What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the victims?
With the exception of Jake, the majority of student
explanations lacked not only awareness of the
long- and short-term developments which helped to
facilitate the murder of disabled people but also an
appreciation of the many individuals and agencies
who made killing a reality. In one focus group there
was evidence that some students were conscious of
their inability to fully account for what happened:
Nathan: The worst thing about him [Hitler] hating
disabled people was, like … the thing is his mum or
someone in his family was disabled. So I don’t actually
get why he went … and killed most of disabled people.
Suzie: He thought they were a pain to society, that they
were slowing him down … the disabled people.
Ben: But the thing is, his mum was disabled, but
they didn’t knock it to her.
Suzie: They went around doing it to other
people instead.
Ben: Year, that’s what I don’t actually get (Year 9, SE1).
Roma and Sinti (Gypsies)
The third main non-Jewish victim group cited
by students was the Roma and Sinti, or Gypsy,
population. In some cases, relevant survey results
could be interpreted as indicating familiarity with the
experience. The Nazi regime did not, for example,
aim ‘to kill every last person from this group,
wherever they could reach them’ (survey question
54), and so the majority of students who did not
assign this statement to the Roma and Sinti were
quite correct (see Figure 5.2).
Figure 5.4 Student responses to the statement,
‘They could avoid Nazi persecution if they gave up
their beliefs’ (survey question 56)
Percentage of students
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
Jews
Roma and Sinti
(Gypsies)
Victim groups
Poles
Jehovah’s
Witnesses
Yet, while such totality was neither planned nor
intended (Bauer 2002: 66), genocidal policies were
still enacted against European Roma and Sinti. How
many were subsequently killed remains a subject of
debate; while ‘most estimates put the figure in the
190,000-250,000 range, there is the possibility that it
could be as high as half a million’ (Levene 2013: 132)
or even more (Crowe, 2000: 197).
A similar remark could be made about responses
to the ‘first victims of mass murder’ statement
(see Figure 5.3). That only 7.3 per cent of students
associated this statement with Roma and Sinti might
again be interpreted as a positive sign – an indication
that students were sufficiently familiar with the Gypsy
experience to recognise this was not a characteristic
of Nazi policy. However, a positive reading of this
kind is complicated by the fact that students
were actually more disposed to seeing Jehovah’s
Witnesses as ‘first victims of mass murder’ even
though this group was never targeted for systematic,
state-sponsored killing. Yet, while the ‘first victims’
statement was not applicable to either Roma/Sinti or
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the regime’s policy towards the
former was far closer to the spirit of the statement
than it’s policy towards the latter.
The suspicion that there was little substance
to students’ knowledge and understanding of the
Roma and Sinti experience was furthered by their
responses to survey question 56 which asked them
to ascribe the statement, ‘They could avoid Nazi
persecution if they gave up their beliefs’ to victim
groups (see Figure 5.4).
The most striking results relate to the large
percentage of students who correctly ascribed
this statement to Jehovah’s Witnesses (41.4 per
cent) and the equally large number who incorrectly
associated the statement with Jews (41.6 per cent),
on which more is said later in this chapter. Less
spectacular was the 13.1 per cent of students who
saw the statement to be applicable to the Roma and
Sinti (Gypsies). Implicit in this figure were two notable
intimations, that:
■■
more than 1,000 students understood Gypsies
as defined by a particular set of beliefs
■■
those convictions were understood as the reason
why Gypsies were targeted by Nazism.
What could not be determined from these results
was whether students’ conceived of ‘beliefs’ in
a religious framework or in reference to cultural
customs and traditions. Either way, while Nazi
persecution drew on a wellspring of religious-cultural
intolerance, it sought legitimacy not from this
heritage but from the principles of race science.
The overall picture presented by the survey data
relating to Roma and Sinti victims was similar to that