How have the Nazi period and the Shoah been presented in history
textbooks for secondary schools published since 1950 in Germany, the
United Kingdom, French-speaking Belgium and France ? This volume
compares their contents by underlining the evolution of this content and
the influence of the historic research as well as the various events
which have been topical over the last fifty years. Whilst the European
public opinion often mentions the deep silence about this Nazi period
and the Shoah up to the late nineties, German textbooks from the fifties
provided pupils, aged 14 to 16, with important information. Although
incomplete and imperfect at the beginning, this knowledge was quickly
offered and broke the silence before being dramatically increased and
more precise at the turn of the century. As far as quantity and quality
are concerned, there is a sharp contrast between the German and French
textbooks and the British ones which deal much less with this topic. As
for Walloon textbooks, they were scarce from the seventies to 2000.