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U.S. History Books Pay Little Attention to Nazi Annihilation of Jews

February 12, 1960
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A survey of history books currently in use in New York City high schools has revealed that Nazi crimes against the Jews are mentioned only briefly. The Nazi atrocities, according to the survey by the New York Post, usually are dismissed in a sentence or a paragraph in the textbooks, many of which run to 700 pages.

“Making Today’s World,” published in 1956 by Allyn and Bacon, gives one paragraph to the Nazi era: “Hitler and the Nazis boasted of the superiority of the Aryan race, and hounded Jews out of places of prominence in business, the universities and the professions.” There is no reference to Hitler’s murder camps and the fate of the 6,000,000 Jews slaughtered by the Nazis.

One paragraph covers the period in “Modern History,” published in 1958 by Silver-Burdett. It reads: “Many Communists, Socialists and Jews were deprived of their property, confined and brutally tortured in concentration camps or executed.

The 1955 revised edition of “World History” published in 1955 by Ginn notes that the Nuremberg decrees were meant to “cleanse” Germany of all non-Aryans. The fate of the Jews is described this way: “Thousands fled the country. Those that remained were arrested and sent to concentration camps where they suffered cruel torture, if not death.”

Rand McNally’s “Our Widening World,” published in 1958, reports that “above all, Hitler preached hatred against the Jews.” Nothing is said about the atrocities and mass murders. The revised edition of “The World’s History” published by Harcourt Brace in 1954 puts the Jewish death toll at 3,000,000, a 50 percent cut in most estimates.

Another text, “Man’s Achievements Through the Ages,” discusses Hitler’s war on Poland, and adds, “Poland had more than 3,000,000 Jews. Most of them were killed, in one way or another, during the next few years.”

With the exception of two texts, none of the histories carry any pictorial documentation of the Nazi crimes. The exceptions have an impressionistic painting of the Crucifixion by Marc Chagall and the captions contrast that event with “the destruction of Jewish lives, temples and scrolls.” The captions also say that “Nazi persecutions were the most barbaric of all and shocked the world.”

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