Holocaust, Police and Human Rights
(By Federal Police Belgium and Kazerne Dossin – Mechelen, Belgium)
The workshop presents the training of police officers of the integrated Belgian Police at the Holocaust Museum Kazerne Dossin. If focuses on human rights and racism, noting how group pressure can effect members of an organization and how people can deal with the dilemmas they are confronted with.
The aim of the course is to provide the trainees with a profound understanding of the phenomenon of discrimination and exclusion. Special emphasis is placed on the dynamic of the power of mass and group aggression while stressing the free choice of individual persons to say no to group pressure and dynamics.
We want to achieve these goals through ‘education by remembrance’. In this concept, we do not want to compare present and past, neither do we want to judge the past with today’s criteria. Instead, we are looking for timeless mechanisms such as tyranny, violence, prejudice, propaganda, xenophobia, exclusion, bureaucracy and dehumanization.
