One thing to keep in mind with a lot of responses is often when someone says “we didn’t learn about x in high school”, what they should be saying is “I didn’t learn about x in high school”. I’ve certainly heard former classmates claiming not to have learned something even though they were sitting next to me when I learned it.

When i was a preteen, we learned about WW2, mainly from a US perspective, and had a fairly large focus on the holocaust, including a visit to a holocaust museum.

As a teen, I had a class on specifically European history. In there, we learned about lot more about the rise of the nazis (though not much on Italian fascists).

Here’s the tl;dr on what I remember learning about then:

WWI ended with the treaty of Versailles which was not a realistic, sustainable peace. We learned about the economic trouble like hyperinflation. We learned about the beer hall putsch, and that it was effectively unpunished. We learned that Hitler then sought power through legal means by allying with a broad range of groups unhappy with the current government. As he rose to power, various elements were purged from the government. Concurrently, political violence from the stormtroopers suppressed minorities and other enemies from organizing against them. This culminated in Hitler being elected chancellor, and then the enabling act gave him ultimate power. In the night of the long knives, all the allied elements in the party were purged. After that was kristallnacht, the remilitarization of the rhineland, annexation of Austria and the sudetenland, and then finally the invasion of Poland.

Not good. All I know is that WW1 ended unfavorably for them, and that struggling under economic sanctions from the other Euro nations is a big part of what laid the stage for Hitler’s rise to power.

Average? Probably very little. I was in a decent school, and all I remember was a brief overview of the hyperinflation and reparations that led to rearrangements of german life. Like others, we read about the overall picture during the war, with a focus on holocaust victims.

I didn’t learn about the weimar republic until after college, and that was only found out about through casual browsing and mentions from others. The specific chain of events giving hitler his power were barely mentioned in formal education. I remember reading a short summary (maybe a diary entry?) of a first-hand account of the night of broken glass.

Rural Nebraska Middle School mid late 80s jr high highschool in the 90s. Regans policies hadn’t yet destroyed the education system. And the right wing was barely hanging on. History was taught really well

I’m in the demographic you’re looking for. It went something like this:

• End of WWI with the Treaty of Versailles
• Massive war repayment debts placed on Weimar Republic
• Beer Hall Putsch
• The Weimar Republic falling because of disenfranchised German citizens
• Nazi party rising in power in the Reichstag
• Brown shirts (SA)
• Burning of the Reichstag
• Hitler seizing power
• Night of the Long Knives
• The west ignoring military limits on German military expansion (aircraft, Panzer 1)
• Annexation of Austria
• Talk of leibenstrom

etc

Thats from memory. Apologies for butchering any spelling or some of those events out of order.

So, yes, lots and LOTS of things in the USA government right now are ringing alarm bells like crazy. Executive orders just this week of military support for local police “to root out immigrants” sound close to creation of the Brownshirts (SA). The villainization of immigrants sound disgustingly close to the targeting of various minority groups that Hitler targeted (Roma, Jews, gays, Poles).

School teaching of history has changed a lot since I was in K-12 … but at that time, I never had a history class that got so far as WW1. Yep. We spent months on the history of Europe from the Holy Roman Empire up to (barely) von Bismarck. That was it.

I suspect that was because teachers were staying away from any history that might be known to anyone who was actually alive. My daughter, on the other hand, had a teacher who spent months on the Vietnam War. I was glad to hear that.

OTOH, when TV was black and white, there was a whole series on WW2 created by the US army called The Big Picture, broadcast on hundreds of stations. Each of over 800 half-hour episodes were available to any TV station that would air them. So there was a time when ADULTS -could- learn that stuff … and no doubt many of those who lived through that era were curious what their relatives and friends died for.

I’m fairly sure that a lot of today’s elected politicians would have paid no attention to that stuff. Many of them move in a different mental culture than people who’ve lost relatives to the whims of dictators. And of course they’re sure they’re smarter than people were back then. Like the Prime Example.

Very familiar but much more from university than from high school.

History is second to math.

“Money money, business, money, go to college, money, greed is good, money, money”

Kids are brainwashed and people have forgotten that Greed is one of the seven deadly sins. The US now preaches greed as a virtue.

We learned about Anne Frank and read Night in middle school. In high school we had separate classes for US, world, and European history. We covered the beer hall putsch, kristalnacht, Reichstag fire, that Hitler was given emergency powers, etc. WWI reparations and hyperinflation. Propaganda and Josef Goebbels “if you repeat a lie long enough, people will start to believe it”. Watched some of Triumph of the Will. We also had separate classes covering western philosophy which included Nitzche and how Nazis appropriated the will to power. I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of the details. However I suspect this is more education than the average American receives.

The level of public education in American schools, about anything that isn’t a STEM precursor, is basically nonexistent. The STEM precursors are sometimes covered okay and sometimes covered poorly, depending on your school system, but outside of that it might as well be nothing.

I went to some good schools and I literally can’t think of a single thing I learned about World War 2 from school, let alone about Germany before the war. It all comes either from family talking to me about it or from my own reading. I like to think of myself that at this point I have some fairly in-depth understanding but that’s not because of school.

Most of my history / social studies classes, including AP history my senior year, focused on the United States. I think there was and is an AP World History, but my school didn’t offer it. So we learned about Pearl Harbor, and D-Day, and Nagasaki, but not much of the Euro-centric lead-up to war.

One of my social studies classes, maybe 9th grade or so, spent a period watching The Wave, which might be the closest part of my formal education to addressing OP’s question.

Plenty here are answering your question more directly so I’m going to answer it in a different way. I’m a 40 year old American by the way.

While we all would have learned about Nazi Germany and the rise of the Third Reich in school the depth will vary by state and type of schooling (public vs. private).

The most important thing, however, is to remember that it would have been taught from an American-centric perspective. For example, there wouldn’t have been much detail covered in all likelihood prior to WWII with the depth increasing greatly to its highest point where the US became involved in the war.

Basically, all history in US primary education is is essentially US history. It’ll cover global events in general terms but really only goes into detail when it involves the US.

Practically none. The only formal education I had that covered the 1930s focused on the Great Depression, and blaming it primarily on the Dust Bowl The same school system completely skipped WWI, and the only WWII lesson was a week on the Diary of Anne Frank.

Everything I know about the rise of Hitler, I learned on my own.

Those guys are older than me but the extent of my education on the matter was basically that Germany was experiencing a lot of poverty and inflation and stuff until Hitler came along and stole everyone’s hearts with his charisma

WWII, and actually the entire 20th century except for some civil rights stuff, was actually hardly covered in history class at all. But boy oh boy did we cover our Revolutionary War about 8 times over, and our Civil War like 5 times over. Most of my knowledge about WWII comes from family members and the History Channel (back when it was about history)

So much of English class, not even any history classes I had, was covering the Holocaust. US History covered everything from Columbus up to and including WW2. I also had European History in highschool, but we only got up to the War of the Roses (and frankly my teacher sucked so I didn’t retain much from that class).

But I live in California; one of the most progressive states in the country. Even a shitty school here can be better than the best school in, say, West Virginia; the state with the lowest scoring education system.