What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the victims?
unending poverty and continual unemployment.
Although it would be unreasonable to expect
students to have extensive knowledge of the
economic history of the Weimar period, the onedimensional
understanding demonstrated by many
had consequences. In effect, students seemed
inclined to present a picture of ‘haves’ and
‘have nots’, with a number colouring this portrait in
a way that framed ‘Jews’ and ‘Germans’ as two
amorphous masses fundamentally separated from
each other. ‘The Jews’, some indicated, ‘had the
best jobs’ (Aaliyah, Year 10, LON5) or were ‘taking
up homes and jobs and stuff’ (Carrie, Year 10, EE1).
Meanwhile, ‘the Germans’ either had no jobs or did
not have ‘good’ jobs.
This artificial separation of Jews from Germans –
together with the notion that Jews ‘were doing well
when the rest of Germany was doing badly’ (Kristy,
Year 9, LON6) – was occasionally depicted in a
way where scapegoating became inevitable: ‘Like,
they [the Germans] had no money and everything
and they were looking for someone to blame’, said
Aaliyah (Year 10, LON5). In turn, she suggested that
Germans were ‘already eager to receive anything’
and ‘then Hitler was like “all the Jews have all the
jobs, duh duh duh duh dah”…so when he said that
I think they had someone to blame’.
Some students remarked on the type of jobs
that they understood Jews to have at this time.
Interestingly, a few who did so prefaced or coupled
their remarks with positive references to Jews
having a ‘hardworking’ attitude or being able to hold
certain occupations thanks to a ‘better education’
(Catherine, Year 9, EE1). Such remarks could, on
occasions, still coexist with misunderstandings, for
instance in the case of Annie (Year 10, NE1), who
stated that ‘Jews were the type of people who had
the most money because they had the education’.
For a few students, then, ‘education’ was actually
seen as a privilege – one that allowed Jews to
have ‘quite qualified, quite academic jobs,’ and
meant they ‘were paid well … high-powered’ (Will,
Year 12, LON7). This correlation was picked up by
a number of focus-group participants: ‘They were
doctors, lawyers, they owned shops so they were
rich, I guess you could say’, said Holly (Year 10,
LON5), who also noted that this led to ‘jealousy or
some animosity’. Fahima (Year 10, LON5) put it more
colourfully when asserting that ‘the Germans, when
they saw that the Jews were better off than them
kind of, I don’t know, it kind of pissed them off a bit’.
It is important to remember that these claims
did not appear in every single focus group and
were by no means shared by all students. However,
perceptions of and ideas about Jewish wealth
were observed to have quite wide currency across
different age groups and different schools. Among
younger students these were sometimes qualified by
admissions of uncertainty. For example, Lucy (Year
8, LON6) – who was yet to study the Holocaust at
school – couched her comments about why Jews
were targeted in the following terms:
I have an idea but I’m not very sure: is it because
they were like kind of rich, so maybe they [the
Germans] thought that that was kind of in some
way evil, like the money didn’t belong to them it
belonged to the Germans and the Jewish people
had kind of taken that away from them.
In a separate interview, Una (Year 8, LON5),
displayed more certainty in saying that ‘the Jews
were like had a rich community … and I think Hitler
was jealous of their power’.
It is tempting to explain away comments like these
by pointing to the fact that these students had not
formally studied the Holocaust. However true this
may be, it does little to account for where these ideas
came from or why they had not been dismissed out
of hand. Moreover, any assumption that students
come to reject such conceptions by learning about
the Holocaust in school is called into question by
indications that even students who had studied the
subject retained incorrect and injurious ideas about
Jewish wealth. For example, in an interview with Year
9 students (LON6), Kristy said, ‘I think Jews were rich
at the time?’ before continuing:
I think they had a lot of money and things like that.
They invented jewellery or something like that, I’m
just guessing. And I think because they invented
a lot of stuff and they had lots of money and they
were quite wealthy. They weren’t really – the other
Germans weren’t as wealthy as them, they like
owned business and stuff so I guess they [the
Germans] were asking ‘okay why are they all so
good with money and how come they have got so
much money.’
Further signs of how far misconceptions,
misunderstandings and misrepresentations endure
were seen in discussions with Year 12 and 13
students. Some endeavoured to root their ideas in
the history: ‘My memory’s a bit hazy’, said Lucas
(Year 12, LON7), but ‘a lot of small German stores
were sort of taken over by big Jewish businesses
during the 1920s, before the Wall Street Crash and
it’s that fear of sort of German identity being
taken away’.
Meanwhile, Samuel (Year 12, LON7) attempted
to introduce social class as an explanation for ‘Why
the Jews?’ when he said, ‘Didn’t he [Hitler] hate the
wealth of the Jews as well, how they dominated
society, because they were predominantly upper
class?’ Answering his own question Samuel
concluded that Hitler ‘didn’t like’ how ‘upper-class