The multi-award-winning educational app ‘Escaping the Holocaust’ is now available as a modern web application
The OeAD’s ERINNERN:AT programme, in collaboration with the Lucerne University College of Teacher Education and the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences (FHV), has thoroughly revised and further developed the multi-award-winning educational app ‘Fleeing the Holocaust’. The new web application was launched to mark World Refugee Day 2026 and helps young people to draw parallels between historical experiences of flight during the Nazi era and contemporary issues of flight and displacement.
The original learning app was developed between 2016 and 2020 and, with more than 150,000 downloads, ranks among the most successful digital educational resources in the sector of Holocaust education in the German-speaking world. Among other accolades, it was honoured with the Worlddidac Award and received the Austrian Ministry of Education’s seal of quality in 2022.
Based on five life stories, pupils meet survivors and witnesses of national socialism and the holocaust in video interviews and engage with their stories of flight. In this way, the app facilitates a form of engagement that is becoming increasingly important given the ever-dwindling number of living Holocaust survivors. The web app is suitable for teaching from Grade 8 onwards on topics such as the Holocaust, Nazism and the Second World War, as well as for exploring flight and migration in the past and present.
It also promotes individual learning: pupils select a person, explore in greater depth those aspects of their life story that particularly interest them, and create a personal album of their encounter. In doing so, they link memories with historical documents and learn to critically analyse and contextualise both sources. The results can then be discussed in class.
With support from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism and other funding bodies, the application underwent a major modernisation in 2025 and 2026. The previous app has been converted into a modern web application that is more flexible, technically more reliable and more secure. This means that, in future, it can be used on laptops, tablets and other devices regardless of the operating system, and meets the requirements of contemporary digital learning.
The further development of the learning app is also an example of successful international educational cooperation. The expertise in history didactics provided by the Lucerne University College of Teacher Education was combined with the technical and design implementation carried out by the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences (FHV). This enabled academic insights and digital educational innovation to be brought together in a joint project. In the spring of 2026, the new web app was trialled in Austrian and Swiss school classes. Feedback from the classroom was incorporated directly into the app’s further development. During a webinar on 22 June 2026, all project partners presented the historical didactic principles, the technical implementation and specific experiences from the classroom.
Web app: www.fliehen-holocaust.at
Further information: www.erinnern.at/lernmaterialien/app-fliehen
