What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the victims?
asking ‘Why the Jews?’ or a derivative thereof.
These results were remarkable because they
suggested that, even after learning about the
Holocaust, many students remained perplexed as
to why the Jews of Europe had been murdered.
Elsewhere in these pilot studies students framed
Hitler and the Nazis as being driven by general
racism and prejudice, and/or a desire to create
a ‘master’ Aryan race, but when it came to the
Jews these young people did not feel such causes
adequately accounted for the specificities of the
Jewish experience.
To further explore these findings from the pilot
studies, ‘Why the Jews?’ became a core question
put to students in the focus-group interviews for
the final research. At times it was met with outright
ignorance. While ‘I don’t know’ was not a common
refrain, it did appear on a handful of occasions, even
prompting Bianca (Year 10, SE1) to ask, ‘Shall we
Google it?’
More frequently students responded with a
self-inquisitive tone and/or couched their replies
with caveats and admissions of uncertainty.
Generally, however, when asked ‘Why the Jews?’
most students were able to forward some kind
of answer. The quality of these responses, and
the extent to which they constituted developed
historical explanations, varied considerably. In most
instances, students began – and in a number of
cases, ended – with some remark of who ‘the Jews’
were. Primarily these directly or indirectly centred on
either on German Jewry or on ‘Jews’ in the abstract,
a tendency symptomatic of a narrow field of vision
used and limited understanding of the Holocaust’s
geographical spread held by many students. More is
said about this in Chapter 7.
Insight into understandings of ‘who the Jews were’
came from both the focus groups and the survey.
Broadly speaking, students’ ideas related to one of
three categories: population size, socioeconomic
status and beliefs. Sometimes in interview, students’
comments would straddle or directly link more than
one of these. This was usually, but not always, an
indicator of the student trying to construct or move
towards a more robust historical account.
Population size
Question 44 of the survey asked, ‘In 1933, what
percentage of the German population was Jewish?’
(see Figure 5.8).
The results revealed that just 8.8 per cent of
all respondents answered this question correctly.
Of these, over 40 per cent indicated they were
either not very confident in their response or simply
guessing. The answer most favoured by the students
(38.6 per cent) indicated that Jews made up 15 per
cent of the total German population in 1933, closely
followed by estimates of over 30 per cent (35.3 per
cent of all students). As Figure 5.8 indicates, the
oldest students (Years 12 to 13) were the most likely
to answer correctly. That said, it can equally be seen
that, with age, students became more inclined to
dramatically over-estimate the number of Jews living
in Germany in 1933.
Focus-group discussions verified these findings.
Students ‘thought’ or confirmed there were ‘lots’ of
Jews in Germany, a few even suggesting that ‘over
half the population was Jews’ (Jess, Year 9, SE1).
In coming to their conclusions some employed
deduction, for example Paige (Year 10, EE1), who
said, ‘There must have been quite a lot of people
because it says in all the diary passages about
how if you looked around you would see gold stars
and stuff on what they were wearing’. While the
occasional older student spoke about the number of
Jews with assurance – ‘5 per cent of the population’
(Isaac, Year 13, EE1) – most resorted to presumption
– ‘I’m pretty sure there were quite a lot of Jews in
Germany’ (Will, Year 12, LON7) – or guesstimation –
‘3 or 4 per cent, maybe’ (Alex, Year 12, EE1).
On one occasion, a pair of students
simultaneously recognised the minority status of
Jews in Germany yet still inflated their size. ‘It was
a small percentage wasn’t it?’ said Damien (Year
12, LON3), ‘I can’t remember the exact statistic but
it wasn’t a massive amount, it wasn’t like it was
half the population’. Interjecting, Harrison (Year 12,
LON3) was more specific: ‘It was around eight per
cent’, he said, and Damien agreed.
The importance of these findings derives from
how a central plank of the Nazi propaganda was
the assertion that Jews were a dominant group
in Germany, intent on destroying the country from
within. ‘Knowing’ that in June 1933 just 0.75 per
cent – 505,000 people – of a total population of 67
million was Jewish is therefore paramount if students
are to recognise the falsity and scurrilous nature of
Nazi propaganda for what it was. It is all the more
essential in light of the misunderstandings which can
arise from incorrect ‘knowledge’ about the size of
the Jewish community in Germany.
Some of these misunderstandings were readily
apparent in the focus-group interviews when
students moved to thinking about population size
as a causal factor for hostility towards the Jews.
For example, a few drew a correlation between the
number of Jews and the potential for blame to be
levied against them:
I think there was quite a lot of them in the
population in Germany so maybe they [the
Germans] thought that because there is a lot
of them there is a lot of them to blame for why