The "StudyGuide" website offers 12 courses on the subject of the Holocaust by Bullets in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Each course deals with a witness and the content of his/her testimony. Interviews with witnesses offer a personal insight into various forms of the Holocaust in Eastern territories, with the interviewees themselves providing access to the topic. Aware that the Holocaust by Bullets in Eastern Europe represents a chapter in the history of National Socialism that is still far less in the focus of history lessons due to the limited research base, the StudyGuide is created to assist educators teaching about this specific topic with incorporating first-hand accounts of witnesses and Yahad – In Unum’s research results into their curriculum in diverse ways.
Based on the content of the interview, each course contains six sections that place the content of the video in its historical and social context.
The first section summarises the most important information about the eyewitness in form of a profile. This gives the student a brief overview of the name, place and year of birth, the year the interview was recorded and a link to a corresponding entry on the YahadMap, the interactive map of Yahad-In Unum, on which all the sites can be found, where interviews have been recorded since the start of the research, until today, in ten countries (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia).
In the second section, the background to the crimes of the Nazis and their auxiliaries described by the witness in their birthplace is presented. Specific dates and facts are given that also relate to the eyewitness and their background. This section is accompanied by a series of pictures of the witness as well as their house or village, which should give the student a more concrete picture of the person they will be dealing with in the following.
A glossary is attached to explain the new vocabulary and help the students to understand specific terms and details that characterised the region at that time, mentioned in the text or the interview.
The third section contains the central part of the course: an interactive questionnaire that gives the student the opportunity to test which details and content have been retained when reading the material. The questionnaire is designed so that it can be downloaded as a PDF after completion.
The following sections can be seen as additional information.
They first deal with information about the (Jewish) history of the town before the Nazi invasion. These facts are illustrated by pictures of historical sites within the village, as well as records from both German and Soviet archives.
Each course concludes with a series of photos taken of the witness during the interview with Yahad-In Unum.
All profiles offer a variety of confidential primary and secondary sources that must be consulted to answer the questions. While the primary sources are based exclusively on Yahad- In Unum's research, secondary sources such as JewishGen, YadVashem or the USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) are included to provide a reliable source basis for the historical notes.
As the student has to deal with these sources in order to answer the questionnaire, he/she finds him/herself in the position of the investigator.
On the one hand, the objectives of these educational materials are pedagogical in nature. The didactic strategy of cross – referencing the sources, allows the students to learn didactic skills that make different intellectual demands on them than those of everyday school lessons. Furthermore it is created to support students in developing a differentiated approach and an understanding of well-founded sources.
On the other hand, Yahad - In Unum’s work is about preserving memory. Not only of the fate of thousands of Jewish communities murdered during the Holocaust in the Eastern European territories, but also of the crimes committed by the Nazi units in these areas against other persecuted groups, including the Roma population, Soviet prisoners of war and psychiatric hospital patients.
We recently experience, that this investigative work is now a race against time. Local witnesses are often the last people able to locate the sites. They are very old and increasingly scarce.
The association has set itself the goal of passing on this valuable knowledge to young people in order to prevent the memory from fading as the communities disappear.
We see it as our task to raise awareness among the younger generations of the dangers of racism, antisemitism, and extremism in order to combat the constant growth of current and future movements of this nature.