COLLINSVILLE, IL (KMOX) - When two middle school students used the Nazi salute, a Metro East teacher didn't ask for punishment. Instead, Elizabeth Baumgartner asked her principal for permission to teach the class about the holocaust.
Baumgartner's students were filling into the classroom when she saw it, "I noticed two of my boys, my students, giving another one of my students what looked like the 'Heil Hitler' sign. And I thought, 'no, that can't be right' and then they did it again!" So she asked what it was and when they told her 'Hitler is cool', she asked another question, "What do you know about him?" The answer was -- nothing.
Baumgartner is a Dual Language teacher at Dorris Intermediate School in Collinsville. Many of her students and parents are immigrants, so she tells KMOX, she knew it was unlikely they had knowledge of Nazi Germany. Even though she teaches math and science, she decided she would have to teach some history.
Over the course of the following two months, she showed videos of holocaust survivors, and read the students a work of historical fiction about two Jewish boys who befriend each other at Auschwitz concentration camp but ultimately die in captivity. The final lesson was a visit to the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum. The experience brought some students to tears. The reaction of the boys who first did the Nazi salute? One in disbelief that something like the holocaust could happen, then other expressing remorse for his actions. "He said, 'I'll never do that again."
Baumgartner says it was a more powerful lesson to learn the truth, than be punished for what they had never been taught.