Pearce, Caroline. “The Role of German Perpetrator Sites in Teaching and Confronting the Nazi Past”

In this chapter, German studies scholar Caroline Pearce discusses the representation of Nazi perpetrators at German memorial sites, the pedagogical value of confronting the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and the possible problems and pitfalls associated with it. Memorial sites increasingly become places of civic education and promote learning/historical understanding through discovery, dialogue, and independent reflection on the past. Perpetrator sites (i.e. sites where the planning, organisation and administration of the Holocaust took place) can play an important role in civic and human rights education: studying the perpetrators, their actions and motivations, as well as the social context in which atrocities happen, can help identify processes that lead to rapid societal change, that alter concepts of what is considered normal and acceptable, and that permit discrimination and violence. Representing and teaching about perpetrators at sites of memory requires humanizing them, but it also requires a careful avoidance of sensationalism or relativism. Pearce discusses these and other issues by focusing on three examples: the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial, the Topography of Terror (Berlin), and the Wewelsburg District Museum (near Paderborn).

Pearce, Caroline. “The Role of German Perpetrator Sites in Teaching and Confronting the Nazi Past.” Memorialization in Germany since 1945. Edited by Bill Niven and Chloe Paver, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 168-177.