A practical resource hub: ready-to-use lesson plans, a place-based chronology, key terms, a method for analysing difficult sources, and a curated directory of archives and museums.
Three modular lessons build on activities already available in the Learning Lab. Suggested age: 14+. For ages 12–14, shorten source extracts, pre-teach vocabulary and provide closer teacher guidance. These are adaptable plans, not a substitute for checking the original sources.
Essential question: How do historians distinguish what an image shows from what its context helps us understand?
Learning objectives
Preparation and materials: Open The Evidence Desk and the linked USHMM photograph record. Display the image with its original caption and record. Do not crop away contextual information.
Discussion prompts: What is literally visible? What does the caption add? What remains unknown? Whose perspective is represented? What other source could corroborate the interpretation?
Teacher guidance: Do not ask students to imagine themselves as victims or to invent dialogue. If a student makes a claim about identity, motive or emotion from appearance alone, ask what evidence would be needed to support it.
Your task
Essential question: How can an individual account help us understand history without treating one person's experience as universal?
Learning objectives
Preparation: Use the published Łódź ghetto diary excerpt in The Evidence Desk, alongside its USHMM context page. Explain the date, place and circumstances of the record. Do not infer a complete biography from a short excerpt.
Discussion prompts: What does the writer choose to record? What might the source not tell us? How does the historical context deepen our reading? What other voices or records would broaden the picture?
Teacher guidance: Avoid asking learners to role-play a person in the ghetto. Offer a quiet alternative to reading aloud. Do not turn testimony into a guessing game or ask students to rank suffering.
Your task
Essential question: What do archives reveal about different local histories, and why must we avoid treating countries as if they had one uniform experience?
Learning objectives
Preparation: Use the Three Countries, Different Records source lab. Provide the original archive records, not isolated images alone. Students should record institution, record type, date, place and limits.
Discussion prompts: Why might a police file and a photograph preserve different traces? Who created each record and for what purpose? What is absent? How does geography change the historical question?
Teacher guidance: The USHMM record about deportations from Lom in March 1943 concerns Jews deported from Bulgarian-occupied territories, including Macedonia and Thrace; do not generalise this event to all Jews in Bulgaria's pre-war core provinces. For Romania, use the archive record alongside regional and chronological context. Avoid national character explanations.
Your task
The big picture in a few minutes. Open the topics that interest you. Each one gives you the key idea first — with a link to go deeper when you are ready.
Choose a date to see what changed.
After taking power in Germany, the Nazis used state institutions to exclude Jews from public life, introduce discriminatory measures and encourage organised persecution. The mass murder of European Jews was not yet the regime’s policy in 1933.
Read the USHMM historical overview ↗This is a simplified overview of key developments, not a single identical sequence in every country. Policies, timing and local conditions varied across Europe.
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. It took place in the context of World War II, but the persecution began before the war.
Jewish people were targeted because they were Jewish. Nazi leaders used antisemitic ideology, racist laws, propaganda, state institutions, violence and mass murder.
Remember: Jewish people were not one single community with one experience. They had different languages, traditions, beliefs, jobs and lives across Europe.
It did not happen all at once. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they removed rights, excluded Jews from public life, encouraged discrimination and used violence. During the war, persecution spread across occupied Europe and escalated into mass shootings, deportations and killing centres.
There was no single, simple path in every country. Policies, local conditions and the roles of German and non-German authorities differed by place and time.
Ghettos were areas where German authorities and their allies forcibly concentrated Jews, often in overcrowded and deadly conditions. They were not simply separate neighbourhoods people freely chose to enter.
Concentration camps were part of a system of imprisonment, terror, forced labour and abuse. Killing centres were established primarily for mass murder. Some sites changed function over time; the terms are not interchangeable.
People were also murdered in mass shootings, forced marches and other forms of violence, not only in camps.
Nazi Germany led and organised the genocide. German state agencies, SS and police units, military structures and other institutions took part. Collaborating governments, authorities, organisations and individuals across Europe also contributed in different ways.
Responsibility must be studied in its specific historical setting. Do not blame whole populations as if everyone had the same power, knowledge or role.
Yes. Resistance took many forms: armed uprisings, escape, hiding, helping others, passing information, preserving religious and cultural life, teaching, documenting crimes and keeping records. People acted under extreme danger and with very unequal possibilities.
There was no single way to respond, and it is not fair to judge people facing terror as if they had safe or free choices.
The defeat of Nazi Germany did not undo the destruction. Survivors faced grief, illness, displacement, the loss of relatives and communities, and the challenge of rebuilding their lives. Many searched for family members or tried to return home; some found that their homes and communities no longer existed.
Survivors’ testimony, family histories, archives, memorials and historical research continue to shape how the Holocaust is documented and remembered.
This is an introduction, not the whole history. It cannot represent every country, community or individual experience.
Continue with the USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia: Introduction to the Holocaust ↗ and the country-specific sources in the archive directory below.
Select an event or a numbered place to see its historical context. The map is a schematic locator, not a boundary map; borders and administrative control changed during the period. Dates and places are deliberately anchored to specific records and historical contexts.
Start with a city or region. Each entry connects a place to a documented event and a source to explore further.
Choose a place here or select its pin on the map. The map is schematic and not to scale; it does not show precise borders or transport routes.
Schematic locator · approximate placement · not to scale. Dashed lines indicate selected documented directions, not surveyed rail routes. For a broader institutional map collection, see USHMM historical maps. *Transnistria was a Romanian-administered occupation zone east of the Dniester, not a single town or deportation destination point.
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. German occupation brought escalating anti-Jewish persecution, dispossession and violence. This is a local starting point for occupation, not a single start date for the Holocaust everywhere.
The March 1943 deportations by Bulgarian authorities also included Jews from Pirot; Pirot is not plotted on this schematic map. The 11,343 figure cited by USHMM covers Bulgarian-occupied Thrace, Macedonia and Pirot, not Macedonia alone. This is a selected teaching chronology, not a complete timeline. Add further events only with verified dates, locations and source records. For a wider chronology, consult the USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia and the partner timeline.
Compare records connected with the September 1942 deportations from the Łódź ghetto. Read the catalogue descriptions before drawing conclusions: a photograph and an archival collection do not answer the same questions.
Creator: Walter Genewein, financial manager of the German ghetto administration.
Date and place: April 1942, Łódź.
What the record tells us: The USHMM catalogue identifies this as a photograph of deportation from the Łódź ghetto to Chełmno.
Open the original USHMM record ↗Read carefully: The photographer was part of the German ghetto administration. Ask who commissioned or controlled the image and what the photograph does not show.
Creator: Multiple creators; collection preserved by YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Dates: 1940–1965.
What the catalogue lists: Diaries in Yiddish, memoirs, a map, poems, official notices, underground bulletins, leaflets, photographs and ephemera.
Open YIVO collection description ↗Read carefully: This is a collection-level description, not one individual document. Access is by appointment; do not imply that every listed item is digitised online.
Use the prompts to build a careful interpretation. Your notes stay in this browser session and are not sent to a server.
Short working definitions. Terms should always be read in their historical context; some have legal, scholarly or institution-specific meanings.
A source does not “speak for itself”. Its meaning depends on who created it, when, why, for whom, how it survived and what other evidence can confirm or complicate it.
Do not infer identity, emotion, consent or motive from appearance alone. Check photographer, date, caption, location, purpose and whether the image was cropped or reused.
Analyse the intended audience, stereotypes, omissions, emotional techniques and institutional purpose. Do not repeat dehumanising claims without clear framing and critique.
Ask who created the categories, what administrative task the record served and whose lives were reduced to entries, numbers or lists. Bureaucratic language is not neutral.
Respect the speaker's words and circumstances. Avoid treating one testimony as universal or demanding that a survivor's memory function like a complete administrative record.
Start with institutional collections and encyclopedias. Search results are not interchangeable: check the catalogue record, rights statement, historical context and the scope of each collection.
Suggested starting bibliography: USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia country articles and topic essays; Yad Vashem educational materials and archival records; POLIN collection records; Arolsen Archives digital collections; and the scholarly publications and research guides issued by the national institutions listed above. Use a specific edition and page reference when assigning a text to students.