‘Israeli treatment of Holocaust is fair and non-sensational’

According to the Israeli-German report on schoolbooks, the Holocaust and Nazism are prominently emphasized in German textbooks, but in many cases in such a way that Nazi Germany is portrayed as “an automatic killing machine,” in which people pay a subsidiary role, thus often avoiding the issue of personal accountability of certain German individuals.

Israeli researchers examining the way the Holocaust is taught in Israel find that it is treated “academically, in a non-sensational matter-of-fact way, while taking care to present the factual data with almost no place for emotions.” The researchers note that “an effort is made to avoid putting hair-raising stories… and very few graphic images of corpses are used as visual documents.”

Additionally, Israeli textbooks do not neglect to note the Nazi treatment of non-Jewish groups which suffered persecution during the Holocaust.

On the other hand, Israeli books fare poorly when it comes to describing post-war Germany, hardly mentioning the Cold War period and the unification of East and West Germany.