Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies (FSWC) hosted a group of Grade 12 students from a local high school with the Leadership 101 workshop. The smaller group size and interest of each of the students who participated made it a very meaningful day of learning and discussion. This group of students belong to a special class that allows them to develop leadership skills by developing and designing their own leadership program. They then visit younger students in elementary schools to teach them about leadership, self-esteem, and other important topics. FSWC Educator Elena was impressed with with the program as it helps high school students develop leadership and speaking skills while also guiding them to think critically about how to communicate information effectively.
The first half of the workshop was dedicated to examining the concept of leadership from a variety of historical perspectives. Elena talked quite a bit about Nazi leadership and the ways that Hitler, Goebbels, and other top officials within the Third Reich manipulated public opinion and used fear and anger to mobilize public support. One of the most interesting conversations from the day centred on the question of whether people who were Nazis during World War II should be put on trial and jailed now, more than 75 years later. We watched a few clips of Reinhold Hanning’s trial and conviction as well as Oskar Groening. Both men were young men when they were SS officers working at Auschwitz and both were found to be guilty. The students were shocked to learn that both men had been around the same age as them when they were at Auschwitz. We talked about how many people who worked with the Nazis claimed they were “just following orders,” and how much responsibility should be attributed to individuals in the context of state-sponsored genocide. Most of the students didn’t know much about the Nuremberg trials or post-war justice efforts of Simon Wiesenthal so we talked extensively about what justice means in the face of millions of innocent lives being stolen. At the end of the discussion, everyone seemed to agree that a key part of justice is transparency and open discussion about the crimes committed. Elena explained to them the distinction between “justice” and “vengeance” as described by Simon Wiesenthal and told them about his work in the post-war period. She also asked the students to consider whether many of the people brought to trial by Wiesenthal would have ever been caught if he hadn’t taken it upon himself as an individual to dedicate his life to Nazi hunting.