What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the victims?
First World War. The idea of conspiratorial betrayal
found root among soldiers and military leaders in the
last days of the First World War, and acquired public
legitimacy following endorsement by the revered
Generals Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg,
who was later President of the Weimar Republic.
While Hindenburg did not explicitly tie this charge to
the Jews when he famously invoked the Dolchstoss
at a parliamentary hearing in November 1919, he
did not really need to. Following the armistice and
the widely despised Versailles Treaty, accusations
of Jews conniving with Bolsheviks and others to
first undermine the Wilhelmine regime and then sell
Germany out by signing the Versailles ‘Diktat’ only
grew in currency. Although this view was by no
means subscribed to by all Germans, the Dolchstoss
– together with other antisemitic critiques of the
Weimar Republic – ensured that ‘the language of
antisemitism became embedded in mainstream
political discourse as never before’ (Evans 2006: 152).
The Dolchstoss and its avengement was both
part of Hitler’s ‘personal fire’ and a ‘central element’
in the Nazi ‘propaganda armoury’ (Kershaw 1998:
97, 2008: 91). For these reasons, the results of
responses to survey question 57 were positive.
The findings were also borne out in focus-group
interviews, with youngest students making little
or no reference to the Dolchstoss, and Year 9
and 10 students making greater note, as with
occasional mention of Jews being seen by Hitler as
‘backstabbers’ (Sarah, Year 10, NE1). References
increased again in discussions held with students
in Years 12 and 13, where a greater number of
students directly using the phrase ‘stab-in-the-back’.
An interesting feature of the focus groups was
the framing of the legend of the Dolchstoss. A few
students – particularly younger ones – narrated
the ‘stab-in-the-back’ theory in such a way that
responsibility for it began and ended with Hitler.
Indicative here was Juliette (Year 9, LON5), who
advanced that Hitler blamed the Jews ‘severely’ for
defeat in the war ‘and then he convinced everyone,
antisemites especially, that it was their [the Jews’]
fault’. Others, like Annie (Year 10, NE1), instead
depicted the myth in a matter-of-fact fashion,
forwarding statements like ‘Jewish people were
blamed for World War I’. One or two stuck to
description but added an unusual twist, for instance
Jack (Year 12, EE1), who spoke of ‘the stab-in-theback
theory, which is like a theory that suggests why
the Germans lost World War I, and they suggested
that it was the Jews and politicians were going against
their country and shooting members of their team.’
Broadly speaking, the focus groups thus
confirmed awareness of the Dolchstoss to be agerelated
but underlined that this didn’t always lead
to secure understanding. In addition, there were
instances when students’ talked of how and why
Jews were blamed for the war displayed a low level
of criticality. For example, Ben (Year 9, SE1) asserted
that, after the First World War, the German people
‘needed somebody to blame and most of them didn’t
really like them [the Jews] anyway, so it was just a
natural push for them to blame someone else. It
was unfortunate that it happened to be the Jewish
people’. One might see in this as insight into the
cultural heritage of anti-Jewish sentiment, but there
is an inflection to the phrases ‘just a natural push’
and ‘it was unfortunate’ which is unquestioning
and lacking in critical thought.
More will be said about similar instances in the
section below. But Ben’s comment also highlights
how a number of focus-group participants linked the
blaming of Jews for the loss of the First World War
to other causes of discontent, particularly economic
turmoil in the 1920s. This was well captured by Elliot
(Year 9, EE1), who remarked that, ‘Germany needed
somebody to blame for the loss of the First World
War and the amount of money they lost afterwards
in the economic crash that they had’. In a separate
interview, Grace (Year 9, LON6) echoed these
remarks but emphasised Hitler’s role in realising the
potential in linking the two themes. He was, Grace
claimed, ‘very clever in the sense that after World
War I, Germany was like in a really bad way and
they had no money and they had, like, a really bad
economy and stuff and everyone was, like, poor
and unemployed’. She concluded that Hitler used
people’s desperation ‘to his advantage’, secure in
the knowledge ‘they were very vulnerable and easily
manipulated’.
Comments like these command attention for
two reasons. First, they reveal students’ ideas
about how and why people supported Hitler and
the Nazis (of which more will be said in Chapter 6)
and second, they demonstrate how students can
draw on broader contextual knowledge to make
sense of the Jewish experience. It is pertinent to
remember that contextual knowledge is not divorced
from conceptual understanding, but intrinsically
entwined with it; the shape of students’ ideas don’t
just underpin and influence knowledge, but are
themselves impacted by what a student ‘knows’
and ‘understands’.
This is especially significant in the case of students
being familiar with the blaming of Jews for military
defeat and economic turbulence, because the
assumptions and inferences that students drew from
this came to variegate many accounts for why Jews
would be targeted by the regime. However, while
employing contextual ‘knowledge’ in this way is
useful, it can become counterproductive if students
do not recognise the spurious nature of many of the
charges levied against the Jews. Here we clearly see