Douglas Rogers, in the Guardian (April 16, 2004):

In 1973, Sandra Hochman's documentary about the women's movement, featuring Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine, caused a sensation. So why has it spent 30 years locked in a vault?

Warren Beatty looked bemused. This should have been so easy for him. He was the hottest film star in the world, the cameras were rolling and he was being interviewed by a gorgeous blonde who had the sexpot body of a 60s Brigitte Bardot. What's more, the subject was women. Or, more to the point, the women's movement. Perhaps he just wasn't prepared for the provocative questioning. When the blonde suggested to him that men might go to rehabilitation centres to be reoriented in society, his reply was rambling. She egged him on and he called her a female chauvinist. She calmly said she wasn't and he tried to sound smooth: "You think you've really licked it, don't you?" Then, his legendary charm really evaporated. "You've changed," he spluttered, as the cameras closed in. "When you came and talked to me at the Beverly Wiltshire, I liked you very much but I don't think you were very direct and very firm the way you are now." The woman deadpanned back: "Well, I was talking about something I didn't feel very firmly about. Which was you."
The woman was the 36-year-old poet, author and first-time film-maker Sandra Hochman. The year was 1972, and the interview was the opening salvo in Hochman's astonishing documentary, Year of the Woman (1973). The good news for Beatty and other men skewered in the film is that few people ever saw it. It has recently been screened at the Sarasota film festival in Florida, but has spent the past 30 years locked in a Manhattan film vault, too radical or too weird for distributors to touch.

The film is set at the Democratic political convention in Miami in July, 1972. The convention was the scene of the first meeting of the newly formed National Women's Political Caucus, which nominated congresswoman Shirley Chisholm as the first woman presidential candidate in American history. Hochman had gone to Miami with an all-woman documentary crew to make the first ever film on the women's movement and she returned with extraordinary footage. The film features a cross-section of American cultural icons, among them Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron and the radical black feminist activist Florence Kennedy. Germaine Greer even appears at one point, standing moody and alone at the back of an auditorium.

The hand-held camera follows Hochman as she prods male politicians, delegates and celebrities into sharing their views on women and the feminist movement. Like Beatty, most of them hang themselves. Future Democrat presidential candidate Gary Hart says no woman is "sufficiently qualified" to be president; a delegate from Alabama is bemused when Hochman calls him sexist for saying women should never be truck drivers. In one extraordinary scene, Hochman sneaks into a packed convention hall with a curvy blonde stripper dressed in a revealing gold sequin dress. The convention literally stops as men gawp at the woman like dogs on heat. "All because Liz Renay has breasts!" Hochman reflects afterwards from a beach chair. "But if a man walked into a convention with a huge cock, would women rush up and ask, 'Who is he, where is he, what's his name?'"

Interspersed with Hochman's poetry, fantasy dream sequences, and some hysterical ad-lib repartee with the beloved Washington Post political humorist Art Buchwald, the film caused a sensation when it showed for five nights at the the Avenue Cinema in New York in October 1973. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr told Hochman it was the greatest documentary he had ever seen and wrote that: "Hochman and Buchwald are the best new comedy team since Hepburn and Tracy." It sold out each night and women queued round the block to see it. And then it disappeared. It was bought in 1974 for $65,000 by a wealthy 23-year-old Filipino woman and her two brothers, who were convinced it was a masterpiece. Yet no film company would touch it. Before Sarasota, it had appeared only once since, at a million-dollar gala-night screening at the Lincoln Centre in New York in 1985. Today it is not on video or DVD and few people have even heard of it.

Dr.M.A. Jayashree & Prof . M.A. Narasimhan, in Star of Mysore (April 21,2004):

...History is a record of past events including many a times, the record of the shortcomings of ancestors. How can a thing of the past, which is based on the meagre knowledge of the ‘then’, be a source of inspiration for the problems of ‘now’? Each day is a new day and the problems and challenges are also new and is it not foolish to claim that the past solutions can be of use under the present circumstances?

Another misnomer is that of not repeating the past mistakes. There cannot be a greater fallacy than this. How can one claim that man has learnt by his past mistakes when we see day in and day out the same complaints being repeated from the preAristotelian time, that the rulers are corrupt, the youths no longer respect the elders, they are more and more pleasure seeking, the life of austerity and spirituality are no longer attractive and people are becoming more and more dishonest and so on. This has been the refrain of almost all the great minds of the world from time immemorial. Under such circumstances what is the use of history?

History of every nation has been teaching its kids that their country is the best, their societal system and the governance are the best and their languages are the richest in the world. If they had lost a war it is due to the treachery and trickery of others. The enemy has always been brutal and crude whereas the war that they had won was to defeat the wicked and to liberate and alleviate the masses from tyranny. Their fight has always been honorable and they have been liberal to their enemies. Under such circumstances if one compiles the history of the world, what use is it, if it can only promote parochialism and narrow mindedness, that too in the present day world where technology has made the whole world a global village.

The much touted heroes of history are those like Alexander, Chenghis Khan, Caesar, Vasco Da Gama, Columbus etc. All are extolled for their valour and conquests in the pages of history. What are they; but avaricious marauders who in their quest for power and wealth destroyed the peaceful stable fabric of many societies? When such is the case should we take these people as our heroes for moulding the character of the coming generations?

Because of these depressing and perplexing reasons, the present generation wants history to be relegated to the limbo and kept as nothing but of historical curiosity. Perhaps all the kids of our country will jump with joy if we were to give a go bye to history. They will be too happy to bury the socalled ‘Social studies’ three fathoms deep....

Michael Whitby and Bill Rawling, Ottawa, Official naval historians, Department of National Defence, in the Ottawa Citizen (April 11, 2004):

Any suggestion that Canada and the United States staged the attack on Estevan Point in June 1942 is unfounded and flies in the face of rigorous historical research.

Two Japanese submarines (I-25 and I-26) were sent to the Pacific coast of North America in June 1942 to reconnoitre the main United States base at Seattle and to give warning if American warships sailed against the attacks on Midway and the Aleutian islands. Japanese naval doctrine at the time decreed that its submarines leave a calling card by shelling shore facilities upon departing their patrol areas, presumably in an attempt to stir up the local populace.

After staying off the Strait of Juan de Fuca for two weeks, during which time they torpedoed two merchant ships (we assume conspiracy theorists would also have us believe that was done by the Americans), I-26 shelled Estevan Point, and a day later I-25 likewise bombarded an American facility in Oregon. Such actions were repeated throughout the Pacific war. The activities of I-25 and I-26 and the orders that set them in motion are verified by Japanese documents from the time.

The eyewitness testimony cited to support the conspiracy theory in the article is also flawed. Rather than coolly watching the attack, the lighthouse keeper ran down the stairs of the 125-foot structure, found his wife to warn her to take cover, and then ran all the way back up the stairs to douse the light. Presumably this took some time and effort, and impaired his ability to observe the relatively short attack.

As far as identifying warship types, trained military personnel consistently make errors, along the lines of aircraft attacking whales they take to be submarines. Also, despite the suggestion that Canadian forces did not immediately respond to the attack, in fact the naval commander on the Pacific coast learned of the attack within 30 minutes, broadcast a general alarm and dispatched air and naval forces to the scene.

Although the navy had most of the coast of Vancouver Island covered by routine patrols, warships could not reach the site until the next morning. However, a RCAF Stranraer patrol aircraft reached the site that night, but I-26 had already fled the scene.

As far as the belief that the attack propped up support for conscription, it should be noted that prime minister Mackenzie King was vehemently opposed to conscription throughout the war. In his world view it would have been preferable if Canada, and Estevan Point, had never been attacked.

Chester Finn, in the Weekly Bulletin of News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (April 15, 2004):

If America’s history teachers were broadly educated, deeply knowledgeable about the content that they’re responsible for imparting to students, and free to draw their information, textbooks, and other instructional materials from whatever sources they judge best, all within a framework of sound academic standards and results-based accountability—under that dreamy scenario there’d be no reason for Sandra Stotsky to tackle the study that yielded Fordham’s newest report, The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America’s History Teachers.

The reality, however, is that many history teachers don’t know much history. And the textbooks on which they depend are vast, themeless compendia of dull, dated, and denatured information. (See A Consumer’s Guide to High School History Textbooks for more information.) Thus has arisen an immense cottage industry to supply teachers with pre-digested “supplemental materials” and “professional development” as part of an effort to prepare them better to teach about difficult issues.

As usual, this enterprise began with laudable intentions. Post 9/11, for example, how could we reasonably expect teachers who had never studied Islamic history to explain it to their pupils, especially if their textbooks lacked pertinent information? How could we expect them to handle complicated and emotionally charged subjects like the Holocaust and figure out what lessons to distill? To escort youngsters safely through the thicket of political correctness and ethnic politics that now surrounds such formerly benign holidays as Columbus Day and Thanksgiving?

So we try to compensate and backfill. Innumerable organizations and agencies, public and private, large and small, commercial and non-profit, create and deliver “supplemental” materials and “in-service education” or “professional development” for teachers. School systems and state education agencies. Publishers of every sort. Advocacy groups. Universities, research centers, and think-tanks. Itinerant teacher trainers. Cable networks and film producers. It’s a long list, engaging many people and spending many millions. (Nobody knows how much.) Some is subsidized by tax dollars or philanthropy. Some is baldly commercial. Much comes out of school system budgets.

Yet we know staggeringly little about how good these materials and workshops are, or whether the information they present is balanced and accurate. We know even less about their efficacy and intellectual integrity. This turns out to be a vast dark continent within our education system.

It’s also a troubled continent. Sandra Stotsky spotted the problem during her tenure as senior associate commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education (1999-2003) as well as during a distinguished career in education research, teacher preparation, and the development of academic standards. She began to collect examples of supplemental materials and professional development workshops aimed at K-12 history and social studies teachers. She attended some of those workshops and summer institutes. And she grew ever more alarmed by what she found.

It appeared that the creation of many of these “supplemental” materials, and the leadership of workshops by which teachers’ knowledge is supposedly enhanced, had fallen into the eager hands of interest groups and ideologues yearning to use America’s classrooms to shape the minds of tomorrow’s citizens by manipulating what today’s teachers are introducing into the lessons of today’s children. Yet this was happening with little or no public awareness. In effect, the K-12 social studies curriculum was being subtly politicized by adult interests working outside the closely scrutinized domains of statewide standards, textbooks, pre-service teacher preparation, and state certification.

For this report, Stotsky separated the terrain into two parts, one dealing with supplemental materials, the other with professional development workshops. The shortcomings she spotted vary by topic, of course. But most share these features: under the guise of heightening teachers’ awareness of previously marginalized groups, they manipulate teachers (and thus their pupils) to view the history of freedom as the history of oppression and to favor cultures that don’t value individual rights over those that do.

Is there a remedy? Stotsky would wipe out much of this “supplemental” stuff and replace it with something very different. Alternatively, she suggests several shrewd ways of mitigating the problems if this enterprise persists.

So far, so good. We should certainly seek to compensate for weaknesses in the knowledge base of today’s teachers while shielding them from manipulative mischief and reducing their risk of becoming unwitting pawns of ideologues. Over the long haul, however, we must insist that future teachers be better educated from the get-go or, as NCLB puts it, “highly qualified” in the subjects they will impart to children. Nowhere is this more important than in history.

But better-educated teachers ought not be equated with more time in ed school, maybe not even on campus (although well-conceived history courses taught by first-rate historians are hard to beat). People can also teach themselves history, pick it up from reading, the History Channel, even movies. The key is to insist that, however they learn it, tomorrow’s teachers must know it—and prove it—before confronting children in the classroom. It may be sufficient to insist that they pass rigorous subject-matter tests, such as the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. They can prepare for such exams however they like, in universities or elsewhere.

As with children, let’s stop endlessly forgiving, compensating and remediating teachers. Let’s do it right the first time. Until we do, the stealth curriculum may swamp the one we think our schools are teaching—and our teachers will remain vulnerable to manipulation by people and organizations who do not place America’s best interests at the top of their priorities.

Keith Sinclair, in the Herald (Glasgow) (April 12, 2004):

THE ancient split between the Scots and the English is older than previously thought, a new academic theory claims.

The difference between the English and Scots, Welsh, Irish and Cornish has traditionally been attributed to the influence of invading forces such as the Anglo-Saxons, Celts and Vikings as they settled in different parts of Britain hundreds of years ago.

However, an Oxford don who was a guest speaker at the Edinburgh Science Festival last night believes the difference originates much further back, to thousands of years, and the proof is in the genes.

Professor Stephen Oppenheimer is professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at Oxford, and has written a book tracing humankind from its origins and developing a theory of the original inhabitants of Britain.

He said that the Celts of western Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Cornwall were descended from an ancient people living on the Atlantic coast when Britain was still attached to mainland Europe, while the English were more closely related to the Germanic peoples of the interior. As evidence, he cited genetic data showing the Celts were more closely related to the Basque people of south-west France and the Celts of Brittany and Spain, while the English were closer to the Germans descended from the Anglo-Saxons.

In the past, the split was attributed to "migration, invasion and replacement", but Professor Oppenheimer said the difference was established long before Britain was even an island.

He said: "The first line between England and the Celts was put down at a much earlier period, say 10,000 years ago."

Suzanne Fields, in the Washington Times (April 13, 2004):

America-bashing coincides with the proliferation of dumbed-down world history textbooks used in grades six through 12 in our public schools. The material our schoolchildren study is either diluted to emphasize trivia or edited with an eye to the politically correct, designed never to offend the lowest common sensitivity.

"In subjects from Africa to terrorism, the nation's leading world history textbooks provide unreliable, often scanty information and provide poorly constructed activities," writes Gilbert Sewall, author of a new report of the American Textbook Council, an independent national research organization which acts as a watchdog on educational issues (www.historytextbooks.org). These textbooks cut, shave and reduce content to pass the litmus tests of advocacy groups organized specifically to search for offenses.

In California, for example, an Islamic council has oversight to the degree that it exerts a censor-like force as editors gloss over facts crucial to understanding the Muslim culture: jihad, holy law, slavery and the abuse of women.

Muslims aren't the only group demanding immunity from examination. Editors similarly pander to Indians, blacks, Hispanics, feminists, Christians, Jews and Islamists. The squawkers get attention and textbook editors cower.

The largest publishing conglomerates, which have made themselves the most susceptible to intimidation, have absorbed dozens of independent publishing houses, making it difficult for a small company with a conscience to enter the competitive fray.

The "full service" providers offer study guides, workbooks, discounts, premiums and teacher enticements. The four biggest multinational publishing houses - Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt and McGraw-Hill - offer ever fewer textbooks in a drive to make one size fit all, and can ignore critics and reformers.

Many publishers save money by hiring anonymous author teams instead of historians whose knowledge and established reputations make them expensive and difficult to intimidate. Texts without a single author lack the cohesion of a thoughtful narrative and events float through the pages with no attention paid to the roots of the culture or the moment. Judgment is limited to contemporary interpretation, or "presentism."

A study of "the hero" links Ulysses with Indiana Jones. A chapter on "going shopping," which requires an appreciation for culture and economics, merely likens a medieval bazaar in Baghdad to an indoor suburban mall in Indianapolis.

Politically correct simplicity describes "Native Americans" as living in harmony with both nature and human nature, with no recognition that Indians, like the rest of us, are subject to human frailty and prejudice. Francis Parkman, the historian who describes the pleasure Iroquois took in torturing the Hurons, is anathema, and gone with the Mohicans.

The lens for understanding the unique American vision focuses on the African-American freedom struggles that "helped open the door for all minorities and women." In one text on the Enlightenment, Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th-century feminist, is featured more prominently than Voltaire, a dominating figure for the ages.

Textbook publishers rely on "standards committees" and focus groups to package their ideas. These groups, made up of men and women raised in an image-centered culture, cater to short attention spans and purvey visuals that turn history into "edutainment."

In varying degrees, world history texts make it impossible for students to discriminate between the brutality of anti-democratic countries like China and Cuba and the democracies, or to understand the conflicts faced by nations determined to preserve freedom.

From the new study by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation study, "The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America's History Teachers," written by Sandra Stotsky:

In the past three decades, scholars and parents have criticized K-12 history textbooks for their inadequate coverage of important topics as well as for being error-laden and poorly written. They came under additional fire with the publication in 2003 of The Language Police by Diane Ravitch. Anxious not to distress anyone, Ravitch found, textbook publishers do not allow their books to address potentially "offensive" topics that might generate controversy at the time of state adoption hearings. Nor do they allow their books to point out features of other cultures that might lead students to infer that life in America or the West is superior in some way. Indeed, it is only America that can be shown as having an unending history of social strife, political repression, and political inequalities among racial or ethnic groups. As a result, students learning from these textbooks may get both a bland and biased history education.

As troubling as most current history textbooks are, however, they are less troubling than many of the supplemental resources available to teachers of history at all educational levels.[1] These resources include consultant services, curriculum units, lesson plans, supplementary information, and other materials. They may be provided by education collaboratives, professional organizations, foundations, large and small educational publishers, independent centers, unions, schools of education, university research centers, cultural sites, museums, historical societies, public agencies such as the courts, and freelance consultants.

History textbooks themselves are relatively few in number, highly visible, and readily if not frequently examined by concerned school board members, state officials, or parents. They are also more easily reviewable by individual scholars like Frances FitzGerald, Paul Gagnon (for the American Federation of Teachers), Gilbert Sewall (for the American Textbook Council), Diane Ravitch, and the various scholars who contribute reviews to William Bennetta's excellent Textbook Letter. Supplemental materials, on the other hand, are far less visible and seldom get reviewed. Occasionally a scholar has reported on the strengths and limitations of materials addressing a specific topic, as did the late Holocaust expert, Lucy Dawidowicz, after examining 25 Holocaust curricula used in the schools.[2] But K-12 supplemental materials usually fly under the radar of historians and other experts with sensitive political antennae.

The source of the problem with many of the supplemental resources used for history or social studies is the ideological mission of the organizations that create them. Their ostensible goal is to combat intolerance, expand students' knowledge of other cultures, give them other "points of view" on commonly studied historical phenomena, and/or promote "critical thinking." But their real goal, to judge by an analysis of their materials and the effects they have on teachers, is to influence how children come to understand and think about current social and political issues by bending historical content to those ends. They embed their political agendas in the instructional materials they create so subtly that apolitical teachers are unlikely to spot them. And they tend to facilitate acceptance of their materials by appealing to teachers' sense of fairness and their presumed obligation to promote "social justice" and withhold negative moral judgments about people or cultures deemed victims of white racism.

In the guise of providing teachers with ideas for a more engaging pedagogy and deeper understanding of a historical phenomenon, frequently one involving instances of prejudice, they recruit unwitting teachers as their agents in cultivating hostility toward America as a country, toward Western culture, and toward Americans of European descent. The poisonous effects of these supplemental resources on teachers' thinking and pedagogical practices can spread throughout the entire school curriculum in the moral and civic vacuum created by neutered textbooks and a host of competing "multiple perspectives."...

Parental complaints are again mounting about some supplemental materials and lessons. In the 1970s and 1980s, many parents worried that the "peace" curricula introduced into their children's elementary schools, ostensibly to teach about the horrors of nuclear "holocausts," served chiefly to frighten them. More recently, alert parents and other citizens have become concerned about the information teachers are giving their students, and activities they are asking students to participate in, as part of an effort to increase youngsters' knowledge of Islam. Most of these materials have been prepared and/or funded by Islamic sources here and abroad, and are distributed or sold directly to schools or individual teachers, thereby bypassing public scrutiny. For example, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Saudi government sent thousands of U.S. schools a package containing a Public Broadcasting System tape, Islam: Empire of Faith, and Karen Armstrong's Islam: A Short History (the revised and updated edition published in 2002). This book attributes the failure of the Muslim world to modernize to Western "colonization" rather than to self-imposed intellectual isolation from the revolutionary political, religious, social, economic, and scientific ideas arising in Europe from the 1500s on.

Many supplemental curricular resources for history and social studies teachers are touted as addressing civic education, moral education, or character education. Because civic education is a major goal of the study of U.S. history in the schools and is by definition a matter of public policy, the public should be informed about the extent to which these curricula are ideological rather than academic. The public also must know whether educators are using materials that undermine the value that the polity places on our political principles, public institutions, and American citizenship itself....

Possibly the most malevolent of the organizations professing to address citizenship education is Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO), which provides materials and services to over 16,000 teachers, ostensibly to help them address racism, anti-Semitism, and violence....

The central problem with this organization's activities stems not from its efforts to provide students with scrupulously accurate information about the Holocaust but from its goal of teaching contemporary civic lessons for American students. To do so, it makes false analogies to a catastrophic historical event, thus trivializing the catastrophe and setting up a moral equivalence between Nazis and white Americans. The purpose of FHAO's first major resource book, titled Holocaust and Human Behavior and published in 1982, was to encourage students to practice "moral decision-making" by speaking up about the dangers of a nuclear "holocaust" and to see the Moral Majority as a danger to freedom of speech.[5] Once those dangers seemed to have receded from the political radar screen, study of the Holocaust was linked to a domestic issue with more staying power. The purpose of the 1994 resource book, bearing the same title as the 1982 manual but with a new conceptual framework, is to make sure that students see the task of confronting white racism in America as the chief reason for studying the Holocaust.[6] It makes explicit and frequent comparisons not only between twentieth-century America and twentieth-century Germany but also between nineteenth-century America and nineteenth-century Germany. In essence, it uses the Holocaust to portray America's blacks as Europe's Jews, thereby reducing genocide to an act of bigotry and equating white Americans to Nazis.

The purpose of the supplementary resource book FHAO published in 2002, titled Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (RMAH), is even more poisonous.[7] FHAO wants teachers and students to infer a causal connection between the American eugenics movement and the Holocaust; that is, to infer that Americans and American science, however indirectly, were responsible for Nazi Germany's extermination policies and the Holocaust. RMAH makes it clear that few American scientists subscribed to the eugenics movement by World War II. Nevertheless, the chapters on "The Nazi Connection" so cleverly connect Hitler's use of the ideas of German scientists on racial "eugenics" to an acknowledgment of the leadership of American scientists, educators, and policy makers in the eugenics movement that Americans appear almost directly responsible for the Final Solution.[8] The net effect is the discrediting of American society.

Dave Addis, Virginia Pilot (April 9, 2004):

Wednesday night, with no new episode of “The West Wing” in sight, my wife and I tucked ourselves into our couches and watched an hour long apology on The History Channel.

This would not normally be considered compelling television. The program consisted solely of four middle-aged white males – a news anchor and three musty historians – sitting motionless in their chairs and talking for an hour.

What could be more boring? There was not a bachelor, a bachelorette, a survivor, an amateur crooner or a Donald Trump in sight.

It's not the sort of thing you see on TV much these days, although it involved more reality than the “reality shows” that dominate the evening fare. But the story behind it was fascinating.

The panel was put together for this special event by The History Channel to atone for a program it ran last November, called, “The Guilty Men.” That show, which was timed with the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, claimed that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was guilty of arranging the murder of the president of the United States.

That, of course, is complete and total balderdash, which is what Wednesday night's panel of historians went to great pains to point out.

Afterward , The History Channel returned to its normal programming, which in this case was a feature on the construction of the pyramids of Egypt.

So, who cares? Well, we all should. The muddling of what actually happened in humankind's past and what some Hollywood film director decides would be more entertaining is having serious consequences.

One of the professors on Wednesday's panel, for example, was discouraged at how many of his bright young university students believe that Oliver Stone's loopy conspiracy film, “JFK,” was an accurate portrayal of the events of November 1963.

Further evidence of a reality breakdown in the history department can be found in a fascinating survey published this week by a respected British newspaper, The Independent.

Of 2,000 Brits who were polled, 11 percent thought Adolf Hitler was a fictional character. Thirty-three percent said Benito Mussolini was a fictional character. And this is from a nation that was nearly wiped off the map, just 60 years ago, by the Hitler-Mussolini coalition.

Conversely, the fictional character King Arthur was thought by 57 percent actually to have ruled their realm at one time. Magical sword and all.

Equally discouraging were the results when Brits were questioned on real events.

Some 52 percent thought World War II's Battle of the Bulge never actually happened. Custer's Last Stand was judged by 48 percent never to have occurred, and 44 percent thought the Hundred Years' War never really took place.

The Cold War, which was still frosting us just over a decade ago, was judged by nearly one-third of those polled to have been a figment of our imagination.

I don't mean to pick on the Brits here. It's likely that an American audience, absorbing much of its history education from the tube and the silver screen, would poll just as poorly, if not worse.

To its credit, The History Channel apologized to Lady Bird Johnson and her family and to the public at large. Its slander of Lyndon B. Johnson, the network said, “failed to offer viewers context and perspective, and fell short of the high standards that the network sets for itself.”

That's a good first step. Maybe a good second step would be a voluntary system that warns viewers whether they're watching a documentary, a drama or a fanciful mingling of the two – a step that The History Channel failed to take when airing “The Guilty Men” in November.

Michael Jeismann, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (April 2004):

What was Auschwitz? A wall of fog of indefinable horror. Who were the criminals? Others. The dead. Leaders. That was the state of play until the trial whose name indicates one of the main locations of Nazi annihilation.

Forty years ago, 22 members of the camp staff of the Auschwitz extermination camp were initially on trial before a criminal court in the Bürgerhaus Gallus, the municipal hall for the Gallus district in Frankenallee 111 in Frankfurt am Main, which had been specially built for the trial. Of these, 11 were charged with murder, while the other 11 were accused of being accessories to murder. Here they sat opposite each other under police guard, the former prisoners and those who were supposed to have murdered them. Some police officers saluted the high SS ranks at the door. Upstairs in the cloakroom, these then met the survivors for the first time.

Later, the judge broke down in tears when he was passing his judgment, as he described the fate of the children in Auschwitz, and the public prosecutors' voices faltered and failed. However, many a defendant even had the audacity to laugh at the witnesses, stylizing themselves as the smallest possible cogs, which actually always only wanted to be a miniscule wrench in the works. This “dialectic of rationality and drama“ in the trial, as Micha Brumlik, director of the Fritz Bauer Institute formulated it, is so powerful that a second-hand emotivity is automatically unthinkable.

The Auschwitz trial had opened on Dec. 20, 1963 in the Römer city hall in Frankfurt, and had subsequently moved to the Gallus municipal hall, ending with the verdict being passed on Aug. 20, 1965. Of the 17 defendants who were convicted of a total of 15,209 murders in the Auschwitz death camp, only six were described as perpetrators in the immediate sense. These six were called “extreme peretrators,“ because it could be proven that they had demonstrated particular cruelty in the murder of the concentration camp inmates.

Thus the opening of an exhibition on the Auschwitz trial in this historic place, Haus Gallus, was not just another reminder of the German offenses against humanity. That would be a fatal misunderstanding that would deprive the visitor of a great opportunity. No hypertrophic symbolism is offered here like that which in years gone by often achieved the opposite to that to which it had aspired. However, you will equally be hard pressed to find pure historicism, which only creates a safe distance from the events.

The exhibition on the Auschwitz trial is one of the best things to be shown in recent years on the Nazi past and the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany. Partly because of Holger Wallat's effective architecture, it creates one of those rare and moving moments in which the Federal Republic has the opportunity to look around and look its own history in the eye. At last, the Federal Republic has docked with itself and its political and moral foundation. One should come here, just around the corner, if one wants to grasp a little of what occurred in the National Socialist era: the extermination of the term “human being.“ In Berlin, on the large Holocaust building site, it is now immediately obvious in contrast to this exhibition that it is about something entirely different - the symbolism of a country, which it regards as enough of an end in itself and, it can be feared, which will arouse great, but vague feelings.
On the other hand, the reminder of the criminal court proceedings of the Auschwitz trial is about precision: of the lawyers, of the statements, of the reporters. The 40th anniversary of the Auschwitz trial has come at exactly the right time, because the memory of the policy of annihilation in Nazi Germany is in danger of becoming an empty, cheap formula that is obscuring the historical consciousness rather than throwing light on it.

The Auschwitz trial was not the first, but probably the most important trial against Nazi criminals. It gave the “totally normal men“ who killed in the Auschwitz death factory a face, a social existence, an address. The figures of horror, which had become intangible, turned into persons that had to answer for their deeds.
How can a trial be displayed, along with the legal background and subsequent history? This question found an exemplary answer in the exhibition, which was put together by a team headed by Irmtrud Wojak from the Fritz Bauer Institute. The main part provides a history of the trial, in which the proceedings in the courtroom can be heard and read. On a second level, the history of its reception in literature, philosophy, publishing and theater, which was collated by Marcel Atze, can be studied on the basis of selected examples. Finally, a number of contemporary artists, gathered together by Erno Vroonen, have created an echo chamber of the trial, as it were.
Apr. 9