What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the victims?
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5.
Who were the victims?
Key questions
1. Why should students know about the victims of Nazism?
2. Who do students identify as the victims of the Holocaust?
3. What do students think happened to non-Jewish victim groups, and why?
4. What, if anything, do students think was distinctive about the fate of the Jews?
5. How do students explain ‘Why the Jews’?
Key findings
1. The majority of students see Jews as victims of the Holocaust. With age, students increasingly
believe other groups to be Holocaust victims as well.
2. Homosexuals are most likely to be included alongside Jews as Holocaust victims, followed by
disabled people and then Roma and Sinti (Gypsies). 1
3. Though students are aware that various groups were persecuted by the Nazis, most are not familiar
with the specific policies enacted against each group or how policies developed.
4. Students tend to presume all groups were simply murdered and that they were killed because they
were in some way ‘different’. ‘Difference’ is explained in various ways.
5. Most students indicate there was something distinctive about the Jewish experience but struggle to
articulate just what that was. This can be attributed to key gaps in substantive knowledge.
6. While students are conscious that Jews were killed in large numbers, they do not see the Nazis’
intent to murder all Jews everywhere they could reach as a defining feature of the Jewish experience.
A significant proportion of students are in fact unaware of, or unable to say, how many Jews died.
7. Students are concerned with why the Jews were targeted, but have difficulty in providing robust,
developed answers to the question. With most (68 per cent) unaware of what ‘antisemitism’ means,
their explanations tend to rest on distorted understandings and misconceptions about who the Jews
were and overlook the distinctive racial dimensions of Nazi antisemitism.
Why should students know about
the victims of Nazism?
If young people are to grasp the significance of any
genocide, it is essential that they know not only the
name of the persecuted group, but who they were,
how they lived, and their culture, traditions and
beliefs. For how can it be possible to understand the
scale of a genocide if you have no appreciation for
what was lost?
Similarly, the imperative that many feel for
commemoration of the victims, to honour and
mourn them, to ‘never forget’, is rendered empty
if students have no real understanding of who those
people were. And yet, in many commemorative events,
in ceremonies, memorials and other representations
of the Nazi crimes, there appears rather limited
understanding of who is being remembered beyond
a longer or shorter list of ‘victim groups’. The risk is
that victims appear as a homogenous mass, objects
of persecution with little or no agency. Typically, they
arrive upon the historical stage only to be persecuted
and murdered.
A further risk is that many young people collapse
the different crimes and their victims into an allencompassing
‘Holocaust’ in which Hitler murdered
anyone who was ‘different’. Such a vague
generalisation may serve a social aim of asking
1 While the authors of this report recognise that some of the
terms used here and throughout this chapter are contested and
potentially sensitive, their employment in this research reflects
their usage both within secondary literature and among students
themselves.
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust