What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the victims?
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for homosexuals and disabled people: a notable
though not overwhelmingly impressive proportion of
students recognised the Roma and Sinti as victims of
the regime and understood this experience as being
defined by ultimate death. There were indications that
students did not think the Roma and Sinti occupied
the same position in the Nazi ‘world view’ as, say,
homosexuals and disabled people. Significantly, there
was sufficient cause to suspect these under standings
were, in many cases, not founded upon secure or
substantial epistemological foundations.
Focus-group discussions reinforced these
findings. Younger students (Years 7 to 11) made
reference to Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) as Nazi
victims, but these were by no means as frequent
as citations of homosexuals or disabled people. In
keeping with a general trend highlighted by this
chapter, Gypsies were often named as victims in
focus-group interviews but students were invariably
silent once asked to provide further detail. In this
regard, Holly (Year 10, LON5) was perhaps speaking
for the majority when she conceded, ‘I don’t really
know about them [the Gypsies] that much’. As
her classmate Imogen went on to explain, ‘We do
get taught that lots of people were involved, were
like victims, but we mostly focus on the Jews and
homosexuals sometimes.’
In comparative terms, Gypsies were more frequently
referred to by older students – corroborating
the finding that those in Years 12 and 13 appear to
be more conscious of the Roma and Sinti as a victim
group (see Figure 5.1). Older students also had
slightly more to say, including explicit talk of murder:
‘A lot of Gypsies were killed as well,’ said Luke
(Year 12, EE1), while Alex ventured a definition of the
Holocaust as ‘the German policy of extermination of
Jews and Gypsies and other minorities during World
War Two’.
In a rare and impressive, if somewhat confused,
demonstration of knowledge interfacing with spatial
understanding, one particular student – Jeremy (Year
12, LON7) – contrasted the experiences of disabled
people and Roma/Sinti, stating, ‘There’s more cases
of Slavs and Gypsies who, as they [the Nazis] begin
to go to Russia, kind of in this huge, big advance,
I think the order was just to kill Russians and Slavs
who were in the way.’
These were all noteworthy remarks and came
in sharp relief to the muted response of younger
students. Even so, some older students still
conceded their knowledge was piecemeal; having
named the ‘Roma community’ as a victim group,
when asked to expand further, Jake (Year 12,
LON7) said, ‘I’m not one of them so I’m not really
best qualified to speak about it, I don’t really know
anything about it, but I know he killed a lot of them
as well.’
The focus-group interviews thus confirmed that
general knowledge and understanding of the fate
of the Roma and Sinti under Nazism was severely
limited across the majority of students. In the main,
the Gypsy experience appeared to register on the
periphery of student consciousness – something
acknowledged as being present when thinking
about the Holocaust and victims of Nazism, but
nonetheless shrouded in a fog of uncertainty.
Although, with age, students appeared to become
more aware of the Roma and Sinti as a victim
group, this did not translate into greater substantive
knowledge of policy.
This situation is problematic. As much as ‘Nazi
policy toward the Roma’ may or may not have
been ‘hazy’ (Bauer 2002: 47), the course of its
development reveals particular qualities of the regime
– especially in regard to how policy was formulated
and its relationship to ideology. With regard to policy
formulation, it has been argued that the absence
of the Roma and Sinti from Hitler’s theorising and
promulgations meant that ‘anti-Gypsy initiatives
emerged from numerous agencies, above all the
police and the SS, but also the academic community’
(Connelly 2010: 275).
Such informal policy-making and policy
implementation was apparent from the earliest days
of the regime. As Burleigh and Wippermann (1991:
116) have shown, while Gypsies were not ‘specified’
in the racial legislation of 1933–4 this didn’t stop
authorities applying the laws in such a way that
Roma and Sinti ‘were sterilised without any legal
basis whatsoever’. In so doing, agents and agencies
were taking cues not just from the ideological
atmosphere of the fledgling regime, but from a
discriminatory tone set by regulations implemented
in Wilhelmine Germany and the Weimar Republic.
Moreover, so ingrained was cultural animosity
towards Roma and Sinti that Donald Bloxham
(2013: 149) suggests ‘it was unnecessary for the
Nazis to enact a web of legislation deemancipating
and stigmatizing Romanies’.
If aspects of policy evolved organically, central
government still made telling interventions which
radicalised the persecution of the Roma and Sinti.
Indicative here was the decision in late November
1935 to extend the Law for the Protection of German
Blood and Honour, which criminalised sexual
relations between Germans and Jews, to include
Roma and Sinti (Friedländer 1997: 153). Together
with illegal sterilisation, this move encapsulated how
‘the main domestic concern about Romany-German
relations was miscegenation’ (Bloxham 2013: 142).
The state also tried to solve the regime’s
preoccupation with just ‘who’ was a Gypsy partly
through sponsorship of race hygienists and
researchers like Robert Ritter. In the years before
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