04 July , 2006
Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has called for the country's Nazi history to be taught as a separate subject at schools. In an interview with the online newspaper "Netzeitung", Knobloch said students were taught far too little about the Hitler regime and the Holocaust, particularly in the eastern part of Germany which was under Communist rule until 1989. "We urgently need to overhaul the way history is taught because far too little attention is paid to National Socialism," Knobloch said, adding that the solution would be to devote a course to this chapter of history. "It should be made legally binding to do so throughout all of Germany's states," she added. Knobloch, a herself Shoah survivor, said there were teachers in the former German Democratic Republic who "hardly know anything about history". The German teachers' union (DL) as well as the president of the council of regional education ministries dismissed her call. "No other era of German history is studied as intensively in German schools as National Socialism," union president Josef Kraus said.