WHO WAS HITLER?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 934, 5 July 1957, Page 11

WHO WAS HITLER?

Sir.-Your editorial of May 31, "Who Was Hitler?" prompts me to write of some discussion on this subject which I had with teenagers last year. My daughter, then a_ fifth-former, came across a reference to Buchenwald and asked what it was. Thinking it was a mame which had been passed over, I asked had she heard of. Dachau and/or Belsen These, too, were meaningless, They were concentration camps, I told

her, and drew another blank. I found it difficult to believe that with all the irrelevant details of past history which she had had to memorise to pass School Certificate, no one had considered it might be instructive to learn a little more of our own times other than that there was once a man named Hitler who was one of the principals in the Second World War. I felt ashamed, too, for it was certainly part of my duties to give instruction regarding the horrors which can be brought about in the name of high-sounding causes. I remembered a German-Jewish girl I worked with back in 1939 who told of concentration camps: we thought of her as a "bit queer," and no one took much notice of her wild statements and. dreadful warnings. Thinking that my daughter’s case was unique, I separately asked three sixthform boys had they heard of Belsen? Did they know what a concentration camp was? All said no to the first query; they had vague ideas about the second. When I expressed my amazement, each said they thought such things were better forgotten, anyway; they felt that that was a long time ago and it couldn’t happen again. Perhaps when the secondary school curriculum incorporates some teaching of elementary psychology we will be closer to ensuring that it will not hap-

pen again.

P.

(Hamilton). |