By MaryAnn Suhl, BA A Thesis In History Submitted to ... - Repositories

GRASSROOTS INTELLECTUALISM: INTERNATIONAL YOUTH MEETING 

DACHAU AS A CASE STUDY FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION AND AWARENESS 

THROUGH PARA-EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES 

By 

MaryAnn Suhl, B.A. 

A Thesis 

In 

History 

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty 

of Texas Tech University in 

Partial Fulfillment of 

The Requirements for 

The Degree of 

MASTER OF ARTS 

Approved 

Lynne Fallwell, Ph.D. 

Chair of the Committee 

Gretchen Adams, Ph.D. 

Alan Barenberg, Ph.D. 

Anita McChesney, Ph.D. 

Dominick J. Casadonte, Jr., Ph.D. 

Interim Dean of the Graduate School 

May, 2013

Copyright © 2013, MaryAnn Suhl

Texas Tech University, MaryAnn Suhl, May 2013 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

I would like to express my appreciation for those individuals who aided me in 

completing this thesis. To my Committee Chair, advisor and mentor, without you Dr. 

Fallwell, this thesis was not possible. I sincerely thank you for all of the guidance and 

support you have given me throughout this process, and today I am confident in my skills 

as a better researcher and scholar due to your efforts and wisdom that you have shared 

with me over these past years. To my committee, Dr. Gretchen Adams, Dr. Alan 

Barenberg, and Dr. Anita McChesney, I want to thank each of you for all of your advice, 

wisdom and support. Next, I would like to thank the Department of History at Texas 

Tech University for awarding me the Dr. Idris Traylor European Travel Award, which 

enabled me to visit Germany and Dachau in order to complete research for this project. 

In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to Jennifer Wood, Uwe Neirich, and all 

of the other “teamers” of the IJB who graciously agreed to be interviewed for this project. 

I would also like to thank Andrea Heller and the Förderverein für Internationale 

Jugendbegegnung und Gedenkstättenarbeit in Dachau e.V. for their support for this 

project. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Steve and my family for all of their 

love, encouragement and support. 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................... ii 

ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................ v 

LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................... vi 

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................. vii 

I. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1 

The Role of Memory in Holocaust Education and Understanding .............................7 

II. TRENDS IN HOLOCAUST AWARENESS SINCE 1945 ................................. 17 

Holocaust Awareness in Divided Germany ..............................................................20 

East Germany .................................................................................................................. 22 

West Germany and Public Responses to the Holocaust .............................................24 

Foundations for Holocaust Education .......................................................................34 

Conclusion .................................................................................................................45 

III. GRASSROOTS INCEPTION OF THE INTERNATIONAL YOUTH MEETING 

DACHAU ................................................................................................. 47 

The Youth ..................................................................................................................49 

Origins of the International Youth Meeting Dachau .................................................51 

Internal Structure of the International Youth Meeting Dachau .................................54 

The Beginning of the “Wild Years” ..........................................................................56 

Action Reconciliation Service for Peace .......................................................................... 57 

The Protestant Church ...................................................................................................... 60 

The First Meeting ............................................................................................................. 62 

Friends for International Youth Meeting Dachau ............................................................. 66 

Supporting Associations for the International Youth Meeting Dachau ............................ 68 

Transitioning to the “Formal Years” .........................................................................72 

Conclusion .................................................................................................................78 

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IV. THE “TEAMERS” AND THE WORKSHOPS ............................................... 84 

The “Teamers” ...........................................................................................................84 

Daily Operations of the IJB ........................................................................................90 

Pedagogical Approaches within the IJB .....................................................................94 

Workshops ........................................................................................................................ 95 

Service Work and Volunteerism ..............................................................................101 

Conclusion ...............................................................................................................104 

V. CONCLUSION .......................................................................................... 106 

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................... 111 

APPENDICES 

A. CHRONOLOGY OF THE IJB .............................................................. 121 

B. SURVEY QUESTIONS FOR THE “TEAMERS” OF THE IJB ................. 126 

C. EXAMPLE OF A DAILY SUMMER IJB SCHEDULE ............................. 127 

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ABSTRACT 

This thesis examines trends in Holocaust education and awareness after 1945 

through the case study of the Youth Meeting Dachau (Internationale Jugendbegegnung- 

Dachau), a para-educational undertaking initiated by a group of young Dachau citizens 

starting in the early 1980s. The primary motivation for these youth was a desire to create 

a forum in which to discuss the implications of the legacy left by the Third Reich. Paraeducation, 

like the IJB, shares characteristics with more formalized, institutional 

education programs but also encompasses unique elements of activism and on-site work 

that extends beyond the traditional classroom. Since the 1970s, Holocaust education has 

transitioned into formalized education that is readily available for students in many 

institutions both in the secondary education systems and also at the university level. The 

“International Youth Meeting Dachau” is a program that began as a grassroots initiative 

by young people in Germany who were willing to pitch tents in open fields in order to 

create the opportunity to come together and have a discussion forum in order to 

contemplate Germany’s tumultuous past. By examining the foundation of the 

“International Youth Meeting Dachau” and its youth leaders as well as its program 

materials, this thesis brings to light much of the ways in which Holocaust awareness has 

manifested in Germany in the past few decades. 

v


LIST OF FIGURES 

3.1 Gathering at the dinner table at the first IJB meeting in 1983 .................................... 63 

3.2 Sign by the Protest Church of Munich for the tent camp ........................................... 69 

3.3 Gardens at the Dachau Youth Hostel, 2012 ............................................................... 75 

3.4 A man and young girl on stilts by the 1988 tent camp sign ........................................ 78 

3.5 Holocaust survivor Max Mannheimer speaks with the a group ................................. 81 

4.1 Dieter Lattmann plays guitar at the IJB, July 11, 1988 ............................................. 91 

4.2 IJB participants gather for an evening group session, 1988 ..................................... 92 

4.3 Group meets to discuss their reactions, 1988.............................................................. 93 

4.4 Group works on a project, 1988 .................................................................................. 99 

4.5 IJB participants clean up a Jewish cemetery in Munich ........................................... 103 

vi


LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 

ASF 

Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (Aktion Sühnezeichen 

Friedensdienste e.V.) 

BDKJ 

Federation of German Catholic Youth in the Archdiocese of Munich and 

Freising (Bund der Deutschen Katholischen Jugend in der Erzdiöcese 

München und Freising) 

BJR 

Bavarian Youth Council (Bayerischer Jugendring) 

CDU 

Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union 

Deutschlands) 

CSU 

Christian Social Union in Bavaria (Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern) 

Sister organization to the CDU and the CSU only operates in Bavaria 

whereas the CDU is political organization in the other 15 German states 

EJM 

Protestant Youth of Munich (Evangelishe Jugend München) 

EVK 

Church of Reconciliation (Evangelische Versöhnungskirche in der KZ- 

Gedenkstätte Dachau) 

FIJB 

Friends of the International Youth Meeting Dachau (Förderverein 

Internationale Jugendbegegnungstätte Dachau e.V.), but in 1999 they 

changed their name to reflect their new mission. It is now called it was the 

Friends of the International Youth Meeting and memorial work in Dachau 

(Förderverein für Internationale Jugendbegegnung und 

Gedenkstättenarbeit in Dachau e.V.) 

FRG 

Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany (Bundesrepublik 

Deutschland) 

vii


GDR 

German Democratic Republic, or East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische 

Republik) 

IJB (JBZ) 

International Youth Meeting Dachau (Internationale Jugendbegnung 

Dachau), but before 1999, it was the Youth Meeting Tent Camp 

(Jugendbegegnungszeltlager) or JBZ 

KD 

City Council of Dachau (Kreisverband Dachau) 

KJR 

Regional Youth Council for the City of Munich (Kreisjugendring 

München-Stadt) 

SPD 

Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialidemokratische Partei 

Deutschlands) 

VFP 

Volunteers for Peace 

viii


CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 

In the summer of 1983 in the meadows near the Leitenberg concentration camp 

cemetery in the town of Dachau, Germany, a very special moment in Holocaust 

education got its start. There, a group of young Germans, many residents of Dachau 

proper, came together to pitch tents and live communally for a few weeks in order to 

create a space that they could gather and discuss the tumultuous recent history of the 

Third Reich. Some of those in attendance were older, bringing with them experiences 

gained in another period of a revolutionary youth movement, the 68 generation – that first 

post-WWII generation who began the challenge of asking their parents and families about 

their roles under National Socialism. Other participants were younger, teenagers, who 

like the 68ers had a profound interest in understanding what the legacy of the Third Reich 

and Holocaust meant for them and their generation. The field chosen for this first 

meeting was full of symbolism. Leitenberg, located several kilometers from the main 

train station or the concentration camp memorial site in Dachau, Germany, was 

intimately tied to Nazi history as it was the location of a mass gravesite where the bodies 

of those who had died in the Dachau camp were buried. This first meeting set the 

foundation for what would become known as the “International Youth Meeting Dachau” 

(Internationale Jugendbegegnung Dachau), or IJB. 1 

What took root in the meadows of 

1 There is an important naming distinction for the abbreviation of IJB. Although I used the abbreviation 

IJB for International Jugendbegegnung Dachau, it began as the International Jugendbegnung Zeltlager 

Dachau or IJBZ. It ceased to be a tent camp in 1999, when the Dachau Youth Hostel opened and the group 

1


southern Bavaria would eventually grow into an example of a national, and then 

international para-educational opportunity for learning about the implications and legacy 

of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. This thesis examines the founding, and structure of 

the “International Youth Meeting Dachau” along with its educators and their pedagogy as 

a vanguard for para-educational activism as a way to enforce notions of Holocaust 

education and also general public awareness about the Holocaust. 

The International Youth Meeting Dachau represents an alternative educational 

experience and way of studying both the specific events of the Holocaust and the legacy 

they left behind. While contemporary Holocaust education, particularly that which 

occurs outside of Germany, is largely restricted to classrooms within formal secondary 

and post-secondary institutional settings, the IJB offers an opportunity for hands-on 

interactive study at the historical site itself. The IJB further distinguishes itself from 

traditional visits to historical sites by its duration: instead of one day, the tent camp 

allows participants to come and stay at the site, engaging with it over several days, and 

indeed weeks. There are multiple components to the IJB experience, which include a 

variety of activities that are physical, intellectual, and creative, and designed to enrich the 

youth’s experiences who participate in the program. The combination of on-site 

education over an extended period of time is what makes the IJB a para-educational 

activity. 

It is important to understand how the IJB is para-educational, in order to 

characterize the educational responsibilities of the IJB in conjunction with the formal 

had a permanent location. Throughout my thesis I will refer to it as the IJB, however, it has a longer 

history as the IJBZ than as the IJB. 

2


education that students receive in secondary education in Germany. In order to define 

para-education, it is easiest to start with a comparison between para-professional because 

it parallels to para-education in both meaning and function. A para-professional is 

defined as “a trained worker who is not a member of a profession but who assists a 

professional.” 2 

Much like the function of a para-professional, the purpose of paraeducation 

is defined by a similarly parallel meaning because it assists in supportive 

education for students in a supplementary role, in addition to the information they receive 

in formal education. 

Para-education is not simply a replacement for formal education on the Holocaust 

and the Third Reich; rather, it is supplementary in function because it offers unique 

opportunities and learning experiences that are just simply unavailable in a classroom 

setting. By using the historic sites where concentration camps were located and where 

prisoners were held, it presents students with an additional dimension of education to 

bring real experiences to the concepts to which they are exposed through textbooks and 

other forms of printed material. Specific to the IJB, part of the daily activities includes 

construction and clean-up work for the memorial site. The IJB is also unlike other 

educational opportunities because it allows the participants to spend several weeks 

focusing on the intense Holocaust education instead of the usual hour or day-long 

programs that are the typical education experiences available to individuals interested in 

Holocaust education. 

2 paraprofessional. Dictionary.com WordNet 3.0. Princeton University. 

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paraprofessional (accessed: October 11, 2012). 

3


It is worth noting that this para-educational, youth-initiated, grassroots activity 

began in southern Germany in a town with a population just over 35,000. 3 

Several 

factors contributed to the foundation of the IJB and thus its subsequent placement in and 

near Dachau, Germany. Each of these elements combined create the uniqueness that is 

the International Youth Meeting Dachau, which constitutes it as a distinct form of 

Holocaust education available to youth apart from the formal education they receive in 

school settings. 

First, the International Youth Meeting Dachau is foremost a grassroots movement 

because it was initiated by the local young people in Dachau as a way to bring meaning 

to the significance of Dachau’s past in Nazi history. The definition of grassroots is that it 

refers to “the common or ordinary people, especially as contrasted with the leadership or 

elite of a political party, social organization, etc.; the rank and file,” and so Holocaust 

education in Dachau was started by a group of Dachauer youth looking for an outlet for 

their questions about the history of the Holocaust and National Socialism. 4 

Although this 

term is often used in connection with political movements or situations, it is applicable 

here because it was the youth, and not the city officials who worked to create the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau. When the term “grassroots” is applied to social 

interaction, the movement is not substantiated by major political parties or individuals, 

but rather those who are on the lower end of the power scheme looking to make changes. 

This is the exact situation that describes the events that were set into motion in Dachau. 

3 Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001, (New 

York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 17. According to a figure in Harold Marcuse’s Legacies of 

Dachau, this is the population count for Dachau in the 1970s. 

4 grassroots. Dictionary.com WordNet 3.0. Princeton University. 

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/grassroots (accessed: October 16, 2012). 

4


The town of Dachau had a particular relationship to the history of Nazism. The local 

youth and select individuals of the city of Dachau called for places in Dachau that could 

be used continually for Holocaust education and awareness, and they were met with 

fervent opposition from not only from Dachau’s city officials, but also from major 

political organizations and regional officials who were clearly against any sort of 

Holocaust education in Dachau. For years, the IJB and its supporters struggled against 

the upper echelons of politicians and bureaucrats who made it their goal to derail attempts 

to bring recognition to Dachau for its role in the Holocaust. Despite the persistent 

resistance against creating a place for Holocaust education in Dachau, the IJB continued 

to gain more support from other individuals and organizations which enabled them to be 

successful in maintaining the annual summer meetings in Dachau. The ultimate defeat of 

the opposition against Holocaust education in Dachau came once a permanent location 

site had been secured in Dachau for the IJB to continue its work with annual summer 

meetings. 

Secondly, in Germany, the term “youth” is not equivalent to the American usage 

that often considers youth to be school aged students and ends by a person’s midtwenties. 

Neither restriction accurately describes the youth who participate in the IJBZ or 

the IJB. In Germany, “youth” is a much broader term encompassing not only those who 

are considered school age students, but also including individuals often well into one’s 

mid-thirties. For this reason, the Dachau camp was open to participants who were already 

school aged, but also included those who were well into their thirties as long as they were 

interested in greater exposure to Holocaust education and awareness. This is yet another 

5


aspect of the IJB that is distinct to other forms of Holocaust education because it is 

difficult to find any type of learning community that consistently engages with such a 

wide range of ages from their participants stretching from sixteen years of age to others 

who are well into their early thirties. The education that is available at the IJB is meant 

for mature adults, but also for the younger youth as well. Other than having the 

stipulation of “youth”, the IJB does not gear the education of its program toward any 

particular age group, but rather it attempts to make it available to the widest group of 

participants as possible, in order to encompass as many individuals as possible to be able 

to take part in the Holocaust education it have to offer. 

Finally, it is an important characteristic of the IJB that its meetings are located 

near the grounds of the former concentration camp Dachau. The grounds are used as an 

educational tool for the IJB, and having the physical place where Holocaust events 

occurred makes the memory of the Holocaust more accessible to the participants of the 

IJB. Dachau and the surrounding areas are used as a textbook, of sorts. There are many 

places in Dachau that remain connected to the history of Nazism and the atrocities that 

occurred during the Third Reich. By visiting the memorial site, the participants have 

access to the places where the events of the Holocaust actually occurred. They are also 

given the opportunity to speak to the survivors and eyewitnesses that can also attest to 

what happened in Dachau during the Holocaust. These components that are available to 

the participants make the experience of the IJB something different than simply sitting in 

classrooms and reading materials about the events of the Holocaust. 

6


The Role of Memory in Holocaust Education and Understanding 

Although the primary topic at hand here is Holocaust awareness and education, a 

sub-field is also the broader topic of memory, or the ways in which the combination of 

facts, events, and previous experiences have shaped the way that Holocaust is 

remembered or recalled. 5 

In the past several decades, the history of the Holocaust has 

become intertwined with the broader field of memory studies. The impact of the 

Holocaust is vast in the study of memory and memorialization, and there is much 

scholarship on the topic. 6 

As discussed by German scholar Helmut Schreier, memory 

studies and memorialization are closely associated with the Holocaust and the events of 

twentieth-century Germany. Many scholars have attributed this development to the 

Wende (or turning point) in German history when East and West Germany were once 

again united at the conclusion of the Cold War. With Germany’s reunification, it would 

prompt reflection in its past, not only as a divided Germany into East and West, but it 

also would incite a reflection on Germany’s history and its subsequent memory before 

the division. 

By the end of the Cold War, and Germany’s reunification, widespread interest in 

Holocaust education coincided with the end of the Cold War which also created rising 

5 memory. Dictionary.com WordNet 3.0. Princeton University. 

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paraprofessional (accessed: February 27, 2013). 

6 For more information on memory and the Holocaust, please see: Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the 

Holocaust, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: the Nazi past in 

the Two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997); Berel Lang, The Future of the 

Holocaust: between History and Memory, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Bill Niven, ed. 

Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 

2006); Moishe Postone, and Eric Santner, eds. Catastrophe and Meaning: the Holocaust and the twentieth 

century, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Mark Wolfgram, “Getting History Right”: East 

and West Germany collective memories of the Holocaust and the War. (Lewisburg, MD: Bucknell 

University Press, 2010). 

7


interests in German memory. Consequently, much scholarship on the relationship of 

history and memory became incorporated into the discourse on Holocaust memory and 

Holocaust education. Beginning in the 1980s, several historians wrote books that 

attempted to depict the relationship between memory and history. 

French Historian Pierre Nora wrote four volumes beginning in the 1980s on lieux 

de mémoire or “places of memory”. Nora claims that “memory takes root in the concrete, 

in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal 

continuities, to progressions and to relations between things.” 7 Nora’s work has been 

influential in the discourse on sites of memory, and he discusses a number of places 

where memory takes shape, including places such as the archives, museums, cathedrals, 

palaces, cemeteries, and memorials. 8 Nora also argues that there is a dichotomous 

relationship between memory and history and their representations are constantly in 

conflict with each other. As Nora suggests, memory and history function in relative 

positions to each, but with contrasting functions: 

Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in 

fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its 

name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering 

and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to 

manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and 

periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always 

problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual 

7 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26, Special Issue: 

Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring, 1989): 9. 

8 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7-24. 

8


phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of 

the past. 9 

Nora views history and memory as these complete and separate entities that are always in 

contrast to each other. Many scholars do not view history and memory in this diametric 

opposition. Many scholars working in the field of memory studies view them as two 

functions on the same trajectory towards reconstructing the past. 

Holocaust education scholar Marla Morris, writing on the topic of the Holocaust 

and memory, ventured to address the relationship of history and memory and identifies it 

in the following way: 

Memory is the larger category under which history is subsumed. History, then, is 

a systematization of memory. History, however, is not reducible to memory; for 

historians, although operating out of their own memories, draw on archives, 

documents, and testimonies and are constrained by the discipline of history. 10 

By Morris’ definition, memory and history have a complex relationship, and both utilize 

a collection of source material to research the topics. Morris’s book is insightful in 

depicting the functions of memory within history and how scholars have used memory to 

address historical topics including the Holocaust. The relationship between the history of 

the Holocaust and the memory of the Holocaust are intertwined when approaching issues 

such as former concentration camp grounds because they serve the purpose of containing 

not only the history of events that transpired there, but also the memory of the Holocaust. 

Former concentration camp grounds are also part of a larger discussion of memory 

because they encompass part of a collective memory of the Holocaust. 

9 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 8. 

10 Marla Morris, Curriculum and the Holocaust: Competing Sites of Memory and Representation, 

(Mahwah: NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2001), 8. 

9


Many scholars have cultivated larger connections of the collective memory of the 

Holocaust and its relationship to Germany’s national history. Wulf Kansteiner states that 

in order to understand the relationship between history and collective memory: 

We should conceptualize collective memory as the result of the interactions 

among three types of historical factors: the intellectual and cultural traditions that 

frame all our representations of the past; the memory makers who selectively 

adopt and manipulate these traditions; and the memory consumers who use, 

ignore, or transform such artifacts according to their own interests. 11 

As Kansteiner suggests, collective memory and history are linked inextricably by their 

functions, however, he also states that even though they have reciprocal objectives, 

“collective memory is not history.” 12 

His definition of collective memory is also 

important to understand his critiques of collective memory surrounding the Holocaust, 

and the potentially problematic role of memory: 

Methodologically speaking, memories are at their most collective when they 

transcend the time and space of an event’s original occurrence. As such, they take 

on a power life of their own, “unencumbered” by actual individual memory, and 

they become the basis of all collective remembering as disembodied, omnipresent, 

low-intensity memory. This point has been reached, for instance, with regard to 

the memory of the Holocaust in American society. 13 

However, even despite his criticisms, Kansteiner states that the Holocaust is a powerful 

source of memory within the German national history and it still functions with great 

historical importance within German memory, but also in an international context of 

11 Wulf Kansteiner, In the Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz, 

(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), 12. 

12 Ibid. 

13 Ibid., 20. 

10


influential, not only in memory studies, but scholars and the general public have referred 

to Young’s work on the topic of Holocaust memorials and how they fit into Germany’s 

memorialization process and the collective memorialization of the Holocaust within the 

German historical narrative. 17 

Young looks at the purpose of memorials and their 

aesthetics as a way to understand “the many complicated historical, political, and 

aesthetic axes on which memory [are] being constructed.” 18 

It is difficult to find material 

on Germany’s memorialization of the Holocaust without identifying at least traces of 

research that can be accredited to Young’s influence in the area. In addition, research on 

the use of memory space is crucial to the memory and memorialization of concentration 

camps because they are the actual sites of memory. This contrasts museums and other 

forms of memory because it is meant to draw on the events that occurred at the place as a 

way to make the memory survive within that particular location. 

The historian Harold Marcuse has contributed work on the history of Dachau, and 

subsequently its memorialization. Marcuse identifies Dachau as central to memorial 

work in Germany and he suggests that the “examination of the memorials established in 

former concentration camps, especially in Dachau, which, as the most heavily 

memorialized site, can serve as a case study for the country as a whole” and thus become 

a national representation of memorialization in Germany. 19 

Consequently, the physical 

location of the Dachau concentration camp has a special connection to the 

17 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meanings. New Have: Yale 

University Press, 1993), x. This quote is located in the preface. 

18 Ibid., ix. 

19 Harold Marcuse, “Memorializing Persecuted Jews in Dachau and Other West German Camp Memorial 

Sites,” in Memorialization in Germany since 1945, ed. Bill Niven and Chloe Paver (New York: Palgrave 

MacMillan, 2010), 192. 

12


memorialization of the terror and crimes committed during the Third Reich. Due to this 

relationship, Caroline Pearce argues that the purposes of memorials are more involved 

than previously considered. She suggests that: 

The role of memorial sites themselves has changed. Their principle function is 

still to remember the victims, but with increased distance from the Second World 

War they are also viewed as ‘places of learning.’ The past two decades have seen 

extensive research into pedagogical approaches at memorial sites. Rather than 

merely transmitting historical facts, the aim is to promote ‘learning through 

discovery’, dialogue, and independent reflection on the past. 20 

Pearce’s concept of “learning through discovery” and not just focusing on conveying the 

facts of history is an essential element to the kind of Holocaust education that the IJB has 

worked to promote in Dachau. In addition, as part of the IJB experience, the participants 

are also encouraged to engage in conversation with those involved and to give time for 

serious personal reflection on how the IJB has impacted their ability to learn Holocaust 

education on a different level than if they were to have the same information 

communicated to them in a classroom. As memorial sites continue to transform into sites 

for education and learning, the role of para-educational experiences such as the IJB will 

be vital in preserving the functions of the memorial site itself, but also to implement the 

education and awareness of the Holocaust to public audiences who want to be more 

educated about the historical implications of the memorial site for the history of 

Germany. 

20 Caroline Pearce, “The Role of German Perpetrator Sites in Teaching and Confronting the Nazi Past,” in 

Memorialization in Germany since 1945, ed. Bill Niven and Chloe Paver (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 

2010), 169. 

13


Accordingly, the shifting function of memory and memorialization is important to 

the work of the International Youth Meeting Dachau, because it is an organization that 

now has an established history of and methodology for educating German youth, and 

more recently, an international audience of youth, to the lessons and connotations of the 

Holocaust. This thesis will work towards connecting the history and foundation of the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau and its work as a grass roots, para-educational 

experience that functions within Holocaust memory and memorialization as the transition 

step for the next generations to know and become educated about Nazi crimes and 

atrocities and how that has developed within Germany’s national history. 

In order to successfully argue these connections, several factors must be discussed 

about the history of Holocaust education and awareness, as well as the internal structure 

of the International Youth Meeting Dachau and the ways that it functions as a paraeducational 

innovation that will lead the next generations in Holocaust education and 

awareness. Holocaust education and pedagogy of Holocaust education are 

distinguishable from each other in a number of ways. Although both are within this 

thesis, there is a distinction that must be made for the purpose of understanding the 

Holocaust education of the IJB and its pedagogy to be used to teach those lessons to their 

participants about the Holocaust. Education is “the results of learning can never be 

measured according to a common standard.” This contrasts with pedagogy considering 

that “those results must be measured because the whole point of learning is to equip 

people for specified social, political, and economic requirements.” 21 

The IJB promotes 

21 Geoffrey Hinchliffe, “Education or Pedagogy?”’ Journal of Philosophy of Education 35, no. 1 (2001): 

31. 

14


Holocaust education and “education can be defined as ‘learning for its own sake’, 

pedagogy can be defined as learning oriented towards social goals.” 22 

Within Holocaust 

education, the tools and methods that are employed to teach the lessons are what make up 

the pedagogy. 

The chapters of this thesis are organized as follows: chapter two discusses the 

post-1945 division of Germany into East and West, and how that affects the different 

states and the policies toward Holocaust history and subsequently Holocaust education. 

There are a several major historical developments discussed in chapter two including the 

Eichmann Trial, the growth of the 1968 youth generation in Germany, and the Holocaust 

TV mini-series. Then there are also significant international public responses that 

followed these events, including the Historian’s debate (Historikerstreit) and America’s 

launching of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the production of 

Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which have furthered general public awareness over 

the course of the last half of the twentieth century beginning in the immediate post war 

period and continuing into present-day. Consequently, beginning in the nineteen 

seventies, formalization of Holocaust education entered as a mainstream topic and takes 

on a heavily American influence in the United States that did not necessarily translate 

equally to the European education systems. By tracing the evolution of formalized 

Holocaust education and also Holocaust awareness, it easily contrasts with the situation 

of para-educational activism founded in organizations such as the International Youth 

Meeting Dachau. 

22 Geoffrey Hinchliffe, “Education or Pedagogy?”’ Journal of Philosophy of Education 35, no. 1 (2001): 

31. 

15


Chapter three then discusses the origins of the IJB, and also includes information 

on the internal structure of the organization and also discussion on many of the 

organizations that are associated with the founding of the IJB. The chapter attempts to 

establish a chronology of the IJB beginning in the immediate postwar years and continues 

through the foundation of Youth Hostel in 1998, and thus completing one part of its 

history and transitioning into the next phase of the IJB. As this chapter will demonstrate, 

the concept of the IJB was a long and arduous process that comprised many people and 

organizations to defend the notion to memorialize the history of the town of Dachau as a 

center for Holocaust education and awareness. 

Chapter four brings to light the educators or “teamers” of the IJB and what 

motivated them to get involved in a group like the IJB. It also highlights the pedagogy of 

summer meetings of the IJB and how the workshops create spaces for the “teamers” to 

educate the participants on themes related to the Holocaust. Also discussed is the daily 

operation of the summer meetings and the planning that went into the activities by the 

“teamers.” 

The last chapter concludes the discussion of the IJB and also offers insight on the 

current status of Holocaust education and where an experience at the IJB fits into the 

modern systems of education and what that might mean for the future of Holocaust 

education. 

16


CHAPTER II 

TRENDS IN HOLOCAUST AWARENESS SINCE 1945 

The shift in socio-political focus from World War II to the Cold War in 1945 

pushed intellectual inquiry into the Holocaust into the background. There were no clear 

paths envisioned by any of the occupying forces in the aftermath of the Second World 

War that decided for Germany how the memory the Holocaust would develop. Many 

historians and other scholars have agreed that there are certain elements of the Holocaust 

that make it a unique event in history. The history of the Holocaust is far-reaching, and 

has a certain place in the memory of the global narrative, and so many professionals are 

concerned with the memory of the Holocaust and how that memory fits into the historical 

narrative of the world. This chapter will examine the different trends in Holocaust 

awareness since 1945, the impact Holocaust education in the divided Germanys, and 

finally the recent trends in Holocaust education in both Germany and the United States, 

and how these developments shaped the foundations of Holocaust education which has 

directed Germany to follow the United States’ Holocaust pedagogy. For a North 

American audience in a post-Schindler’s List, post-United States Holocaust Memorial 

Museum world, it appears that Holocaust education has been around forever. However, 

formal institutionalized education on the Holocaust is a relatively recent phenomenon 

that emerged out of growing public awareness on the topic beginning in the 1970s and 

1980s. In order to fully consider the implications of Holocaust education, it is important 

17


to consider how the Holocaust as a historical event shifted by way of public interest and 

awareness into the educational narrative. 

Consequently, interest from the general public or from scholars about the 

Holocaust was not a sweeping phenomenon that took hold in the immediate years of the 

post-War period. Instead, it was a gradual process. In fact, it would take decades after 

1945 for Holocaust education to become integrated in school curriculums not only in 

Germany, but also in Western Europe and the United States. That does not mean that no 

one asked questions in the immediate post-war period, but rather that the questions being 

asked had a particular purpose and direction. Michael Marrus, a pioneer in Holocaust 

education and teaching methods, notes “in the first two decades after the Holocaust 

writers were preoccupied with the search for a single key—something that would unlock 

the mystery of the massacre of the European Jewry.” 23 

In the initial decades, scholars 

were not necessarily interested in exploring the process of what happened to the Jews in 

Nazi Germany. Instead, this pursuit of the single key was centered on the search for a 

“why,” as in why (how could) one group murder another? Gradually, however, the range 

at how something this devastating could happen broadened out and began to encompass 

an interest in understanding exactly what did happen. This evolution was a result 

primarily of two factors; the fading of acute pain experience by survivors, and the rise of 

a new generation of scholars who came of age after the events of the Holocaust. These 

factors, plus specific events such as the capture and subsequent trial of the notorious Nazi 

23 Michael Marrus, the Holocaust in History (Toronto: Key Porter Books Ltd., 2000), 93. Marrus also has a 

great article on the historiography of the Holocaust written several decades after the first publication of this 

work. Please see: Michal Marrus, “Reflections on the Historiography of the Holocaust,” The Journal of 

Modern History 66, no. 1 (Mar.,1994). 

18


doctor Adolf Eichmann, combined to promote resurgence in research into the Holocaust 

starting in the late 1960s. Following on the heels of this interest in understanding 

Holocaust history, came a desire by scholars to find a way to teach about what happened 

and the field of Holocaust pedagogy, of which this study on grassroots para-educational 

programs is a part, began to appear in the late 1970s. 

The Holocaust, while physically taking place on the European continent, has 

created a lasting impact throughout the world. Discussion on the Holocaust is an 

international forum. Research on the Holocaust has been contributed by countless 

scholars from places all over the globe. In particular, the United States, in conjunction 

with England and Germany, have helped to shape the discourse about the Holocaust. 

Due to the international nature of the topic of the Holocaust, it is again difficult to merge 

all of the different viewpoints and topics into a single historiographical narrative 

concerning Holocaust education. However, there are distinct reoccurring topics that 

dominate both the history and education discourses that overlap and help to make sense 

of the divergence paths constructed by many of the scholars involved in writing on the 

Holocaust. 

The difficulty with Holocaust education is that there is little formal research on 

the pedagogy of teaching this subject. The two fields have yet to merge and create a 

discourse of the material that overlaps between the two areas. While researching this 

topic, the paths diverge in so much of the material that it is impossible to cover all of the 

topics within the discourse of the Holocaust and education on the Holocaust. Another 

problem with the discourse surrounding the subject of the Holocaust is that it is 

19


interdisciplinary. It is possible to conduct research on the Holocaust in a variety of fields 

within the humanities, and it again creates more problems for those working to construct 

the discourse over published material. For the purposes of this chapter, the history of the 

discourse surrounding the Holocaust will be reconstructed by examining the discourse on 

Holocaust awareness. 

Holocaust Awareness in Divided Germany 

At the end of the Second World War, Europe was in ruins both physically and 

politically. Within a few years, Germany was divided into East and West Germany and 

both halves remained occupied for many years. This political division had enormous 

impact on how each side handled the history and legacy of the Holocaust. In the 

aftermath of World War II, both sections of Germany were influenced by their foreign 

occupiers and the subsequent political situation developing that would eventually explode 

into the Cold War. The political divisions of the Cold War would also be the factor 

determining Germany’s division after the Second World War. Western occupied zones 

of Germany were occupied by the French, British and Americans. These western Alliedcontrol 

territories would eventually be combined to make up the new Federal Republic of 

Germany, or the FRG. The Eastern occupied zone of Germany was controlled by the 

Soviet Union, and after the division of Germany, East Germany became the GDR or the 

German Democratic Republic. 

While East Germany took the stance of triumph over antifascism, West Germany 

would shift through phases of reconciliation (Versöhnung) by the occupying powers, but 

20


“with the onset of the Cold War and its exacerbation by the Berlin blockade, the Western 

powers, led by the United States, deemphasized denazification, stopping it in many 

instances before it began.” 24 

In 1983, Herman Lübbe, a German philosopher, noted that 

West Germany’s “partial silence was the social-psychological and politically necessary 

medium for the transformation of our postwar population into the citizenry of the Federal 

Republic.” 25 

Consequently, the silence that was promoted by the occupying powers and 

thus the new German regime viewed it as a necessary part of the transition of de-Nazified 

citizens into the new West Germans. The way that the FRG dealt with the Holocaust is a 

direct reflection of how the occupying powers also viewed the Holocaust. Without 

silencing their pasts, the transition into the newly developed West Germany would not 

have been able to remove themselves from the Nazis of their past so easily. 

This is markedly different from the legacy of National Socialism that developed 

in East Germany by the Soviet Union who “drew on an intact “antifascist” political 

tradition which originated in the Weimar Republic and continued in emigration during 

the period of Nazi rule.” 26 

The Soviets rejected Nazis and associated them with 

capitalists of the West, and so the Holocaust was viewed by the Soviets as part of the 

problem of the capitalists and thus did not need to concern East Germany with the 

24 Andrei S. Markovits, and Beth Simone Noveck, “West Germany” in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, 

Ed. David Wyman. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 403. 

25 Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity, (Cambridge, 

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 90. For other works on silence and its political implications, 

please see: Herman Lübbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im Deutschen Nachkriegsbewesstsein,” Historische 

Zeitschrift 236, no. 3 (June 1983), 579-599; Dennis L. Bark and David R. Gress, A History of West 

Germany: From Shadow to Substance, 1945-1964 (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Ulrich 

Brochhagen, Nach Nürnberg:Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Westinegration in der Ära Adenauer 

(Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1994); Thomas Alan Schwartz, American’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the 

Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 

26 Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 13. 

21


Holocaust. The Soviets were able to draw the well-established traditions of anti-capitalist 

stereotypes that had been popular within Germany beginning with the end of World War 

I in order to effectively silence East Germans about the Holocaust. 

East Germany 

There are several issues in East Germany that caused the history of the Holocaust 

to develop in particular ways. First, the East German government was controlled by its 

larger political entity in the Soviet Union, and so the official record was that the 

“government saw itself as relieved of responsibility for Nazi crimes: the government and, 

by extension, the citizens of the GDR were the antifascist resistance fighters and victims 

as well.” 27 

Again, the Nazis and the crimes committed by the Nazis were closely 

associated with capitalism, and the Soviets were able to use rhetoric that has become part 

of Germany’s popular history since the end of the First World War. The new East 

German citizens were no longer Nazis, but the individuals who were antifascist resistors 

and victims of the Nazis as well. Scholars researched information present in the 

educational books for schools in East Germany as a way to describe the discussion of 

historical topics and the ways the state chose to teach the war and the Holocaust, and the 

results demonstrated that “the Jews and the Holocaust [were] equally absent from GDR 

textbooks.” 28 

Scholars, like Jeffrey Peck, have suggested that “the Soviet-influenced GDR 

policy on the Jews was definitely related to the government’s lack of interest in the 

27 Jeffrey Peck, “East Germany” in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, Ed. David Wyman, (Baltimore: The 

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 448. 

28 Peck, “East Germany,”452. 

22


writing of the official Holocaust histories.” 29 

Peck describes the relations of the GDR to 

the Jewish communities in East Germany, and he states that “the history of East German 

responses to the Holocaust closely parallels the GDR’s postwar history, its relation to 

German identity, and its association with its ever-dwindling number of Jews.” 30 

Peck 

explains that there were changes that dramatically shifted the East German state and its 

concern with Holocaust education: 

In the 1960s, a decade that began with the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, 

historical research in the GDR began to address the Holocaust since it was “at the 

beginning of this decade the GDR historiography was constituted as a 

independent [selbständige] social science discipline.” Historian Walter Schmidt 

pointed out that while up until this time the social sciences, including history, did 

not attend to the Holocaust sufficiently, the Holocaust was a subject of great 

interest in the public sphere in “popular literature, art, painting, film, journalism, 

radio, and television.” 31 

He characterizes that the “established historiography covered the Holocaust only within 

the framework of fascist crimes and antifascist resistance,” which was the Soviet Union’s 

way to describe the era of National Socialism and Nazism in Germany under Hitler’s 

regime. 32 Finally, Peck comments that there is a major deficit in the amount of research 

conducted on the relationship of the GDR and the history of the Holocaust and that the 

publications that are available on this topic have done nothing to reduce the deficiency of 

research on this particular subject. Overall, there was a serious lack of attention devoted 

to the history of the Holocaust, and it was reflected not only in the education system, but 

29 Ibid., 455. 

30 Ibid., 449. 

31 Peck, “East Germany,” 457. 

32 Ibid., 458. For more information on East Germany and its relationship to the history of the Holocaust, 

please see: Thomas Fox, Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust, (Rochester: Camden House, 

2001); Richard Rubenstein, and John K. Roth, Eds., Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its 

Legacy, (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987); and Friedrich Schweitzer, ““Education after Auschwitz”- 

Perspectives from Germany,” Religious Education 95, no. 4 (Fall, 2000). 

23


also in the governmental policies of the East German government and by proxy the 

Soviet Union. 

More research on East Germany and their policies toward Holocaust history needs to 

be conducted and so there is still much investigation necessary to fully develop the 

history of the Holocaust in relationship to East Germany. East Germany defined Nazism 

and all things related to Nazism, including the Holocaust, as a capitalist problem. 

Instead, East Germans chose to focus on the communist victims of Holocaust, and in fact, 

those communists who survived the concentration camps were the East German state’s 

new heroes. The East German state virtually washed its hands of needing to deal with the 

history of the Holocaust because they associated it with Nazism and capitalism, and thus 

marked it as a responsibility of the Western world, including West Germany to figure out 

the place of the Holocaust in history. For this reason, the rest of this thesis will focus on 

what happens in West Germany. 

West Germany and the Public Responses to the Holocaust 

Similar to the rhetoric of East Germany, West Germany too followed the model 

provided by their western occupying powers and ignored the Holocaust. West 

Germany’s active engagement in Cold War effectively silenced interest in studying the 

Third Reich and the Holocaust until several major international events reawakened 

general interest in the subject. Several distinct events in West Germany’s history helped 

to bring the topic of the Holocaust to the forefront and so, the development of the history 

of the Holocaust beginning with Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961, and then continuing 

with the growth of the new generation of German youth who were interested in their past 

24


who were known as the 1968 generation, and also, general interest in the Holocaust 

“reached a peak with the broadcasting of the docudrama Holocaust in 1979.” 33 

Each of 

these events reawakened a general interest in the Holocaust, which eventually led to a 

series of public responses by international audiences: first, the debate amongst 

academics in West Germany about nuances of guilt, responsibility, and memory in the 

Holocaust, which became known as the Historian’s Debate, and finally, the American 

projects of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Hollywood 

production of Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in the 1990s. Again, it is important to 

note that these events not only had an impact on West German audiences, but also that 

each of these events brought the topic of the history of the Holocaust front and center 

internationally. 

The first development to spur international attention on the Holocaust was the 

highly publicized Eichmann trial that brought international attention not only to West 

Germany, but also to the continued existence of Nazi War Criminals. The trial caused a 

chain reaction of responses within several countries for how the world dealt with the 

history of the Holocaust. There was an international reaction to the Eichmann trial. 

Hanna Arendt, a public figure who escaped Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, 

attended the Eichmann trial and later wrote a book detailing the trial proceeding and the 

significance of the Eichmann trial for the world. 34 

Arendt and her involvement brought 

33 Myran Goldenberg and Rochelle L Millen. “Introduction,” in Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun: Teaching 

the Holocaust in Colleges and Universities. Eds. Myran Goldenberg and Rochelle L. Millen. (Seattle: 

University of Washington Press, 2007): 5-6. 

34 Hanna Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem; a report on the banality of evil, (New York: Viking Press, 1963). 

25


international attention to the trial. It paved the way for discussions about perpetrators and 

victims. Soon, countries would no longer ignore the impacts of the Holocaust. 

Historian Jeffrey Herf discusses the immediate post-war political rhetoric that was 

characteristic of the official West German policies towards the history of National 

Socialism. Specifically, Herf focuses on the actions of West German’s first post-war 

Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (1949-1963). Herf states that “what was implicit in 

Adenauer’s practice, namely, that the price for postwar integration of those Germans 

compromised by their beliefs and actions in the Third Reich was silence about the crimes 

of that period.” 35 

In correlation with the policies of silence about the past and the role of 

National Socialism, Herf also argues that “confronting the crimes of the Nazi past 

constituted a, and in many distinguished cases the, central preoccupation of postwar 

German intellectual, journalistic, literary, cinematic, theological, legal, and scholarly 

engagement.” 36 

This duplicitous juxtaposition between silence and yet at the same time, 

working towards confrontation of crimes of the past will continue to dominate how West 

Germany deals with the history of the Holocaust and the Third Reich. 

The scholar Andreas Markovits remarks that “a mature Bewältigung der 

Vergangenheit [coming to terms with the past] has never occurred in West Germany, 

because the initial response to the Holocaust in 1945 was to repress and forget it rather 

than confront it in an honest and collective manner.” 37 

Markovits states that there were 

35 Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 

University Press, 1997), 6-7. 

36 Herf, Divided Memory, 8. 

37 Markovits and Noveck, 401. 

26


two groups in Germany involved in the discussion about the Holocaust and he asserts that 

“Germany’s political, administrative, and economic elites remained silent on the 

Holocaust [, but] German writers and intellectuals, however, did not.” 38 

Markovits 

articulates the lasting impact of the Holocaust even after the re-unification of the two 

Germany’s by asserting that “it would not be an exaggeration to say that the holocaust 

and the legacy of German anti-Semitism have to this very day provided the central theme 

framing discourse among the Federal Republic’s literati and intellectuals.” 39 Markovits 

discusses the impact of literature and Group 47 (Gruppe 47) in the early years of postwar 

reconstruction. 40 

Beginning in the late 1960s, a newer generation of young people had influential 

effects on the trajectory of the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust. By the 

end of the 1960s, a new generation had come of age in West Germany. This first postwar 

generation has become known as the 1968 generation. Those who are considered to be 

part of the 1968 generation were those who were born immediately after the end of the 

Second World War and are thus, the first generation to be removed by birth from the 

complicity of National Socialism. A considerable part of the tendency to look inward to 

consider the historic implications of National Socialism spurred from this new generation 

awakening to the complicity of their parents in the era of National Socialism. The 

importance of the 1968 generation is that “their confrontation with their parents’ Nazi 

past decisively influenced their identity... [and] the anti-establishment movement 

38 Ibid. 

39 Ibid. 

40 Ibid., 414. Group 47 was a group of writers who were led by Hans Werner Richter, and they were the 

intellectuals who worked to reestablish the traditional literature of German after the war. 

27


culminating that year left a lasting stamp on their political attitudes.” 41 The political 

attitudes that developed from those confrontations are what lead to more Germans 

interested in the Holocaust and education about what transpired during the National 

Socialist era. 

With this type of environment developing throughout the younger generation of 

Germans, the creation of the International Youth Meeting Dachau, or IJB then became a 

solution for those who were interested in education and discussions about Germany’s past 

and its role in the Holocaust under National Socialism. Thus, the IJB is essential in 

understanding how young Germans dealt with the silence of their past history and worked 

to create an experience so that they could learn for themselves about the Holocaust, but 

also to teach those who were interested about the Holocaust. Although the IJB began as a 

way for German youth to gather in Germany to learn about their past histories, eventually 

the IJB includes individuals from the international community to participate in the 

experiences of the IJB. German Holocaust educator Hanns-Fred Rathenow states that 

the reason for this was because until the mid-1960s, “National Socialism and its memory 

was suppressed by Germany.” 42 During last several decades, the Holocaust narrative and 

legacy has been developed and continues to stand at the forefront of the debate in 

Germany’s reckoning with the events and legacy of World War II, National Socialism, 

and the Holocaust. 

Much like the developments in West Germany’s 1968 generation coming of age, 

the broadcast of the television miniseries Holocaust in 1979, spurred a demand by the 

41 Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau, 296. 

42 Goldenberg and Millen, 5. 

28


public and recognition by academics for the need for formal education on the Holocaust 

in the United States, and subsequently in Germany. 43 

Markovits remarked on the effect 

of the mini-series: 

The airing of the American-made television docudrama Holocaust during the 

week of January 21, 1979, captured the German nation’s rapt attention. More 

than one hundred previously televised documentaries and educational programs 

on Germany’s Nazi past had attracted only a handful of viewers. The muchmaligned 

Hollywood melodrama, however, succeeded where the others had 

failed: it pricked the conscience of many Germans and catalyzed a public debate 

on an unprecedented scale. 44 

Many scholars have commented that the Holocaust series was made in a melodramatic 

style so as to capture the attention of American audiences. The mini-series was noted for 

being extremely successful and garnered more attention than the producers anticipated. 

Further, it received much international attention, especially from Germany, that the 

producers did not expect. Scholars have commented mostly from the American 

perspective of the film, which is also interesting considering that the series was a German 

production. It also highlights the aspect of another part of the growing international 

public awareness in Germany and elsewhere. 

Despite the numerous responses by American scholars, there are also several 

publications written by German scholars who have remarked on the Holocaust miniseries’ 

effects on German audiences and its relationship to the topic of the Holocaust. 

German scholar Helmut Schreier also commented from the German perspective on the 

Holocaust series and suggested its impact on the German population at the time: 

43 Samuel Totten, The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Ed. Walter Laqueur and Judith Tydor Baumel. (New 

Haven: Yale University Press 2001), 306. 


29


This series was shown on German television in 1979, and it had then a most 

profound and surprising impact. For a while, the memory of the Holocaust 

became the dominant topic in public discussion upon all levels of society, from 

tabloid papers to conferences at universities. It is not saying too much to say that 

a Hollywood-movie that was done in soap-opera-style has shaken the conscience 

of the West-Germans at the end of the Seventies. 45 

There is general agreement that the mini-series had a monumental effect on the 

discussion of the Holocaust, and it sparked renewed interest in the subject matter not just 

for scholars and intellectuals, but also for the public audiences who were so captivated by 

the production. It fostered a truly international discussion on how the Holocaust 

transitioned into the historical narrative of not only Germany, but also for the United 

States. The Holocaust miniseries is still considered one of the great moments in the 

Holocaust historiography, even by scholars writing the most recent of publications. 

Newly published materials on the history of the Holocaust continue to cite the airing of 

the Holocaust docudrama as a linchpin of public response over the history of the 

Holocaust. 

The Eichmann Trial, the 1968 generation, and the airing of the Holocaust TV 

mini-series all garnered attention from the international audiences, as well as academics 

for the ways in which they have helped to shape current attitudes towards Holocaust 

education and remembrance. Each of these three events prompted a series of 

international response which included the West German Historian’s Debate beginning in 

1986, and also a number of American responses including the foundation of the United 

States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the release of the Hollywood blockbuster film 

45 Helmut Schreier, and Matthias Heyl, eds. Never Again! The Holocaust’s Challenge for Educators, 

(Hamburg: Germany, Verlag Dr. R. Krämer, 1997), 189. 

30


by Stephen Spielberg, Schindler’s List, in 1993. These events had a significant impact on 

Holocaust awareness because they had global implications which aided in garnering 

attention for Holocaust awareness. 

The renewed interest in the topic of the Holocaust spurred a debate amongst 

German authors and intellectuals in what has become known as the Historian’s Debate 

(Historikerstreit). Omer Bartov commented on the Historian’s Debate and suggested that 

it “demonstrated the extent to which all history is indeed contemporary history, on the 

other hand it forcefully illustrated that historians must exercise a great deal of caution in 

relating their writing on the past too close to current events.” 46 

In the decades following 

World War II, West Germans attempted to analyze of the internal structures of the Nazi 

regime and their plans to destroy the Jews of Europe. Several West German scholars 

described the internalized structure of entire regime of National Socialism, and “refused 

to concentrate on particular individuals in their explanation of the Holocaust [, and] 

instead they focused on the more abstract interaction of structures, institutions, and 

bureaucracies of Hitler’s government.” 47 

The struggle in the Historian’s Debate brought 

to public attention in West Germany and elsewhere the notions of guilt and responsibility 

in the memory of the Holocaust. 

46 Omer Bartov, “Time Present and Time Past: The Historikerstreit and German Reunification,” New 

German Critique, no. 55 (Winter, 1992), 173. 


31


Historian Konrad Jarausch writes an intriguing overview of the Historian’s 

Debate and those who were involved. 48 

He suggests the larger implications of the 

Historian’s Debate in the following way: 

The quarrel of the German historians might not be “superfluous,” if it were to 

suggest some ways of living more constructively with Hitler’s indelible shadow. 

Since both Right and Left try to escape from the burden of this terrible past, the 

political overtones of the Historikerstreit serve as a warning against the dangers 

of restored nationalism and the illusions of naïve neutralism. 49 

While many historians disagree whether the Historian’s Debate was a turning point in 

German historiography, scholars agree that the repercussions of the debate still resonate 

in contemporary struggles of Holocaust memory and history. For example, constructing 

memorials in Germany harken debates that linger on these same issues that include 

defining victims and conversely the perpetrators. 

The early 1990s were full of changes for the world. Situations in Europe and the 

fall of the Soviet Bloc had great impact on the resurgence of Holocaust interest not only 

in Europe, but also in the United States. In particular, 1993 is a pivotal year for changes 

in Holocaust studies in the United States for two reasons: The opening of the United 

States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C, in 1993 brought Holocaust 

education to the forefront in the United States, but also in that same year, Steven 

Spielberg’s Hollywood motion picture Schindler’s List was released and it subsequently 

unleashed a vibrant interest in the topic of the Holocaust for average Americans and the 

48 Jarausch, “Removing the Nazi Stain? The Quarrel of the German Historians,” German Studies Review 

11, no. 2 (May, 1988). 

49 Konrad Jarausch, “Removing the Nazi Stain,” 296-7 

32


international audiences who were exposed to the film. 50 

Many scholars have discussed 

the consequences of the film on the German historiography. Schreier stated that 

“Spielberg’s movie “Schindler’s List” was seen in Germany by a higher percentage of 

people than in any other country... [and] it again helped along the process of discussion 

that makes up collective memory in Germany.” 51 

Although there has been some negative criticism of Schindler’s List, the 

evaluation of the film itself has not been unfavorable. Much of the criticism surrounding 

the film is how educators have employed the film in classrooms and for educational 

purposes. As scholar Simone Schweber indicates, there are problems with using this 

particular film as a teaching tool for students. She denotes the problems of the film for 

these specific reasons: 

The most frequently assigned film in classrooms has been Schindler’s List, which 

encourages students to empathize with a rescuer. The popularity of these 

materials has resulted in a curricular emphasis on victims and rescuers, and 

orientation that deserves scrutiny because, in extreme form, it can render invisible 

the perpetrators, collaborators, and on-lookers, which, combined with the typical 

downplaying of antisemitism and the oversimplification of Jews and Jewishness, 

leaves significant gaps in Holocaust education efforts. 52 

Again, Schindler’s List was yet another event in Holocaust history that resulted in 

scholars’ agreement that is impacted interest and spurred discussion about the Holocaust. 

50 John P. Fox, “Holocaust Education in Europe” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Ed. Walter Laqueur and 

Judith Tydor Baumel. (New Haven: Yale University Press 2001), 308. For more information on the effects 

of media and popular culture on the history of the Holocaust, please see: Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and 

the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Jeffrey 

Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); 

and Robert Samuel, Teaching the Rhetoric of Resistance: the Popular Holocaust and Social Change in a 

Post-9/11 World, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 

51 Helmut Schreier, and Matthias Heyl, eds. Never Again! The Holocaust’s Challenge for Educators, 

(Hamburg: Germany, Verlag Dr. R. Kraemer, 1997), 189. 

52 Simone Schweber, “Education” in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, (New York: Oxford 

University Press, 2010), 702-3. 

33


Unlike the Holocaust miniseries, Spielberg’s film received more critical attention 

because so many educators have incorporated the film into their lesson plans. There is 

much artistic liberty in Spielberg’s film, because it was after all, a Hollywood 

blockbuster. Much of the storyline deviated from the original Otto Schindler, and so 

Spielberg’s fictional representation caused some concern in making sure that students 

understand the difference between works of fiction for entertainment purposes and other 

forms of media that are made for educational purposes. However, even with these 

difficulties, there is no doubt that the film remains one of the most popular resources for 

lessons on Holocaust education. 

Thus, the Eichmann Trial, the 1968 generation, and the Holocaust TV mini-series 

brought an end of the silenced world on the issue of the Holocaust. These events 

garnered a series of international public responses that included the West German 

Historian’s debate, and also several American projects including the launching of the 

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the production of Schindler’s List. All of 

these events culminated in the reawakened interest from the international community that 

brought about new considerations about how to teach the history of the Holocaust. 

Foundations for Holocaust Education 

For Holocaust education, the most prolific categories are: structure of Holocaust 

education, education curriculum research, and finally memory studies and 

memorialization. Germany’s division into East/West, the War Criminals Trials, the 

airing of the Holocaust American TV-miniseries, the historian’s debate (Historikerstreit), 

and finally the release of the Hollywood blockbuster film Schindler’s List by Steven 

34


Spielberg, are all of events which have generally been agreed on by scholars as essential 

to the Holocaust historiography, both in the writings on education curriculum and history. 

There are a multitude of possible reasons as to why the Holocaust historiography has 

developed in this manner. 

First, there is great disparity of research in the early years after the Holocaust with 

several points of heightened interest in the subject of the Holocaust by American 

academics and the general public in the late 1970s. Frank Littell pointed out that in 1970, 

Wayne State University held the first conference in the United States on the topic of the 

Holocaust, and “from the start it was clear that study of the Holocaust and teaching of the 

lessons of the Holocaust must be interfaith, interdisciplinary, and international.” 53 

Samuel Totten, a leading scholar of Holocaust education in the United States, 

stated “since the mid-1970s education about the Holocaust in the United States has been 

directed by an eclectic group of individual teachers and professors, state departments of 

education,” and so it has followed a more individualized way of teaching the subject of 

the Holocaust. 54 

Totten and other scholars have suggested further that there is more need 

for structure within the system of Holocaust education and those who are teaching the 

lessons because there is virtually unlimited ways in which instructors can formulate 

lessons on the subject. In order create more structured systems for teaching about the 

53 Frank Littell, “Fundamentals in Holocaust Studies,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and 

Social Science 450, Reflections on the Holocaust: Historical, Philosophical, and Educational Dimensions 

(July 1980), 215. The first part of this sentence is paraphrased from the abstract and first paragraph of 

Littell’s article on page 213-4. Martin Davies has an interesting book on the international perspectives of 

the Holocaust. Please see: Davies, Martin L., and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, eds. How the Holocaust 

looks now: international perspectives, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 

54 Samuel Totten, The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Ed. Walter Laqueur and Judith Tydor Baumel. (New 

Haven: Yale University Press 2001), 305. 

35


Holocaust, many scholars have conducted research to study Holocaust materials and its 

impact on students’ learning on the subject of the Holocaust. 

Considering the task of creating Holocaust education with Littell’s perspectives in 

mind, Richard Libowitz, a historian who writes on the historical trends of the Holocaust, 

noted several problems to mapping out the trends with material dealing with the 

Holocaust, and that is because since the 1980s, scholars have “witnessed an 

unprecedented expansion of Holocaust related publications.” 55 

Libowitz suggests that 

only a few decades ago, it would have been possible to read every book published on the 

Holocaust, but today, scholars have a difficult task to keep pace with the volume of 

material produced each year. 56 

Libowitz also noted that “a discussion of the writings 

from or about the Holocaust now requires the establishment of categories and 

subheadings, including scholarly monographs in history and theology, anthologies, 

personal memoirs, and works of fiction.” 57 He also discusses the pedagogical approach to 

the Holocaust that concerned many scholars within the field of education, which many 

scholars deem necessary to teach students lessons on the Holocaust. 58 

Libowitz also 

describes the advances in teaching on the Holocaust, and says that “the development of 

Holocaust teaching has followed several patterns... [the] Holocaust has been introduced 

as a unit within survey courses on Judaism or in studies on the second World War.” 59 

55 Richard Libowitz, “Holocaust Studies,” Modern Judaism 10, no.3 Special Issue: Review of 

Developments in Modern Jewish Studies (Oct., 1990), 273. 

56 Libowitz, “Holocaust Studies,” 273. 

57 Ibid. 

58 Libowitz, “Holocaust Studies,” 273 

59 Ibid., 279. 

36


This is an important distinction that Libowitz states because many courses taught 

on the Holocaust are rarely devoted solely to discussing the issues of the Holocaust, and 

the classes are often larger subjects that the Holocaust is discussed within a lesson or two 

as a smaller portion of the overall theme of the course. Many of the arguments suggested 

by Libowitz also demonstrate the differentiation between historical approaches to the 

Holocaust, but also where education fits within the historical discourse. 

Similar to Jeffrey Peck’s argument about the coverage of the Holocaust in East 

German textbooks, Markovits also researched the coverage of the Holocaust in West 

German textbooks. In his description, Markovits comments that “during the 1950s, 

history textbooks dealt with the Holocaust inadequately, and many social studies teachers 

avoided the topic altogether.” 60 

Markovits also discusses the dramatic shift in textbooks 

about the Holocaust during the 1960s: 

The real push to teach the Holocaust in Germany’s schools began in the early 

1960s after a rash of anti-Semitic graffiti prompted politicians to supplement the 

social science curriculum with materials combating the cultivation of fascist and 

undemocratic sentiments. Teaching the history of the Third Reich became 

mandatory for the curricula of all types and levels of schools in 1961. Students 

who wanted to complete high school were required to study the Holocaust. 61 

However, the mandatory curriculum for all school levels did not always require students 

to complete studies on the Holocaust. To conclude, Markovits notes that there is a 

general absence outlining the details of the Holocaust in German textbooks. One of the 

60 Markovits and Noveck, 421. For more information, please see: Randolph Braham, Treatment of the 

Holocaust in Textbooks, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Keith Crawford, and Stuart Foster, 

War, Nation, Memory: International Perspectives on World War II in School History Textbooks, (Charlotte, 

NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc., 2007); and Henry Friedlander, On the Holocaust: A Critique of the 

Treatment of the Holocaust in History Textbooks-Accompanied by an Annotated Bibliography, (New 

York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1972). 


37


leading scholars of Holocaust education in Europe, John Fox suggested “for nearly two 

decades after 1945, most European school systems paid little or no attention to Nazi 

Germany’s persecution and extermination of the Jews.” 62 

This further emphasizes 

Markovits claims that West Germany did not push teachings of the Holocaust because 

Western Europe by in large ignored Nazism and the Holocaust. 

The general accepted practice by many educators and school systems was to 

either ignore altogether the period of National Social, or if it was covered in the school 

curriculum, it was mentioned in a minimal context within twentieth century German 

history. Due to the treatment of National Socialism and the Holocaust in this manner in 

West Germany, it spurred young Germans to consider the implications of the history of 

National Socialism and the Holocaust within their own lives and family. 

Simone Schweber, an expert on Holocaust education and teaching curriculum, has 

conducted much research on Holocaust education and has made significant contributions 

to the history of Holocaust education. Schweber’s work is primarily concerned with the 

ways Holocaust education in relayed to students. She indicated that the “lack of a solid 

evidentiary foundation on which to base Holocaust education is explained, at least in part, 

by the relatively recent incorporation of the Holocaust in school curricula.” She noted 

that “rigorous research about Holocaust education did not emerge until the 1990s.” 63 

62 John P. Fox, “Holocaust Education in Europe” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Ed. Walter Laqueur and 

Judith Tydor Baumel. (New Haven: Yale University Press 2001), 301. 

63 Simone Schweber, “Education” in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, (New York: Oxford 

University Press, 2010), 695. Schweber also has another fascinating article on research conducted at an 

American yeshivah (religious school for Jewish students) and how the Holocaust was taught in a secular 

environment at the school. This is another good example for some of the issues raised in the “Education” 

article about how and what is being taught in Holocaust education courses. For more information, please 

38


Since that time, historians and other scholars have written much on the pedagogical 

approach to the subject of Holocaust education and there are a multitude of methods and 

materials which discuss how and what teachers should use in teaching about the 

Holocaust. 64 

For example, the scholar most often noted is Claire Hirschfield and her work on 

the conceptual model for lessons on the Holocaust, in which she suggests many ways to 

approach the topic of the Holocaust so that instructors can “communicate some 

understanding of the multidimensional nature of the subject and of the moral dilemmas 

which lie buried within the historical narrative, thus ultimately helping [their] students to 

define values and to face painful but necessary truths.” 65 

Hirschfield states that the 1980s 

“have witnessed a dramatic upsurge of interest in the Holocaust,” and so her goal is to 

break the silence from the past several decades when “instructors and textbook writers 

alike chose to ignore so disturbing a subject.” 66 

She suggests ways to teach the subject of 

the Holocaust to students in colleges and universities, not students who are in secondary 

see: Simone Schweber, ““Here There Is No Why”: Holocaust Education at a Lubavitch Girl’s Yeshivah,” 

in Jewish Social Studies 14, no.2 (Winter, 2008). 

64 The most comprehensive source for information on teaching the many different aspects of the legacy of 

the Holocaust is: Marianne Hirsch, and Irene Kacandes, ed. Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, 

(New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004). For more information on the methodology 

for building curriculums for Holocaust instruction, please see: Chaim Schatzker, “The Teaching of the 

Holocaust: Dilemmas and Considerations,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social 

Science 450, Special Issue: Reflections on the Holocaust: Historical, Philosophical, and Educational 

Dimensions (July 1980); Marion Fabor, “Teaching a Multidisciplinary Course on the Holocaust and 

German Culture,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548, Special Issue: The 

Holocaust: Remembering for the Future (Nov. 1995); 

65 Claire Hirschfield, “Teaching the Holocaust: A Conceptual Model,” Improving College and University 

Teaching 29, no.1 (Winter, 1981). 

66 Hirschfield, “Teaching the Holocaust,” 24. 

39


education systems. 67 

Hirschfield explains her five-level model for teaching the 

Holocaust, which begins with of the Holocaust in a historical perspective, an example of 

man’s inhumanity to man, a unique event in World History, a social science process, and 

finally as a moral and ethical problem. 68 

Other scholars have also applied Hirschfield’s model in ways as to compare 

historical events that also have applicable messages similar to the Holocaust. One such 

example was used by Myran Goldenberg who used the American Civil Rights movement 

as a vehicle for viewing violations of human rights, which in turn brought attention to 

those same issues during the Holocaust. 69 

By using Holocaust studies in comparative 

teaching Goldenberg also asserted the connection of the Holocaust to the larger historical 

category of genocide. She suggested that in the 1970s, genocide studies burgeoned as a 

legitimate historical field that deserved scholarly attention because of its important 

inquiry for intellectuals and thus created a connection to the Holocaust as a study of 

67 Ibid. For more information on teaching the Holocaust to different education levels, please see: Arye 

Carmon, “Problems in Coping with the Holocaust: Experiences with Students in a Multinational Program,” 

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 450, Special Issue: Reflections on the 

Holocaust: Historical, Philosophical, and Educational Dimensions (July 1980); William Collins Donahue, 

“”We shall not speak of it”: Nazism and the Holocaust in the Elementary College German Course,” Die 

Unterrichtspraxis (Teaching German) 27, no. 1 (Spring 1994); Karen A. Wink, “A Lesson from the 

Holocaust: From Bystander to Advocate in the Classroom,” The English Journal 96, no.1 (Sept., 2006); 

Jeffrey Glanz, “Ten Suggestions for Teaching the Holocaust,” The History Teacher 32, no. 4 (Aug., 1999); 

Nancy Gorrell, “Teaching the Holocaust: “Light from the Yellow Star” Leads the Way,” The English 

Journal 86, no.8 Special Issue: New Voices: The Canon of the Future (Dec. 1997). 

68 Hirschfield, “Teaching the Holocaust,” 24. 

69 Myran Goldenberg and Rochelle L Millen, “Introduction,” in Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun: Teaching 

the Holocaust in Colleges and Universities, Eds. Myran Goldenberg and Rochelle L. Millen (Seattle: 

University of Washington Press, 2007), 8. Paraphrased information found on page 8. For more information 

on teaching the Holocaust through a comparative lens such as genocide, please see: Honey Kern, “An End 

to Intolerance: Exploring the Holocaust and Genocide,” The English Journal 91, no. 2 (Nov., 2001). 

40


genocide. 70 

Hirschfield is so often cited because many of the scholars have taken one of 

the levels on Hirschfield’s model and discussed it in comparative ways. 

In particular, James Farnham wrote “Ethical Ambiguity and the Teaching of the 

Holocaust,” to suggest that there are certain ethical complications created out of specific 

moral value systems. 71 

There is much similarity to what Farnham suggests about the 

ethical complications of the Holocaust, and the description of Hirschfield’s model levelfive, 

where she discussed the problems of morality and ethical behavior when 

considering the Holocaust. Farnham cited Hirschfield’s model in the first paragraph of 

his article, and so there is a direct correlation between his study and the work by 

Hirschfield. 72 

Recently, Simone Schweber published a chapter on Holocaust education, which is 

the best and most comprehensive source for the current state of education on the 

Holocaust. In her publication, Schweber denotes that “early on, researchers of Holocaust 

education divided over the Holocaust’s uniqueness and the extent to which it had 

“universal” implications that could serve as a bases for encouraging civic engagement.” 73 

Schweber discusses the current trajectory of Holocaust education research, which is 

70 Myran Goldenberg and Rochelle L Millen, “Introduction,” 8. 

71 James F. Farnham, “Ethical Ambiguity and the Teaching of the Holocaust,” The English Journal 72, no. 

4 (April 1983), 67. Farnham also has several other articles that discuss the ethical implications of teaching 

on the Holocaust. For more information, please see: James F. Farnham, “Teaching the Holocaust: A 

Rationale for dealing with the Absurd,” The Journal of General Education 33, no. 4 (Winter 1982); James 

F. Farnham, “What is the Value of Teaching the Holocaust?” The Journal of General Education 41, (1992). 

72 Farnham, “Ethical Ambiguity,” 63. For another fascinating article on ethics and the Holocaust, please 

see: Deborah E. Lipstadt, “Not Facing History,” New Republic 212, no. 10 (March 6, 1995); Lucy Russell, 

Teaching the Holocaust in School History: Teachers of Preachers? (New York: Continuum International 

Publishing Group, 2006). 

73 Schweber, 696. 

41


primarily concerned with what is being taught, and how it is taught, but she suggests that 

further research needs to be done on where the Holocaust is taught. She states that “the 

venues for Holocaust education can be delimited in three intersecting ways: schooling 

level, geographic locale, and structure (formal or informal).” 74 

She also suggests that 

there needs to be more research on locations of Holocaust education and to what extent 

the learning takes place in classrooms or through a variety of informal settings such as 

pilgrimages to memorial sites, museums, or other various extracurricular activities. 75 

This line of her argument is similar to those scholars working in memory studies and 

memorialization because they are also concerned with the way in which societies 

remember events. 

Schweber observes that there is much room for more research on how age affects 

certain learning potential, especially “middle-school students, whose ages span the late 

pre-teen and early teen years, when children’s capacities for intellectual understanding, 

ethical judgment, and emotional awareness are at crucial states of development.” 76 

Schweber’s research has left other scholars with many questions and opportunities for 

further research on the effects of Holocaust education to students. Schweber also 

discusses the need for more research on Holocaust education. She points out specifically 

that “comparative research remains to be done on the educational effects of visits to 

actual Holocaust sites and visits to museums that are not authentic sites of Holocaust 

74 Schweber, 698. 

75 Ibid., 701. 

76 Ibid., 699. Samuel Totten has also produced excellent studies on the ages of school children and how that 

effects their abilities to comprehend certain types of material. For more information: please see: Samuel 

Totten, Holocaust Education: Issues and Approaches, (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002); and Samuel 

Totten, and Stephen Feinberg, Teaching and Studying the Holocaust, (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001). 

42


events,” as well as the ways in which classroom education has had an impact on students’ 

learning abilities on the subject of the Holocaust. 77 

Schweber suggests several current problems in Holocaust education curriculum, 

because she suggests that there seems to be a lack of variety in the sources that instructors 

use to teach lessons on the Holocaust. She indicated that “the most commonly assigned 

literature on the Holocaust, not only in the United States but also worldwide, remains The 

Diary of Anne Frank for younger students and Elie Wiesel’s Night for older ones.” 78 

She 

mentions the problem of singularized teaching material and suggests that “over-reliance 

on these works can produce what has been called “victim as curriculum,” wherein 

students’ attention focuses exclusively on the diaries, memoirs, and perspectives of 

Holocaust victims and survivors.” 79 

Again, Schweber argues that more research is 

necessary to understand the impact of Holocaust materials used for instructing students 

on the topic of the Holocaust. 

Likewise, German scholar Helmut Schreier contributed works on the German 

memorialization and the Holocaust’s place within it. Schreier’s book is a collection of 

work from German authors who have assessed the legacy of Holocaust. One of his 

strongest criticisms are the implications of Germany’s school system and their failure to 

decisively construct the Holocaust narrative into the education curriculum in German 

schools. His book contributes to Holocaust awareness because he is a German scholar 

77 Schweber,701 

78 Ibid., 702. For more information of age-specific curriculum guides, please see: Beth Greenbaum, Bearing 

Witness: Teaching about the Holocaust, (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2001); and Norman Friedman, 

“Teaching about the Holocaust.” Teaching Sociology 12, no. 4 (Jul., 1985). 

79 Ibid., 702-3. 

43


giving insight to the situation of Holocaust awareness in Germany and many of the 

potential problems facing Germany and its dealings with the legacy of the Holocaust. 

First, Schreier considers the word “Holocaust” and concludes that all of the words 

used to describe this event that is so deeply engrained into twentieth-century German 

history, has been defined from the borrowed terms “Auschwitz,” “Shoah,” “Holocaust,” 

which they all originate from other languages besides German. 80 

Essentially, Schreier 

states that the problem of discussing the Holocaust in Germany begins with the fact that 

“the German language has no word of its own to refer to the genocide, the systematic 

killing that was planned and executed by Germans.” 81 Schreier concludes that “the fact 

that there is no German word in today’s Germany to refer to a procedure that was so 

German points to the problem of memory in the nation of perpetrators.” 82 

Although, 

even if Germany were to have words added to their language to discuss the problem, 

Germany would still suffer from the same issues with identity because it would not 

alleviate the question of how the Holocaust should be represented in Germany’s 

history. 83 

An explanation for why this occurs is that the development of Holocaust 

education and awareness in America takes a different direction than what happens in 

Germany. A key point of differentiation between the American and Germany settings is 

that America has an element of public response to the Holocaust that brings Holocaust 

awareness in the United States to the national public audience. The formalized, 

80 Helmut Schreier, “The Holocaust: Consequences for Education-A German Perspective,” in Never Again! 

The Holocaust’s Challenge for Educators, Eds. Helmut Schreier, and Matthias Heyl, (Hamburg: Germany, 

Verlag Dr. R. Kraemer, 1997), 190. 

81 Schreier, 190. 

82 Ibid. 

83 Ibid., 191. 

44


institutionalized Holocaust education movement was spearheaded by efforts in the United 

States, but Germany follows the model provided by the United States. 

Conclusion 

Many historical events shifted the Holocaust discourse since the end of World 

War II in 1945. These shifts in the history of the Holocaust often run parallel to the shifts 

in Holocaust education because history and education are often closely associated. This 

chapter has discussed trends in the historiography of Holocaust education and the 

historiography of the Holocaust as an attempt to bridge the seemingly substantial gap 

between the two subjects. Holocaust education shifted from classroom structure, and 

education and curriculum research, and expanded to include the burgeoning field of 

memory and memorialization. The Holocaust history discourse surrounds the division of 

East and West Germany, America’s Holocaust TV-miniseries, Historian’s Debate 

amongst German writers and intellectuals, and finally the release of Spielberg’s 

Hollywood film Schindler’s List. The importance of combining history and education on 

the Holocaust is that the future of Holocaust education lies somewhere is the trajectory of 

the past and in order to facilitate the affiliated historiographies, the disparity of the topics 

must be converged. Only then can historians and educators work find ways to continue 

to teach lessons on the Holocaust in ways that are appropriate for the coming generations. 

One such method, as Schweber suggested, is to focus on the places that are conducive to 

Holocaust education, such as memorial sites and museums. 

45


One such way to bridge public awareness with Holocaust education is to examine 

the para-educational experience created by the International Youth Meeting Dachau, or 

IJB, that serves to both educate and raise public awareness on the Holocaust. As both the 

history of Holocaust awareness and Holocaust education suggests, they were long 

processes that consumed Germany’s history throughout the latter part of the twentieth 

century. The annual IJB summer experience is one example of a para-education which is 

available for international youth in a Dachau, Germany as a place to gather and 

participate in Holocaust education that is different from lessons taught in formalized 

school class curricula. During their experience at IJB, youth gather to participate in 

activities and workshops lead by volunteer youth in order to promote Holocaust 

awareness and education. There is much to learn from this organization for how this type 

of education is separate from the information that students learn in a classroom, and how 

it compares to what is available through programs like the IJB. In order to examine who 

the teachers are, and what they teach, it is important to begin with the history of the IJB 

in order understand how and why the IJB began, but also the development of the program 

in a time and place that was not as ready for Holocaust awareness to be so readily 

available to the youth in their town, let alone becoming known to the international 

audience as a place of Holocaust education and awareness. 

46


CHAPTER III 

GRASSROOTS INCEPTION OF THE 

INTERNATIONAL YOUTH MEETING DACHAU 

After 1945, the physical and political division into East and West Germany 

continued to shape the collective memory of the victims as well as the path of Holocaust 

education for each of the German societies. 1 

As a point of clarification, a few words 

must be said about the use of the term “Germany”. From this point forward, “Germany” 

will exclude any meaning or association to East Germany. In addition, it will also 

include the post-1989 period, which includes the approaches taken by West Germany that 

continued to dominate in the newly reunified “Germany” in the ways that the country 

dealt with its past. Marla Morris, a scholar on memory texts suggested that “collective 

memories arise for all sorts of political, ideological, and psychological reasons, [and it] 

has everything to do with the politics of national identity.” 2 

Since 1945, Germany 

struggles to adequately positions to legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust into 

the national history through collective memorialization. 3 

Many of the perpetrators and 

collaborators did not want to take responsibility of their participation in the atrocities 

committed under the Nazi regime. The German community has never really confronted 

1 Thomas Lutz, “Gedenkstätten – Rundbrief Topography of Terror Foundation,” (Berlin: Topography of 

Terror Foundation), 4. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell. 

2 Marla Morris, Curriculum and the Holocaust: Competing Sites of Memory and Representation, (Mahwah: 

NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2001), 89. 

3 I use the term collective memorialization from the combined works of Jeffrey Olick and James E. Young. 

For more information please see the following: Jeffrey K. Olick, “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures,” 

Sociological Theory 17, no.3 (Nov. 1999): 333-348. James E. Young The Texture of Memory : Holocaust 

Memorials and Meanings, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993 

47


the legacies of the National Socialists, and thus has continuously ignored and egregiously 

marginalized the fate of the victims and survivors. 4 

There were a number of factors at work prompting this development of the 

grassroots para-educational IJB in Dachau. One is the Protestant Church and its desire to 

atone for sins committed under Nazis. Another is the post-war generation looking for 

answers. A subset of this youth group is the youth of Dachau whose personal identities 

are tied up with the fact that the rest of the world reacts so negatively to hearing the term 

“Dachau”. The chapter will address the development and internal structure of the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau. The complexity of the IJB is based in its 

development by the motivations of the youth, the reasons behind the resistance from 

Dachau as a town, and finally the organization that support the youth in building the IJB 

in Dachau. 

The complexities of the development of the International Youth Meeting Dachau 

can be contextualized in the motivations for why young people in Dachau thought it was 

necessary to have a place where youth could meet and discuss the history of Germany. 

Part of the problem for the youth is that those born in Dachau carry a stigma on their 

passports because of the location of their birth. The rest of the Western world 

immediately associated them the Nazi atrocities even those all of these youth people were 

born well after the Third Reich. The desire to both understand what went on in their town 

and also to provide a place for others to learn about what went on in Dachau is the prime 

motivation driving these youth. 

4 Thomas Lutz, “Gedenkstätten – Rundbrief Topography of Terror Foundation,” (Berlin: Topography of 

Terror Foundation), 4. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell. 

48


It is vital to understand the individual groups that were involved in shaping the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau from its initial conception through the solidification 

of its permanent settlement in the Dachau Youth Hostel in 1998. The International Youth 

Meeting Dachau is a representation of a grass roots para-educational activity in Germany 

that developed around an historic culture that has been surrounded by notable influences 

on the legacy of National Socialism which have shaped modern-day Holocaust education. 

By tracing the history of the development of the International Youth Meeting Dachau, it 

will bring to light how para-educational activities function within the current trajectory of 

the Holocaust education culture that has developed in Germany over the last several 

decades. 

The Youth 

By the 1960s, there were new generations slightly removed from the direct 

connection of National Socialism who were looking to explore the past history of Nazism 

in Germany. It is important to define who the youth encompass in the current context. 

The youth which are described here include individuals aged between fifteen and thirtyfive. 

Subsequently, the singularity of the 1960s generation was that, as historian Pol 

O’Dochartaigh suggests, they “were the sons and daughters of those who had fought for 

Germany in the Second World War, and many began to ask the simple questions: ‘What 

did you do in the War, Dad?’ The older generation frequently did not want to answer, 

indeed, did not even want to remember.” 5 

Consequently, the youth movements of the 

5 Pól O’Dochartaigh, Germany since 1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 98. For more on the 

twentieth century German generations, there is an excellent table in Harold Marcuse’s Legacies of Dachau: 

49


1960s laid the groundwork for the later generations who would work to address the 

history of the Nazi past. The postwar generations including the generations after the 

1968 generation would be met with opposition for confronting the past not only from 

German communities, but they would also encounter silence from their family members 

for almost three decades after the end of the war as a way for many Germans to ignore 

the past and avoid certain complications for the family members who questioned the level 

of participation of their family during the era of National Socialism. 6 

The youth movements of the 1960s generations would have lasting effects that 

would carry-over into the student generations of the 1970s and 1980s. The student 

generations in Germany were insistent about creating learning environments where they 

could go to discuss the era of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Historian Harold 

Marcuse describes the vital importance of the having the younger generations involved in 

development of collective memorialization of the past: 

The natural process of history dictates that at some point people who experienced 

certain historical events will no longer predominate in the recollective political 

and cultural institutions of their society. Instead, younger generations move into 

those positions and begin to shape the character of public recollection. In our 

case, these younger generations’ attitudes toward the past were determined 

primarily by two factors: their learned knowledge of the past, and their emotional 

feelings towards the people who experienced it. 7 

The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp 1933-2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 

2001), 292-3. 

6 Vicki Lawrence, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past,” Agni, no. 45 

(1998): 101. Lawrence primarily discusses the silence within families that becomes the basis for the 

literary and social movements known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, beginning with Group 47, which 

advocated for Germans to come to terms with their past. For more information on Group 47, please see 

page 101 of Lawrence’s article. Andrei Markovits also discusses the lack of a coming to terms with the 

past. Please see: Andrei S. Markovits and Beth Simone Noveck “West Germany” in The World Reacts to 

the Holocaust ed. David Wyman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 401. 

7 Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau, 290. An interesting note to Marcuse’s argument is that he does not refer to 

the groups by generations, but rather that they are “cohorts” because he wants to disassociate the biological 

implications by using the term “generational.” Although Marcuse’s argument has merit about the use of 

50


The youth of these generations were able to discern the importance for a place where they 

could find answers to the questions that the older generations were not willing to answer. 

These newer generations of students were interested in establishing an open community 

where educational discussions would be welcomed and encouraged in a place where they 

would be free to ask the uncomfortable questions and talk about the difficulties which 

have plagued Germany’s past. However, during the twenty years between the end of the 

Holocaust and the spiked interest of the younger generations of students in the 1960s, 

there had been no support within the community of Dachau to facilitate places where 

youth could go to discuss and learn about the history of National Socialism or the 

Holocaust. Despite resistance due to the overwhelming disapproval to delve into 

Germany’s past, the youth took it upon themselves to establish and organize a program 

which would meet annually during the summer months, which would be geared towards 

young people with interests and passions for educating themselves about the era of 

National Socialism and the Holocaust. 

Origins of the International Youth Meeting Dachau 

The recommendation to transform the former concentration camps into memorial 

site which would be used as educational purposes for the youth of Germany was 

proposed a decade after the end of World War II. The concept of using former 

concentration camp grounds as site of history and memory especially for the youth of 

Germany as well as the international youth to learn about Germany’s past, was suggested 

cohort instead of generation, I will continue to distinguish the decades by the term generation because the 

meaning of it is more familiarized than cohort. 

51


in September of 1955 as a response to County Governor Heinrich Junker who 

recommended closing the crematorium the public. 8 

As an alternative to the proposal suggested by Junker, the leading advocate 

Baruch Graubard suggested to use the concentration camp and crematorium as a 

historical site where youth could gather for educational purposes. Rather than 

demolishing the former concentration camp, Graubard’s suggestion was to preserve the 

grounds including the libraries, documents, and photographs for international youth to 

gather and learn about the history of National Socialism. 9 In the following decade, there 

was much controversy surrounding Dachau’s former concentration camp grounds, but in 

1965 the memorial was finally opened. 10 It was clear that by May 1967, that there was at 

least marginal support from high officials, although none from Dachau, who advocated 

for a place of education for youth on the grounds of the former concentration camp. 11 

However, even with the support from other high-ranking officials, the local members of 

Dachau did not support such action to convert the site into a memorial and education 

center. 

The unique history of the town of Dachau in the relation to Nazism offers some 

explanation for the resistance from locals against creating organized Holocaust education 

8 Marcuse, 271. 

9 Marcuse, 271. Marcuse does not give Graubard’s name in the text of his book, but this information 

comes from the footnote associated with the quoted material I have included here. 

10 Marcuse, 241. Marcuse discusses in great detail what happens to the former concentration camp grounds 

from 1945 to 2001. The chapter titled “The survivors negotiate a memorial site” details the controversy 

surrounding Dachau officials and the Bavarian government, and how they proceeded to transform the 

former concentration camp into a resettlement camp, and then finally a memorial. 

11 Marcuse, 271. The event that Marcuse discussed here was the dedication of the Jewish memorial 

building, and the three keynote speakers’ mention in this quote which all expressed a desire to transform 

the grounds of the concentration camp into a memorial site for youth not only in Germany, but youth 

around the world. The names of the supporters were the cabinet minister Hundhammer, Bavarian senator 

Jean Mandel, and Israeli ambassador Asher Ben-Nathan. 

52


in their town. The town of Dachau has an unparalleled locus within the history and 

memory of Nazi atrocity in Germany. The name has a specific place in the history of 

Nazism even for an international audience that may not be familiar with the specific 

details of what happened at Dachau specifically. Dachau has been the subject of many of 

the media and popular culture productions about the Holocaust and the use of 

concentration camps during the Third Reich. Harold Marcuse illustrated this 

dichotomous relationship of the town’s memory between the locals and the outsiders who 

come to visit the town: 

While most outsiders connect the name with a Nazi concentration camp, or with a 

site of the genocide perpetrated by the Germans against the Jews, many Dachau 

city residents wish to view their home as a picturesque 1,200-year-old town in 

southern Germany with a rich cultural heritage. [Yet] some local residents see the 

concentration camp as an unfortunate blip in a long and illustrious history, while 

most foreigners (and many Germans) associate the name Dachau with a site of 

Nazi atrocities. 12 

As Marcuse suggests, there is a binary opposition inherent in the meaning of Dachau 

because on the one hand it reflects the history of a quaint historic town in southern 

Germany, and yet on the other hand it identifies the horrors of genocide during the Third 

Reich which has become synonymous with the depravity of human nature. While many 

local Dachauers work to have their town recognized for its long history as major salt 

trading center, the name “Dachau” in international recollection remains firmly planted in 

contemporary history. There are several reasons for this. First, Dachau was one of the 

initial concentration camps to become operational after Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power 

12 Marcuse, 15. This is an amalgamation of two sentences in the first paragraph of the first chapter. 

Marcuse discusses a poster that is displayed around Dachau, which is an attempt to disassociate the town 

from the all-too-common correlation that visitors have of the town and the legacy of Nazism. 

53


in 1933, and prisoners were sent to Dachau as early as March of 1933. 13 

Secondly, 

Dachau is not only the name of the town, but it is also the name of the former 

concentration camp, which became problematic for Dachau after the end of National 

Socialism. After 1945, it was impossible to separate the town of Dachau from the former 

concentration camp because they had the same name. Other concentration camps did not 

suffer the same associated name problem. For example, there was the major 

concentration camp named Buchenwald but was located outside of Weimar in 

Ettersburg. 14 

The concentration camp is not the town’s namesake and therefore had a 

more likely chance to be disassociated with Nazi atrocity. Due to the singularity of the 

town’s name and the concentration camp name, Dachau has had a particularly difficult 

reckoning with the legacy of Nazism considering it simply cannot disassociate itself from 

the images of atrocity for the name of the town acquired a second meaning in the 

aftermath of National Socialism. Given these factors, it is quite understandable, but also 

remarkable, that Dachau became the site which eventually garnered student activism in 

reckoning the legacy of Nazism in Dachau. 

Internal Structure of the International Youth Meeting Dachau 

To understand the International Youth Meeting Dachau is to first understand the 

complexities of its internal structure. Since the start of the International Youth Meeting 

Dachau, there has been a considerable influx of associated organizations that have 

13 http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/1945.html. The memorial site has provided a timeline of events 

for the concentration camp. According to their records, the first political prisoners arrived to Dachau on 

March 22, 1933. 

14 This information was found on the website for the memorial website and foundation for Buchenwald: 

http://www.buchenwald.de/643/. 

54


supported the group. There are three main organizations that are responsible for all of the 

volunteers who work and contribute to the preparation and general operation of the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau. Those three organizations are the Church of 

Reconciliation at Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, or EVK, the Action 

Reconciliation Service for Peace, or ASF, and Friends of International Youth Meeting in 

Dachau, of the FIJB. 15 

In order to facilitate the summer program, the volunteer staff 

participates all year long in group meetings and editing projects which are an intensive 

examination of the aspects of the camp which range from the technical structure and 

execution of the specific history about the Dachau camp which also includes meeting 

with witnesses and addressing differences of nationality that are inherent to diverse 

cultures in an international setting. 16 

Apart from the EVK, ASF, and the FIJB, there are various other local and 

Bavarian regional groups who have and continue to sponsor the International Youth 

Meeting Dachau by contributing financially to the organization as well as making 

contributions of other forms of support, and consequently they are also involved in the 

internal structure of the International Youth Meeting Dachau. 17 

The International Youth 

15 The names of the organizations in German are: the Church of Reconciliation (Evangelische 

Versöhnungskirche in der KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau), Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (Aktion 

Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste), and Friends of International Youth Meeting in Dachau (Förderverein für 

Internationale Jugendbegegnung und Gedenkstättenarbeit in Dachau e.V.). 

16 Document of IJB from 1983 to 1988. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 20. 

17 http://www.jugendbegegnung-dachau.de/showstructure.php?struc_id=38. On their official website, the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau lists the six partner organizations which sponsor the annual summer 

program. Federation of German Catholic Youth in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising (Bund der 

Deutschen Katholischen Jugend in der Erzdiözese München und Freising), German Trade Union 

Federation – Youth Munich (DGB [Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund] – Jugend Münich), Protestant Youth 

Munich (Evangelische Jugend München), Friends of International Youth Meeting in Dachau (Förderverein 

für Internationale Jugendbegegnung und Gedenkstättenarbeit in Dachau e.V.), and finally the Regional 

Youth Dachau (Kreisjugendring Dachau). Many of the German names I translated to allow readers to 

understand the types of groups which were involved in the International Youth Meeting Dachau. 

55


Meeting Dachau would continue to be organized in similar fashion until 1998, when they 

would undertake a structural shift in their internal organization. 

The Beginning of the “Wild Years” 

The “wild years” refers to the years of the IJB when they were a tent camp 

without a permanent location, which forced the organization to constantly move around 

each year to a new location in the Dachau are in order to hold the annual summer 

meetings. The “wild years” began with the first meeting of the IJB in 1981. With the 

first meeting of the IJB that took place during the summer of 1981, there are several 

organizations that worked to establish an education center at the memorial site in Dachau 

for many years before the IJB. The transition of the Dachau concentration camp into the 

memorial site had an impact on the IJB. After 1945, the former concentration camp 

Dachau remained a displaced persons camp until 1966. Although the camp was being 

used for displaced persons, in 1960 the Bavarian state government and the “Comité 

international de Dachau” agreed on the transitioning the former concentration camp 

grounds into a memorial site, which was finally completed in 1973. 18 

One year after the 

agreement for the Dachau memorial site, the Action Reconciliation for Peace, or ASF, 

organization would call for an education center in Dachau. Together the ASF and the 

EVK would work together for many years to push for support in founding an educational 

center for you in Dachau. 

Action Reconciliation Service for Peace 

18 KZ-Gendekstätte Dachau. “Timeline: 1945-Present”, http://www.kz-gedenkstaettedachau.de/present.html 

(accessed March 3, 2013). 

56


The role that the Protestant Church played in the supporting the group from the 

very early years is not coincidental because the German Protestant church was the group 

in Germany that initially supported the creation of organizations that were designed to 

specifically confront the history of Nazism. Shortly before the student movements of the 

1960s, a Protestant church group of several individuals founded a volunteer organization 

in 1958 called Aktion Sühnezeichen, which translates in English to ‘Action Signs of 

Atonement’, in which there purpose was to confront the crimes committed by Nazis 

during World War II, and then to work towards the goal of atonement. 19 

Eventually the 

volunteer organization would be known as the Action Reconciliation for Peace, or ASF. 

The ASF organization was “founded in 1958 at a synod of the Protestant Church in 

Germany,” and from the very beginning the church viewed their position as one that 

would support an organization that would be related to service work for young 

volunteers. 20 

The goal of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace was clearly aimed 

specifically towards the youth because their mission statement in 1958 stating that 

“‘peace through reconciliation’ is to take the shape of young volunteers serving in the 

countries which had especially suffered under German fascism.” 21 

By 1965, the ASF was a regular participant in supporting education and activism 

in Dachau, as well as supporting the creation of a youth meeting place in Dachau. After 

the creation of the memorial site, ASF committed their volunteers to the memorial every 

year to participate in services for the memorial site. In the early years of the IJB, the 

19 Andrea Koch and Brigitte Scheiger, “Testimonies of Atonement: A German Protestant Movement Aktion 

Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (ASF),” in The Reconciliation of Peoples: Challenges to the Churches, ed. 

Gregory Baum and Harold Wells (New York: Orbis Books, 1997), 144. 

20 Action Reconciliation’s Peace Services at Dachau.1983. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 1. 

21 Ibid., 1. 

57


volunteers of the ASF would participate in the meetings, and had responsibilities of 

helping to plan the annual IJB summer meetings. The ASF would send the two volunteer 

youths on a regular basis to work at the Dachau memorial camp, but they were also 

tasked with preparation and organization of the IJB as well. 22 

In order to compensate for the Protestant church’s view of the shifting mission of 

the ASF, “in 1968, they added the word Friedensdienste-in English, ‘Services for 

Peace.’” 23 

The Protestant church took action to create an organization that would 

respond to such problems and “the appeal at the founding of Aktion Sühnezeichen/Action 

Reconciliation starts with acknowledging Germany’s guilt for Nazi crimes,” because in 

the wake of the Holocaust and Germany’s role in it caused many to question how 

Germany should rectify their involvement, and so in an effort to address this problem, the 

church fully supported not only the organization of the International Youth Meeting in 

Dachau and also the creation of the Action Sühnezeichen in order to fulfill to goals of 

civil service to create awareness of the crimes during National Socialism and the 

atrocities of the Holocaust. 24 

They provide an extensive network for various opportunities and a variety of 

options for the members of the youth who are interested in volunteering. Presently, the 

Action Reconciliation Service for Peace has two distinct missions for their organization 

and that involves “educational work, together with survivors of the Holocaust, at 

memorial centers of former concentration camps, in institutes, and in museums, 

22 http://www.versoehnungskirche-dachau.de/themen/pages/Suehnezeichen.htm 

23 Andrea Koch and Brigitte Scheiger, “Testimonies of Atonement,” 144. 

24 Website: https://www.asf-ev.de/en/about-us/history.html 

58


confronting German history, challenging right-wing extremism and antisemitism, 

lobbying for the recognition of “forgotten” victims of the Nazi oppression, and 

participating in peace groups and initiatives.” 25 

Volunteers who participate with the 

Action Reconciliation Service for Peace have two distinct options; the first option is a 

shorter service requirement, but they also have the opportunity for longer service 

requirements for volunteers who are interested. There are three phases of preparation, 

reflection and evaluation which constitutes the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace 

longer service commitment which focuses on helping the volunteers to have certain 

considerations for strengthening society by creating concern for the human rights of all 

people, and each of these phases enables the volunteers to view history in Germany 

differently especially when considering their path towards democracy which ensued with 

the precipice of 1933. 26 

From the very beginning Action Reconciliation Service for Peace was focused on 

creating volunteer opportunities for young Germans because they wanted younger 

generations of Germans to have an opportunity to with their own history and relationship 

to the past, and by participating in the atonement process, it is in a sense working 

towards the individual transformation of guilt, more specifically by contributing 

volunteer services to support educational goals about the teaching topics of the Holocaust 






Gregory Baum and Harold Wells (New York: Orbis Books, 1997), 156. Paraphrase of the information 

under the section about the Future Outlook of the ASF. 

59


to youth in Germany. 27 

Likewise, since the creation of Action Reconciliation Service for 

Peace in 1958, the Protestant Church of Reconciliation at Dachau has remained an 

instrumental part of the International Youth Meeting Dachau. 

The Protestant Church 

While ASF is a Protestant organization, there were many other Protestant church 

affiliates of the IJB beginning in the “wild years” of the IJB, and have continued their 

support of the IJB even today. The Protestant Church and its place within the history of 

Third Reich is complex. The control of the church by Nazism in the Third Reich was 

evident and many prominent Nazis “held important positions within Protestant church 

governments at every level and occupied influential posts in theological faculties and 

religious training institutions.” 28 

Similar to many other organizations and institutions in 

Germany, “after the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, instead of being ostracized in their 

congregations and shut out of ecclesiastical posts, German Christians, lay and clergy, 

found it relatively easy to reintegrate in Protestant church life.” 29 

While some did not 

want to take responsibility, others sought out ways to atone, especially Protestant activists 

who were particularly interested in forming organizations “with the purpose of 

confronting the crimes committed by the Nazi movement and enacting gestures of 

atonement for the sins of Germany during World War II.” 30 

27 Action Reconciliation’s Peace Services at Dachau.1983. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 1. 

28 Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: The 

University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 2. 

29 Ibid. 




60


There are several reasons why it was the Protestant church who were the leaders 

in the atonement and reconciliation movements in Germany, but the most significant is 

that many of the Protestant church officials were highly complicit in many of the crimes 

committed during the Third Reich. 31 

Protestant church members comprised the largest 

percentage of Nazi party supporters, and many of the high church officials were 

prominent brown-collar criminals during the National Socialist era. 32 

The role of the 

Protestant church is essential for the foundation of the International Youth Meeting 

Dachau, because many of the organizational supporters from the beginning were 

Protestant church groups. In the beginning the Protestant group ASF and the Evangelical 

Church of Munich were instrumental in supporting the foundation of the IJB. In the early 

years of the tent camp, many other Protestant church groups financially supported the IJB 

every year as well. 

Another entity within the Protestant Church that is important for the IJB is the 

Church of Reconciliation at Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, or the EVK. 

The EVK was built in 1967 by the Protestant Church in Germany. The EVK and the 

ASF have a very close partnership, and every year, there are two ASF volunteers that are 

sent to the EVK. This relationship between the two organizations is crucial to the early 

years of the IJB. It is through that partnership between the ASF and the EVK that gained 

international volunteers and participants for the IJB beginning in the 1990s. 

31 Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp 1933-2001 (New 

York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 276. Marcuse discusses the role of the Protestant church during 

National Socialism and how that translated into atonement and reconciliation after the end of the war. He 

offers several explanations of why the Protestant church was the initiator of education and memorialization 

of the concentration camp at Dachau. 

32 Marcuse, 276. 

61


The success of the efforts from the ASF and the EVK culminated in 1980 when a 

proposal for a meeting place in Dachau was submitted to the mayor of the Dachau city 

council by Mr. Waltenberger and Mr. Lehner. However, the proposal was denied and the 

mayor stated that the opinion of the city was that there were no solutions to the problem 

of the concentration camp. The next year in the fall of 1981, an initiative group was 

created in order to organize and plan the inaugural IJB meeting. In December of 1981, 

there was an open public panel to discuss the founding of the IJB, and by summer of 

1982, the initiative group published a piece in the local newspaper about the plans to hold 

the IJB meeting in Dachau. Finally, in early 1983, the preparations are made for the first 

annual summer meeting of the IJB. The “wild years” of the IJB began that summer in 

July and August of 1983 when the group hosted the first meeting of the International 

Youth Meeting Dachau. 

The First Meeting 

An initiative group met for the first time in 1981 to discuss the idea of an 

International Youth Meeting Center Dachau. 33 

After this initial group meeting in 1981, it 

was almost two years later in the summer of 1983 when the IJB finally hosted their 

inaugural meeting. This experience gave an opportunity for those who were interested in 

education about National Socialism and the Holocaust to gather each summer and take 

part in an educational forum centered on Holocaust education. 

33 Förderverein für Internationale Jugendbegegnung in Dachau e.V., Internationale 

Jugendbegegnungsstätte Dachau, 15 Jahre Planung Zur Grundsteinlegung des Jegendgästehauses Dachau 

am 25. März 1996: eine Dokumentation von Ideen und InitiativenVerhinderungen und Versprechungen, 

(March 1996). Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, This document has a chronology of the IJB from 

the initial years until the publication of the document in 1996. The chronology began in 1981 with the 

meeting of the ‘Initiative group,’ but the first summer camp was not held until 1983. 

62


Although this was the first camp, organizers had a remarkable participation of one 

hundred seventeen young people who were all from Germany. In the first year there were 

only German youth who participated in the tent camps; in the next several years they 

gained a large variety of youth who then made this a truly international operation with 

representation from a variance of countries. 34 

Figure 3.1 – Gathering at the dinner table at the first IJB meeting in 

1983(Photo courtesy of Förderverein für Internationale Jugendbegegnung 

und Gedenkstättenarbeit in Dachau e.V.) 

34 Dokumentation der Jugendbegegnungszeltlager von 1983 bis 1988. Private collection of Dr. Lynne 

Fallwell, 82. The countries that are represented by students who participate in the International Youth 

Meeting Dachau: Belgium, the former Yugoslavia, Switzerland, the former Czechoslovakia, Hungary, 

Denmark, Tanzania, Finland, Sweden, Canada, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Spain, France, the USA, Ireland, the 

former Soviet Union, Great Britain, Holland, Israel, and finally, the former East and West Germanies. 

63


In the first year, participants gathered in the meadows at Leitenberg due to the 

lack of accommodations available in the town of Dachau, which had no youth hostel and 

were only limited hotels. 35 The meadows at Leitenberg are open fields which are located 

on the outskirts of the city of Dachau. This location is significant because reflects 

resistance from the town. The meadows at Leitenberg were not chosen at random. They 

are the location where bodies of Dachau concentration camp victims were buried in mass 

graves. It is a significant landmark of the history of the Holocaust, and provided 

inescapable evidence of the crimes of National Socialism. 

Meeting at the Leitenberg site, due to its historic significance, caused an outcry 

among civic leaders, forcing the Tent Camp to move locations. In the initial years of 

operation, organizers adopted a level of guerrilla action, continuing to pitch tents in 

locations significant to NS history but not necessarily sanctioned by the town council, 

such as attempts to take over a former SS barracks. Eventually, the town and the Tent 

Camp reached an agreement and the youth organizers were granted permission to locate 

their summer workshop in an open field adjacent to the Stadtweiher, the town’s local 

lake. While a beautiful natural setting with space for the Tent Camp to expand, the 

Stadtweiher location was frustrating in the sense that it placed participants on the far side 

of the town, well away from their reason for gathering, the Dachau Memorial. Ensuring 

that the IJB remained a significant distance from the memorial site is also representative 

of Dachau’s response to the camp. 

35 Peter Bernard, Jugendbegenungszeltlager Dachau: Geschichte – Entwicklungen – Teilnahme – Mitarbeit. 

April 1994. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 1. 

64


The popularity and growth of the International Youth Meeting Dachau can be 

assessed by sheer exponential increase in the number of students coming to Dachau to 

participate in the summer programs each year, which more than doubled from 1983 to 

1989. 1983, there were one hundred seventeen people who attended the summer program 

for a total duration of four weeks, but by 1989 there were over three hundred participants, 

consisting of four international youth groups and sixteen German youth groups, who took 

part in the International Youth Meeting. 36 

The International Youth Meeting Dachau kept 

excellent records each year of not only the numbers of participants, but also the 

nationalities of the youth who attended the programs. The International Youth Meeting 

supported their growing numbers each year by gaining additional support from different 

organizations, expanding the location of the summer program, restricting the duration of 

the summer camp and also allocating for more groups within the program to allow for the 

surge in international participation in the years after 1983. 

After the first official meeting in the summer of 1983, the International Youth 

Meeting Dachau made it their mission to find a place to have permanent place to holds 

their meetings in Dachau where the participating youth could come each summer during 

the International Youth Meeting Dachau program. 37 After the initial summer of the IJB 

in 1983, the EVK and the ASF would join together with many other organizations to 

found the Friends for International Youth Meeting in Dachau, or the FIJB. The FIJB is 

the formal administration organization of the IJB. 

36 Jugendbegenungszeltlager Dachau. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 4-5. 

37 Ibid., 4. 

65


Friends for International Youth Meeting Dachau 

After the overwhelming success of the first meeting of the IJB, it was clear that 

the goal of ASF the EVK and the individuals, including the youth, where interested in 

making the IJB a permanent institution in Dachau. While the ASF and EVK were 

certainly heavily involved in the IJB organization, it was clear that a new structure was 

necessary for the IJB. In November of 1984, the Friends of the International Youth 

Meeting Dachau (Förderverein Internationale Jugendbegegnungstätte Dachau e.V.), or 

the FIJB, was founded to be the formal administrative organization for the IJB that works 

in conjunction with the ASF and the EVK to organize and plan the annual IJB meetings. 

According to the history of the FIJB, it was originally created for the sole purpose to 

support the IJB in attaining a permanent location in the city of Dachau in order to 

continue their annual summer meetings. From the very beginning, the organizers of the 

IJB needed an administrative organization that would be the official organization 

supporting the goals of the IJB. The participants who were instrumental in the founding 

of the IJB and also the FIJB in Dachau understood that the memorial site assessed the 

value of the former concentration camp in Dachau because it was not only a historic 

place, a museum, an archive, and also a library, but also a place of learning for future 

generations. 38 

Not long after the creation of the FIJB, in 1985 a statement was issued by the 

District Association of Dachau, (Kreisverband Dachau) or the KD, with the support of 

the CSU or the German political party, the Chrisitian Social Union. In their statement, 

38 Friends for the International Youth Meeting Dachau. “Decades of Interference – 2009” 

http://www.foerderverein-dachau.de/showstructure.php?struc_id=2. (accessed: September 28, 2012). 

66


they expressed their opposition to the IJB and that they did not want any such 

organizations like the IJB to be in Dachau. 39 

They suggested that the IJB be moved to 

other cities such as Nuremberg, Munich, or Berlin. 40 

The statement launched a response 

from the FIJB in the form of solidifying official organizational structures, and in March 

of 1986, the FIJB official established their Board of Trustees. The city of Dachau sent an 

official representative to that meeting due to the celebrity-level status of some of the 

individuals in attendance. 

For the next decade, the town officials for the city of Dachau would continue to 

fight against the IJB, the FIJB, to try to keep the summer meetings out of Dachau and its 

surrounding areas, particularly when the concept of a youth “Meeting House” is proposed 

in 1986 for Dachau as a meeting place for the IJB. In response to the struggle against the 

FIJB, city councilman for the city council of Dachau, Hansjörg Christmann, asserted his 

concern for the IJB in Dachau by suggesting that “what we do not want is the 

politicization and exploitation of such a facility for long haul activities for specific groups 

of our society, to use the memorial as a moral soundboard for their political soup.” 41 

In 

response to this negative politicization of the IJB, there were many other individuals from 

outside the Dachau community who spoke out in favor of the IJB and their mission for 

educating youth in Southern Germany, including Franz Henrich, leader of the Catholic 

Academy in Bavaria, who said that “this youth meeting place will emerge in Dachau 

39 Förderverein Internationale Jugendbegegnungstätte Dachau e.V. 1984-1989. Ein Zwischenbericht. 

Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 7 

40 Ibid. 


Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 13. 

67


[because] nowhere else [occurred] this place of horror, and from [the IJB,] a force will 

grow to build a better future.” 42 

By 1989 the Friends of International Youth Meeting in Dachau reported that there 

were more than fifty associated local, regional, and national organizations who were 

supporters of the International Youth Meeting Dachau. 43 Today, there are more than 550 

members and 45 associated organizations that support the initiatives of the FIJB and the 

IJB in Dachau. 44 

The goal of enhancing the International Youth Meeting Dachau to be to 

create more suitable and permanent location of meeting for German youth was not a 

simple or tumultuous-free process. The FIJB spent more than fifteen years working to 

achieve their goal of obtaining a permanent meeting place for the IJB in Dachau. In 

conjunction with the FIJB, there were a number of local and regional organizations that 

gave their support in several ways to the IJB. 

Supporting Associations for the International Youth Meeting Dachau 

In the initial planning stages of the International Youth Meeting Dachau, the 

students who were interested in creating a place to educate about the Holocaust received 

strong support from the Evangelical Church in Germany, which is evident from their 

support of the International Youth Meeting Dachau since the beginning. The first year 

the summer camp was operationally, the group was most heavily supported by the 

Protestant church through the combined efforts of the Protestant Youth of Dachau – 

42 Ibid. 

43 Ibid. The FIJB set up a mission statement and seven points of clarification to carry out the mission and 

ultimately the goal of having a place in Dachau for the annual International Youth Meeting Dachau. 

44 Ibid., 6. 

68


Church of Mercy, and also the Protestant Youth of Munich – West, who would continue 

their support of the group until 1985. 45 

Figure 3.2 – Sign by the Protest Church of Munich for the tent camp (Photo 

courtesy of Förderverein für Internationale Jugendbegegnung und 


Another important group that was involved in the initial years of the International 

Youth Meeting Dachau was the Regional Youth of the city of Munich, who in 1986 as 

supported the creation of the Youth memorial site, and worked to support the group from 

45 Peter Bernard, Jugendbegenungszeltlager Dachau: Geschichte – Entwicklungen – Teilnahme – Mitarbeit. 

April 1994. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 1.I have translated the names of the organizations into 

English, but the original names in German are as follows: Protestant Youth of Dachau – Church of Mercy 

(Evangelischen Jugend Dachau – Gnadenkirche), and also the Protestant Youth of Munich – West 

(Evangelische Jugend Munchen-West). 

69


a financial standpoint, so in 1986, they requisitioned a foundation for the International 

Youth Meeting Dachau with 300,000 DM of start-up funds with the stipulation that any 

donors would receive a guarantee that their money was being used appropriately. 46 

The Regional Youth City Council of Munich also published a document in 

January of 1983 “Youth Meeting site, Dachau?” which contains practical information 

about the Concentration camp at Dachau that would be beneficial for supporting such a 

youth initiative because of the similarly successful youth program that was initiated at 

Auschwitz in 1981. 47 The committee suggested both positive and negative points that 

ultimately supported the creation of the organization in Dachau, and the document also 

discusses the practical nature of the pedagogical advantage for the educational purposes 

of the group that would be able to use a site such as Dachau that has the historical site as 

well as survivors and witnesses. The document is posed as a question as to whether or not 

they should support a German youth meeting because they are making valuable 

considerations of the viability of the proposed construction of the youth meeting. 

Also included in the document are sets of questions which provide the framework 

for considering the practical information about finances and location, but also about the 

availability of volunteers to organize and structure the organization, which would be left 

to Action Reconciliation for Peace. However, even though the document is relatively 

neutral in tone, by the end of the document, there is strong evidence that demonstrates 

46 Documentation for Internationale Jugendbegegnung Dachau from 1983 to 1988. Private collection of Dr. 

Lynne Fallwell, 20. Again, I translated as closely as possible the name of the organization into English: 

Regional Youth of the city of Munich (Kreisjugendring München-Stadt) 

47 Peter Bernard, Jugendbegegnungsstätte Dachau? January 1983. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 

1. 

70


the Regional Youth Munich’s willingness to support the creation of a youth meeting in 

Dachau, because they provided statistics in the document about the number of visitors 

each that come from somewhere other than Germany to visit the concentration camp and 

that it would be possible to have an international meeting of young people because they 

are coming to visit Dachau already. 

As evident from this document, it becomes clear that serious consideration was 

given by the Regional Youth Dachau to support the creation of the International Youth 

Meeting Dachau because the benefits of having such an organization where substantially 

more important than ignoring Holocaust education for Germany’s youth. Without the 

support of these other local and regional organizations, the contributions of the Action 

Reconciliation for Peace and the Friends for International Youth Meeting Dachau may 

not have been as successful in the early years of the groups creation because these 

supporting groups played a large role in actively supporting the internal structure of the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau in its initial years. Due to their contributions which 

began in the 1980s and have continued to this day, the International Youth Meeting 

Dachau was successfully created and has continued to develop and grow into a more 

complex organization which now hosts an even wider international participation. 

In addition, another group who was instrumental in the early years of the IJB was 

the Bavarian Youth Council (Bayerische Jugendring) or the BJR. The BJR supported the 

idea of a meeting place for youth at the former concentration camp in Dachau since the 

1960s. The BJR also continued to support the IJB in the years directly after the first few 

summer meetings when the IJB was met with great resistance from the local officials in 

71


Dachau who spoke out against the IJB and tried to keep the IJB from continuing their 

annual meetings in or near Dachau. 48 

In March 1987, the BJR held a symposium 

“Learning Dachau” as a way to garner support for the organization and to meet with 

German political representatives from the major political parties to try to bolster political 

support for the IJB and its mission in Southern Germany. 49 

There were representatives 

from the major Germany political parties including the CDU, the SPD, and the CSU. 50 

Also in attendance at the symposium were the city council members of Dachau, who 

came to speak out against having the IJB meet in the town of Dachau and they claimed 

that they would fight “to the last drop of blood before giving in” to the demands of the 

IJB. 51 

Although the “wild years” do not official end until 1998 when the Youth Hostel 

became the permanent location for the IJB, the period of transition out of the “wild years” 

and into the “formal years,” or a permanent location for the IJB meetings, began in 1988. 

Transitioning to the “Formal Years” 

By March of 1988, support for permanent space for the IJB was growing. The 

Bavarian Parliament asked the Ministry of Culture to present to the Legislative Assembly 

a design for the “Meeting House.” They were asked to have the plans submitted by June 

of 1988, yet they submitted them in April of 1988 instead. In July of 1989, the BRJ and 

the CSU agree to establish a youth guest house based on the concepts submitted to the 

Bavarian Parliament by the Ministry of Culture. By February of 1991, the town of 



49 Ibid., 6. 

50 Ibid. 

51 Ibid., 7. 

72


Dachau proposed a potential location for a youth guest house, but nothing ever happened 

with the proposed space. By November of 1991, the Board of Trustees for the FIJB were 

infuriated by the lack of decisions from the government, and the fact that foundation for 

the house had still not been established. 52 

The frustrations of the FIJB only continued in the subsequent years. In January 

1992, Dachau city council received a proposal for a space for the youth guest house, but 

they rejected the proposal stating that the recommended space was too large. In March of 

1993, as an attempt to incite any sort of response, an FIJB board member Klaus Hahnzog 

asked the Ministry of Culture about the continued silence for the youth hostel. During 

this time, the newly elected Prime Minister of Bavaria visited Dachau and promised to 

personal take care of the implementation of the youth hostel in Dachau, which brought 

considerable hope and renewed efforts to the FIJB. A letter by the Bavarian Minister of 

Culture, in April of 993, stated that the construction of the youth hostel could not begin 

realistically before 1995. By October of 1993, the Ministry of Culture orchestrated an 

architectural competition to design the youth house in Dachau. In January of 1994, the 

Bavarian Minister of Culture moved back the completion date to 1998. In May of 1994, 

from the twelve designs that were submitted, Munich architect Rudolf Hied was named 

the competition winner. 

Even with the numerous set-backs and delays by the Bavarian Minister and the 

Ministry of Culture, the IJB continued to hold their annual summer meetings in the form 



73


of the tent camps located in the fields surrounding Dachau, despite the constant resistance 

from the town officials and members of the community who fought to suppress Dachau’s 

historic connections with the evils of National Socialism. Finally, on March 25, 1996 

there was a local ceremony that captured the moments when the foundational stones were 

laid for a Youth Hostel in Dachau twelve years after the founding of the Friends for 

International Youth Meeting in Dachau, but they were not included in the event and 

received a letter from the Assistant Secretary of the Ministry of Culture stating that the 

organization had nothing to do with the foundation of the youth hostel and that the 

creation of the hostel was attributed solely to the efforts of the local government 

officials. 53 

In 1998, Dachau officially inaugurated the Youth Hostel as open to the public. 

The opening of the Youth Hostel also ended one phase of the IJB, or the “wild years”, 

and began a new phase of “formal years” for the organization. By the time that youth 

hostel was finally completed in 1998, it was not what the association had always 

envisioned for because they had opposed a nationalization of youth and memorial work, 

nonetheless, the Friends for International Youth Meeting in Dachau considered it a 

monumental success over the struggle of political opposition in Dachau. 54 Although the 

youth hostel was not the goal of the original group, their goals were to create a center for 

young people who were focused on learning and exchange, and even today, the 



54 Ibid. 

74


Internationale Jugendbegegnung Dachau meets for two weeks in the summer at the youth 

hostel for their program. 55 

Figure 3.3 – Gardens at the Dachau Youth Hostel, 2012 (Photo courtesy of the 

author) 

Not long after the Dachau youth hostel project was completed, the next year in 

1999 the organization was renamed ‘Friends for the International Youth Meeting and 

55 Jennifer Wood. “A Project,” Dachau is also a town, 2011, dachauisalsoatown.wordpress.com/aproject/service/ 

(accessed October 12, 2012). 

75


Memorial work in Dachau’ in order to promote their continued efforts towards more 

broad educational works of remembrance and supporting former concentration camp 

inmates within the town of Dachau. 56 

However, the Friends for International Youth 

Meeting Dachau was founded on the intention of having a youth hostel built in the town 

of Dachau where the International Youth Meeting Dachau would convene annually to 

participate in the workshops and in 1998 the town of Dachau finally construct a youth 

hostel. 57 Consequently, the student movements which had carried over from the previous 

decades were now prevalent with a large enough base of power to allow students to join 

together and create the International Youth Meeting Dachau. The climate and 

atmosphere of the early 1980s, coupled with the sparked interest in the Holocaust as a 

topic, by things like the Holocaust miniseries, it is perfectly understandable why a group 

like the International Youth Meeting Dachau would take shape in the early 1980s. The 

generations are now far enough removed from the generation who were the perpetrators 

of the National Socialist era and the crimes of the Holocaust, and they are at the right age 

to rebel against the earlier generation and not back down to public pressure, and ask the 

difficult questions. Para-educational programs were vital for student populations to have 

a space to gather and confront the history of National Socialism and crimes committed by 

their parents and grandparents, but also the International Youth Meeting Dachau was 

essential in establishing a Holocaust education program that would meet annually and 



57 Ibid. 

76


give students the opportunity to discuss the Holocaust and it effects in an open 

environment with international participation which would allow for discourse on the 

Holocaust in ways that could not be afforded to students in a regular academic setting in 

the classroom. 

Part of the program experience that is afforded to the participants of the 

International Youth Meeting, is that they are exposed to the stories of the experiences by 

victims of the concentration camps who were imprisoned in Dachau under the Nazi 

regime. This allows participants of the IJB the experience to listen and speak with the 

survivors of the Holocaust. An important question that must be addressed in the very 

near future is how Holocaust education will continue when so much of it is dependent on 

the use of survivor testimonies and lectures to large public audiences. When there are no 

longer any survivors here to tell us their stories and the physical representation of the 

Holocaust that is contained within the survivors, how will the Holocaust relate to the 

future generations who will not have the opportunities to sit and talk with Holocaust 

survivors? Due to these drastic changes in the current methods of Holocaust education, a 

new pedagogy must be put into place to continue to teach the lessons that must outlive 

the survivors of the Holocaust. For this reason, the programs that focus on Holocaust 

education, like the International Youth Meeting Dachau, will take on a larger part of the 

education of younger generations about the crimes against humanity that were enacted 

during the Holocaust. 

77


Figure.3.4 – A man and young girl on stilts by the 1988 tent camp sign 

(Photo courtesy of Förderverein für Internationale Jugendbegegnung und 


Conclusion 

The foundation of the IJB was the culmination of decades of struggle from 

numerous individuals and organizations to finally build a permanent location in Dachau 

as the meeting place for the annual IJB. In the early years, or the wild years before the 

foundation of the youth hostel, the summer camp met in different fields located in the 

78


surroundings of the town of Dachau. However, in 1999, the IJB moved to their 

permanent location in the youth hostel that was complete with rooms for the participants 

of the IJB, but also conference rooms, meeting places, gardens for recreational and dining 

purposes, and also kitchen as well as other amenities for use by the IJB. No matter where 

the camp was located, organizers were committed to a program of education and 

information. 

The International Youth Meeting Dachau functions as para-educational Holocaust 

education not only accessible to the youth of Germany, but also to an international 

audience. In a close examination of the climate among the youth of Germany in the 

1970s and 1980s, it is clear why there was a large involvement in the process to create the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau by many of the students. The youth of Germany 

were eager to support the formation of the International Youth Meeting Dachau because 

they would finally have an outlet to convene and discuss the history of National 

Socialism and ask the questions that were uncomfortable. The contributions made for the 

structure and organization of the International Youth Meeting Dachau highlight the level 

of coordination with the different organizations involved in the structure of the 

organization, and it also demonstrates the support for an organization that was previously 

considered as something going against the grain of popular opinion. 

However, there is much evidence to support claims that the International Youth 

Meeting Dachau, although it was a grassroots movement in the 1980s, has tranformed 

into an international organization which has garnered support from even the most ardent 

opposition groups which vehemently rejected Holocaust education in Dachau. The 

79


purpose of the International Youth Meeting Dachau can be traced back not only to the 

ideas which were propelling the student movements of the 1960s generation, and so by 

creating a connection between the 1960s generations with the future of Holocaust 

education, “the message of hope expressed by most concentration camp memorials since 

the 1960s is indicative of a broader tendency to integrate younger generations into the 

recollection of Nazism.” 58 

Examining the organizations that were responsible for 

conceptualizing a structured organization that would continue to meet annually as a way 

for students to be involved in the discourse involving the legacies of Nazism and the 

Holocaust in Germany, it becomes clear the motivations of the groups involved and what 

purpose they viewed in reaching international participation for education about the 

horrors of National Socialism. They were all working towards creating a program that 

was centered around Holocaust education but would be offered in an historically unique 

location which would be accessible not only to Germany’s youth, but to all visitors who 

would be travelling to Dachau looking for information about Germany’s past and its 

relationship to National Social and the Holocaust. 

The International Youth Meeting Dachau is unique because it allows students to 

explore history in more intimate ways than students who read and learn about National 

Socialism and the Holocaust from a textbook during their years in formalized schooling. 

The mere location of the IJB in Dachau provides the historic site and memorial which 

adds yet another dimension to the educational experience for students that again, would 

not be afforded to them in a classroom setting. Max Mannheimer, a survivor of 

58 Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: Uses and abuses of a concentration camp, 1933-2001. (New 

York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 271. 

80


Auschwitz and Dachau, expressed his views on the importance of the International Youth 

Meeting Dachau by claiming that “one of the most important goals of the camp should be 

to overcome the prejudice that the young generation in Germany has not learned from the 

past.” 59 The function of the IJB is to preserve the history of the atrocities committed in 

Dachau, and transfer that history to the next generations after many of the survivors, such 

as Max Mannheimer, can no longer attest to the significance of the concentration camp 

memorial. 

Figure 3.5 – Holocaust survivor Max Mannheimer speaks with the youth 

group (Photo courtesy of Förderverein für Internationale Jugendbegegnung 

und Gedenkstättenarbeit in Dachau e.V.) 

59 Max Mannheimer. 1994 pamphlet for the International Youth Meeting Dachau. Private collection of Dr. 

Lynne Fallwell, 7. This quote comes from the section in which Max Mannheimer was asked why he 

speaks. Although it is not expressly stated, they presumably want to know why Mannheimer is supporting 

the work of the International Youth Meeting Dachau. 

81


From its initial summer, the International Youth Meeting Dachau has evolved 

from a semi-organized event that was formed by students who were so interested in 

educational activism for learning about Germany’s painful past, and thus created a 

learning community where interested participants would participate in a learning 

community to further their knowledge of National Socialism and the Holocaust. 

Consequently, the International Youth Meeting Dachau has come a great distance from 

the days of pitching tents in the middle of a field to having a readily available Youth 

Hostel that provides all of the space and lodging demanded by the annual participants in 

the summer program. With these advancements in the structure of the organization, the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau now has the opportunity to focus solely on the 

mission, which is to educate young people from different cultures and backgrounds to 

work together to learn about problems that are created by nationalism, racism 

antisemitism not only in Germany, but in many countries around the world today. 60 

Finally, due to foundation of the International Youth Meeting Dachau and the 

support of the associated organizations, students in Germany have a place outside of 

traditional education to learn about the history of National Socialism and the crimes 

committed during the Holocaust. Programs like the International Youth Meeting Dachau 

have created an environment suited for learning in unique locations, such as former 

grounds of concentration camps. They also facilitate learning in ways unlike typical 

classroom settings, because the students, who are interested in being involved with a 

program like the International Youth Meeting Dachau, are there because they have 

60 1994 pamphlet for the International Youth Meeting Dachau. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell,11. 

Paraphrased from the section “Talking with the Youth.” 

82


enthusiasm and passion for the subject matter, which fosters positive learning 

environments for this difficult history in Germany. With programs like the International 

Youth Meeting Dachau, Germany can move forward, toward more comprehensive 

education about their past and hopefully instill in the German youth the lessons from the 

Holocaust which will promote tolerance and acceptance of other’s differences and 

promote universal bonds for the future to have equal participate in the progress of human 

rights. 

83


CHAPTER IV 

THE “TEAMERS” AND THE WORKSHOPS 

This chapter looks at both those who set up the curriculum and what they taught. 

First, there are the “teamers” or leaders who are responsible for planning and 

implementing the workshops for the IJB participants. The materials used in the 

workshops are composed of various articles and information sheets that are compiled into 

booklets that are called “readers”. Each component, both the “teamers” and the “readers” 

needs to be analyzed independently in order to see how each of these approach the ways 

that the IJB is defined as para-educational, as well as a grassroots initiative. This chapter 

will discuss the practicalities of the IJB, the nature of both the teachers or “teamers” and 

then the material or “readers” used within the summer program of the IJB to promote 

Holocaust education and awareness. First, the “teamers” must be explained before 

transitioning to the importance of the “readers” since the teamers are the people who are 

responsible for preparing materials for the workshops and thus, creating the “readers.” 

The “Teamers” 

Understanding the function of the “teamers” is essential to the IJB’s work as a 

para-educational experience. “Teamers” comes from their occupational duty as a leader, 

but in the German language leader translates into “Führer.” Since the end of National 

Socialism, the word “Führer” has connotations related to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and 

so the IJB needed a word that corresponded to the function of leader without using 

German language. Even though the term roughly translates into “leaders,” they actually 

84


perform the duties of a teacher, organizer, guide, and volunteer, as well as a number of 

other administrative type responsibilities. 1 

As an example of the all-encompassing 

position of the teamer, in an interview with the former “teamer” Jennifer Wood, she was 

asked to describe her daily tasks and she responded with the following explanation: 

I was responsible for workshops and its historical content, the translation of 

documents, survivor talks, and also everyday communication. I communicated 

with the press, and annual planning of the tent camp. There is an annual planning 

cycle to prepare for the summer program that includes administration, finances, 

logistics, content, etc. 2 

The role of the “teamer” is much more than leader, and in fact there is really no term in 

either language that adequately describes their function within the IJB, because they 

assume so much responsibility in the everyday running of the IJB. 

After conducting several interviews, there are multiple reasons that drove 

individuals to join the IJB in the “teamer” capacity. While some participants were 

looking for ways to get involved on a deeper level than just tourist opportunities, other 

participants were interested in education that went beyond just reading books on the 

subject. In an interview with Jennifer Wood, a native of the United States and former 

‘teamer’ admitted that the reason she initially went in search of something that led her to 

the IJB was that she “was looking for a way to be more than just a tourist, and she was 

1 Organizational documents from the 1995 tent camp planning documents. Private collection of Dr. Lynne 

Fallwell. 

2 Jennifer Wood interviewed by author, Berlin Germany, July 28, 2012. All of the names of those 

interviewed for this thesis are the actual names of the interviewee, per agreement by the author and the 

interviewees. For a list of questions that were the basis of the interviews, both in-person and through 

electronic communication, please see Appendix B. 

85


looking for a way to connect to the memorial sites in Germany.” 3 

Wood found the IJB 

through an organization called Volunteers for Peace which is involved with an 

international network promoting community service work, and it was through 

connections within this organization that she was able to spend several years in Dachau 

and the IJB. 4 

Another former “teamer” Uwe Neirich initially decided to participate in the IJB 

because he “wanted to teach the Holocaust and have an impact on younger people.” 5 

Neirich also asserted that he wanted to participate as a “teamer” for the IJB because he 

“thought it [was] important to see the original place and to meet survivors and not only 

[read] books.” 6 

Next, in another interview, Astrid Müller declared that “at Dachau Neo-Nazis 

weren’t visible – [which was] completely different from [her] hometown,” and she 

described the impact of her experiences with the IJB by stating that she “was confirmed 

in [her] political attitudes, [she] learned about history, and [she] met very interesting 

people.” 7 

It is evident that these are typical answers from the “teamers” who 

participated with the IJB. Even though the “teamers” represent a variety of nationalities 

and backgrounds, there is a common response in that they are each looking for ways to be 

involved in the education process for young people about the Holocaust and what the 

memorial site means to the future education of National Socialism and the Holocaust. 

3 Wood, interviewed by author, Berlin Germany, July 28, 2012. 

4 Jennifer Wood. “A Project,” Dachau is also a town, 2011, dachauisalsoatown.wordpress.com/aproject/service/ 


5 Uwe Neirich, interviewed by author, Berlin Germany, July 28, 2012. 

6 Neirich, interview. 

7 E-mail message to author by Astrid Müller, August 2, 2012. 

86


Subsequently, the nationalities of the teamers are also important because in the 

early years, they were mostly Germans from the region of Bavaria. 8 

In the following 

years, youth of other nationalities joined in at the IJB. 9 

While the first year was mostly 

German participating, the ensuing years began to elevate the IJB to its position as an 

international organization. An article published in 1994, by the Dachauer, the local 

newspaper of Dachau, spoke with many of the people who were involved with the IJB 

that year, and there were participating youth from Germany, the United States, Canada, 

Africa, Denmark, Poland, Belgium, and Holland. 10 

With participants from several 

countries even beyond the borders of Europe the IJB had become part of an international 

network very early in its existence. 

With all of the different countries involved in the IJB, language and 

communication is of note. There are two official languages of the IJB, which are German 

and English. Historically, the IJB has had many participants of the years who had the 

ability to communicate in English. English-language materials dominate Holocaust 

education, and the English-speakers are a powerful force in general for promoting 

Holocaust education. In the case of the IJB, although English-speakers were part of the 

IJB experience early on, the first native English-speaker did not join the IJB until 1995. 

All other participants in the IJB experience must be able to communicate in either 

German or English in order to participate. Despite these language restrictions to English 

8 Uwe Neirich, interviewed by author, Berlin Germany, July 28, 2012. 

9 Action Reconciliation-Dachau “Year End Report” September 1994-September 1995 - Lynne Fallwell. 


10 Petra Schafflik, “Menschen im Dachauer Jugendbegegnungszeltlager“ Dachauer Neueste, August 10, 

1994. 

87


and German, it did not cause a decrease in the number of participants wanting to 

participate with the IJB. 

In discussing reasons for participating in the IJB, there were a number of youth 

from Germany who were interested in the IJB as a way to fulfill their military obligations 

to the state. During an interview with a former ‘teamer’ from Germany, he claimed that 

he “joined the IJB as a conscientious objector.” 11 

All German men at the age of eighteen 

were required to complete mandatory military service; however, for various reasons there 

were ways to fulfill the service obligation through volunteerism. According to Neirich, 

there were many Germans during this time who wanted to volunteer, or complete 

community service in lieu of military service, but with organizations in Germany instead 

of being sent abroad, like he was to the Netherlands, since they were not allowed to 

complete the mandatory community service inside Germany. 12 However, by working 

with the ASF, many Germans could complete their obligatory service requirements and 

so many of these individuals chose to complete their mandatory two-year civil service 

requirements in this way. 

Another important distinction to understand about the “teamers” is that they are 

not a group with advanced education degrees in teaching about the Holocaust. 13 

Rather, 

they are individuals, mostly youth themselves, who are interested in taking part of the IJB 

not only to share their own knowledge and information, but also as a learning experience 

for themselves. In an email message with the author on September 15, 2012, former 



13 Action Reconciliation-Dachau “Year End Report” September 1994-September 1995 - Lynne Fallwell. 

Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 1-2. 

88


“teamer” Regine Vogl revealed that “the most impressive memory for me was to look 

after a group of inmates from a juvenile prison who was allowed to leave the prison to 

participate in the program.” 14 

Vogl’s comments demonstrate that the IJB is about much 

more than Holocaust education, but that it is also about the unique experiences that are 

afforded to those who have participates with the IJB as a way for them to have a deeper 

and more personal connection to what happened during their time at the IJB. 

Consequently, as the IJB became more internationally collaborative, identities 

also seemed to play an increasingly significant role in the learning process and 

participation for the “teamers.” Identity is a reoccurring theme at the IJB, not only 

because of its internationality amongst the “teamers” and also its participants, but also 

because there significant lessons to be learned about “othering” and moral lessons that 

can be demonstrated by National Socialism and its corruption of “othering” aligns with 

the teachings of the IJB. As noted by a Vogl in an email interview, she articulated this 

point from her own experiences in the following way: 

I’ve learned a lot about prejudice (even my own). The IJB made it possible to 

bring together different people – not only from different countries, but also with 

such diverse backgrounds – and for me this was the most important and exciting 

part of the whole project. 15 

This sentiment is widely discussed amongst the teamers, but also lessons about prejudice 

and ‘othering’ are as exemplified in the workshops and activities during the IJB. At this 

point, knowing the daily operations of the IJB will provide more of a context for how the 

IJB operated in terms of its activities. 

14 E-mail message to author by Regine Vogl, September 5, 2012. All interviews were confidential: the 

names of interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement. 

15 Email interview, September 15, 2012. 

89


Daily Operations of the IJB 

The IJB has always taken place in July or August. The initial IJB summer lasted 

over six weeks. Over the years, the duration of the camps has gradually condensed from 

five to six weeks whereas now the summer meeting runs during two weeks of time. In 

terms of activities, the “teamers” plan out the day of activities and the participants are 

presented with a schedule of events for the duration of the IJB. 16 

On the first day, the 

participants would arrive and then late in the afternoon, they would receive a tour of the 

camp groups, followed by a group lesson in smaller group units, and then finally, the day 

would conclude with an evening meeting for the entire group. The next several days of 

the IJB were filled with visits to the memorial site, discussions with eyewitness and 

survivors, workshops that were both educational and creative, which will be explained 

last in this chapter, and also group projects that would allow collaboration amongst the 

“teamers” and participants. They would also take part in entertainment as well as a 

number of afternoon creative activities which included music, theater, art, and dancing. 

The IJB promotes activities apart from the educational workshops with the idea to spur 

creative activities to enhance the experience of the participants. This also includes 

exposure to many cultural activities including concerts and performance that typically 

features local artists from the Dachau or Munich areas. 


Fallwell. For an example of a daily schedule, please see Appendix C. 

90


Figure 4.1 – Dieter Lattmann plays guitar during the music workshop at 

the IJB, 1988 (Photo courtesy of Förderverein für Internationale 

Jugendbegegnung und Gedenkstättenarbeit in Dachau e.V.) 

As evident by the documentation, much time and effort went into planning the 

IJB, and setting out times and durations for activities, as well as developing a varied 

schedule full of activities for the participants to be able to participate in a multitude of 

sessions throughout their IJB experience. After each day, the evenings were reserved for 

91


large group meetings to discuss the daily activities, or to gather and work on group 

projects amongst the different groups. 

Figure 4.2 – IJB participants gather for an evening group session, 1988 (Photo courtesy 

of Förderverein für Internationale Jugendbegegnung und Gedenkstättenarbeit in 

Dachau e.V.) 

On the last full day of the IJB, participants were given ample opportunity to 

reflect on their times at the IJB, and they would gather in a number of groups in order to 

collaborate and share their individual experiences with each other and to add time for 

92


contemplation of all that they had seen and participated in during their weeks at the IJB. 

These were small, more intimate groups that would have several hours to discuss all of 

the different lessons and experiences that each participant had while at the IJB. 

Figure 4.3 – Group meets to discuss their reactions, 1988 (Photo courtesy of Förderverein 

für Internationale Jugendbegegnung und Gedenkstättenarbeit in Dachau e.V.) 

The final night of the IJB concluded with a farewell party, and then the 

participants would head home on the following day. Over the course of the IJB, the 

participants engage in a number of activities that are all part of the IJB pedagogy, which 

now needs further investigation. 

93


Pedagogical Approaches within the IJB 

The importance of examining not only the teachers, but also their pedagogy used 

at the International Youth Meeting, is vital to understand how the IJB functions as a paraeducational 

experience to educate and create awareness for the Holocaust and the history 

of National Socialism. By examining the different pedagogical approaches in the IJB, one 

can understand how the educators implement these tools in order to teach the various 

lessons of the Holocaust. Because this group functions as a para-educational program, 

the education students receive in the program serves as a supplement to the education in a 

formalized classroom settings in their school systems. Some of the biggest debates 

surrounding Holocaust education in the United States are based on the argument of what 

and how the Holocaust is taught. Scholars are concerned with the materials teachers use 

to teaching their students about the Holocaust. Many scholars have insisted that there is 

an ever increasing problem of “Holocaust fatigue,” or the unsystematic coverage the 

event that leaves one with the sensation that it “is being taught to death.” 17 

The IJB offers more to youth than traditional classroom curriculum because at the 

IJB, “the participants have the opportunity to concern themselves with various topics in a 

creative as well as a more traditional way.” 18 

The workshops are designed in a way that 

the participants have different areas they can learn about and they have the opportunity to 

develop knowledge in particular subjects of their choosing. For example, at the IJB “in 

1994, there was a workshop with the topic “Being Different” and also a workshop to the 

17 Simone Schweber, ““Holocaust Fatigue”: Teaching it Today” Research and Practice 5, no.1 (Jan. 2006): 

48. 

18 1994 pamphlet for the International Youth Meeting Dachau. Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell, 

17. 

94


topic “National Identity.” 19 

With topics like these, “the possibility was given to deal with 

[their] own experiences, often through games.” 20 

It is important to examine the kinds of pedagogical material being used by the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau, because it provides insight into the educational 

direction of the IJB and how the history of the Holocaust fits into their teaching on the 

history of National Socialism. It is also important to understand the pedagogy because it 

is a reflection of the mission and goals of the organization itself. To understand the 

pedagogy of the IJB, an analysis of the workshops is necessary in see the approaches of 

the IJB to Holocaust education. 

Workshops 

Part of the process of the IJB is to participate in a variety of activities, and one 

part of the camp program is the workshops. 21 

These workshops are created by the 

“teamers” and a significant portion of time is used by the teamers to research different 

interests dealing with themes related to National Socialism. 22 

One of the great methods 

employed by the IJB for their workshops is freedom for independent pursuit of research: 

The participants are free to choose their own topics and have access to the 

archives and library located on the memorial site as well as a chance to hear first 

person accounts from survivors, and some groups have organized themselves and 

created various presentations such as newspapers or documentation booklets 

based on their research . 23 

19 Ibid. 

20 Ibid. 

21 Ibid. 

22 Ibid. 


13. 

95


This allows the IJB a certain amount of liberty for their curriculum in the sense that the 

“teamers” have the ability to choose the information for the ‘readers’ in order to 

education those participants attending the workshops. This system in the IJB is different 

from curriculums in school systems, where administrators and high level educators 

devote their time to developing a standardized curriculum to be used unilaterally for 

students. These curriculums are designed so that it aims to use certain materials in order 

to teach specific narratives of the Holocaust. However, at the IJB, the topics reflect the 

aims and interests of the “teamers” to educate topics related to National Socialism and the 

Holocaust. 

This situation is the most accurate reflection of the freedom that “teamers” had to 

choose and research their topics, but also what kinds of issues were important to the 

“teamers” and participants at that time. This is significant because there were no 

guidelines that restricted certain topics of National Socialism from being discussed by 

“teamers” who were interested in that subject. This allows greater freedom for the 

curriculum of the workshops to be a field of interest for the “teamers” to learn more about 

it themselves, as they spend time researching those specific topics, but also in the 

conveyance of the material to the participants of the different workshops. 

The themes of the workshops between the early, or “wild” years, and the 

workshop themes after the IJB moves into the “formal” years of the youth hostel, have 

many similarities. In the “wild” or early years of the IJB, the topics that were addressed 

were those that interested the group of participants from that time period. Several of the 

workshops included topics on: Victim Groups of the concentration camps, Racism in 

96


Germany; Xenophobia in Germany; Radical Right movements in Germany; Neo-Nazis; 

Personal Relationship to National Socialism (via survivor testimonies and eyewitness 

accounts); Women and National Socialism; Coming to Terms with the Past 

(Vergangenheitsbewältigung); Reworking History; Political Agitation and Political 

Extremism. 24 

Again, these topics focus on the problems that very apparent to Germans 

in the political climate of the 1980s. 

Indeed, the most reoccurring topic of the workshops during the “formal” years, or 

the years that the IJB has conducted its annual summer meeting in the youth hostel 

include: Remembrance Culture and the Holocaust, Children and Youth as victims of 

National Socialism, Subsidiary Camps of Dachau, Nationalities of prisoners in Dachau; 

Victim Groups in Dachau, including Priests, the Sinti and Roma, Homosexuals, and the 

European Jews, and Soviets; Human Rights Violations; the Hitler Youth; the Role of the 

Church and Priests in National Socialism and the concentration camps; Culture in the 

Nazi Regime and in the concentration camp; The Final Solution: From “Mein Kampf” to 

the gas chambers; Survivors and Eyewitnesses. 25 

The topics covered in a given summer 

were a direct reflection of the individual interests of the teamers and of larger current 

political events. For example, in 1996 the Bosnian Conflict was a huge topic, in part 


Lynne Fallwell, 28-37. The topics for the workshops are listed in the personal accounts from previous 

participants beginning on page. The testimonies are a true representation of the participants reacts not only 

to the workshops, but also to the experiences of the IJB, and the significance of their time there and the 

memories that were created due to their involvement in the organization. 

25 Internationale Jugendbegegnung Dachau “Workshops” http://www.jugendbegegnungdachau.de/showstructure.php?struc_id=58 

(accessed September 5, 2012). This is a compilation of 

workshop topics from 2008-2013. 

97


because the IJB had a group of students from Sarajevo at the camp and in part because 

the war was newly over. 

Notably, there are several purposes to the workshops. Many of the workshops 

were designed with thematic educational topics and consisted of copied material, such as 

articles and information sheets in booklets or ‘readers’ that were distributed to the 

participants. 26 

The readers were designed as a guide through the themes that had been 

researched by the “teamers” and were used to educate the participants on that particular 

theme. The readers generally contained a collection of documents that included 

newspaper articles and other various literature and publications that were directed toward 

the overarching theme of the workshop. 

However, not all of the workshops were strictly about academic research. After 

all, the IJB did take place during summer, and so the “teamers” would work to 

incorporate fun and games into designated workshops as ways for the participants to 

partake in creative activities alongside the educational workshops. Typical activities 

would often include singing, dancing, drawing and painting. 27 

Often, participants were 

encouraged and promoted to be creative and artistically express their experiences in the 

workshops and sessions during the IJB. Also, participants are sectioned off into groups 

in order to explore and collaborate together to complete group projects and assignments 

as well. These sorts of activities were about team work and the collective effort of 

individuals who had different insights and experiences to benefit the learning process of 

26 “Mappe 5.” Private collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell. 


Lynne Fallwell, 

98


the groups as a whole. They were about coming together and sharing different 

perspectives in order to gain more insight on the assigned topics. 

Figure 4.1 – Group works on a project, 1988 (Photo 

courtesy of Förderverein für Internationale 

Jugendbegegnung und Gedenkstättenarbeit in Dachau 

e.V.) 

99


As demonstrated here in this section, there are a multitude of functions pertaining 

to the workshops. Particularly, the workshops are designed with specific pedagogical 

elements, and the “teamers” use the readers as the foundation for the educational 

workshops. Each year, the “teamers” and the IJB define the workshops by focusing each 

one on a particular area of interest that is related to National Socialism and the Holocaust. 

For the workshops conducted at the IJB, the “teamers” are charged with conducting 

research on the different themes associated with the Holocaust and National Socialism, 

and then they create booklets that are copied and distributed to the participants as a guide 

to the particular topic that will be discussed in the workshop. Within the “readers,” there 

are several documents including a variety of articles and stories that are aimed to create 

discussion in the themed workshops of the particular topics about different facets of 

National Socialism and the Holocaust. 

For example, in the early years of the 1990s, there was a significant amount of 

attention for “Children of Nazi Perpetrators.” The topic of the children whose parents 

were known Nazi perpetrators is also part of the larger discussions of Germans as victims 

and perpetrators. 28 

Many of the participants in the IJB were German, and so the issue of 

identity and how the Holocaust shaped Germany in the post-war world, is still a very 

important discussion for Germans collectively, but also individually for the several 

generations following the end of the Second World War. 

28 Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity, (Cambridge, 

MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). This issue is substantial in discussions of how the Holocaust has 

shaped German Identity since 1945. Charles Maier’s The Unmasterable Past is a good source for 

information on guilt and victimhood, and its construction of German identity, but also how the Historian’s 

Debate (Historikerstreit) discussed the issue as well. 

100


Apart from the time spent by participants in the workshops, they are also involved 

in other activities as well. As suggested by former participants, “an important item on the 

program is the guided tour of the memorial site which is one of fixed points during the 

stay of each [of the] groups.” 29 

While at the memorial site, the participants are taken on a 

guided tour through the grounds of the former concentration camp Dachau, and during 

“this guided tour, the participants have a chance to look at our major theme 

“Remembering-Meeting-Understanding-Working for the Future,” and he/she can make 

him/herself a better picture of the topic. 30 

An important element of their experiences at 

the memorial site is that “the guided tours are often held by former prisoners, but also by 

the team members from the tent camp.” 31 

Service Work and Volunteerism 

While participating in the IJB, the participants take part in numerous activities. 

Although at first glance certain activities can seem arbitrary, they are all focused on 

service and aid of the memorial site in Dachau. Wood, who was a ‘teamer’ in 1997, 

2003, and 2004, describes one of her experiences in detail when they participated in 

volunteer work cleaning up the memorial site: 

One day, our task was to weed in and around one section of the barbed wire 

fence. This work needs to be done by hand because machines cannot get into the 

small triangular spaces created by the criss-cross pattern of the trip wire against 

the ground. This pattern was devised to catch prisoners’ ankles and feet if they 

ran towards the electric fence in an attempt to escape or commit suicide. I knew 


17. 

30 Ibid. 

31 Ibid. 

101


the fences were not “real.” I could leave at any time to go to the bathroom or take 

a sip of water, but still, the work was sobering. 32 

As described by this teamer, the work associated with the IJB is much more than 

participants and “teamers” sitting around and having intellectual discussions of the 

meaning of the Holocaust. Here is an example of the way that their volunteer services 

contributed to maintaining the Memorial site, but at the same time it reflects a personal 

and emotional connection to the work by the “teamer.” As Wood suggested, there were 

no real barriers that kept her from completing the clean-up of the barbed wire fence, but 

at the same time there was a sense of psychological heaviness in order to perform the 

work. 

Tent Camp volunteerism was not simply confined to Dachau. In 1988, a group 

from the IJB traveled to Munich in order to clean up a Jewish cemetery that had been 

neglected for years. 33 

This was a way for participants of the IJB to get involved in other 

communities surrounding Dachau, but it was also a chance for them to participate in 

“hands-on” memorialization by promoting the memory of the Holocaust by physically 

performing deeds that worked to instill sites that were related to the events of the 

Holocaust. These kinds of activities create a connection that is different that reading 

testimonies or literature about the Holocaust, because they are active participation by 

volunteering time and energy to preserve historic sites of memory. 

32 Jennifer Wood. “Service,” Dachau is also a town, 2011, dachauisalsoatown.wordpress.com/aproject/service/ 



Lynne Fallwell, 49. 

102


Figure 4.5 – IJB participants clean up a Jewish cemetery in 

Munich (Photo courtesy of Förderverein für Internationale 

Jugendbegegnung und Gedenkstättenarbeit in Dachau e.V.) 

The service and volunteerism of the IJB is founded in notions that the experience 

incorporate active participation of the youth in maintaining the preservation of the 

memorial site and other places associated with the Holocaust and National Socialism as a 

103


way for them to have a personal connection with these places after they leave the IJB. 34 

There were also very practical applications of the volunteer work performed by the 

participants of the IJB in that as Wood described, the machinery at the memorial site 

could not reach the weeds under the barbed wire, but also many places like the memorial 

site or the Jewish cemetery may not always have the funds to keep all of the sites 

properly maintained except by volunteerism. By contributing their time and labor in such 

a way, they establish a deeper personal and even a psychological connection to the places 

and sites of memory of the Holocaust that they initially came to learn. 35 

Conclusion 

Combining the “teamers” and the workshops with their “readers” and other 

educational tools, the IJB promotes Holocaust awareness and education that is unique to 

the current forms of formalized Holocaust education in secondary education systems. 

The motivations of the teamers are also unique to the IJB, because they are not 

professional academics, but rather they are individuals who are interested in learning and 

sharing knowledge about the Holocaust with other youth members as a way to keep the 

education and memory of the Holocaust alive and in the current memories of the younger 

generations. The “teamers” and their pedagogical tools highlight the uniqueness, 

motivation, and para-education qualities of the IJB because of the way that they each 

function together to create the experiences for the participants of the IJB, which could not 

be replicated in an institutionalized classroom setting. 


Lynne Fallwell, 48-50. 

35 Jennifer Wood. “Service,” Dachau is also a town, 2011, dachauisalsoatown.wordpress.com/aproject/service/ 


104


All of the components of the IJB make a unique experience that includes 

participation in workshops, both educational and creative, with the “reader” material 

created by the teamers, but it also includes elements of service and volunteerism, to add 

yet another personal connection to the education provided by the IJB. Finally, the IJB 

offers the authentic site of memory, which contrasts visits to other places like museums 

or Holocaust exhibits, because working with the memorial site, as a place where the 

crimes of National Socialism occurred, is yet another essential part of the experience of 

the IJB. 

105


CHAPTER V 

CONCLUSION 

This thesis has worked to address the history of Holocaust education and 

awareness, and as a case study, examine the internalized structure and operation of the 

International Youth Meeting Dachau. The IJB has come a long way from its early days 

of pitching tents in the open fields surrounding Dachau, to the current state of a 

permanent Youth Hostel that is equipped with all of the modern conveniences of any 

technological savvy classroom. 1 

This thesis argued that the International Youth Meeting 

Dachau is a para-educational activity that provides youth, not only in Germany but in the 

international community, with a resource to participate in Holocaust awareness and 

education. 

The preceding chapters have contributed to the overall discussion on Holocaust 

education and awareness and how the participants of the IJB are exposed to particular 

experience that creates a certain form Holocaust education through para-educational 

devices. Chapter one introduced the concepts of para-education and how the IJB fits into 

a para-educational category. As discussed were ideas about Holocaust education in 

contrast to Holocaust pedagogy and how both concepts are important to understand the 

functions of the IJB’s teachers and their teaching methods. Finally, chapter one also 

discussed Holocaust memory and memorialization and how these concepts are significant 

to Holocaust history, but also how they are important to the function of the IJB. 

1 “Home” Internationale Jugendbegegnung Dachau, “Home,” http://www.jugendbegegnung-dachau.de/. 

106


Next, chapter two discussed the post-1945 division of East and West Germany 

and what influences each of the different states had towards policies on Holocaust history 

and subsequently Holocaust education. This chapter also discussed the major historical 

events that led to the development of international public interest in Holocaust awareness. 

The major events discussed in chapter two that helped to shape the increasing public 

interest on the Holocaust included the Eichmann Trial, the 1968 youth generation in 

Germany, and also the Holocaust TV mini-series. 

As a response to these events, there were several public reactions that included the 

Historian’s debate (Historikerstreit) in West Germany and the United States opening of 

the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as the production Stephen 

Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Due to the impressive international interest in Holocaust 

education and awareness, many scholars were prompted to reconsider the ways in which 

the Holocaust has been taught and to establish research on the formalization of Holocaust 

education within schools. By discerning the path of formalized Holocaust education and 

awareness, it highlights the distinction of the para-educational activism founded in 

organizations such as the International Youth Meeting Dachau. 

Then, chapter three then discussed the origins of the IJB, and also included 

information on the internal structures of the IJB as well as a discussion on many of the 

associated organizations that were instrumental in the founding of the IJB. The chapter 

attempted to establish a chronology of the IJB beginning in 1945, and concluding with 

the founding of the Youth Hostel in 1998, and thus closing the chapter of the “wild” 

years and transitioning into the “formal” years. Chapter three demonstrated that the IJB 

107


was created in a time and place that by in large did not fully embrace ideas about 

Holocaust education and awareness. 

Finally, chapter four discussed the educators or “teamers” of the IJB their 

motivations for getting involved with an organization such as the IJB. The chapter also 

highlighted the daily operations of the IJB, and included discussions of the different 

pedagogical tools used during the IJB summer meetings including the use of workshops 

and volunteerism. 

There are several elements of the IJB that are significant in terms of Holocaust 

education and awareness. The experience of the IJB is education that cannot be 

replicated in formalized educational institutions because several of the qualities of the IJB 

are unique to its place of being in the vicinity of the memorial site for the Dachau 

Concentration Camp. Historian Harold Marcuse suggests that there are significant 

implications for memorial sites and that, “they should draw especially on their unique 

strength, namely the emotional appeal of a genuine historical site with authentic 

remains.” 2 

The authentic nature of a historical site is part of the experience developed by 

the IJB, which cannot be duplicated in any place outside of the memorial sites for the 

Holocaust. 

Another element that is essential to IJB is that the organization is its nature as a 

grassroots organization. The environment of the late 1960s and 1970s were a direct 

reflection of the attitudes of the newest postwar generation, known as the 1968ers. They 

were the first group of youth people to question their parents about their complicity 

2 Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau 

108


during the Third Reich. Those who were involved with establishing the IJB were met 

with fierce opposition from the upper echelon bureaucrats who were willing to do 

whatever was necessary to make sure the Dachau would not be associated with the 

Holocaust, and thus, the locale of Dachau as the site for the IJB had created a climate of 

severe political tension. Mary Fulbrook commented that “the turbulent history of 

twentieth-century Germany will inevitably arouse all manner of emotions in those 

seeking answers to the myriad of fundamental questions it poses,” and the environment of 

the IJB allows its participants to engage with the emotional aspect of Holocaust education 

that is not always present or acceptable in classroom settings. 3 

Also commenting on the political implications of National Socialism and the 

Holocaust and how that trajectory fits into current modes of Holocaust education is 

historian Jeffrey Herf. He makes connections between the historical memory of National 

Socialism and the Holocaust and its implications for the governmental politics moving 

forward by stating: 

Some of the most perceptive German participants and observers who lived 

through the war and Holocaust, the Nuremberg interregnum, and the post war 

decades understood that whether and how they remembered or forgot the Nazi era 

and the persecution of the Jews would be of great importance for the nature and 

prospects of dictatorship and democracy in Germany after Auschwitz. 4 

Again, many of the political problems that arose out of National Socialism and its 

legacies are central to the themes of education that are promoted in the teaching of the 

IJB. They are among the various lessons that the IJB focuses its teachings for the younger 

3 Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918-2008: The Divided Nation, (New York: Wiley-Blackwell), 

325. 

4 Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 

University Press, 1997), 394. 

109


generations to understand the potential problems that come with the many different 

approaches of political ideology that developed from the Nazis including 

authoritarianism, fascism, and in the more current decades, the resurgence of Neo- 

Nazism. 

Finally, the most important feature of the IJB, are its “teamers” and their 

pedagogical tools including the “readers” that are used in the educational portions of the 

workshops. As historian Caroline Pearce noted, the “generational interpretations of the 

Nazi legacy are determined by the dominant experience of that generation and influenced 

by the (non)transmission of communicative memory from one generation to the next.” 5 

For this reason, the work of the IJB is a generation creating for itself the legacy and 

memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust, and transmitting that memory and 

information through the current young generations. 

With the new challenges to teaching the Holocaust in the twenty-first century, 

more research is necessary to understand how the shifts in formalized teaching of the 

Holocaust have made an impression on students today. More research is necessary to 

uncover the lasting impact of different types of “hands-on” memorialization by 

comparing other methods of contemporary Holocaust projects like the “Paperclip 

Project” or other exercises in collecting, to the IJB experience. 6 

Likewise, more research 

needs to be conducted on how Holocaust education through experiences in places such as 

the IJB has helped to shape current globalized Holocaust education. 

5 Caroline Pearce, Contemporary Germany and the Nazi Legacy: Remembrance, Politics and Dialectics of 

Normality, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 228. 

6 Daniel H. Magilow, “Counting to Six Million: Collecting Projects and Holocaust Memorialization” 

Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 1 (Fall, 2007): 24. 

110


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120


APPENDIX A 

CHRONOLOGY OF THE IJB 

April 1956 

First thoughts and ideas were formulated for a memorial on the 

grounds of the former Dachau Concentration Camp. The first 

considerations for a meeting place in Dachau were suggested by 

surviving camp prisoners. 

Early 1960s 

The BJR discusses the need for a meeting place in Dachau for 

education about the history of the camp. 

1960-1973 The memorial site is created on the ground of the former Dachau 

Concentration Camp 

July 1966 

The EVK and the ASF develop the idea for a youth meeting 

center 

1980 A proposal for a “Meeting House” in Dachau was created by Mr. 

Waltenberger and Mr. Lehner, and was presented to the mayor of 

Dachau. The proposal was denied and the opinion of the city was 

that “a real solution to the problem of the concentration camp 

could not be achieved.” 

Fall 1981 

The initiative group meets for the first time to consider the IJB 

December 1981 

A public panel discussion was held for the IJB 

Summer 1982 

The initiative group published a call for establishing an 

International Youth Meeting Center in Dachau. 

121


Early 1983 

Preparations for the first IJB are made 

July-Aug. 1983 

First annual meeting of the IJB 

July 1984 

The church board members of both Dachau Protestant 

communities advocate the establishment of a youth center in 

Dachau. 

Nov. 25, 1984 

The FIJB is official formed Among the founding members are 

the former President of the Israeli Cultural Community in 

Munich, Dr. Hans Lamm, (the rector of the cathedral in Freising, 

Germany and former Dachau inmate), Monsignor Dr. Michael 

Höck, and Dr. Kurt Scharf (retired bishop of Berlin and chairman 

of the ASF). The founding meeting elected Dr. Rolf Hanusch first 

chairman. 

March 25, 1985 

The CSU and the KD speak out against the formation of the IJB 

in Dachau 

March 1986 

Establishment of the Board of Trustees of FIJB. The city of 

Dachau sent a representative to this impressive meeting with 

celebrities from home and abroad. 

October 1986 

The BJR decides to design a youth meeting center in Dachau 

January 1987 

For the first time, the Bavarian Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauß 

expresses publicly in the magazine “Tribune” support of a youth 

meeting center in Dachau. In the article, he argues against a 

“Pedagogy of Silence” and states that the size and proximity of 

the IJB to the concentration camp memorial site is unsuitable. 

122


March 1987 

A symposium “Learning Dachau” is held by the BJR, and they 

speak with representatives from the SPD, CSU and CDU to have 

the IJB in Dachau 

March 1987 

The CSU in Dachau speaks for a youth center in Munich, 

Nuremberg or Berlin. They speak against the Dachau site “with 

all their strength to resist the IJB” and proclaim that they will 

protest the IJB in Dachau "to the last drop of blood.” 


The Dachau City council rejects the request for a house, despite 

the vote of support from the SPD and Greens. 

March 1988 

The Bavarian Parliament instructed the Ministry of Culture to 

present to the Legislative Assembly a design for the home by the 

end of June 1988. After Easter, The BJR presents a concept 

design for a youth meeting and discusses the issues within the 

government and with the legislative bodies of the Dachau CSU. 

July 1989 

The BJR and the CSU agree to establish a youth guest house 

based on the concepts designed by the Ministry of Culture. 

May 1990 

As the sub-goal of intending to building a guest house in Dachau 

is partially reached, the general assembly of the FIJB consider 

changing part of their name to reflect the new goals of the 

organization 

February 1991 

The town of Dachau proposes a potential location for the Youth 

guest house. The CSU in the city of Dachau emphasize that they 

will stand true to a concept of a youth hostel, but they “will not 

allow the group to deprive the city of its historical continuity and 

dignity.” 

123


November 1991 

The Board for the FIJB is outraged and dismayed that two and a 

half years after the decision of the Legislative Assembly, the 

foundation for the house was still not established 

January 1992 

The city of Dachau turns down the proposed space for the youth 

hostel because it was too big. 

November 1992 

The budget of the State Government committed only four instead 

of six million dollars for the youth hostel. The Ministry of Culture 

promises to continue its funding. It also provides the legal 

framework for difficulties that occurred for the planned site of the 

youth hostel in Dachau. 

March 1993 

FIJB board member – Dr. Klaus Hahnzog asks about the 

continued silence for the youth hostel by the Ministry of Culture. 

The newly elected Prime minister of Bavaria visits Dachau and 

promised to take care of the implementation of the youth hostel in 

Dachau personally. 

April 1993 

The Bavarian Minister of Culture (Hans Zehetmair) announced in 

a letter to the FIJB that “actual construction of the youth hostel 

could not be realistically expected before early 1995.” 


An architectural competition is organized by the Ministry of 

Culture. 

January 1994 

The Bavarian Minister of Culture (Hans Zehetmair) shifts the 

completion date of the youth guest house to 1998. 

May 1994 

From twelve designs submitted, the design of the Munich 

architect Rudolf Hied was selected as the competition winner. 

124


December 1994 

At the board meeting of the FIJB, Secretary Dr. Manfred Hegel 

assured the organization that they “were on schedule,” and that 

with a construction period of two years, the house could be 

inaugurated in 1997. 

July 1995 

The Ministry of Culture confirmed that they would apply for 

building permissions within the next two weeks, and that they 

foundation would be laid this year. 

September 1995 

The Ministry of Culture moves the beginning of construction to 

March 1996. First a "groundbreaking" later this year, to be sure 

"still possible, but basically not necessary." 

December 1995 

The FIJB protests the further postponement of the start of 

construction on the youth guest house, and they speak with the 

Ministry of Culture about their will to actually build a youth 

hostel in Dachau. 

January 1996 

A possible date for a groundbreaking ceremony is now set for the 

beginning of March 1996. 

March 25, 1996 

Groundbreaking ceremony for the Dachau Youth Hostel 

1998 Dachau Youth Hostel is completed and finally opened to the 

public 

1999 FIJB changes their name to include “Memorial work in Dachau” 

at the end, in order to reflect their new organizational goals. 1 

1 For more information and details on the chronology of the IJB, please see: Förderverein Internationale 

Jugendbegegnungstätte Dachau e.V. 1984-1989. Ein Zwischenbericht. Private collection of Dr. Lynne 

Fallwell, 6; Jugendbegenungszeltlager Dachau: Geschichte-Entwicklungen-Teilnahme-Mitarbeit. Private 

collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell; Internationale Jugendbegegnungsstätte Dachau – 15 Jahre Planung: Zur 

Grundsteinlegung des Jugendgästehauses Dachau am 25. März 1996.:eine Dokumentation von Ideen und 

Initiation Verhinderung und Versprechungen. Private Collection of Dr. Lynne Fallwell. 

125


APPENDIX B 

SURVEY QUESTIONS FOR THE “TEAMERS” OF THE IJB 

1. Name. 

2. What year(s) were you involved with the Jugendbegegnung-Dachau? 

3. How old were you when you participated with the group? 

4. How long were you a participant? (i.e. 7 days, 1 month, 2 years) 

5. At the time of your participation, what country would you consider to have been 

your permanent residence? 

6. How did you become aware of the group? (i.e. received an advertisement, heard 

about it from a friend, etc.) 

7. Why did you initially decide to participate with the group? 

8. What were your initial thoughts going into the program, prior to your involvement? 

9. What tasks did you perform while participating in the organization? Describe your 

daily experience. 

10. What is the most significant memory you have of your time during your 

participation with the group? 

11. After completing your time with the group, how would you describe the impact of 

the group on you personally? What specific experiences from the program are you 

basing your opinion? 

12. Would you participate in the program again if given the opportunity? Why? 

126


APPENDIX C 

EXAMPLE OF A DAILY SUMMER IJB SCHEDULE 2 

TUESDAY – AUGUST 2, 1994 

8:00-12:00 PM ARRIVAL 

5:00PM 

6:00PM 

7:30PM 

TOUR THROUGH TENT CAMP 

GROUP LESSON 

EVENING MEETINGS 

WEDNESDAY – AUGUST 3, 1994 

10:00 AM TOUR OF THE MEMORIAL SITE 

POST-PROCESSING TIME 

3:00PM 

5:00PM 

FREE EVENING 

GROUP LESSON 

THURSDAY – AUGUST 4, 1994 

10:00 AM CONVERSATION WITH 

EYEWITNESSES 

5:00PM GROUP LESSON 

7:30PM 

KEMPIN CONCERT (DACHAU 

SINGER OF YIDDISH SONGS) 

FRIDAY – AUGUST 5, 1994 

MORNING MUSIC WORKSHOP 

AFTERNOON EXCURSION TO HERBERTSHAUSEN 

5:00PM 

FREE EVENING 

GROUP LESSON 

SATURDAY – AUGUST 6, 1994 

10:00-1:00 PM WORKSHOP 

AFTERNOON CITY RALLY 

5:00PM 

7:30PM 

GROUP LESSON 

PROJECTS FOR GROUPS 


Fallwell. 

127


SUNDAY – AUGUST 7, 1994 

10:00 AM WORSHIP SERVICE 

DAY OF THE OPEN TENT 

12:00PM 

5:00PM 

7:30PM 

GROUP LESSON 

EVENING MEETINGS 

MONDAY – AUGUST 8, 1994 

EXCURSION TO THE ALPS 

OTHERWISE-FREE DAY 

EVENING MEETINGS UPON RETURNING 

TUESDAY – AUGUST 9, 1994 

MORNING WORK AT THE MEMORIAL SITE 

AFTERNOON 

5:00PM 

7:30PM 

FREE 

GROUP LESSON 

PROJECTS 

WEDNESDAY – AUGUST 10, 1994 

MORNING CREATIVE WORKSHOP 

AFTERNOON 

5:00PM 

7:30PM 

CREATIVE WORKSHOP 

GROUP LESSON 

PROJECTS 

THURSDAY – AUGUST 11, 1994 

10:00 AM WORK AT THE MEMORIAL SITE 

WORKSHOP 

2:00PM 

5:00PM 

FREE EVENING 

GROUP LESSON 

FRIDAY – AUGUST 12, 1994 

10:00AM 

AFTERNOON 

7:30PM 

FINAL REFLECTIONS 

FREE DAY 

FAREWELL PARTY 

SATURDAY – AUGUST 13, 1994 

DEPARTURE 

128

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