Thousands of West German children returning to school this week will read for the first time about Nazi concentration camps and the massacres of millions of Jews and other civilians, in new history books distributed to the schools, it was reported here today.
The significant feature of the new school books is that they officially confirm, for the first time, the existence of concentration camps and throw the onus for the Reichstag fire on Marshal Hermann Goering. They also describe how Germany, under the Nazis, “sank into a period of horror greater than she ever experienced before. “
The publication of the new textbooks is a victory for West German education authorities and a number of voluntary groups–several of them Jewish–who have been trying for years to supply independent background information on the Nazi period to the younger generation.
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