Culture
Exclusion, deportations, mass murder: without the complicity of large parts of society, National Socialism and the Holocaust would not have been possible. The traveling exhibition “Some Were Neighbors”, developed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. (USHMM), highlights the role of ‘ordinary people’ in the Holocaust. With a low-threshold educational offer for the exhibition, the Villa ten Hompel History Site in Münster and the Villa Merländer Nazi Documentation Centre in Krefeld, together with the USHMM, now want to reach young people with different backgrounds and learning requirements in particular and raise their awareness of topics such as anti-discrimination and human rights. The transnational cooperation project is funded by the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung (LpB NRW) in the Ministry of Culture and Science.
The traveling exhibition “Some Were Neighbors: Perpetration, Followership and Resistance” was shown in the German Bundestag in 2019. Since then, Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel has been coordinating the presentation at numerous locations in North Rhine-Westphalia as a cooperation partner of the USHMM. In addition, the Münster history site is working with the memorial in Krefeld and the USHMM to develop educational formats to accompany the exhibition, thereby deepening transatlantic cooperation in education and remembrance work.
“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel in Münster have been working closely together for many years on various projects to promote Holocaust research, remembrance and education,” says Tad Stahnke, Director of International Education Programs at the Holocaust Museum. “Our transatlantic partnership is based on trust, regular exchange and an understanding of how we can work together even more effectively. Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel has shown the USHMM traveling exhibition; ‘Some Were Neighbors’, which deals with the choices made by ordinary people during the Holocaust, in more than 20 museums, memorials and archives in North Rhine-Westphalia. Together we have developed new educational approaches and tutorials, including support for accessible learning. We look forward to building on our unique relationship and continuing to learn from and with each other.”
Young people visit the exhibition “Some were neighbors” in the Münster district government (Image source: Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel)
The exhibition “Some were neighbors” does not focus on leading National Socialists or structures of the Nazi persecution machinery, but on the behavior and options for action of the civilian population. It is about ‘ordinary people’ who actively participated in Nazi crimes, who stood idly by and watched, but who in some cases also offered resistance. Historical photographs in the exhibition show how they reacted to the humiliation, exclusion and persecution of their Jewish classmates, colleagues, neighbors and friends.
The exhibition thus raises the question of scope for action and individual responsibility – a core issue of historical and political education that is still highly relevant today and plays a particularly important role in educational work with young people. In order to reach as many young people as possible with the content of the exhibition, accompanying educational formats are being developed for different audiences and needs.
Feedback on existing offers such as workshops and history tours has shown that local points of contact – such as historical sites of Nazi persecution where the participants live – offer easier access to the subject matter of the exhibition. To accompany educational concepts at local and regional level, the Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel and the Villa Merländer Nazi Documentation Center have therefore already developed a handout and video tutorials for multipliers in 2023 in collaboration with the USHMM – funded by the North Rhine-Westphalia State Center for Political Education.
With the current follow-up project, the memorial sites in Münster and Krefeld are linking up with this and responding to the state and nationwide need for low-threshold and inclusive educational formats in educational and remembrance work: “It is striking that most of the educational offers on ‘Some were neighbors’ have so far been used by school classes from grammar schools and comprehensive schools. However, our aim is to create offers for all educational levels and backgrounds – in the educational formats for ‘Some Were Neighbors’ and also generally in the educational work of memorial sites,” explains Thomas Köhler, who has been coordinating the cooperation with the USHMM on behalf of Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel 2018. “For example, we have observed that teachers at special schools are reluctant to visit history sites with their pupils because they find the educational formats there too complex. We want to break down barriers here and adapt the educational offers to different needs in terms of content, language and design,” emphasizes Kim Sommerer, who is scientifically responsible for the NRW-USA project at Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel.
Surveys in schools now form the starting point for the development of learning materials that respond to different areas of support and interest and offer access to historically and currently relevant topics such as exclusion and persecution, enrichment, but also help and resistance. The aim is to appeal to young people who are difficult to reach with existing educational materials, for example due to learning difficulties or language barriers. Exhibition backpacks are planned, filled with learning materials such as pictograms and explanatory cards. However, it is also about community-building elements that are intended to convey appreciation, for example when the young people set up the exhibition together on site in a school.
The educational materials are being developed in collaboration with the USHMM as the cooperation partner and creator of the exhibition – both digitally and in direct encounters on site. In October, the project team from North Rhine-Westphalia will travel to Washington to exchange ideas with colleagues from the USHMM and gain insights into learning situations and Holocaust education there. As a result, more and more research approaches to viewing the Holocaust from an international perspective are being incorporated into the didactic work.
The aim is to develop an inclusive didactic concept whose methodology can also be transferred to existing and future educational programs at memorials and historical sites in NRW with their respective local specifics. The accessible learning materials for “Some were neighbors” are to be tested in schools in North Rhine-Westphalia in early 2025.
Educational work with the exhibition (Image source: Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel)
About the cooperation between Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel and the USHMM
The Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel in Münster has been an official cooperation partner of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. (USHMM) since 2018. In 2023, the USHMM honored the Münster history site with the Elie Wiesel Award. The award is the USHMM’s highest honor and last year went jointly to the museum’s international partners who actively promote the memory of the Holocaust, stand up against hatred and anti-Semitism and show great commitment to democracy and humanity. A current example of transatlantic cooperation, alongside the “Some Were Neighbors” project, is the international anthology “Police and the Holocaust. A quarter of a century after Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men”, edited by Thomas Köhler and Peter Römer from Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel together with Jürgen Matthäus from the USHMM and Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan from the University of Chicago.
Thomas Köhler from Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel (left) together with the Deputy Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Sarah Ogilvie and Klaus Mueller, the museum's European representative, at the presentation of the Elie Wiesel Award (Image source: Memorial and Museum Villa ten Hompel)
More information on borrowing the traveling exhibition “Some were neighbors” and on the current project “Barrier-free learning transfers”:
https://www.stadt-muenster.de/villa-ten-hompel/forschung/laufende-projekte/einige-waren-nachbarn-2
