So this situation occurred in the past couple of weeks, and got reported in the Hessen regional news in the last day or two.
A school group out of Giessen (forty miles north of Frankfurt) had a tour arranged....to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp (roughly a 90 minute drive east of Giessen).....over near Erfurt.
14-year old kids in this group.
The intention is that you provide instruction on the war, the holocaust, and the damages done to society.
Kids visit the Camp, and on the return back home....on the bus....three of the young 'lads' flip on some anti-Jew type music and sing this on the bus. As far as I can see....the driver didn't hear it or report. It comes from other kids on the bus.
In terms of facts.....no kids have been identified yet. Yes, it's more or less third-hand information and it's gotten folks all riled up. You will have to go to virtually every single kid on that bus (fifty-plus) and interrogate them.
If identified, then you go to the worst case scenario....where they toss the kids out of this school. Best case scenario, you put the three into some mandatory re-education or indoctrination program.
The curious thing is that this has gotten into the news cycle and is one of the top five stories of the day. Politicians are pumped-up over it, and journalists are talking over the pitiful nature of 'kids'.
You can go back to the 1960s and find that these concentration camp tours are mandatory to a great extent, and funded by the districts.
The curious in this case, no one has said ethnic status of the kids, and it will probably be a public issue if they are non-German.
3 comments:
How did your kids cope with these things when growing up in the German system? I tell mine that they're Australian, and thus they were on the other side of this war.
My kid was in the German system from Kindergarten on. However, this was a rural area, and they did not take 'tours' like this one described above. The school did tours to regional museums. I would say that the kid grew up skeptical of the 'system' and the intentions of teachers.
But I would suggest that most kids coming out of the German school system over the past thirty years...aren't exactly buying into WW II guilt. They've simply moved on. You can test them on a dozen WW II facts that most should know, and they know almost nothing.
Although my wife came through the system around that time (she's in her 30's) and they were swamped with guilt over it. So it could be regionally specific.
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