Youtube –– A Platform for Holocaust Education?

The Importance of Oral History Archives in Documenting Testimony

The Holocaust is the history of great tragedy and trauma. The Holocaust claimed the lives of over six million European Jews and over five million non-Jewish people. (USHMM 2) Over the course of World War II the German Nazis industrialized the killing of those they considered a threat. The main focus of their destruction were the Jewish people of Germany and the countries that they conquered. As the war was concluding the Allied forces came across the concentration camps where much of the industrialized killing took place. Though the Nazis tried to disguise the purpose of such camps and their deeds, the survivors found clinging to life in the camps were clear evidence of what the Nazis tried to hide.

After the end of World War II, the documentation of the extent of the Nazi’s atrocities began. While in the final stages of the war Nazi soldiers attempted to destroy the evidence of what had occurred, there was much documentation of the Holocaust remaining for the Allies to discover. Documentation and the physical sites were important in discovering the scale and inner workings of the Final Solution; however, the survivors themselves were a key resource to understanding the horrors that were inflicted. Many of the survivors have spent a great deal of their time after the Holocaust detailing what exactly happened to them during the war. Whether through written means, a journal, or an article, or through talks that have given to those willing to listen. The documentation given by the survivors is an extremely powerful tool to combat the ever-growing denial of the Holocaust. (USHMM 1)

Despite the large volume of evidence, both physical and oral, denial of the Holocaust has existed since the beginning stages of the discovery. At first, it was the Nazis attempting to save themselves from the punishments for the atrocities they had committed. However, even so many decades past the event, there are a great deal more deniers than ever. Widespread disinformation has been disseminated on the internet, contributing to the growing problem. Much of this denial centers around discrediting the survivors and witnesses. Those who deny the Holocaust tend to downplay what happened and minimize the losses that occurred, if they do say that any occurred at all. (USHMM 1) There are many efforts being made to combat this disinformation. Organizations like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem both work towards education and remembrance. One of the strongest tools to push back against the deniers is the voices and stories of the survivors.

Ever since the end of the war, many organizations have created ways to record the stories of those who witnessed the events that took place. With the improvements in technology, digital recordings have provided a way to preserve the voices and faces of those telling the harrowing stories of survival and pain. With the numbers of survivors ever dwindling, these recordings are extremely important to preserve the words and emotions felt by the survivors. Recording the stories has enabled a great deal of information to be kept safe from the decay of memory and the destruction of physical evidence.

While the written word is powerful, an oral history recording helps to preserve the emotions in the voice and the face of the speaker. These emotions help evoke empathy and sympathy from the viewer in a stronger way than the written word. (Bradley and Puri 2016, 77) By preserving the emotions that are attached to the words, the words are able to more clearly convey the horrors of the Holocaust. (Gustman et al. 2002, 21) Many of these videos have written transcripts and summaries attached to them, but the reactions to the actual listening of the tapes and visible reactions of the survivors on videos are unable to be captured by written words.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Contribution

From its inception in 1980 (USHMM 3) The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has championed the stories of the survivors of the Holocaust. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s mission statement is as follows:

The Museum’s primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy; to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust. (USHMM 3)

This mission statement declares the museum’s intention to educate their visitors of the history of the Holocaust and how the echoes continue to affect the world today. Through their programing at the museum and their online resources the USHMM does a great deal to preserve and circulate the information that exists detailing the Holocaust.

The USHMM spends a great deal of effort to record the stories of survivors and use these testimonies to educate the public. They have a very large archive that can be accessed in person through a request on their website. (USHMM 4) This archive contains a great deal of documentation about the Holocaust and those who did and did not survive it. They also have a great deal of objects that can help tell the story of the Holocaust. Many of the documentary and video-based evidence is digitized. Their website has a page dedicated to connecting viewers to different types of records to give different perspectives and information. These include written documentation and recorded videos of survivor’s testimony. As well as the online archive on their website, the USHMM also has a YouTube channel where they share videos, lectures, and eye-witness accounts.

The YouTube Channel

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s YouTube channel was started in 2006, with their first video being in 2007. (Wong 2011, 104) Clearly the USHMM has considered the video platform to be a useful tool for many years. From the beginning the videos had a strong focus on communicating the oral stories of those who survived. Starting in 2013 videos, the USHMM’s YouTube channel started to make use of livestream technology to broadcast interviews and talks to a wider audience than those who were able to attend a lecture in person. Today the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum maintains a strong presence on YouTube, posting some form of content around twice a month. While survivor stories are featured heavily, the YouTube channel does feature objects from their collection, historian talks, stories of other genocides, and many other types of videos. The large range of content on their channel follows the USHMM’s mission to “advance and disseminate knowledge.” (USHMM 3) By creating an account on an easily accessible digital platform, a place that is easily found through internet searches on the topic of the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is able to reach out to a wider audience than if they had kept all of their videos solely on their website.

YouTube as a platform has multiple advantages, making it a good place for the USHMM to share and store videos on. By using YouTube as a host, the USHMM is not bearing the burden of storage for these videos. YouTube itself is a successful and popular video sharing website, so using it as a platform can help increase engagement. (Wong 2011, 104) YouTube has also been dealing with the issue of Holocaust denial. In 2019, the platform banned speech that denied the Holocaust. (Guhl and Davey 2020, 2) Since the changes in 2019, there has been a sharp decline in certain buzzwords that were used in many of the videos and comments that denied the Holocaust on the platform. (Guhl and Davey 2020, 9) These policy changes have undoubtedly made the moderation of the comment section of the USHMM’s videos much easier as the platform’s policies now fully support such actions.

Institutions dealing with heavy topics such as the Holocaust, especially when the truth of the events are directly under attack, need to curate their digital media carefully. The decision on whether to allow dialogue in comments under the videos is an important one. Dialogue is a good way to encourage public engagement with the content produced; however, dialogue can bring in people acting in bad faith. If only positive comments are allowed, this can be seen as censorship of certain viewpoints. While perusing the comments on the YouTube channel of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I only saw positive comments –– whether this is due to their curation of the comment section or to the fact that only those who are interested in the topic for positive education are seeking out this information is unknown. According to Amelia Wong, who previously moderated the comments for the USHMM’s YouTube channel, a set of criteria was developed to prevent abuse, denial, and hate from spreading through the comments on their videos. (Wong 2011, 104) Wong’s article on the social media of the USHMM was written before the changes of YouTube’s terms of service in 2019, so it is unclear what exactly the affect of the changes have been to the channel in general, but the current state of the comments shows that a similar trend of keeping up the positivity is continuing.

Since the conflict between Israel and Palestine broke out in late 2023 all of the USHMM’s latest videos have had the comments turned off. This could have been a preemptive attempt to avoid conflict in the comments, or a response to comments that were made as the conflict began in earnest. Either way, clearly the moderators of the YouTube channel have had to adjust their strategy based on the current events happening in Israel and Gaza. While silencing the ability for discussion is something that Wong had written was not something that the USHMM was interested in, clearly the conflict has created a need for extra protections and safeguards for the channel’s health. (Wong 2011, 104-105)

YouTube Shorts

A newer part of the USHMM’s channel is the inclusion of shorts. YouTube Shorts are videos that are of 60 seconds or less duration. Shorts are YouTube’s attempt to find the popularity of Vine or TikTok with the short video format. Often these short video formats are used to grab the attention for a brief period before moving on to the next video. While shorts are an interesting approach to appealing to the attention span of the current generation, some might think that they are lacking the context needed to fully understand the story. (Pagenstecher 2018, 117) With more serious content, the media form of a Short seems to be generally less meaningful and less engaging than what the subject matter seems to dictate. The USHMM has used the format of the Short in a couple different ways, some of which seem to fit the tone of the rest of the channel, while one series of three videos does not.

Majority of the shorts on the channel are the videos in the series “Truth Is…”. These shorts focus on the physical evidence left behind by the Holocaust. In the 60 second videos, an object is presented by the survivor that it is attached to. The survivor describes the object and how it shows the truth of their story. The objects range from a photograph of their family to a doll, to an ID card. The wide range of objects, from innocent to sinister show the true scope of how people were affected by the Holocaust and the memories that were tainted by it. There are a couple of videos that tell the stories of victims and survivors but without narration, relying solely on text to give context to the images shown. Overall, these fit the general theme of the rest of the YouTube channel, using the survivors’ stories to explore the truth in the history of the Holocaust.

There are three shorts that drastically deviate from the rest of the videos. The first being “Submit Your Questions to Andrew (Andy)” (USHMM Youtube 2) and the subsequent videos of Andrew Jampoler, a survivor, answering two questions that were posed in the comments of the first short. This type of question-and-answer video is fairly common in the short form video format. However, to me this format feels very lighthearted and lacking the gravity that the rest of the channel provides. The two questions that Mr. Jampoler answered, “Do you know exactly who saved you?”(USHMM Youtube 1) and “What did you learn in your journey?” (USHMM Youtube 3) were interesting questions to see answered. However, the drastic difference in the tone and style of the video was quite jarring. The short format of the video did not allow for Mr. Jampoler to elaborate on his answers, nor even to finish his thoughts as the first of the two answers was cut off due to the short format.

While a question-and-answer format would be a good way to continue to educate the audience of the YouTube channel, using the Shorts question and answer format would be a mistake. With the live technology that the USHMM has been using for many years already, a question-and-answer livestream would allow for a more natural flow and for the answers to be complete and fully fleshed out. Overall, the Shorts format does not fully remove the context as some might worry it would, but only if the videos are very carefully crafted. The biggest problem would be the fact that these shorts can be mixed into the algorithm and be shown in the middle of inappropriate videos given the content and theme of the USHMM’s Shorts.

How to Move Forward

As time moves forward, the available living memory of the Holocaust shrinks. Survivors die out and their voices and testimonies are lost. We find ourselves further and further removed from the horrors of the Holocaust. As the twenty-first century proceeds, humanity finds itself facing one crisis after another. This constant flood of trauma and pain through the media has desensitized the general populace to such horrors. (Clark 2005, 266) Mary Marshall Clark, a lecturer on oral history at Columbia University, comments on this:

“The danger is that the speed and scope of the media threaten to overwhelm and replace personal memory, contributing to a new and insidious indifference that cannot be explained by a lack of knowledge.” (Clark 2005, 267)

Social media platforms operate based on continuous bombardment of information and media that has led to mental fatigue and lack of attention span in its users. This lack of attention can lead to issues with the proper contextualization of the trauma and the pain that the videos of the USHMM are trying to convey. While the visual imagery of the survivor telling their story is powerful, the indifference of a modern or future viewer may render all of the effort pointless.

With modern pain dulling the shock of the past, how can institutions like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum keep modern audiences engaged with their message? Their YouTube series Eyewitness to History is a treasured archive of the testimonies of the survivors of the Holocaust. The engagement with the videos is often positive; however, the previous curation of the comment section and the current disabling of comments, makes it difficult to know what exactly the engagement of the channel is. With the current conflict in Israel and Palestine causing a great deal of attention to be drawn to the subject of the Holocaust, there is as great a need as ever for channels like the USHMM to continue producing content that can get through the mental fatigue and grab the attention of those searching for information. By using YouTube Shorts, the USHMM has a chance to take advantage of the short form media to transmit small snippets of information to an audience that may not have been seeking out information directly like with their other videos.

With evolving media technologies and strategies, the USHMM seems primed to continue using social media and digital content to spread awareness and education. With continued use of their digital collections and carefully curated content, there is a great deal of possibility in their YouTube channel. The use of Shorts may assist in their ability to reach a previously untapped audience, as the YouTube algorithm works its magic. As long as the social media curators continue to respect the tone and themes that they are bound by, there is a lot that can be achieved by their current model.