What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

110
Who were the victims?
statement applied. Figure 5.2 shows responses to
the first of these statements.
More will be said later in this chapter about the
large percentage of students who marked this
statement as applying to Jews. Here, it is pertinent
that over a quarter of students believed intended
annihilation was also true for homosexuals and
disabled people (the latter of whom will also be
discussed below). This conviction only increased
with age: where 16.6 per cent of Year 7 students
indicated homosexuals as being marked by the
regime for complete extermination, by Year 9 this
had risen to 30.9 per cent and it peaked at 40.6
per cent in Year 12.
These results suggest that a large proportion
of students come to regard wholesale murder
as a defining characteristic of the experience of
homosexuals during the Nazi period. When crossreferenced
with other findings from the study this
may account for the increased tendency of students
to include homosexuals alongside Jews as victims
of the Holocaust. There was some evidence of this
possibility in students’ free-text descriptions of what
they thought the Holocaust was (survey question 30),
as discussed in detail in Chapter 3.
The combined responses to questions 30 and
54 suggest that the experience of homosexuals
occupies a prominent position in students’ thinking
about Nazi victims, further implying that they have
a measure of knowledge and understanding about
what happened to this group, and why. However,
the focus-group interviews did not support this
implication. When referred to by younger students
(Years 7 to 11), homosexuals tended simply to be
listed as victims of the regime. On being asked to
provide detail about their fate, only a few students
offered additional information. Of these, just one
indicated that homosexuals were sent to prison,
while the majority said that homosexuals were sent
to concentration camps.
Student responses here were commonly
accompanied by a degree of doubt, for example
when Michael asked, ‘Were they all took to the
concentration camps to get killed?’ (Year 8, NE1)
and when Lauren stated, ‘I think they got sent to
the concentration camps as well or they got killed, I
can’t remember’ (Year 10, LON6). Only two students
offered alternative narratives, with one indicating
homosexuals may have been used as forced labour
(Aaliyah, Year 10, LON5) and another suggesting
attempts may have been made to ‘make them
un-gay’ (Holly, Year 10, LON5).
When compared with related data from the survey,
these findings from the focus groups were surprising.
They revealed that students in fact had little sense
of what happened to homosexuals and that their
‘knowledge’ was actually the product of inference
and guesswork rather than informed understanding.
Nor was there compelling evidence from interviews
with the older students in Years 12 and 13 that this
state of affairs was rectified with age. Homosexuals
were again often identified as victims, but detail
proved equally elusive or led to the repetition of lines
like, ‘They got shipped off to death camps and killed’
(Jake, Year 12, LON7).
Students of all ages were slightly more
forthcoming when it came to providing accounts
of why homosexuals were (or may have been)
targeted by the regime. Among younger students,
explanations tended to accent perceived difference
and/or dislike. This was well captured during one
exchange among a group of Year 9 girls who, having
previously pointed to the centrality of Hitler in killing
homosexuals in concentration camps, were asked,
‘Why did he decide to target homosexuals?’
Courtney: Because he thought they were wrong.
Juliette: Yeah they were different; he felt that they were
the wrong species I guess.
Nina: Isn’t it what Juliette said about them against
Christianity?
Chloe: Yes because somewhere in the Bible it says that
you have to marriage the opposite gender don’t you,
the opposite sex, yeah that’s it. I think it was something
about not going ahead with religious people
(Year 9, LON5).
This exchange contains a number of distinctive
features which also appeared in other discussions
of the homosexual experience and in students’
explanatory accounts more generally. For example,
the positioning of Hitler as the primary perpetrating
agent was evident in many focus-group interviews,
raising questions about students’ knowledge and
understanding of his role and responsibilities which
are further explored in Chapter 6. As to how students
explained the targeting of homosexuals (and victims
more generally), we see in the above exchange
two frameworks at play that figured often among
students of all ages.
The first of these saw ‘difference’ narrated through
biology. In remarking that ‘they were the wrong
species’, Juliette displayed awareness – crudely put
– that biology mattered to Hitler (and, by extension, to
the regime). In many ways, this is testament to how
understandings of Nazi Germany as the ‘Racial State’
have had widespread currency in recent decades, so
much so that a ‘hegemonic racial paradigm’ (Confino
2012b: 140) has emerged and is now taken to
explain everything the regime ever did.
The strengths and weaknesses of this
characterisation have been the focus of interest from
scholars (Confino 2009: 531–59; Stone 2010: 160–
202), although Juliette’s uncertain ‘I guess’ suggests