What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the victims?
107
‘structural pressures’. Put differently, policy was the
product of interplay between ideology and reality: it
was context-bound, subject to change, and could
(and often did) follow paradoxical or what would
appear to be nonsensical trajectories.
When it comes to the victims of Nazism there
is evidently a great deal that students need to
ideally ‘know’ and ‘understand’. None of this is to
say that the absence of any one of the above will
inevitably result in complete ignorance – the nature of
knowledge is more complex than that – but it serves
to underline how gaps in knowledge, misconceptions
or misunderstandings will have ramifications.
Through their studies students should ultimately
not just know that there were numerous victim
groups, but develop knowledge and understanding
of what happened to each group, as well as how
and why they happened. This approach can
enable students to identify points of intersection
and commonality; it can also empower students
to recognise particularity, and help them come to
appreciate that ‘there were frayed edges to Nazi
racial concepts as well as practices’ (Bloxham 2013:
181). Such outcomes are the best means of ensuring
not only historical accuracy, but also establishing the
specific phenomenological character of Nazism.
Who do students identify as the victims
of the Holocaust?
Students were asked in the survey to provide a freetext
response to the question ‘Who were the victims
of the Holocaust?’ (question 40). Responses were
coded, producing the results presented in Table 5.1.
This data indicates that, while students at the
younger end of the age spectrum tend to identify
only Jews as victims of the Holocaust, this is
increasingly reversed with age – so much so that by
the age of 15/16 years old, most will include Jews
and at least one other victim group.
Such movement towards inclusive, holistic
understandings of ‘who’ was a victim of the
Holocaust suggests a fundamental shift in how
students come to conceive of ‘the Holocaust’ during
the course of their formal schooling. It implies that,
as students get older, they see the term less as a
descriptor of something specifically or exclusively
‘Jewish’, and more as a catch-all phrase for a shared
or common experience. While this trend might be
seen to indicate that with age students develop
more complex understandings of victimhood, it
nonetheless goes against the Jewish specificity of
the Holocaust. Moreover, as was outlined at the
beginning of this Chapter, a conceptual approach
which collapses all victims of Nazism beneath one
umbrella term and blurs the distinguishing features
of each group’s experience, actually risks being
counterproductive and even pernicious.
It may also be tempting to attribute any correlation
between age and conceptual transformation to a
simple accumulation of knowledge. Although both
this piece of research and the Centre’s previous
investigation into teaching practices (Pettigrew et
al. 2009) have shown that younger students are
increasingly likely to encounter ‘the Holocaust’ in
multiple subject settings during Years 7 and 8,
it remains the case that most formal teaching and
learning takes place in history classrooms during
Year 9. With that in mind, the transformation in how
students come to think of the Holocaust and define
its victims might appear to be the result of newly
acquired knowledge brought through organised study.
However, the nature of learning and the
development of knowledge and understanding is
far more complex than this. Moreover, the notion
that students necessarily come to know more with
age and to re-evaluate their conceptions of the
Holocaust and its victims was not always evidenced.
As will be demonstrated in the following sections,
students’ knowledge and understanding of the
experiences of different victim groups was in fact
Table 5.1 Reponses to the question ‘Who were the victims of the Holocaust?’, by year group (%)
Year 7
(n=895)
Year 8
(n=1,038)
Year 9
(n=2,482)
Year 10
(n=1,128)
Year 11
(n=487)
Year 12
(n=544)
Year 13
(n=343)
Total
(n=6,917)
Jews, Jewish people,
65.5 65.7 55.2 45.6 38.7 39.5 29.4 52.9
the Jewish, etc.
Jews plus any other
15.8 25.4 38.2 49.9 59.0 57.5 67.3 39.7
victim group
Other groups without
1.8 0.7 1.0 1.5 1.0 1.7 1.2 1.2
reference to the Jews
Other relevant answer 1.9 2.3 1.3 0.7 0.3 0.0 0.9 1.2
Inaccurate answer 15.0 5.9 4.3 2.3 1.0 1.3 1.2 5.0
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust