What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the victims?
113
experience of homosexuals, the data still indicated
that a significant number of students regarded Nazi
policy towards disabled people to be annihilatory
and total.
Student responses to the second question
relating to disabled people are shown on Figure
5.3. These results not only confirm that students
associate mass murder with Jews, they expose a
skewed understanding of how anti-Jewish policy
interfaced with the measures taken against other
groups. Given that murder of disabled people
predated the organised killing of Jews, it is notable
that only 14.4 per cent of students marked disabled
people as ‘the first victims of the Nazis’ mass murder
programme’. When arranged by age, this data saw
students becoming only slightly more aware of this
reality as they got older; where just 13 per cent of
Year 9 students correctly ascribed the statement to
disabled people, the figure grew only fractionally to
16.2 per cent of Year 11 students. By Year 12,
21.3 per cent of respondents answered the question
correctly, while the number reached a peak of
36.7 per cent of Year 13 students.
Taken together, the responses to questions 54
and 55 indicate considerable vagueness in student
knowledge and understanding of what happened
to disabled people under the Nazi regime. Certainly,
a sizeable number of students appeared aware
that disabled people were killed and a similar
proportion noted this in their survey descriptions
of the Holocaust (question 30). Yet the wider data
generated by the survey gave a clear indication
that students generally did not know the origins or
development of Nazi measures towards the disabled.
These findings were substantiated in focus-group
discussions. Disabled people were mentioned in
nearly all interviews – often listed in the same manner
as homosexuals in a general cataloguing of Nazi
victim groups. But, when asked to expand on the fate
of disabled people, students’ uncertainty was again
palpable. While they were able to name disabled
people as among Nazi victims, student responses
to follow-up questioning often resembled Michael’s
remark: ‘Were they all took to the concentration
camp to get killed?’ (Year 8, NE1). Since some
participants were yet to study the Holocaust in their
history lessons such uncertainty is not altogether
surprising, although students’ ability to name disabled
people as a victim group indicated they already had
some awareness of this group’s experience.
More revealing was the discovery that, while
students who had studied the Holocaust were more
assured that disabled people had been killed, details
provided of this group’s experience were no more
extensive than that of their younger peers.
These trends extended into the focus groups
held with older students, although two Year 12
respondents made notable additions to their
accounts. Damien (LON3) indicated knowledge of
difference between victim groups by saying that
‘disabled people saw a lot of experimentation’, while
Anton (EE1) made this passing remark: ‘The majority
of killings that were disabled, the ambulance services
they had, that was before anything that was before
the “Final Solution”’.
It would be easy to overstate the significance of
these two comments; ultimately, it is unclear what
understanding lay behind them or how deep this
may have ran, and time did not allow for exploration
with the students involved. Nevertheless, both
interjections did hint at students being able to deploy
a measure of knowledge which went beyond simply
‘knowing that’ disabled people were killed.
Furthermore, despite being unclear in both
expression and meaning, each statement contained
a kernel of truth. In relation to Damien’s comment
about experimentation, Nazi benevolence towards
race scientists meant that medical experimentation
was rife within the Third Reich and those designated
mentally or physically disabled were indeed deemed
expendable for such endeavours (Friedlander 1995:
49, 131–2).
As for Anton, reference to ‘ambulance services’
may or may not have represented a nod towards
the Community Patients’ Transport Service
(Gemeinnützige Krankentransport or Gekrat).
Sometimes translated as ‘Common Welfare
Ambulance Service’ (Lifton 2000: 70), this company
customised former grey postal vans with blacked-out
windows to transport those selected for murder to
one of six killing centres located in Greater Germany
(Burleigh 1994: 123; Friedlander 1995: 84). It’s not
possible to determine whether Anton was making
reference to this little-known facet of the killing
programme, though he was certainly correct to
assert that the murder of disabled people ‘was
before’ the ‘Final Solution’. On this Anton was the
exception: in all other focus groups, there was no
indication that students knew when disabled people
were murdered.
All told, both the survey and focus-group data
indicated that the killing programme launched by
the regime against those designated as disabled is
a major blind spot in student consciousness. This
was paradoxical, since many students indicated that
disabled people were victims of the regime and were
subject to mass killing.
With these findings we see that, while students
may ‘know’ that disabled people were targeted
by the regime and that this led to murder, their
knowledge does not rest on deep or secure
epistemological foundations. For a number of
students, their ‘knowledge’ also carries incorrect
understandings, including that disabled people were
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