PCE Pop-Up: What You Do Matters: Lessons from the Holocaust

On January 27, 2026, PCE hosted a Pop-Up on What You Do Matters: Lessons from the Holocaust.

Photo Credit: What You Do Matters Institute

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators from 1933-1945. The Holocaust provides important insight into the consequences when a government shifts the mission of the police from protecting individuals to supporting the abuse of basic human rights.  How Germany changed in less than a decade from a free, democratic, and scientifically advanced society to a totalitarian regime that systematically targeted and murdered millions of its own citizens is a lesson a free society must learn. In the words of Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial in 1945, “Civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
 

After a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2006, law enforcement leaders in Arizona recognized that the Holocaust is much more than a chapter from a history book.  Working with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Prescott, Arizona, law enforcement leaders from across Arizona developed a powerful curriculum to ensure that the core values of our democracy are upheld. What You Do Matters examines policing within the legal and political framework of Nazi Germany, a journey that eventually turned those who should protect life and liberty into those who intimidated, humiliated, deported, and eventually murdered millions of innocent people. Using historical images and stories from the Holocaust, trained facilitators engage students in a dialogue about the role of law enforcement in today’s communities and the importance of core values in ensuring the integrity and vibrancy of democracy.