What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the victims?
115
students’ lack of knowledge and understanding.
Not only does it result in a hollow cognisance
of the particular fate of disabled people, it also
decontextualises the policies pursued against
other groups, especially the Jews. Yet, just as with
persecution of homosexuals, lack of knowledge
about how policy towards disabled people
developed did not inhibit students from venturing
explanations in interview for why disabled people
were victimised and killed.
When this occurred, one set of student accounts
gravitated towards deviation from (or difference to)
a perceived normality or envisaged ideal. ‘I don’t
think they [the disabled] were what he was looking
for as humans’, remarked Una (Year 8, LON5),
who concluded that since ‘he wanted people with
blue eyes, blonde hair, perfect normal people, they
weren’t what he wanted in his country’. Others
echoed this sentiment, although Lara (Year 9, SE1)
did caution that ‘even if you were mentally disabled
but you looked normal he’d still put them in
concentration camps and killed them’.
The articulation of difference around notions of
blonde hair and blue eyes was not exclusive to
accounts of the experience of disabled people; it
was pervasive among a large swathe of students
when considering a range of subjects other than
disabled victims in both the survey and the focus
groups. With age, this shorthand tended to give way
to more developed language or the employment of
more precise terminology. In the case of explanations
for the experience of disabled people, this found
form through remarks like those of Jeremy (Year 12,
LON7), who maintained that:
Hitler kind of dreamt of almost like an Aryan species,
and obviously disabled people did not conform to
that, and I think it was more like an irritant and they
were kind of standing in his way of a perfect state.
Although this explanation had a measure of truth,
the framing of Hitler as the sole determining agent
in the process and an inability to suggest how such
a ‘dream’ (or, indeed, ‘irritation’) translated into
the deaths of up to a quarter of a million people,
rendered Jeremy’s account deficient in its level of
sophistication.
The almost instinctive pull towards Hitler as
the primary causal factor for the ‘euthanasia’
programmes was equally strong among other older
students, some of whom introduced notions of
superiority and inferiority into their explanations. In
the words of Paul (Year 12, LON7), ‘Hitler saw them
[the disabled] as unequal and unworthy of having a
life like they were subhuman and so he thought they
were a waste of space’.
Paul was quite right that disabled people were
viewed as ‘unworthy of having a life’. However, he
was incorrect in thinking this led to disabled people
being viewed as ‘subhuman’ (a status generally
reserved for Jews, Roma/Sinti (Gypsies) and Slavs).
Similarly, while Hitler did indeed believe that disabled
people neither deserved nor warranted existence, he
was by no means alone in harbouring these kind
of ideas.
In 1920, the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist
Alfred Hoche argued, in their publication Permitting
the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living, that
people with certain mental and physical disabilities
should be euthanised. Such calls were by no means
uncontroversial, but they drew sustenance from
deeper traditions in the German eugenics and ‘race
hygiene’ (Rassenhygiene) movements, including
concern for ‘national efficiency’ (Weiss 1987;
Weindling 1989).
So Paul’s account can be seen then to commix
truth and accuracy with misunderstanding and
‘mis-knowledge’. In his reasoning that negative
views of disabled people were at least partly related
to perceptions of use and utility, Paul hit on a core
causal factor for the ‘euthanasia’ programme.
This understanding was also presented by other,
younger students. In one interview, a group of Year
9 girls (LON5) explained Hitler’s disdain for disabled
people as being because, according to Juliette, ‘They
weren’t able to fight in the First World War’.
‘He basically blamed them for not being able to fight’,
she continued, with his hatred coming from the fact
that ‘they weren’t able to fight for his country and that
is all he wanted people for’. The girls were asked if
this meant that disabled people were seen as having
no real purpose, and Chloe assented, remarking
poignantly, ‘It is like they were just dust on top of a
box, just get rid of them when you open it up. You
don’t need them, just get rid of them’. ‘You have to
blow it away’, concluded her classmate Courtney.
While aspects of all these explanatory accounts
contain some truth, their major flaw – the recourse
to Hitler as ultimate agent – is the result of a lack in
broad knowledge and/or detailed understanding.
Unaware of the history of eugenics, race hygiene or
the sociocultural animosity towards disabled people,
most students compensate by reasoning that the
very notion of killing disabled people began and
ended with Hitler who objected primarily to disabled
people’s ‘difference’.
The one exception to this came from Jake, a
solitary Year 12 student (LON7), who – in presenting
perhaps the best account from all of the focus
groups – widened the circle of agency when he said,
‘It was about genetics as well, the Nazis were about
genetics and stuff … so they didn’t like disabled
people because they thought they were genetically
inferior, and that they were weakening the
German race’.
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust