The Holocaust is now taught in schools, commemorated in formal annual events, and preserved through extensive recording and archival projects. The institutional infrastructure has been built up substantially since the 1980s. It is not uniform across the democracies. It is not always taught well. The pages in this cluster address what is now done and how well it is done.
The principal institutions and projects
The USC Shoah Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg in 1994 with the proceeds of Schindler’s List, has recorded around 55,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses across 65 countries and 43 languages. The archive is held at the University of Southern California and is the largest single body of recorded survivor testimony. The Yad Vashem testimony archive in Jerusalem holds an additional substantial collection in Hebrew, Yiddish and the languages of the European communities. The Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale, established in 1979, holds around 4,400 testimonies and was one of the founding projects of the recording-survivors movement.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), established in 1998 as the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, is the inter-governmental body that coordinates Holocaust education and commemoration across thirty-five member countries. The IHRA’s working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion (adopted 2013) and its working definition of antisemitism (adopted 2016) have been adopted by national governments and many institutions, with substantial debate in some cases about the implications of adoption.
27 January, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, has been the United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day since the General Assembly resolution of 2005. The day is marked by national commemorations in most democracies, by educational programmes in schools and universities, and by the annual Holocaust Memorial Day Trust commemoration in the United Kingdom.
What is taught and how well it is taught
National school curricula on the Holocaust vary substantially across the democracies. Germany has a uniformly developed Holocaust education programme rooted in the post-war Vergangenheitsbewältigung tradition. The United States has substantial state-level variation. The United Kingdom requires Holocaust teaching at Key Stage 3 (ages 11 to 14) but the depth and quality of what is taught varies by school and by teacher. The UCL Centre for Holocaust Education has produced substantial research on what British secondary-school pupils actually know about the Holocaust; the findings, published in 2009 and again in 2016, identified substantial gaps in basic knowledge (a substantial proportion of pupils could not say what year the Holocaust took place in, or who Hitler was).
The 2020s have raised a new question: how to teach the Holocaust to a generation whose primary contact with the subject is through social media and whose factual basis is therefore at the mercy of the algorithmic incentives of those platforms. The dedicated denial pages on this site address the specific factual claims that the platforms surface; the educational question is the broader one of how to build the documentary literacy that allows a young reader to evaluate them.
Living memory and the period beyond it
The youngest survivors of the camps were children in 1944 and 1945. The youngest are now in their eighties. The recording projects have captured what can be captured of their direct testimony. The pages in this cluster address what happens when the witnesses are gone, what the recordings can and cannot do that a living witness could, and what the institutions of Holocaust memory will have to become in the period after the survivors. The period is not coming. The period has begun.