Zwischen Dethematisierung und Demonetarisierung Der Holocaust in Darstellungen von NS und Zweitem Weltkrieg auf YouTube

Between Dethematizing and Demonetisation: The Holocaust in depictions of National-Socialism and World War Two on YouTube – In September 2018, an ambitious and highly noteworthy project for the construction and distribution of a broad-reaching portrayal of 20th-century violence in the digital age was launched: the YouTube channel World War Two (WW2). Their mission was to present the experiences of those who lived through the war in a radically objective, apolitical, and detailed manner. The main series, sharing the same title as the channel, focused on military events, while another series titled War Against Humanity (WAH) would address war crimes, human rights abuses, the mass murder of civilians and prisoners of war, Nazi euthanasia crimes, and the Holocaust. This division of the narrative into a military history (main series) and a separate history of war crimes and the Holocaust (side series) raises important questions about the conditions, opportunities, and limitations that YouTube’s media and economic structures impose on the portrayal of war, mass violence, and genocide. The paper also examines how these structures influence the narrative and shape the presented historical image, and what consequences arise for the depiction of war and history from an academic perspective. Lastly, it explores the reasons behind this narrative split: whether it was a deliberate decision to systematically differentiate the storytelling or a strategic move shaped by YouTube’s media and economic constraints. The question arises: to what extent can historical education on digital platforms like YouTube, driven by the need for content monetization, still align closely with academic standards?