Teaching the Holocaust can be an incredibly challenging endeavor. After all, most Western students would have a hard time imagining a national government actually turning against an entire people, or more precisely, an entire group of people and other subgroups (gypsies, homosexuals, people with physical and mental disabilities and political opponents). Fortunately, the Holocaust is foreign to most students today.

Of course, when teaching the Holocaust, it is imperative to try to make it as relevant as possible to students’ lives. Actually, this is true when teaching anything. Relevance promotes understanding and retention. While the Holocaust may be foreign to students’ lives, bullying, unfortunately, is not that foreign to our students. Many of our students have experienced bullying in one form or another and obviously some have acted as bullies. Ask students to consider why people bully others. Although bullying can certainly hurt the one being bullied, the bully is also hurting. After all, why bully if something doesn’t hurt?

Obviously, this question can become abundant. Why bully if you’re hurt by one thing or another? Unfortunately, the answer makes too much sense. Bullies bully so they don’t have to think about their own pain and hurt. Instead of turning their attention inward to their own problems, they turn their attention outward in a petty way. Through intimidation they feel powerful and important, something their own pains prevent them from feeling if they turn their attention inward.

So when teaching the Holocaust, a good place to start would be with the reasons why the German Third Reich was feeling pain before committing the atrocities of the Holocaust. In fact, they were feeling real pain. For one thing, they had just lost the First World War. The Allied victors were extracting significant payments from the Germans. Obviously these payments harm the German economy. A whole wheelbarrow full of money could buy a loaf of bread. Challenge students to consider ways previously successful Germans might have felt about these new challenges and difficulties. Unfortunately, in light of an understanding of bullying, students will now be able to better understand the horrors of the Holocaust.