What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the victims?
125
how absolutely crucial students’ critical awareness
can be.
To summarise, the focus-group interviews
revealed that students see scapegoating as a
distinctive and exclusive feature of the Jewish
experience. Beyond this, they spoke in other, less
well formed ways about the particularity of actions
against the Jews. For example, a number of younger
students described Jews as being ‘singled out’
or ‘treated the worst’ (Ellie, Year 9, EE1). If they
expanded on these ideas, students often became
muddled, with some indicating that treatment merely
constituted the Nazis ‘doing more’ to Jews – the
notion, as expressed by Lachlan (Year 10, EE1), that
‘there was more focus on them’.
Others provided more description while centring
on a certain experience which they saw as illustrative
of Jews being treated ‘worse’, for example Ellie
(Year 9, EE1) suggested that ‘they were put into
concentration camps and stuff’. Finally, there was
a smattering of students like Hamish (Year 9, SE1),
who suggested, ‘I think they [the Nazis] particularly
really hated Jewish people and they did more to them.’
In some cases the simplistic quality of responses
such as these can be explained away in terms
of limits to individuals’ powers of expression.
However, they should also be seen as evidence
of a general shallowness in student knowledge
and understanding of just what happened to ‘the
Jews’ beyond being killed. This is especially true of
students’ familiarity with the experience of German
Jews between 1933 and 1939. More will be said on
this in Chapter 7.
However, what can be said here is that – as with
the other victim groups – the breadth and depth
of students’ knowledge of the Jewish experience
evidently has implications for the accounts that
students can (and do) construct to explain why Jews
became victims of the regime.
Students’ awareness that Jews were used as
scapegoats is welcome, as is the discovery that
many students have a field of vision which looks
beyond 1933 to take in at least the immediate period
after the First World War. Elements of this contextual
knowledge was found to be wanting at times, and/
or sitting in front of skewed understandings or even
unchallenged misconceptions. This latter finding has
particular significance since what students know and
understand about the scapegoating of the Jews is
linked to what they know and understand about who
the Jews ‘were’ and what Jews had (or had not)
‘done’, both in the years directly preceding the Third
Reich and in the longer term. The consequences of
these ideas were most emphatically seen in student
responses to the question ‘Why the Jews?’
How do students explain ‘Why the
Jews?’
Explaining why events have happened in history (and
why others have not) is a fundamental component of
historical thinking. It moves beyond ‘raw’ knowledge,
or the capacity to simply describe something from
the past, towards being able to comprehend the
intersection of different forces and determine their
role in bringing that something about.
These forces are myriad. They can be intentional
or unintentional; the direct product of human
intervention or the unpredictable outcome of other
developments. Crucially, they are context-bound
and context-dependent, meaning that the manner
in which they interact and intersect with one another
is complex and unpredictable. When these ‘forces’
are directly tied to a historical event or occurrence
they acquire the status of ‘causes’, since they
have become associated with consequences and/
or effects. Identifying causes and relating them to
an event or occurrence are therefore the building
blocks of historical explanation and, by extension, of
historical understanding.
Historical explanations vary in levels of validity and
sophistication. This is determined not just by whether
an explanation notes the various causes of an event,
but how these are narrated, accounted for and
woven together. Just as an explanatory account that
fails to incorporate all of the causes of an occurrence
will be flawed, so an explanation which merely lists
or cites causes without determining their importance
or relating them to one another will be reductive
and simplistic.
The issue of historical explanation in relation to
students’ knowledge and understanding of the
Holocaust became a concern for this research
in light of pilot studies. Undertaken in advance
of the national survey as a means of developing
methodologies and refining approaches (see Chapter
2), part of these investigations saw 342 students
aged 11 to 18 years old invited to note any questions
they might have about the Holocaust. Three
dominant questions emerged from their responses,
all of them explanatory in nature. Two centred on
responses to the Holocaust, namely, ‘Why didn’t
anyone stop them?’ and ‘How did they get away
with it?’ The third, and by far the most common
question across all age groups, was concerned with
rationale or, as students’ phrased it, ‘Why the Jews?’
Revealingly, it wasn’t just students who were yet to
study the Holocaust who honed in on this question,
as 63 per cent of Year 9 students – all of whom had
recently completed a programme of study on the
Holocaust – raised it as well. Although the number
fell slightly for Year 10 (52 per cent), it then increased
among Year 12 students, with 69 per cent explicitly
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust