Questions to Ask About the Holocaust
For students, teachers and museum visitors looking for good questions to ask about the Holocaust, whether for a class discussion, an essay or a visit to a museum or memorial. The list follows the history in order: how it came about, the ghettos and camps, the choices of perpetrators, bystanders, resisters and rescuers, the world's response, liberation and what came after, then evidence, memory and denial today. Each question has a note with the facts a full answer needs, what a weak one leaves out or how to use the question with a group.
Want questions from the whole vault instead? Try the random question generator.
The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Origins
What was the Holocaust, and who were its victims?
Why ask it
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-run persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany, its allies and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. The regime also persecuted and killed Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians and others. In an essay, say what set each persecution apart instead of folding them into one list.
What was Jewish life in Europe like before the Nazis came to power?
Why ask it
Begin here so the people are known for more than how they died. More than nine million Jews lived in Europe in 1933, in Yiddish-speaking towns in Poland, assimilated families in Berlin and old Sephardic communities in Greece, religious and secular, rich and poor. An answer that treats them as one kind of person has already lost something.
Why did the Nazis target Jews?
Why ask it
The hatred has a name, antisemitism, and its roots go back centuries before 1933, to religious hostility, legal exclusion and old conspiracy myths. The Nazis laid a racial theory on top, which held that being Jewish was in the blood and no conversion could change it. Be wary of any answer that hunts for a cause in something Jews did. The explanation belongs with the people who hated.
How did Hitler and the Nazi Party come to power in a democracy?
Why ask it
Look for the Depression, bitterness over the defeat of 1918, fear of communism and the conservative politicians who thought they could control Hitler when he was made chancellor in January 1933. The detail worth adding is that the Nazis never won a majority in a free national election. Power was handed to them, then made permanent within months through emergency decrees and the Enabling Act.
What changed for Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1939, law by law?
Why ask it
Ask for a timeline in place of a summary: the boycott of Jewish shops and dismissal from the civil service in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that took away citizenship, the forced sale of businesses, then the violence of November 1938. Set out in order, it shows each step making the next easier to accept, which is the point a class tends to keep.
How did propaganda and schooling prepare people to accept persecution?
Why ask it
Go to the material itself: newspapers, films, posters, children's books and school lessons repeated one picture of Jews until it passed for common knowledge. Study a single real example with the teacher's framing around it and ask what it wanted the viewer to feel. Putting propaganda on a slide with no comment only repeats it.
What was Kristallnacht, and why do historians treat it as a turning point?
Why ask it
On November 9 and 10, 1938, synagogues were burned, Jewish shops and homes were wrecked, and about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. It marks the turn because the violence was now open, organized by the state and carried out in front of the neighbors. The follow-up is how those neighbors, and the foreign press, reacted.
Why was it so hard for Jews to leave Germany, even when they wanted to?
Why ask it
This usually arrives as 'why didn't they just leave', and it deserves a real answer. More than half of Germany's Jews had left by the time war broke out in 1939. Those who stayed faced exit taxes that stripped their savings, visas almost no country would grant, relatives too old to travel and no way of knowing what was coming. Follow it by turning the question toward the countries that kept their doors shut.
Was the Holocaust planned from the start, or did it develop in stages?
Why ask it
Historians argued over this for decades, and most now take something from both sides: a hatred central to Nazi thinking from the beginning, and a policy that moved from forced emigration to ghettos to mass murder as the war widened. It makes a strong essay question because it has to be argued and cannot simply be looked up.
How did the outbreak of war in 1939 change what the Nazis could do?
Why ask it
Three things changed. Conquest put the large Jewish communities of Poland, and later much of Europe, under German rule; the routes out closed; and wartime secrecy removed restraints that had still held in peacetime. This is the bridge between the laws of the 1930s and the killing that followed, so do not let a class skip across it.
Ghettos and camps
What were the ghettos, and what was daily life inside them like?
Why ask it
They were sealed or guarded districts in occupied Eastern Europe where Jews were forced to live, many to a room, on rations too small to live on. Warsaw's, the largest, held more than 400,000 people. Ask for the living as well as the dying: secret schools, soup kitchens, concerts, children smuggling food through the wall, and diaries kept so that someone would know.
What impossible choices did the Jewish councils in the ghettos face?
Why ask it
The Germans made Jewish leaders answerable for housing, food, labor and, in the end, lists for deportation. Compare how leaders responded, such as Adam Czerniakow in Warsaw and Chaim Rumkowski in Lodz, who believed that work would save his ghetto. Be uneasy with an answer that judges them as if a good option existed. The scholar Lawrence Langer's phrase for such decisions is 'choiceless choices'.
What is the difference between a concentration camp and a killing center?
Why ask it
Precision matters here. Concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald were built to imprison, punish and work people, and huge numbers died in them. Killing centers such as Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno existed to murder people within hours of arrival, and Auschwitz-Birkenau was both at once. An essay that calls every camp a death camp cannot explain how the system worked.
Did all of the killing happen in camps?
Why ask it
No, and many courses pass over it. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units, helped by police battalions, army units and local collaborators, shot Jewish men, women and children at pits and ravines close to their own towns. At Babyn Yar outside Kyiv more than 33,000 people were killed in two days that September. A large share of the victims never saw a camp, and an essay on the camps alone leaves them out.
What did the Nazis mean by the 'Final Solution', and what was the Wannsee Conference for?
Why ask it
'The Final Solution to the Jewish Question' was the regime's own term for the murder of every Jew within its reach. Students often write that it was decided at Wannsee in January 1942, but mass shootings and the first gassings were already under way, and the senior officials met to coordinate deportation and murder across their ministries. The surviving minutes are short enough to read in class, and their office language is worth a discussion of its own.
How were deportations organized, and what were people told about where they were going?
Why ask it
Look for the machinery: lists, assembly points, railway timetables, and the word 'resettlement' with a promise of work in the East. The deception explains a good deal about why people boarded, and it answers the unfair question of why they complied. Then ask how many offices and trades had to cooperate for one train to run.
What was Auschwitz, and why has it come to stand for the whole Holocaust?
Why ask it
It was a complex: a concentration camp, the killing center at Birkenau and labor camps serving German industry, where about 1.1 million people were murdered, most of them Jews. It became the symbol partly for its size and partly because, being a labor camp too, it left survivors who could describe it, while Treblinka and Belzec left almost none. Ask what the symbol hides.
What was a day like for a prisoner in a concentration camp?
Why ask it
Memoirs describe roll call before dawn that could last for hours, a day of forced labor, thin soup and a piece of bread, crowded bunks and punishment that followed no rule. Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Elie Wiesel's Night are the accounts many classes read. Add that this was the life of those selected for work: most people sent to a killing center were dead within hours and never had a day in a camp.
What happened to Roma, people with disabilities and the other groups the Nazis persecuted?
Why ask it
Roma and Sinti were murdered as a people. Disabled patients were killed in a program whose staff and methods later moved to the killing centers. Soviet prisoners of war died in the millions, Polish civilians were killed in very large numbers, and political opponents, Jehovah's Witnesses and gay men were sent to the camps, where many died. Keep each history distinct, and do not rank the suffering.
What happened to children during the Holocaust?
Why ask it
More than a million Jewish children were killed. There were also the children hidden in convents and farmhouses under false names, the roughly 10,000 brought to Britain on the Kindertransport without their parents, and those who kept diaries. With a younger class, one child's story told in full is a better way in than the figure.
Choices
Who were the perpetrators, and what kinds of lives had they led before?
Why ask it
Be concerned if the answer stops at Hitler and a handful of monsters. A better one names policemen, clerks, railway officials, doctors, soldiers and local auxiliaries, most with unremarkable lives before and after. Christopher Browning's book Ordinary Men, a study of one German police battalion, is where many courses start.
Were perpetrators forced to kill, and what happened to those who refused?
Why ask it
'They would have been shot themselves' is the answer most people expect. Historians who searched the postwar trial records for a German executed for refusing to shoot unarmed civilians did not find a documented case, and men who asked to be excused were generally given other duties. That moves the discussion from fear to conformity, career and belief, which is the harder conversation.
How much did ordinary Germans know, and when?
Why ask it
Avoid both easy answers, that everyone knew everything and that nobody knew anything. The persecution of the 1930s, the deportations and the public sale of deported families' belongings happened in plain view, and soldiers on leave brought home talk of mass shootings, while the working of the killing centers was kept secret. Sort the evidence into what was seen, what was rumored and what people chose not to ask.
Who gained from the persecution of their Jewish neighbors?
Why ask it
This one makes complicity concrete. Businesses changed hands for a fraction of their worth, apartments and furniture were reassigned, jobs opened up, and companies took forced labor. Have a class list who benefited in a single town, and standing by stops looking like doing nothing.
What does the word 'bystander' cover, and is it a fair word?
Why ask it
It takes in very different people: a neighbor who watched a deportation, an official who stamped a form, a government that read the reports. Some historians find the word too comfortable, since it suggests standing outside events. Try placing real examples along a line from helping to harming, and let the argument be about the middle.
How did Jews resist, with weapons and without?
Why ask it
Armed resistance includes the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, the revolts at Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and partisan units in the forests. Count the unarmed kinds too: the secret archive buried under the Warsaw ghetto, forged papers, prayer and teaching carried on in hiding, and couriers who took news from one ghetto to the next. When someone asks why there was not more, go through what it cost: reprisals against whole communities, almost no weapons and nowhere to run.
Who hid or rescued Jews, and what made them act when most people did not?
Why ask it
Cases to study include the village of Le Chambon in France, the boats that carried most of Denmark's Jews to Sweden in 1943 and the diplomats who wrote visas against orders. Notice how plain the reasons are that rescuers gave afterwards. Then remind the class that rescue was rare, because a unit built mostly on rescuers leaves a false picture.
Why did a far larger share of Jews survive in some occupied countries than in others?
Why ask it
Set cases side by side: Denmark, where most were saved; the Netherlands, where about three quarters were killed; Bulgaria, which refused to hand over the Jews of its prewar territory and deported those of the lands it occupied; Hungary, where more than 400,000 were deported in under two months in 1944. The explanation lies in how directly Germany ruled, what local officials did, geography and timing, and an essay that reaches for national character has given up on the evidence.
What part did collaborating governments and local police play?
Why ask it
Germany did not act alone. French police carried out the roundups in Paris, the regimes in Romania and Croatia killed on their own initiative, and local auxiliaries took part in the shootings in the East. A French president did not acknowledge the French state's part until 1995, which shows how long this history can wait to be said aloud.
How did doctors, judges, teachers and clergy respond?
Why ask it
A question for older students, since it concerns people with training, standing and codes of ethics. Doctors ran the killing of disabled patients, judges enforced the racial laws, and a few in every profession objected at real cost. Bishop von Galen's sermon of 1941 against the killing of patients is worth reading both for what it achieved and for what it left unsaid.
World response
What did the Allied governments know, and when did they know it?
Why ask it
Reports reached London and Washington during 1942, through the Riegner telegram and the Polish courier Jan Karski, and that December the Allies publicly condemned the extermination of the Jews. So 'they did not know' is not a full answer. The discussion that remains is about what was believed, what was thought possible and what was put off until victory.
Why did so few countries take in Jewish refugees in the 1930s?
Why ask it
Look for the Evian Conference of 1938, where delegates from 32 countries voiced sympathy and almost none raised a quota, and for the St. Louis, the ship turned away from Cuba and the United States in 1939. The reasons given at the time were unemployment, antisemitism and fear of spies. Have students read the letters and editorials of those years before anyone reaches for a present-day comparison.
Could the Allies have bombed Auschwitz or the railway lines leading to it?
Why ask it
A debate with evidence on both sides. Requests reached the Allies in 1944, American bombers struck factories a few miles from the gas chambers, and officials answered that aircraft could not be diverted. Historians disagree about what a raid would have achieved. Judge an essay by how it handles that evidence, because a confident yes or no is easy to write and hard to support.
How did newspapers outside Europe report the killing while it was happening?
Why ask it
The reports existed, and they often ran small on an inside page. Send students to find a wartime article in a digitized newspaper archive, a local paper if there is one. Have them note where it sits on the page, how sure the wording is and what was printed beside it.
What did the neutral countries, the Red Cross and the Vatican do?
Why ask it
Each case is still argued over. Sweden took in Denmark's Jews and sent Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest, Switzerland admitted some refugees and turned others back at the border, the Red Cross was led through a staged visit to Theresienstadt in 1944, and the public silence of Pope Pius XII is being studied again in archives opened in 2020. Distrust an answer that delivers a single verdict on all four.
What did my own country do, and fail to do, while the Holocaust was happening?
Why ask it
It depends on where you are, and the record is seldom all to a country's credit. For the United States, begin with the immigration quotas that stayed in place through the 1930s and the War Refugee Board, created only in January 1944; for Britain, with the Kindertransport on one side and the 1939 limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine on the other. A national museum or archive will hold the documents for your country, so ask there, and be wary of a version in which it appears only as a rescuer or a liberator.
Liberation and after
When were the camps liberated, and what did Allied soldiers find?
Why ask it
Soviet troops reached Majdanek in July 1944 and Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, and American and British forces reached Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau that April. Soldiers' letters home and the film their commanders ordered are sources in their own right. Pick images to suit the age of the class, and say beforehand what will be shown and why.
What were the death marches, and why did the killing go on to the last days of the war?
Why ask it
As the fronts closed in, guards drove prisoners west on foot and in open rail cars, and a great many died on the roads in the final months. Press on why a regime that was plainly losing still spent guards and trains on this. That it did shows how central the killing was to the people running it.
What did survivors face in the months after liberation?
Why ask it
Thousands were too ill or too starved to recover and died within weeks of being freed. Those who regained their strength searched for relatives, found strangers in their homes, met violence on their return in some places, as at Kielce in Poland in 1946, and waited for years in displaced persons camps until Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries admitted them. A lesson that ends with cheering soldiers has stopped too early.
What did the Nuremberg trials achieve, and who was never tried?
Why ask it
The trial of leading Nazis in 1945 and 1946 set out the record largely in the perpetrators' own documents and established that following orders was no defense. It reached only a small number, and thousands of others went back to ordinary careers. The Eichmann trial of 1961 and the recent prosecutions of camp guards in their nineties make a good follow-up on whether justice has a time limit.
Where did the word 'genocide' come from, and what did it change?
Why ask it
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost most of his family, coined it in 1944 because no word existed for the destruction of a people. The United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948. It is a careful way to link the Holocaust to later history: ask what the legal definition requires before applying the term to anything else.
How did Germany and the countries it occupied come to terms with what had been done?
Why ask it
Slowly, and differently in each place. West Germany moved from reparations and a good deal of family silence in the 1950s to trials, school curricula and memorials in later decades, while East Germany, Austria, France and Poland each told their own story about themselves for a long time. On a visit, look at the year each memorial was put up and at whom its inscription names as the victims and as the killers.
Memory
How do we know what happened during the Holocaust?
Why ask it
From several independent kinds of evidence: German records, including transport lists and reports that counted the dead, perpetrators' testimony in court, survivors' accounts, photographs and film, diaries written at the time and the sites themselves. That they agree with each other is the reply to anyone who says the history rests on stories. As an exercise, give each group one kind and ask what it can and cannot show.
Where does the figure of six million come from?
Why ask it
It does not come from one list. Historians reach it by comparing census counts from before and after the war, German deportation and killing records, and research done community by community, and separate estimates fall between about five and six million. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem has also gathered millions of victims' names one at a time, and is still missing many.
Why are both 'Holocaust' and 'Shoah' in use, and what do the words mean?
Why ask it
'Holocaust' comes from a Greek word for a burnt offering, which some people object to because it hints at sacrifice. 'Shoah' is Hebrew for catastrophe, and Roma communities have their own words for their genocide, among them Porajmos and Samudaripen. Ask a museum or a teacher which term they use and why, since the reasoning is the real answer.
What can one diary, such as Anne Frank's, tell us, and what can it not?
Why ask it
A diary gives a single voice writing day by day, with no idea how things will end, which is why it reads so well. Anne Frank's stops before the arrest, so a reader who stops with it learns about hiding and very little about deportation or the camps. Pair it with a ghetto diary or a survivor's memoir, so students leave with more than one hopeful line.
What are Holocaust denial and distortion, and how do you recognize them?
Why ask it
Denial claims the genocide never happened or was wildly exaggerated. Distortion admits it and then shrinks it, excuses it, blames the victims or turns it into a casual insult. The purpose of both is to make hatred of Jews respectable again, and it has little to do with evidence. Teachers can describe the tactics without staging a debate, since a debate grants denial the standing it is after.
What should you do when you meet a denial claim or a Holocaust joke online?
Why ask it
Do not share it, even to mock it. Check who published it, report it where the platform allows and bring it to a teacher instead of arguing in the comments. Denial is a crime in some countries and not in others, and platform rules differ as well, so ask how it works where you are.
When is it fair to compare the Holocaust with other events, and when is it not?
Why ask it
Comparison is how historians work, and setting the Holocaust beside the Armenian genocide or the Khmer Rouge years in Cambodia can show what was shared and what was particular. The trouble starts when 'Nazi' becomes shorthand in a quarrel about something unrelated, which teaches nothing about either. In an essay, state exactly what is being compared and on what evidence.
Could something like the Holocaust happen again?
Why ask it
Genocide did happen again: international courts have ruled that it was committed in Rwanda in 1994 and at Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995. So the more useful form of the question is which early steps a person could recognize, such as laws that single out one group, propaganda that calls people vermin or a threat, and neighbors who look away. Steer a class away from predictions about today's politics and back to what the warning signs were.
How will the Holocaust be remembered when no survivors are left to speak?
Why ask it
People point to archives of recorded testimony, diaries, descendants who tell a parent's story, and the sites. The discussion worth having is about what a recording cannot do, such as answer a new question, and what that leaves the listener responsible for. If your class can still hear a survivor in person, arrange that first.
What should I look for when I visit a Holocaust museum or memorial?
Why ask it
Read the opening panel to see how the institution defines its subject, notice whose objects and voices it relies on, and choose one name or one object to follow instead of trying to take in everything. Ask the staff what they left out and why. Age guidance and photography rules differ from site to site, so check both before you go.
How is the Holocaust taught and commemorated where I live?
Why ask it
What schools must teach, and which days are marked, depends on the country and, in the United States, on the state. International Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on January 27, the date Auschwitz was liberated, and Yom HaShoah is kept in spring in Israel and in Jewish communities elsewhere. Ask a teacher, a local museum or a Jewish community organization what happens near you and who is welcome.
Why do we still study the Holocaust, and what should it change in how a person acts?
Why ask it
Keep this for the end and distrust the tidy answers. 'Never again' and 'be kind' are sincere and too easy, so push for something specific, such as noticing when a group of people is described as a problem to be solved, or naming what someone in a particular job could have refused to do. Students leaving with the question still open is a fair result.
Asking about the Holocaust with care
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before you ask anything
Agree on the words
Settle what the group means by Holocaust, ghetto, concentration camp, killing center and collaborator before the discussion starts. Half the confusion in a class comes from one word doing several jobs, and the Origins and Ghettos and camps groups go better once the terms are fixed.
Start with a life
Six million is too large to picture. Open with one person or one family, with a name, a town and a photograph from before 1933, and bring the figures in afterwards. The question about Jewish life before the Nazis is on the list for this reason.
Fit the questions to the room
The mass shootings, the killing centers and the fate of children are for older students, with notice given beforehand. Museums and schools set their own age guidance, and it differs from place to place, so ask what yours recommends before choosing.
Say who did what
'Jews were deported' hides the people who did the deporting. Write and speak in the active voice, put the regime's own euphemisms such as 'resettlement' in quotation marks, and be exact about whether you mean the Nazi Party, the German state, the army or a local police force.
For a discussion, an essay or a visit
Running a class discussion
Choose three or four questions from one group, not a dozen from all six, and attach a source to each: a law, a diary entry, a photograph, a page of trial testimony. Students argue better from a document in their hands than from memory, and the quiet ones have something to point to.
Choosing an essay question
Pick one that has to be argued: whether the genocide was planned from the start, how much ordinary Germans knew, whether Auschwitz could have been bombed, why survival differed so much by country. Then narrow it to a place and a span of years. 'Why did rescue succeed in Denmark in October 1943' can be answered well in a way that a question about all of Europe cannot.
Visiting a museum or memorial
Bring three questions written down, and put at least one to a guide or educator, who is rarely asked anything beyond directions. The Memory group has the ones that suit a visit. Afterwards, write down the one name or object you followed and what you still do not know about it.
When a survivor or a descendant is speaking
The questions on this page are about the history, and most of them are wrong for a person telling their own story. With a speaker in the room, ask about their life and let them decide how much to say, and keep the questions about causes and policy for the class that follows.
What to steer away from
Role play and simulations
Do not ask students to imagine themselves into a cattle car, act out a selection or argue the perpetrators' side as a game. It cannot come close to the experience and it tends to leave a class either upset or flippant. Reading what people who were there wrote does the work that a simulation only pretends to.
Answers that are too simple
'Hitler did it', 'the Germans were brainwashed' and 'nobody knew' each close a discussion that should stay open. So does treating the outcome as inevitable, or suggesting that courage or attitude decided who lived. At every stage people made decisions, and the questions in the Choices group exist to keep those decisions in view.
Ranking suffering
Avoid questions that ask which group, camp or country had it worst, and avoid setting the Holocaust against another atrocity to decide which was greater. Ask what was distinct about each and what the evidence shows.
Shock in place of understanding
The most graphic photographs are rarely the most instructive, and many were taken by the perpetrators. If an image is shown, say who took it and why, and ask whether a document or a testimony would teach the same thing without turning the victims into a spectacle once more.
Debating whether it happened
Questions about evidence are welcome, and the Memory group has several. A debate with denial as one of two sides is another matter, because the format itself suggests the facts are in doubt. Study how denial works instead.
After the conversation
Leave time to close
Do not let a bell end the hardest question of the hour. Keep the last ten minutes for students to write down one thing they learned and one thing they still want to ask, and begin the next session from those notes.
Check where a fact came from
Figures and dates quoted in class should trace back to a museum, an archive or a named historian. Anything that arrives as an unsourced image or a short video gets checked before it goes into an essay, which is good practice for the questions on denial as well.
When it is someone's family history
There may be a student whose relatives were victims, refugees, soldiers or, less comfortably, perpetrators or bystanders. Never single anyone out to speak for a group. Let it be known that family stories are welcome, and leave the choice to share with the student.
Follow one thread close to home
The history sticks when it touches a place students know. Look for a refugee who settled in your town, a wartime article in the local paper, a soldier from the area who was at a liberation, or a memorial nearby, and ask a local museum or library what records they hold.