Nazi Atrocities Omitted in Textbooks Used in Philadelphia Schools

Most of the 22 history textbooks used in Philadelphia’s public and private high schools fail to explain to students the Nazi theory and practice of racism, The Jewish Exponent charged here today.

In the second of a series of articles resulting from a special study of the high school texts, the newspaper reveals that most of the history books “omit the complete story of Hitlerism.” A few of the books, it is disclosed, “don.’t even mention anti-Semitism” as practiced under the Hitler regime. The report, citing various textbooks by title, author and publishers, shows:

1. One textbook picturing Nazi concentration camps as places into which “ministers and priests who objected to policies of fanatic devotion to the State were thrown.”

2. Another textbook “which does not draw the lesson of racialism” but makes “the curious error” of stating that 3,000,000 Jews were victims of Nazism in concentration camps–instead of using the confirmed figure of 6, 000, 000.

3. Still another book credits Hitler with transforming Germany into “a united, energetic nation,” but concedes that the “gains were won at the cost of human liberties” and that the Nazis “persecuted the Jews”–but does not mention concentration camps or genocide.

Throughout most of the texts, the study shows, there is “abysmal silence” concerning the systematic murder of Jews under the Hitler regime. One text is denounced as “fantastically deficient” in this regard. “Calculated omissions” were found in some college texts used in advanced high school classes in Philadelphia.

One text was found not only short on telling the history of Nazi racial persecutions, but also indulged in adverse criticism of Jews in America who resisted “amalgamation” by retaining for a long time “in home and synagogue traditional Jewish rites and practices.” This textbook writer is shown as disapproving the fact that some American Jews spoke Yiddish and read Yiddish newspapers.