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As just one person who experienced education in the US, including about the Holocaust, I have no informed opinion on the whether education about the Holocaust in the US is really a meaningful contributor of the phenomenon you're talking about, but I do sense that something went wrong somewhere in the education system to lead to the phenomenon you're talking about. I read Night in middle school and watched Schindler's List during my free time (as a budding film/Steven Spielberg fan, not as a Holocaust/World War 2 enthusiast) around that age, and I was certainly hammered with messages as much as anyone about how evil the Nazis were. And certainly the evilness was taught as having to do with their specific ideology and their specific actions, but more generalized lessons were also taught about things like groupthink (not in that term; I didn't read 1984 until high school) and group-based guilt/resentment. One of the earliest films about Nazis I was shown at school The Wave (1981) in either late grade school or early middle school, which was presented as a true story about a US high school teacher conducting a social engineering experiment on his students to show how easy it would be for them to get swept up in some fascist-like movement - one that lacked any overt similarities to Nazism - due to social pressure. The lesson I got through my education on the subject was partly specifically about the Nazis, but mostly generally about social pressure and pitfalls of ideology. Like most people, I didn't think too much about this, but I had believed that this was the overall lesson most people in the US had gotten from the education about the Holocaust and the Nazis.
Of course, as anyone paying attention to the culture wars knows, one big movement/cluster of movements en vogue the past decade has been enforcing groupthink by explicitly advocating bullying people who step out of line, with that groupthink including explicitly condemning individuals due to their group-based guilt, while simultaneously deriding their opponents as Nazis and fascists. This completely caught me off guard and forced me to drastically update my model of how other Americans perceived the Holocaust. Given my own experience with education about the Holocaust, I didn't really think that the style/quality of the education about it in the US had been the issue. My guess had been that the draw of groupthink is just that seductive, but from your post, I'm wondering how much of it is that the education about the Holocaust in the US is mostly really simplistic and flawed. I feel like I can notice signs of such when thinking back with this additional context, but of course I can't discount a sort of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon with confirmation bias there.
I almost wonder what sort of curriculum/syllabus/media list you could put together to try and warn against groupthink and getting caught up in movements. I'd suggest Dune Messiah, but that novel might be weird without the context of the original Dune and it also doesn't exactly show how things went from Paul getting sweet revenge at the end of Dune to being associated with genocide by the start of Messiah. I almost hope that Villeneuve's second Dune movie shows that process happening.
It used to be kind of part of the standardized curriculum -- 1984, Catcher in the Rye, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies; all screamed "beware of authority".
Not sure how much that's changed; my kid is "reading" (listening to books-on-tape in class) Fahrenheit 451 for junior high English, so that's something I guess -- his teacher seems quirky, so IDK how widespread that is.
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