What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the victims?
(Longerich 2010: 307), indicated by the circulation
among attendees of a statistical breakdown of
Europe’s ‘11 million’ Jews, sorted by country –
all of whom would be ‘evacuated’ to the East
as part of an eventual ‘final solution’. In a telling
indication of the correlation between war and
anti-Jewish policy, Heydrich, in his position as
meeting chair, emphasised that these ‘larger
evacuation actions will largely depend on military
developments’ (Dawidowicz 1976: 78).
As a major milestone in the history of anti-Jewish
policy, and one which points to a totality emerging in
the Nazi imagination, knowledge and understanding
of the Wannsee Conference is elemental. So it is all
the more remarkable that most student respondents
(84.4 per cent) said ‘no’ or that they ‘did not know’
when asked whether the Wannsee Conference had
any connection with the Holocaust (survey question
31). When responses were cut by age, less than a
fifth of 11 to 16 year olds answered ‘yes’, and it was
only in Year 13 that the proportion rose substantially
to reach 40 per cent.
These trends could also be observed in focusgroup
discussions. At no point in interviews with
younger students (Years 7 to 11) was the Wannsee
Conference referred to by name, although it was
vaguely alluded to on a couple of occasions. In the
first of these Abby (Year 8, LON6) explained: ‘They
say that Hitler was in a meeting and I can’t remember
the exact what he called it, the Final Plan … like
that day when he declared that that was going
to happen’. In the second, Tom (Year 10, NE1)
described ‘a meeting in a big room where they had
all big Nazi leaders and when they decided that they
would use the “Final Solution”, which was killing
people in death camps.’
These were the only gestures to the Wannsee
Conference, and also among just a handful of
instances where younger students referred to a
‘Final Solution’ or ‘Final Plan’.
Interviews with older students saw a sharp
increase in references to Wannsee and the notion
of a ‘Final Solution’. On the former, some students
were able to name the conference but not to provide
more detail about it; others did not (or could not)
provide the specific name of the meeting but were
aware that a gathering had taken place and had
some sense of its content. For example, Will (Year 12,
LON7) thought that the purpose of the conference
was ‘to decide what they were eventually going to
do with the issue of like Jews and minority groups’,
while Max said that (Year 12, EE1) ‘they met and they
decided the “Final Solution.”’
Where both of these statements incorrectly
framed the conference as a decision-making
exercise, others demonstrated more accurate
knowledge and/or nuanced understanding.
Responding to a question on responsibility, Aimee
(Year 13, EE1) asserted that ‘Hitler instigated it’ but
emphasised ‘it was more of a proposition towards
the leading Nazis on what the solution was’, such
that by the time of the meeting ‘it was almost already
decided’. Perhaps the most profound remark came
from Simon (Year 13, LON7) who declared: ‘In
terms of the Holocaust you’d say that the Wannsee
Conference is when it started to take shape.’
All told, while older students’ familiarity with the
Wannsee Conference was by no means perfect,
it was undeniably more advanced than seen in
younger cohorts. The 16 to 18 year olds who tied
the meeting to the ‘Final Solution’ exemplified this
more advanced knowledge, although a larger number
of students referred to the phrase outside of the
Wannsee context. Some who did were quite specific
in their usage: ‘Rather than putting the Jewish
population into huge camps’, said Mike (Year 13,
LON7), ‘the “Final Solution” was basically the initiation
of death camps and the extermination of the Jewish
population’. Others expressed similar sentiment but
with less precision, for example Paul (Year 12, LON7)
remarked that ‘the sort of “Final Solution” clearly
wasn’t intended from the beginning, that was more a
result of a situation where they perceived the need for
a result, and that result was getting rid of the Jews’.
A third type of response displayed familiarity with
the term, yet confusion as to its referent: ‘It was sort
of put into practice’ when Germany saw it would lose
the war and ‘thought we need to hide this’ (Lucas,
Year 12, LON7); and ‘he [Hitler] got everyone to sign
about the “Final Solution”’ (Nikki, Year 13, EE1).
Older students were therefore more familiar with
the term ‘Final Solution’, even if they were not always
confident in how to use it. Equally, there was a
distinct impression that students saw the term as
having direct and even exclusive association with
Jewry, and with their extermination: indeed, the word
‘extermination’ itself was employed extensively in the
older focus groups.
Overall, the above findings suggest that students
develop a sharper sense of some of the particular
dimensions of the Jewish experience as they get
older. It also appears that students become more
attuned to seeing these aspects in policy terms,
with some developing the potential to move beyond
purely Hitler-centric accounts and explanations,
and to approach the reality of power relations and
decision-making within the Third Reich.