Indiana Social Studies WH.6.5
The Standard
Examine the causes, course, and effects of the Holocaust, including accounts of camp victims, survivors, liberators, and perpetrators, and summarize world responses, including the Nuremberg Trials.
2026 Indiana Academic Standards: K-12 Social Studies
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Explain how Nazi antisemitism, discriminatory laws, and war led to mass murder. Use victims' writings, survivor testimony, liberator reports, and perpetrator records to trace what happened. Describe wartime responses and the postwar trials.
What Mastery Looks Like
- A student can put exclusion, ghettos, mass shootings, deportations, liberation, and the trials in order. They can use a source detail to explain a Nazi action and name a specific government response or failure to act.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may think the Holocaust began with death camps, overlooking years of exclusion, violence, ghettos, and mass shootings. They may assume governments acted quickly to stop the killings or confuse the 1935 Nuremberg Laws with the postwar trials.
How to Assess It
- Give students three short source excerpts: a 1935 anti-Jewish law, a 1942 deportation order, and a 1946 trial verdict. Ask them to put the excerpts in order and explain what each shows.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs five dated cards: a 1935 anti-Jewish law, ghetto diary excerpt, deportation record, liberator report, and trial verdict for sequencing.
Ask students: What does a survivor's testimony reveal about deportation that a Nazi transport record leaves out?
Run a source-sort relay: groups place dated excerpts under causes, events, effects, wartime responses, or postwar justice, then defend one placement.
On the UN website, find Article 2 of the Genocide Convention; match one listed act to evidence used at the Nuremberg trials.
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Related Standards
- USH.5.2
Identify key leaders and events from World War II, and explain the significance of each.
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- USH.5.3
Describe the policies that led up to the Holocaust and Hitler's state-sponsored "Final Solution" and explain the Allied response to war crimes.
- WH.6.4
Identify the causes (i.e., social, political, militaristic, and economic) and key events of World War II, and analyze the impact this war had on the global comm...
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