Walz opposed role-play game as Holocaust teaching method

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz

As Tim Walz, newly minted Democratic vice presidential candidate, was inveighing against trends in Holocaust education in his 2001 master’s thesis, the high school where he worked was employing one of those methods: a “game” that, by today’s standards, would repel almost every expert in the field.

A fellow teacher, Bob Ihrig, divided his class into halves: Some would have to wear yellow stars and play Jews, while the others would play the part of Gestapo officers charged with tormenting them.

A Jewish former student who was disturbed by the activity told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last week that Walz had stepped in to stop the game after her father complained. Her father, Stewart Ross, and Ihrig, subsequently told JTA that they did not recall that.

What is certain is that in another context, Walz had cautioned against exercises like the one Ihrig used, which was called the “Gestapo Game” and was a trademarked activity conducted in settings around the world. In his thesis for his master’s degree at Minnesota State University, in experiential education, he argued for changes to Holocaust education. Walz noted that researchers had “deemed counterproductive” activities in which students were asked to play roles from the Holocaust.

“Trying to simulate the conditions that victims of the Holocaust experienced was absurd,” Walz wrote. “The result on student learning was a trivialization of the horrors experienced during the Holocaust.”

Walz was not alone in objecting to the game: The activity championed by Ihrig is anathema in the field of Holocaust education today. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the Anti-Defamation League all warn against Holocaust role plays.

“Even when great care is taken to prepare a class for such an activity, simulating experiences from the Holocaust remains pedagogically unsound,” the U.S. museum says on its website.

Walz’s thesis reflected a longstanding interest in teaching about Holocaust and genocide that predated Walz’s years at Mankato West High where he taught geography and extended into his current tenure as Minnesota’s governor.

In his thesis, Walz argued that schools would do better to remove teaching about the Holocaust from units about World War II and instead situate it within instruction about genocides and human rights. That way, he said, students could understand the root causes of the violence with the aims of preventing future genocides.

The belief appeared to be long-held. Walz had previously taught about the Holocaust and other genocides in an early teaching role in Alliance, NE. There, after studying the Holocaust as one of several genocides, his class accurately predicted that Rwanda was the most likely place for a future genocide to take place; one unfolded there the following year.

Though Walz did not discuss his outlook on Holocaust education with some of his closest colleagues at Mankato West, two told JTA that Walz was an inspiring teacher and good colleague who participated in the collaboration that took place informally in their department.

Ihrig said he first encountered the Gestapo game in a catalog for teachers in the late 1970s – making him one of thousands to purchase Rabbi Raymond Zwerin’s Gestapo game since its release in 1976.

Zwerin, a congregational rabbi in Denver who was married to a Holocaust survivor, designed the game in response to clamor from classroom educators for more engaging curriculum materials about the Holocaust, according to a 2022 story in the Forward. He told the news outlet that the game was meant to illustrate the role that luck – mazel, in Yiddish – played in survival.

“I think about my wife’s situation. Her parents were killed, her sister was killed, and she escapes,” he said. “Somebody found her on the street, as a little kid, and got her to the right ship at the right time. Total mazel.”

Zwerin’s game landed in a receptive climate, though over time was largely rejected.

Wiesel was appalled

Among early critics of the teaching method was Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, author and Holocaust survivor. A New York Times story reported that Wiesel was “appalled by the fact that well-meaning teachers think they have conveyed the meaning of the Holocaust to children by locking them in small rooms to simulate gas chambers” – a move that he traced to an NBC miniseries.

Ihrig’s classroom was never made to resemble a gas chamber. But the Gestapo activity morphed and expanded as generations of Mankato West students experienced it, Ihrig said. Students suggested that some of them act as the Gestapo. The stars, he said, were his own innovation.

Holocaust educators today say there are far better ways to teach that lesson: through survivor testimonies, by examining primary source materials and by learning about psychology and human behavior. They say role plays serve to traumatize students and trivialize the experiences of survivors and victims while not teaching anything about history.

Ihrig said he understood that times have changed and that many would see the simulation as “traumatizing” today. But he also recalled years of positive feedback including from a school board member who said it benefited her daughter when she took Ihrig’s class.