I once had a professor of Judaism (i.e. a religion professor) tell me that, when one looks at the way that the history of the Holocaust is told, the Nazis effectively won.
What he meant by that is that the history is written from the view of the Nazis. We teach our children about the society of the Nazis, not the societies of the people they murdered (honestly, how many of us have ever seen a picture of a shtetl?). When we do teach about the Holocaust, we teach only about death and destruction, camps and ghettos, murder and genocide, but we much less often teach about resistance, love and life and the survival of Jews, their religion and their culture. Even when we think about Jews during the Holocaust, the dominant image is that of the Muselmann, barely human at all, and certainly evoking the concept of the Untermensch. Those Jews we do teach about tend to be assimilated (like the Frank family or Victor Klemperer) instead of those living traditionally Jewish lives, differentiating even those victims we date to recognize from the majority about whom we pay little attention. So in the way we look at the Holocaust, in how we teach it and what we teach, we basically vindicate many of the views the Nazis themselves held, ergo, they won when it comes to how we tell the story.
I'm curious what the folks here think about this argument? And just to be clear, I'm talking about the way the history is taught to the public and at the undergraduate level. I know that these limitations will be surpassed in any graduate program worth its salt.
Thanks!
EDIT: words
What your professor told you is a little over-the-top, but there's a certain truth to it, at least from my viewpoint as a german Public Historian. Germany, at least the Federal Republic, has gone to great lengths since the 1970s to teach students on the Third Reich and the Holocaust, which is certainly a good thing and did very well in terms of bringing the german society to a better understanding of the guilt this nation has loaded upon itself.
However, for about ten years, there's been a vocal part of the Jewish community as well as Historians, Public Historians and History teachers to not only teach about Antijudaism, Antisemitism and eliminatory Antisemitism, but the rich german-jewish history surrounding it. German students are almost exclusively taught a History of Jews in Germany as a History of Jewish Victims in Germany. However, there are great achievements in History done by Jewish men and women, on individual as well as social, cultural and political level, that most History didactics simply forget. To some degree, this has led to the term "Jude" (Jew) being a derogatory term on german schoolyards much like "Opfer" (victim).
School curriculums in Germany are provided by the respective federal states (there are 16 of those in Germany), so it always takes a while for new developments in didactics to really enter the schools. The movement to tell German-Jewish history not merely from the perspective of victims is slowly gaining traction in schools and will certainly take some years, if not decades, to enter public memory. This public memory as I understand it is mostly made of school contents and History in mass media (TV, newspapers, magazines, online media). Mass media, however, is mostly made by people who tell stories from their own perspective, which itself is founded on public memory and culture. To really change this public memory will take a lot of time, but it will happen.
That said, there's a distinct problem with teaching History of what you called "traditionally Jewish lives". For one, in Germany, the large majority of Jews were quite assimilated, among the Jewish Intellectuals almost 100%. So those that were able to be witnesses (in diaries or other ego-documents) were part of the assimilated exclusively. Furthermore, they didn't have to surpass the language barrier because they spoke and speak German and not just Yiddish. Those not-as-much-assimilated Jews were mostly found east of Germany, and thus, were to a larger degree victims of the Holocaust. The greatest parts of traditional Jewish communities there were completely destroyed, and with them, most of the testimonies of their History. And whoever survived, as a person, a community, and a culture, was subject to Antisemitism in the Soviet Union and didn't play a great role in historical research, either.
To sum it up, because I tend to get side-tracked easily: There are a number of factors that play into what your professor said. I doubt that the Nazis "won", because not only do we talk about the Holocaust at great lengths, we have a lot more research on Jewish history than anyone could have imagined before World War 2.
Slight question: Doesn't Musselmann/Muselmane refer to muslims and arabs?