What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the victims?
119
to redress them. Importantly, data collected from
focus-group discussions with students in Years
12 and 13 indicate that these shortcomings were
not necessarily transformed with age. Of the older
students who offered or hinted at an explanation
during interview, Kylie (Year 13, LON3) suggested
that, ‘They just didn’t fit the social norm’, while
Patrick (Year 12, LON7) framed ‘Gypsies or Roma’
as not fitting ‘Hitler’s perfect ideal’ – possibly
because ‘they had less a sense of German identity,
they didn’t conform to his sense of perfect Aryan,
perfect brotherhood’.
The third (and only other) attempt at explanation
saw Harrison (Year 12, LON3) simply admit that he
was ‘not a 100 per cent sure, to be honest’.
What, if anything, do students think was
distinctive about the fate of the Jews?
Although students had a tendency to believe that
all Holocaust victims shared a similar fate, they
nevertheless regarded the Jewish experience as
noteworthy. Indications of this came from various
areas of the research. As seen in Chapter 3, for
example, the majority of students made some
sort of allusion to Jewry when asked to describe
the Holocaust, and commonly they referred to
large-scale killing. This pattern was mirrored in the
opening remarks with focus groups. When asked
to brainstorm information related to ‘the Holocaust’,
‘Jews’ (or versions thereof) and associations of
mass death were among the very first replies in all
age groups. The data produced by both of these
exercises, while not a perfect barometer, revealed
that Jews and the killing of Jews were at the forefront
of many students’ minds when they were asked
about ‘the Holocaust’.
Totality
These impressions were augmented by responses
to the question ‘Who were the victims of the
Holocaust?’ (survey question 40, discussed at the
beginning of this chapter), and by data produced
from responses to questions 54 to 57. This chapter
has already noted how students ascribed the
statement ‘The Nazis planned to kill every last
person of this group, wherever they could reach
them’ (see Figure 5.2). This statement, which
focuses not on grading the suffering of victim groups
but on determining the perpetrators’ intentionality,
was correctly identified by the majority of students
(86.6 per cent) to be associated with the Jews. The
strength of this result implies that most students
don’t just recognise that a lot of Jews were killed,
they know that Jews were killed en masse and in an
organised, intentional, determined fashion. Further,
given the wording of the statement, the results
suggest that most students also have a hold on the
scale and scope of the measures enacted against
the Jews.
The findings are muddied because nearly a third of
students believed the statement also applied to the
experience of homosexuals, while over a quarter saw
it as applicable to disabled people. These tendencies
only increased with age, suggesting that students
become increasingly less disposed to regard
totality as limited only to Jews. This has particular
resonance for thinking about what students take
‘the Holocaust’ to mean and to involve. However, as
students were able to select more than one answer
for this statement, the results produced should not
be taken as conclusive evidence that they either did
or did not have a sense of the specific totality of Nazi
exterminatory policy towards Jews.
Commonly, the starting point for establishing the
centrality of ‘the Jew’ within the Nazi ‘world view’
is to look at what was said by the perpetrators
themselves. Infamous pronouncements such as
Hitler’s Reichstag speech of January 1939 on the
prospective ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’
are accordingly taken as proof positive of long-term
intent. However, as Bloxham (2013: 222) cautions,
although declarations like these are ‘important’,
‘precisely the same phrases could mean different
things at different times’. Similarly, unforeseeable
events and circumstances were crucial in turning
‘the abstract idea’ of continental genocide into ‘a
concrete possibility’ (Bloxham 2013: 223).
Development of policy is a far better gauge of
intentionality than the rhetoric of principal Nazi
ideologues. In this respect it is evident that, by
the winter of 1941/42, the envisioned scope of
anti-Jewish measures was acquiring continental
proportions. This is evidenced by the Wannsee
Conference, held on 20 January 1942. Although
popular history long presumed this to be the point
when genocide of the Jews was decided upon,
this meeting of 15 high-ranking officials from the
state, the NSDAP and the SS was in fact more
concerned with discussing issues arising from the
decision already taken to extend existing anti-Jewish
measures to a transnational scale.
As a ‘keyhole through which we can glimpse
the emerging final solution’ (Roseman 2003: 79),
the surviving minutes of the meeting have been
subject to different interpretations, principally due to
contrasting accounts for why references were made
to both the extermination of Jews and their use as a
source of slave labour (Lawson 2010: 139). What is
readily apparent is that the meeting envisaged ‘the
conception of a gigantic deportation programme’
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