Alberta Education removes document suggesting students learn about positive attributes of Nazis

Alberta Education deleted an educational guidelines document and promised to review all others on its website after multiple groups flagged a section which suggested students learn about the positive attributes of Nazis.

A reflection section in Alberta Education's Guidelines for Recognizing Diversity and Promoting Respect asked: "Does the resource reveal both the positive and negative behaviours and attitudes of the various groups portrayed? For instance, if a video details war atrocities committed by the Nazis, does it also point out that before World War II, German government's policies substantially strengthened the country's economy?"

The document also said that "some Canadian history print and digital resources dwell on the mistreatment of [First Nations, Métis, and Inuit] Peoples by Caucasians and do not include any examples of non-FNMI individuals or groups actively opposing this type of treatment."

"The resource should attempt to provide some balance by presenting factors causing the behaviour or portraying positive qualities exhibited by members of the group that have acted inappropriately," it said.

Education Minister Adriana LaGrange denounced the document on social media Friday, saying she had immediately instructed her department to remove it from all Alberta Education publications.

She said the document contained "wrongheaded views" and "horrendous content" and claimed neither she nor anyone in her office had seen it before Friday morning.

"There is not a 'positive' side to tell of the murderous Nazi regime, as this document wrongfully suggests," she posted on Twitter.

Press secretary Nicole Sparrow said the ministry has since initiated a content review of all documents on its website, "with a particular focus on longstanding documents that have not been recently reviewed."

On Friday morning, the Jewish Federation of Edmonton and Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies contacted the education ministry with concerns about how the document portrayed the Nazi regime.

"It dragged the world into the largest global armed conflict in history and in the end it destroyed its own country so what positive attributes could we possibly find in that?" said Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, director of policy at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

According to Wayback Machine, a digital archive, the Nazis' inclusion in the document pre-dates recent governments. A version from 2008 contained a paragraph with similar wording.

The document was first created in 1984 but has since been revised multiple times.

Sparrow said numerous documents were updated in 2019 to remove references from previous legislation.

"A general review of the document content was not done at that time and at no point did this document come to the minister's office for approval," she said in an email.