What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the victims?
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that she had not reflected upon it. It is far more likely
that her supposition speaks to a general ambiguity
around why homosexuals were persecuted, just as
it also captures some of the difficulties that students
encounter when levels of historical knowledge and
understanding do not allow them to determine the
validity of a particular explanatory framework.
The second explanatory framework gestured to
by these students centres not on blood or ‘race’, but
rather religion. For Nina and Chloe there is at least
the possibility that homosexuals were targeted by the
Nazi regime because their behaviour went against
perceived Christian doctrine. Although both students
demonstrate uncertainty about this, it is nevertheless
significant to find them even entertaining such
an idea. While Nazi homophobia did indeed take
objection to homosexual behaviour it was not
on account of homosexuality violating Christian
beliefs; rather, it was predicated on the notion that
homosexuality threatened the spiritual wellbeing of
the German nation and endangered the production
of progeny.
It should be re-emphasised how, in the main,
younger students had little to say either about the
particular experience of homosexuals or the specific
reasons for their persecution. It became apparent
from focus-group discussions like the one above
that, in spite of absent historical knowledge, students
still felt able to propose explanations for what they
believed was the wholesale murder of homosexuals
by the regime. It was, of course, positive to find
students prepared to venture possible answers
for why homosexuals were targeted, but the level
of certainty many displayed was distinctly at odds
with their ability to validate their arguments. At times
it was as if the very strength of ideas about why
homosexuals were persecuted – due to ‘dislike’ or
‘difference’ or Hitler himself – stood in for absent
knowledge and understanding. This tendency was
by no means exclusive to students’ awareness of the
experience of homosexuals; instead, it reappeared in
conversations about other victim groups as well.
Of final note are the ways in which older students
attempted to explain why homosexuals were
targeted. While these students also generally held
the belief that homosexuals were subject to mass
murder, their explanations were more firmly centred
upon ideology. For example, the majority made some
sort of reference to the ‘master race’ or the ‘Aryan
race’, and positioning homosexuals as having been
understood by the regime to deviate from or threaten
the realisation of these ideals. Thus, Damien mused:
‘Maybe he [Hitler] thinks that being homosexual
doesn’t fit into the idea of the Aryan race either,
maybe he thinks that to be an Aryan you have to
be straight’ (Year 12, LON3). Others, like Harrison,
pointed to a wish to ‘preserve that master race’, to
‘further it on, develop it, make it, like evolve it in a
sense, [and] he kind of saw homosexuals as getting
in the way of that’ (Year 12, LON3).
In the same vein, Jake said the regime viewed
homosexuals as ‘either subhuman or race traitors
or something’, while Lucas explained the regime
believed that homosexuals threatened the ‘key policy’
of population growth (both Year 12, LON7). These
examples demonstrate how older students displayed
a greater sophistication and assurance in their
explanations for homosexual persecution compared
to their younger counterparts. Further, in identifying
the importance of reproduction to the Nazis, these
students were actually closer to the main reasons
behind targeting of the group.
Homophobia and legal discrimination of
homosexuals predated the Third Reich and were
rife throughout interwar Europe. On coming to
power, the Nazi regime maintained and extended
existing legislation, adding its own violent stamp
(Evans 2006: 529). By 1936, growing animosity
towards homosexuals was institutionalised in the
establishment of the Office for the Combating of
Homosexuality and Abortion. The linkage of these
two ‘practices’ revealed how both were regarded
as injurious to Nazi population policy: as Rüdiger
Lautmann (1990: 346) has put it, ‘the persecution
of homosexuals was aimed at preventing sexual
behaviour between men and men, not so much
at the homosexual as a human being’, for the
homosexual man could in theory be ‘encouraged
to participate in reproduction’.
Homosexuality was nevertheless regarded by
some – in particular, Heinrich Himmler – to be a
threat to the moral and spiritual wellbeing of the
nation. Accordingly, discriminatory measures
increased throughout the 1930s, with imprisonment
accompanied by escalating police harassment
and rising incarceration in the concentration camp
system. Life in the camps was particularly severe for
homosexuals, with maltreatment from guards and
fellow prisoners the norm and responsible for the
deaths of many. Meanwhile, from the late 1930s onwards
some homosexuals, both within and outside
the camps, also endured castration. Homosexual
persecution was, therefore, brutal and violent.
The precise number of homosexuals who died at
the hands of the Nazis is unclear. Around 100,000
were arrested during the regime’s lifespan, with
about half that number sent to prison for some
duration, and between 10,000 and 15,000 absorbed
into concentration camps where mortality rates for
homosexuals were exceptionally high.
However, the regime did not adopt a coherent,
organised policy of murdering homosexuals. Instead,
as Günter Grau (1990: 342) notes, deterrence and
violent ‘re-education’ tended to be pursued in the
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