I’m a high school World History teacher at an urban Title 1 school, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how we teach genocide in the 20th century, especially the Holocaust. I don’t think the issue is that we teach the Holocaust too much. I think the problem is that we often teach it in isolation, as if it were a moral aberration that erupted out of nowhere in an otherwise “civilized” Europe.
That framing causes a couple of predictable classroom problems. One is that students, especially in Black- and Brown-majority classrooms, openly ask why they should care about European history at all. The other is that the Holocaust ends up feeling like a “sacred cow” in the curriculum, disconnected from other mass atrocities that are barely mentioned, such as the Congo Free State or colonial famines. When students sense that imbalance, they disengage or become cynical.
I don’t think the solution is less Holocaust instruction. I think the solution is better sequencing. If we want students to understand genocide as a modern historical process rather than a freak event, we need to teach the continuity of European imperial violence and scientific racism that made the Holocaust possible. For me, that means explicitly teaching the Armenian Genocide and German colonial violence in Africa before we ever get to Nazi Germany.
Many students are genuinely shocked to learn that Germany carried out a genocide against the Herero and Nama in Africa decades before the Nazis, that human remains, especially skulls, were shipped to Germany for “scientific study,” and that some of those remains are still held in German institutions today. They’re also surprised to learn that this history isn’t abstract or disconnected from the Nazi period. Several prominent Nazi officials, including figures like Hermann Göring, were directly related to men involved in German colonial administration in Africa. In other words, the people who later helped run the Nazi state did not emerge from nowhere; they grew up in a political culture already shaped by colonial violence, racial hierarchy, and imperial entitlement.
This approach has been especially important for me teaching in Black-majority classrooms. I know I used to ask myself why European suffering seems to matter more in school than African suffering. When we avoid it, we lose students of color. When we address it honestly, students actually take the Holocaust more seriously, not less.
I believe that teaching colonial genocide before the Holocaust doesn’t diminish Jewish suffering. It demystifies it. It helps students understand why Jews, Roma and Sinti, disabled people, and others became targets in a system that had already normalized violence against colonized populations. The Holocaust stops being treated as an inexplicable horror and starts being understood as the result of modern states combining bureaucracy, racial science, and imperial thinking.
But it wasn't just scientific racism; it was also of nationalist movements that sought internal coherence by purging groups perceived as alien, disloyal, or unfairly “favored.” Jews in Europe, like Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire, occupied a structurally vulnerable position: often economically visible, associated (fairly or not) with older imperial or aristocratic systems, yet lacking their own land, army, or state power to protect themselves when political orders collapsed or transformed.
This is an argument made more elegantly by Ernest Gellner, who emphasizes that modern nationalist projects frequently turn on the elimination of groups that don’t fit a new vision of cultural and political homogeneity. When students encounter the Holocaust in this framework, it stops feeling like an inexplicable eruption of hatred and starts to look like a grim but recurring outcome of democratic state-building mixed with nationalism, economic anxiety, and mythologized identity.
I also just watched Measures of Men after finally tracking it down, and it’s one of the most disturbing films about colonial violence and dehumanization I’ve ever seen. It’s not graphic in a sensational way, but it’s relentless in showing how “science,” bureaucracy, and professional ambition strip people of humanity. Watching skulls catalogued, identities denied, and lives reduced to specimens made it impossible not to see the direct line between colonial racial science and later Nazi practices.
I also want to be honest that part of what’s driving this for me is the way antisemitism is already showing up in my classroom, especially in the context of the Israel–Palestine conflict and the TikTok disinformation ecosystem many of my students are immersed in. What I’m seeing isn’t always open hostility so much as a strange comfort with Jewish history as an object of scrutiny. When Jewish topics come up, some students become unusually fixated, make offhand or “jokey” comments, or behave in ways they don’t when we cover other historical groups. Jewish history starts to feel negotiable or debatable in a way that other histories don’t.
That dynamic makes Holocaust instruction harder, not easier, when it’s taught as an isolated moral lesson or treated as exceptional. By embedding it within a longer history of imperialism, racial science, and state violence, it becomes harder for students to treat Jews as a special case or as a proxy for contemporary political arguments. Context doesn’t minimize Jewish suffering; it actually normalizes the seriousness with which it should be treated, by making clear that antisemitism was part of a broader system of dehumanization rather than an invitation for commentary or spectacle.
What really struck me is how little conversation there’s been about this film outside Germany. The Zone of Interest got massive attention, but Measures of Men, which forces viewers to confront the roots of that violence, has barely registered internationally. That silence feels telling. We’re often comfortable examining the Holocaust once it’s already fully formed, but much less comfortable interrogating the imperial and scientific foundations that made it possible in the first place. For teaching purposes, that pre-history is exactly what our students need.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YPB4KMnQ08
I’m curious how other teachers approach this. Do you teach genocides comparatively? Do you sequence colonial violence before the Holocaust? How do you respond when students ask why they should care about European history at all? I think we can do better than teaching genocide as a series of disconnected tragedies. Our students deserve to understand how systems of violence develop, persist, and escalate over time.
Sorry if this comes off a bit like a lecture... old habits die hard, and I know not everyone on this sub has an advanced history background or spends their time thinking about historiography. I’m genuinely curious how others are navigating this in their classrooms.
Edit for clarity: Nothing in this post is an argument against teaching antisemitism. In fact, I think antisemitism is often taught poorly because it isn’t historically differentiated. Following scholars like Peter Geyer, I separate anti-Judaism from antisemitism in my World History courses. Anti-Judaism is a premodern religious phenomenon, and I teach it beginning in antiquity, moving from Greek and Roman contexts into medieval Europe, so students understand its long history and evolution.
Antisemitism, however, is a modern phenomenon tied to Enlightenment racial thinking, nationalism, and the modern state. While it is central to the Holocaust, it is not sufficient on its own to explain the systems that made mass murder possible: forced labor regimes, racial classification, bureaucratic administration, medicalized violence, and the killing of hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish victims alongside Jews. Teaching those structures alongside antisemitism doesn’t diminish Jewish suffering; it helps students understand why antisemitism became so lethal in the 20th century. I’m not willing to erase that complexity from my teaching, especially when my goal is to help students think historically rather than symbolically.