Historical Education & Human Rights

National Socialism and Human Rights – the Smuggled Documents as an Appeal to Humanity


The project, promoted by the “Memory, Responsibility and Future” foundation aims to connect education about National Socialism and the Holocaust with an engagement with human rights, and particularly with the idea of human dignity. Along the way, it teaches what human rights violations are, or can be, and what the struggle for human dignity means in this context. 


Approach to Human Rights 

There is no one unambiguous formula for answering questions in the classroom about the meaning to be attached to historical experiences and the significance of the legal situation, or its formulation in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We consider, however, that it is a very promising start to approach human rights through art and an active work of remembrance attached to the subject. Being aware of human rights abuses from a contemporary perspective, and of the way humiliation and brutal treatment – depicted in the trove of documents as an incredible act of self-assertion, even as resistance – was handled back then, leads inevitably to the question of what can result from our own outrage and the knowledge we have gained.

Young people (and adults too) need time and a space for discussion – permission to make their own picture of the historical National Socialist era. Questions of human rights, then and now, will then develop out of their historical education, and do so all the more consistently, the more it can be clearly located in a personal, real-life world, in the first instance.

Human Dignity

The project folder is based on questioning the relationship between human rights violations and human dignity, and it proposes various answers for discussion. The building blocks developed here are intended to help with debating the extent to which human rights violations in concentration camp conditions are actually all that different from violations of human dignity in the classroom. They should also, however, enable students to experience the fact that there is always a very subjective dimension to any definition of what is an affront to our own human dignity; correspondingly, answers can vary considerably. It should equally be possible to come to a precise and generally binding agreement on what actually constitutes human dignity and a dignified life.



Engaging creatively with these historical, artistic testimonies can enable the subject of oneself to enter into a dialogue on an equal footing. The questions that arise from this are aimed, on the one hand, at expressing similarities between individual experiences of degradation, disadvantage and powerlessness, of discriminatory working conditions, violence and the desire for revenge, as well as the continuing nature of marginalisation. On the other hand, they reveal structural differences between the times then and now, along with our changed scope for action in a human rights context.

Learning Through the Human Rights

The various core curriculums of Germany’s federal states reflect the need for educational approaches that connect this area of history, i.e. “Dictatorship and Democracy”, with the question of what can and should be learnt from violations of human rights. When it comes to the right to education and a decent learning environment, we are convinced that learning about human rights can only succeed if the methods used also enable students to learn through the human rights. Open-ended processes should be at the heart of the pedagogic work, but there must still be an expression of values.

It is obvious that just declaiming these values and attitudes, brought to bear in the human rights, cannot impart them to others, and neither can any kind of process of addition, where a little bit about human rights is tacked on to learning about history. Instead, it must be possible also to experience rights such as freedom of opinion, the right to education etc. on a relational level and as part of the educational process.

Pedagogy of Recognition

We have developed study days for less academic secondary school pupils and groups with special needs on behalf of the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Education Site. In the course of this work, we realised how helpful it is to have a highly flexible set of building blocks to hand. As well as an internally differentiated entitlement to achievement, this must principally follow a "pedagogy of recognition". This means more than just appreciating the sensitivity to experiences of injustice that participants may bring with them, or encouraging debate and a respectful attitude to others. It requires a learning process that enables a reciprocal acknowledgement of difference, a form of identifying perception, a self-recognition that ultimately develops in structures of recognition from others (cf. Paul Mecheril 2002). 

Empowerment as Process

We are critical of any form of human rights education that cites National Socialism and the Holocaust as extreme examples as a basis for singing the praises of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, justifying its existence with the Holocaust, and, preferably during the same lesson, expecting young people to immediately spring into action for human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not the definitive, legally binding answer to the horrors of the Second World War.

The history of human rights itself neither begins nor ends in 1948. Just a superficial look at current EU politics or the human rights conventions around the world reveals that the vital thing is the way human rights can be put into practice. The extent to which this must be thought of as a process soon becomes apparent – a process that begins with the inviolable rights of the individual, but which must be implemented in the structures of state, codified under international law, and the practical application of which must be moderated and reviewed. If a thing is a process on the structural, political level, it cannot also suddenly reveal itself as a miracle of commitment to human rights on an individual level. All the same, we hope to be able to use this project folder to make the younger generation aware that human rights need their respect and protection, and to motivate them to help shape the struggle for a life of human dignity every day – both for themselves and for others.