Did Whoopi really think the Holocaust wasn't about race?!?

I am going to agree with you. I have no idea how the Holocaust is taught in high school.

Also class of 91, and the emphasis was on the American impact of WWII and about Judaism as a religion. Then and even now they try to cram so much history into a year that the curriculum just glosses over all of it. And even world history is supremely brief and glossed over, and skewed to US involvement. Heck they can take 200 years and jam it into 2 chapters which is about 2 weeks worth of work. We did not read or even hear about Mein Kampf in history class and my kids didn’t either. I didn’t know about until the current book series I’m reading mentioned it, and I do know more than some about WWII because my husband is a history buff.

The series I’m reading right now by an author about my age made a comment in the book between a Nazi commander and a resistance fighter, he said that even though Jesus was a Jew he “overcame his disability” and became a Christian. And that the reich was there to continue that path to create an aryan nation, with the emphasis being on removing the less desirable and that includes religion, disabilities and anything else that makes someone inferior. (Their words, not mine)

It would be "better" for her if she did resign. 

from Wikipedia:
About her stage surname, she claimed in 2011, "My mother did not name me Whoopi, but Goldberg is my name—it's part of my family, part of my heritage, just like being black", and "I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don't go to temple, but I do remember the holidays."[16] She has stated that "people would say 'Come on, are you Jewish?' And I always say 'Would you ask me that if I was white? I bet not.'"[16] One account recalls that her mother, Emma Johnson, thought the family's original surname was "not Jewish enough" for her daughter to become a star.[16] Researcher Henry Louis Gates Jr. found that all of Goldberg's traceable ancestors were African Americans, that she had no known German or Jewish ancestry, and that none of her ancestors were named Goldberg.[12] Results of a DNA test, revealed in the 2006 PBS documentary African American Lives, traced part of her ancestry to the Papel and Bayote people of modern-day Guinea-Bissau. Her admixture test indicates that she is of 92 percent sub-Saharan African origin and of 8 percent European origin.[17]


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whoopi_Goldberg

I will admit that for a good part of my life, I too thought the Holocaust was about religion. But as I learned more, mostly from a college class I had as an adult, it became clear it was about race. Until that class, I thought only practicing Jews were targeted and sent to the camps. I was surprised when I learned that someone could have been born and raised Christian, yet if there was someone Jewish in their family tree, they were considered a Jew, so for Hitler, it was about him thinking of being Jewish as a race. I didn't know until I was an adult that Naziism is white supremacy. I also do not remember learning in school all of the other groups that Hitler targeted in order to make a "pure" race. What I learned in school was that Hitler hated Jews. But I went to school in the 60s and 70s ,so...

I am going to ask my kids what they learned in HS about the Holocaust.

Today, I think there is no excuse for Whoopi G to not know that the Holocaust was about race, not religion.

I think this is a decent summary of what I understood of nazi racial ideology, from what I learned at school. The important thing is the nazi ideals and beliefs, that’s what determined their actions towards them. You have to understand their thinking, abhorrent as it is. It was not based on anthropological concepts of *race*.

encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/victims-of-the-nazi-era-nazi-racial-ideology

This is a description of a PBS program called The Master Race. It contains statements from people who witnessed-and ones who participated in the Holocaust. It specifically mentions the master race.

Full Program Description
Master Race
Nazism overtakes German society
Original broadcast: Monday, June 15 at 9pm
(check local listings for re-broadcast dates)


"A sea of swastikas. We were out in the streets and went to the Brandenburg Gate and watched the Nazis marching into power. Restaurants were open almost all night. People were drinking, there was a huge commotion. We were shocked by this incredible upsurge and the sudden swing to Nazis." Josef Felder remembers the eve of Adolf Hitler's inauguration as Chancellor. The following day, the national socialists swept to power and the German people would take their first steps down a new road.


Berlin, 1933: With a unique blend of nationalism, militarism, and racial theory, Adolf Hitler persuades millions that they are a unique people -- a master race with a special destiny. He promises a more orderly and united society, free of industrial conflict and ripe with opportunity and new jobs. Luise Essig remembers Hitler and her first Nazi Party party -- a Harvest Festival: "We all felt the same, the same happiness and joy. Harvest Festival was a 'thank you' for us farmers having a future again. Things were looking up. I believe no statesman has ever been as loved as Adolf Hitler was then. It's all come flooding back to me. Those were happy times."

An entire generation was taught to live the ideal German life the Nazi's prescribed. Reinhard Spitzy remembers: "I personally was in the SS. 'Selected people shall be the future aristocratic spinebone of the German nation.' I felt myself very much flattered by being chosen for this. And then the uniform was very beautiful -- black. Of course we liked the uniform and boots and all that."

The SS had originated as Hitler's bodyguards -- but they would soon spearhead the drive to confirm the German people's supremacy. To build national unity, the Nazi's turned to blame: The Allies of the First World War were responsible for the country's economic distress; weak leadership of the 1920s contributed to Germany's problems. And then there were the Jews. The Nazi's drew on old hatred and old jealousies; says Rienhard Spitzy: "[The Jews] were much slyer in business . . . excellent in literature, in theaters, in cinema, in science. And of course all that made for a strong and hard-line anti-Semitism."

"It was a process which developed slowly, but surely, and took over all sections of the population who had never thought about it before," recalls Horst Slesina, an officer in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry from 1934 to 1945. "A lot of them talked about it, not necessarily believing it. But gradually their brains became fogged. They started to say, 'The Jews are our misfortune'."

The misfortune, however, was to be a Jew -- or black, homosexual, mentally or physically challenged, a Gypsy, or among any one of the minorities then judged to be subhuman. Records were made on the basis of physical appearance and ancestry. Partners had to be chosen with great care. Rienhard Spitzy: "I was affected by this when I married. . . . We thought that we should, that we could form a new ideal race -- and I chose my wife according to this line."

For those who weren't considered a threat to the German race, life was improving by 1937. Germans were regaining their pride as Hitler's aggressive diplomacy forced respect from European neighbors. At home, propaganda continued to find eager listeners. Friedl Sonnenberg remembers: "Young people were the most excited by the propaganda, over ninety percent of us were behind everything that went on." And state film and radio would drive the message home, one idea above all others -- "in a word," says Horst Slesina, "the greatness of the German people. Propaganda gave people a big boost in confidence for the first time."

In March 1938, Germany absorbed Austria in direct defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. It was a euphoric moment -- for the Nazis. Norbert Lopper was a nineteen-year-old Viennese Jew: "There had always been anti-Semitism in Vienna, long before 1938. But then it became official and that made it much worse." The Nazis were determined to expand their territory, invading Czechoslovakia in January 1939. With Hitler's invasion of Poland that September came the Second World War. And by 1941, the decision to systematically kill all Jews -- the "Final Solution" -- had been made.

Ejszyszki, Lithuania in September 1941, the Nazi's led some 3,500 Jews to pits outside the town and ordered them to undress. Zvi Michaeli was sixteen: "When I saw Rabbi Zushe undressed, I thought this was the end. The verses from Psalms that he recited in our ears up until then -- I'd been confident that we wouldn't die. And my father was saying 'You will live, don't be afraid.' He put his left hand on me. I saw my brother David climbing up on his thigh; so tight, he clung so tight. He didn't let go of him until the last minute. And the shots of the machine gun. There was a mixture of voices, of people crying, and children, and the shots -- and the dust -- and everything mingled together.... I felt my father give me a push and then fall on top of me. He covered me. He wanted me to live."

Shootings took place in thousands of towns and villages across the Third Reich. Jürgen Kroger was an interpreter for one of the execution squads: "They said the Jews were an inferior race. One of them said to me, 'It's like having a rosebush and the rosebush has got greenfly on it. You have to get rid of the greenfly.' The Jews weren't human beings for them. It was like killing fleas."

Dora Schwartz was sent to a concentration camp. She describes her arrival at Auschwitz: "When we arrived, we didn't know where we were. We suspected this was a place of death. We saw those chimneys. We saw the smoke from the chimneys. The sight made you shudder. This was going to be our fate."

Hans Münch served as an SS doctor at Auschwitz and remembers the gas chambers: "[The chamber] was almost hermetically sealed. You could hardly hear anything. Then the Zyclon B gas was thrown in from the top and the doctor had to check after about ten minutes to see if it was all over. . . . You looked through the peephole and if everyone was on the floor, then it was alright. Then the doors...were opened and lorries drove up to take them away more easily."

Since 1933, Nazi Germany had sung the rousing songs, been stirred by the Führer's rhetoric, and shared the glow of early military success. Twelve years later, on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally. Only now would the true cost of the Nazi pursuit of a special racial destiny be exposed.

and 100 yrs ago, italians and those from southern europe were not considered "white".. but inferior.. as many immigrants came to america..and they were "othered".. dirty.. non protestant, non white.. all sorts of horrible ideas.

so these trends manifest in many ways and many times.  the jewish people have been subject to this for hundreds of years.

I was in high school in the 1970's. our class never made it through usa history in ww2.. (though our history teacher had been an RAF pilot). we didn't learn about the holocaust. though I personally knew people who had escaped europe in the 1930's. we heard about it.. a very little. I learned most about it from tv shows, and my love of reading history. my kids know about it because I made sure they knew about it. 

I think also the diary of anne frank's popularity in the later 1970's was the source of information for many.. we certainly did not read it in school. 

sleepingbooty.. studying a war that took place in the place you are studying.. sort of like the usa studies the civil war.. it happened to us!! vs studying a war that mostly took place elsewhere.. to other people. ..not to say the americans were not greatly affected.. but combat did not happen in most of our country.

that is a flaw in history instruction in the usa.. mostly much of the action is removed from where you live. it is always-.."over there" and not here. we have poor instruction in geography also.. too many "man on the street" interviews.. people could not name the continents, could not tell you when ww2 was or where it was and who was fighting. somehow americans are ok with generally having poor general knowledge.

Lots of good points in this thread. I would like to point out that anti-semitism was rampant all over Europe and here in the US, too. What little is taught to US kids in school glosses right over that. Jewish families were desperate to move somewhere safe in the 30’s, and no one wanted them. Germany was not the only country where politicians talked of  “ The Jewish problem”, just the only country to decide genocide was the answer.

Oppression and hatred of Jews over most of the occupied world goes back well over 2,000 years.

Everything you say is true, although I will say that it's not really a public/private school divide here -- there are excellent private and public schools, and really, really questionable private and public schools, unfortunately.  Part of the drive here to de-fund public education is to get more $$ into the hands of the private schools that are going to do exactly the opposite of what you'd hope with respect to history education.

I don't watch The View, but I think it's ridiculous to fire, or suspend someone when they make a mistake. You have a conversation, you don't silence them. 
And it seems to be a conversation that needs to be aired.