What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the victims?
students to condemn ‘intolerance’, but does it show
a valuing of ‘diversity’? Surely, if we genuinely do
value different ways of life, different groups of people
and different cultures, we should at least devote a little
curriculum time to understanding those differences –
and to understanding the different policies that led to
the persecution of a ‘mosaic of victims’.
Young people need to understand that the first
Nazi concentration camps were constructed not
for Jews but for the Nazis’ political opponents and
that, in the early years, most people who were sent
to these camps walked out again within a matter of
months. Many, of course, were also killed in these
camps, particularly as the Nazis became far more
murderous during the war years. Even so, these
were not killing centres as such and there was
no plan to murder all political opponents of the
regime. Nor was there systematic mass murder of
Jehovah’s Witnesses or gay men although, again,
large numbers were horrifically persecuted and
thousands of German homosexuals were killed.
Still, these programmes were different from the
systematic mass murder of the German disabled,
or the continent-wide genocide of the Roma and
Sinti (Gypsies).
Students need to be able to differentiate
between the different victim groups, not in order to
create some hierarchy of suffering but to genuinely
understand why and how individuals came to be
persecuted and killed. Each victim, whether German
trade unionist, Polish priest, Lithuanian Jew, Soviet
Prisoner of War or other, is surely entitled to the
uniqueness of their own death. Lumping all together
as ‘Holocaust victims’ blurs important differences,
submerges each into a vague and faceless mass,
and does a disservice not only to the people in the
past but also to our students who are denied an
understanding of the complexity and diversity of
that history.
Furthermore, each of these crimes is significant in
and of itself. Even if the gas chambers of Treblinka
had never been constructed – if the genocide of
the Jews had never happened – it would still be
worth our young people knowing about the violent
persecution of political opponents in concentration
camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald. And the
persecution of political opponents by violent regimes
of course continues today in countries around the
world, even more frequently than genocide. If we are
keen to prevent similar crimes in the future then we
need to understand better why they happened, and
to know their warning signs. For example, some of
the Nazis’ victims were victims of war, others were
victims of political persecution; we need to do very
different things to try to prevent the former than we
do to prevent the latter.
Finally, none of these crimes and none of the
experiences of these victim groups can fully be
understood in isolation from the others. Not only
are there similarities and differences between the
persecution and murder of the different groups of
Nazi victims, but often these policies overlapped
and entwined. Deeper understanding of each
group of victims therefore contributes to a greater
understanding of the broader system of violence
and mass murder.
In order to understand the particular policies that
were pursued against the various victim groups,
it is essential that students have knowledge and
understanding both of Nazi antisemitism and the
broader, ultranationalist and racist Nazi ‘world
view’. It would also be valuable if students were
able to identify where there are interrelationships
and divergences between these different facets of
Nazi ideology. Equally, since ideology is ‘one form
of thought among others’ (Confino 2008: 227),
students need to be aware that an individual’s
resolve to persecute, discriminate against, or
even kill others cannot always and exclusively be
explained through the dominant political ideology of
the day. Knowing why the victims of Nazism were
targeted draws on knowledge and understanding
of Nazi ideology and in turn enriches it. It follows
that erroneous knowledge and understanding
of why a group was targeted can and will distort
understandings of Nazism, and vice versa. This
carries direct consequences – not least for how
students account for the actions of the perpetrators.
Yet ideas alone cannot answer why hundreds
of thousands were persecuted and millions more
killed; students need to appreciate how ideologies
are translated into reality. On one level, this demands
that students utilise and adapt their understanding
of substantive concepts like ‘power’, ‘politics’ or
‘agency’ in order to identify the means by which
things happened in Nazi Germany and occupied
Europe. On a separate level, it requires students
to employ second-order concepts like causation
and significance, change and continuity, so as to
determine the relevant forces that enabled things
to occur.
If these processes are to be performed
successfully, students need to have content
knowledge of and familiarity with:
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how the Third Reich was organised
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its various agents and agencies
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its nature and characteristics
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key events and chronology
These are especially significant in the case of the
various victim groups, since ideas themselves were
altered, amended and revised due to unforeseen
developments and what might be termed as