Ressources

How have the Nazi period and the Shoah been presented in history textbooks for secondary schools published since 1950 in Germany, the United Kingdom, French-speaking Belgium and France? This volume compares their contents by underlining the evolution of this content and the influence of historical research as well as the various events that have been topical over the last fifty years. While European public opinion often mentions the deep silence shrouding this Nazi period and the Shoah up to the late 1990s, German textbooks from the 1950s provided pupils, aged 14 to 16, with important information. Although incomplete and imperfect at the beginning, this knowledge was quickly made available and broke the silence before  vastly increasing and becoming more precise at the turn of the century. As far as quantity and quality are concerned, there is a sharp contrast between the German and French textbooks and the British ones, which deal much less with this topic. As for Walloon textbooks, they were scarce from the 1970s until 2000. (By the publisher)