• The decision of the German worker (in the reading Do You Take the Oath?) about whether or not to take the oath to Hitler
• The choices young people made about participating in Nazi youth groups
• The range of responses by individuals and groups to the violence and destruction of Kristallnacht

Take a moment to reflect with students on how the circumstances of each of these situations were different and how the range of possible choices (and the associated consequences) may have been different in each instance.

Explain to students that in this lesson, they are going to read the stories of individuals, groups, and nations that faced difficult, often life-altering decisions under even more intense circumstances: war, the mass imprisonment and murder of Jews and other groups, and violent retribution for dissent.

Before distributing the readings for this next activity, ask students to take out the handout The Range of Human Behavior Vocabulary Terms from Lesson 17 to review the definitions of perpetrator, bystander, and upstander. To this list, you can add rescuer, a subcategory of upstander. Explain to students that while “upstanding” included a wide range of actions to oppose Nazi injustice, some upstanders took action to directly save people from the Nazis by hiding them, taking their children into their homes, helping them get visas to flee to safe countries, and helping in other critical ways. We refer to these upstanders as rescuers.

Divide the class into six groups, and assign each group one of the following readings:

• A Commandant’s View
• Bystanders at Hartheim Castle
• Protests in Germany
• Deciding to Act
• Le Chambon: A Village Takes a Stand
• Denmark: A Nation Takes Action

Explain to the class that today they will be collaborating with their group members to read stories of Holocaust perpetrators, bystanders, upstanders, and rescuers and then answering questions. Each group will make a presentation about its reading in the next class period.

Distribute one of the readings to each group, along with the handout Perpetrators, Bystanders, Upstanders, and Rescuers for each student. Read the instructions on the handout aloud so the groups are clear about the steps for reading, annotating, and discussing the questions together.

Tell students that they will have time to prepare their presentation at the start of the next lesson. If any groups did not finish responding to their reading’s questions, they should do so outside of class for homework.

Day 2 

Activity 1: Prepare Poster Presentations

Tell students that they will be presenting their readings to the class, focusing on the choices, motivations, and consequences of the decisions that were made. So they can be mindful of time, let students know at the outset of the activity at what time they will begin their presentations.

Each group should prepare a poster that draws from the information they collected yesterday on the handout Perpetrators, Bystanders, Upstanders, and Rescuers and includes the following information:

• The setting of the reading
• One significant choice that individuals, groups, or nations made in the reading
• A motivation, reason, or explanation for this choice
• The possible or actual consequences of this choice
• A sentence describing how the individuals, groups, or nations in the reading define their universe of obligation
• A significant quotation from the reading

After the groups have finished preparing their posters, ask them to select two people to provide a brief summary of their reading and present the information on their poster to the class. Alternatively, you might ask each group to present, with each student sharing one or more aspects of the poster.

Activity 2: Present Posters to Class

Pass out the handout Choices and Consequences for students to record notes during the group presentations, and have one pair from each group present their information to the class.

Students in the class should record notes on the handout as they listen to their peers. There is space at the bottom of the handout for students to add their own questions.

Activity 3: Discuss Decision-Making in a Time of Crisis

To help students synthesize the material presented in this lesson, lead a class discussion about decision-making in times of crisis. While you might not have time to address all of the questions, consider selecting one or more of the following to explore with the class:

• When looking at these readings as a whole, what similarities and differences do you notice when considering the circumstances under which people chose to perpetuate violence, stand by, or take action?
• How did circumstances of time, place, and opportunity factor into the choices that individuals, groups, and nations made in the 1940s?

Reflect back on recent lessons to compare the choices that might have been open to individuals, groups, and nations in the 1920s and 1930s with those choices available in the 1940s.

• Which choices were no longer possible?
• Which choices seemed riskier than they might have been in previous years of Nazi rule?

The two Holocaust lessons (Lesson 20 and this lesson) expose students to a range of choices that individuals made during the Holocaust. You might want to start the discussion of this topic by making a list of choices on the board to visually capture the range for students and asking questions such as these:

• Were such choices available to all people who were part of this history?
• How does thinking about the range of choices extend or challenge your thinking about the Holocaust?
• How does thinking about the range of choices extend or challenge your understanding of human behavior?

Activity 4: Reflect on the Holocaust

Before moving to the next phase of Facing History’s scope and sequence—“Judgment, Memory, & Legacy”—it is important that students have time and space to reflect quietly in their journals about what they have learned so far in this unit. You might simply give students a few minutes to freewrite in their journals about the experience of learning about the Holocaust in the past several class periods. Or you can have them respond to one of the following prompts:

• Describe what you thought about and what you felt while learning about people’s experiences and choices during the Holocaust. What did you learn about human behavior? What did you learn about yourself?
• What information, stories, ideas, or questions from your study of the Holocaust do you think are most important to share or for you to remember?
• What questions about the Holocaust or individual and group choices during this time of crisis do you still have?

You might collect students’ journals to get a sense of what they are thinking and their questions at this point in the unit. If you do collect the journals, it is important to inform students of this before they write, or have them write their response on a separate sheet of paper to collect if you have established in your class that student journals are private.