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German children will be forced to see concentration camp sites
From The Times, January 8, 2009 (see sig)
German children will be obliged to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp as part of their regular school curriculum. The move — to be introduced in Bavaria and likely to become the norm throughout the country — is in response to the almost fatal stabbing of a senior police officer by a neo-Nazi.
"We have to take a stand against this far-right octopus, this tentacled monster," said Host Seehofer, the prime minister of Bavaria, who has ordered every ministry to come up with proposals to stamp out neo-Nazi influence in southern Germany. They will feed into a comprehensive action plan to be unveiled next week.
"The first thing we have to do is set up a website that will give a point of contact to everyone who has problems with far-right extremists," Joachim Herrmann, the Bavarian interior minster, said. "Our aim must be to bring up kids so that they can resist any attempt by the far-Right to lead them astray."
In the Bavarian case this will mean a compulsory visit to a concentration camp — usually Dachau, outside Munich — or former offshoots of camps where slave labourers were forced to work for the German war effort. History lessons will also include excursions to centres that document Nazi crimes such as the one that has been set up near Hitler's Alpine refuge on the Obersalzberg.
The German educational system is organised on federal lines and some regions already take high school students to former camps. The Holocaust is taught in every senior school during history lessons and in civic studies. Some religion teachers also draw on the moral choices faced or neglected during the Third Reich. The curriculum of North Rhine Westphalia — where camp excursions are already common practice — stipulates that teachers must emphasise the Holocaust from the perspective of the victim.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5468635.ece?print=yes&randnum=1231388160869
