The experiment was carried out again last week with three thousands of students from Portuguese schools. In a brief survey carried out at the entrance to the Holocaust museum in Porto, students almost invariably state that Nazi policies of total extermination were applied to all victimized groups, blurring totally the distinct historical realities of the Roma, homosexuals, and Jewish victims.

The museum visit begins. First room: Auschwitz. Message: "For every ten victims, nine were Jewish." Further on, the guides explain: "The Final Solution only targeted the Jews, who were destined to be murdered in all territories that the National Socialists managed to occupy."
The Portuguese socialist mainstream confronts the Jewish community not only in synagogues, the Jewish state, or the teaching of Portuguese history. The cultural struggle extends to the Holocaust. Even about the name of the antisemitic doctrine of that era arouses animosity. Socialists call it Nazism, the community calls it "National Socialism, a sibling of Soviet socialism".

Studies show that when education shifts strictly to generalized tolerance, students frequently conflate the experiences of different targeted groups.

There is a tension in modern curricula between the "universalist" approach to Holocaust education focusing broadly on racism, and marginalized groups, and the "particularist" approach focusing on the specific targeting and near-total annihilation of European Jews).
Portuguese rulers, their media, cultural tools and education ministries have intentionally broadened Holocaust education into a broader civic and human rights curriculum aimed at protecting racial and sexual minorities.

The pedagogical goal is often to teach students about the dangers of prejudice, discrimination, and state-sponsored hatred by drawing lessons from the Holocaust that apply to contemporary human rights struggles. In this drive to make history universally applicable to modern diversity, racism, and inclusion, educational discourses and textbooks frequently dilute the specific, central role of antisemitism and the deliberate extermination of the Jewish people.

Educational researchers and historians have pointed out limits and complete distortions in this approach. By framing the Holocaust exclusively as a general crime against "minorities," official discourses are erasing the specific racial ideology the Nazis held, which categorized Jews not merely as a minority, but as an existential, global "anti-race" marked for total physical annihilation.

This tendency to subsume Jewish suffering under modern categories of minoritized defense has sparked extensive pedagogical debate, with scholars warning that obscuring the central Jewish identity of the victims distorts historical accuracy. The term genocide itself is today used against the Jew of the nations, the state of Israel.

A disgrace of education

Holocaust education in Portugal is based on "civic responsibility". The curriculum framework emphasizes tolerance and fostering active citizenship to prevent future atrocities. The Ministry of Education ensures the Holocaust is taught through a cross-disciplinary approach rather than just as a historical event. The Holocaust and human rights violations are core components in the 9th-grade curriculum, as well as in 11th and 12th-grade History (History A and History B). It is also integrated into specialized subjects like History, Cultures and Democracy.

Under the National Strategy for Citizenship Education, the topic about the Holocaust is approached through the lens of Human Rights "to promote empathy and social justice". In addition, launched by the socialist government (Resolution No. 51/2020), the Never Forget Project intended to equip educators with resources to "fight against racism, xenophobia, and disregard for human dignity". The result was that the Project coordinator spent years wandering who knows where and never even visited the only museum in the country on the subject and which receives 50 thousand teenagers a year.