A great way to get students excited about World War 2 is by introducing them to two things:
1. The magnitude of the violence that occured
2. The way countries portray the events in their textbooks today
Descriptions and graphic images from the Holocaust the Rape of Nanking could easily illustrate the barbaric and violent atrocities that were committed by the German and Japanese armies. Then an engaging question for students would be "Well, how do those countries portray those events in their books today?"
A great book to quote from is "Censoring History", a collection of essays that focus on American, German, and Japanese textbooks and how they treat war stories. One section lifts paragraphs from 4 textbooks and shows how the end of world war 2 is described differently by a Russian book, a Japanese book, an American book, and a British Book.
This would be a great tie in to the excerpts in our binders from Ienaga Saburo's book on Imperial Japan during World War II, because although Japanese textbooks have been notorious for simplifying history, Saburo acts as a critical dissenter to what can be percieved as a monogomous Japan.
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