Holocaust Research Paper Topics
Developing Narrow Focus Areas That Provide In-Depth Analysis
Sep 13, 2009
The 20th-Century Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi government and its agents continues to be an important part of curriculum goals as well as research paper topics. Many colleges and universities have created entire courses focused on this terrible event, while others have constructed studies in genocide that focuses on the Holocaust but includes other comparative 20th-Century ethnic massacres. Despite the almost limitless sources available, students still have difficulty narrowing an area of focus. The following suggestions might help toward the process of thesis development.
Focusing on Specific Trends and Events
An analysis of the Holocaust might focus on narrowly constructed topics that, given the length requirements, will require a larger body of research material:
- How Nazi propaganda desensitized the German population in the 1930s
- Effect of the Nuremberg race laws
- Why Jews initially refused to flee Germany
- Role of the Christian Church
- Kristallnacht – causes and effects
- Voyage of the St. Louis
- Nazi exploitation of latent Anti-Semitism
- Segregation of Jewish populations
- Christians that opposed the treatment of Jews
- Mein Kampf as a blueprint for the Holocaust
- Explaining the lack of Jewish resistance
- Sanitizing the Nazi Olympics of 1936
- Other Holocaust victims like Gypsies and Homosexuals
Comparative Book Reviews and Personal Memoirs
There are many survivor accounts that detail the struggles of the Jews before deportation to the camps, life within the camps, and the aftermath following liberation. The stories of Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank are two of the more famous examples.
Other books by or about non-Jews that suffered and died, hid Jews, or took part in the liberation of the camps also offer historical perspectives, like the life of Edith Stein or Father Kolbe. Unlike a book “report,” a book review evaluates various similar memoirs in order to find comparative and contrasting conclusions.
General Topics of Comparison and Contrast
The World War II Holocaust can be compared and contrasted to other 20th-Century events that, while not as definitive, demonstrate similar patterns of ethnic cleaning that resulted in mass murders:
- The Armenian genocide during World War I in Asia Minor
- The Rape of Nanking, often called the “Chinese Holocaust”
- Tribal genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan
- Southeast Asian genocide in Cambodia
- Ethnic cleaning in the former Yugoslavia
- Religious-based massacres in Timor
- Why Holocaust deniers are wrong
Social Justice Topics
The study of the Holocaust has as an ultimate goal the determination that such events must never happen again. Yet, on a smaller scale, they do. Bringing past events into contemporary perspective can involve psychology, sociology, globalism, philosophy, and politics.
Jeanette Friedman and David Gold have written an excellent book, Why Should I Care? Lessons From the Holocaust [The Wordsmithy, LLC, 2009]. Although geared toward high school students, their chapters tackle the Holocaust with a 21st Century relevance, suggesting research themes that might be more palatable to the post-modern student.
Chapter Six, for example, “The Lure of the Dark Side,” demonstrates that the banality of the Nazis might be comparable to questionable medical experiments still a part of research. “Using humans for medical experiments raises ethical issues,” (p 62). What makes this resource so valuable for all students is that each chapter relates Holocaust issues to contemporary concerns.
Purposes of Holocaust Research
The on-going conflicts between different groups of people, whether Sunni and Shiite in Iraq or Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, demonstrates the need to explore historical events like the Holocaust in order to develop an educational framework capable of rendering Anti-Semitism and Ethnic Cleansing powerless. The post-paper experience should be thought provoking and perhaps allow for student discussion once the papers have been submitted.
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