Jewish leader riles teachers with demands for 'Nazi' lessons
From Roger Boyes, of The Times, in Berlin

The new president of Germany’s Jewish community has sparked fierce controversy by calling for the Nazi era to be made a separate and compulsory subject in German schools.

“We urgently need to overhaul the way history is taught because far too little attention is paid to National Socialism,” said Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor. “It should be made legally binding to do this subject throughout all of Germany’s regional states.”

Frau Knobloch, 73, who represents Germany’s small but growing Jewish community of 170,000 is a political heavy-hitter and is regarded as a moral authority. Her grandmother was murdered in Auschwitz and she herself survived only because she was sheltered by a German Catholic family servant.

However teachers and politicians have reacted furiously to her first major statement since taking on the office on the Central Council of Jews last month.

“The proposals are wrong and unjustified,” the German teachers union said. “No other era of German history is studied as intensively in German schools as National Socialism,” Josef Kraus, the union’s chairman, said. In many regions of Germany it is compulsory for schoolchildren to visit the sites of former concentration camps.

Ute Erdsiek, the Education Minister of Schleswig Holstein, said that the Holocaust was a “mandatory, integral and exhaustive” part of history teaching. “Nazism is also a permanent part of the teacher training programme in western and eastern Germany,” she said.

Frau Knobloch claimed that East German teachers who had grown up under Communism were particularly badly informed about the Nazi era. That had, in turn, contributed to the strength of neo-Nazi groups in eastern Germany.

The theologian Richard Schröder — often tipped as a future President of Germany — said that Frau Knobloch had missed the point. “No people or individual can gain moral confidence simply by studying catastrophes. History has also got to show the more pleasant sides of the German experience before 1933, after 1945 and above all after 1989.”

Professor Schröder added: “If the telling of German history is structured so that we have to be ashamed of being German then that plays straight into the hands of the extreme Right.”

Ironically, Frau Knobloch’s comments come as British schools are being urged — not least by the German embassy — to broaden the teaching of German history beyond the Third Reich.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2259323,00.html