What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the victims?
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Jews were living quite a nice life’. The issue of class
was also taken up by Steve (Year 13, LON7), who
boldly argued that the Holocaust
can be explained by different sort of analytic
methods, like didactic materialism … it could
be explained as sort of a class conflict between
generally rich business-class Jews, and sort of
working-class Germans, or at least some classes
of working-class Germans, yeah.
While it was impressive to hear these older
students trying to provide sophisticated explanations,
their incorrect ideas about Jewish wealth rendered
those explanations inherently flawed. This capacity
for insight to be undermined by erroneous
‘knowledge’ was illustrated in the response of Alex
(Year 12, EE1) who suggested:
They [the Jews] are stereotypically much richer than
other German people, and they are always viewed
as sort of separate and different, and the Nazis sort
of used them as a scapegoat for a lot of Germany’s
problems, especially with losing World War I they
were blamed a lot for that.
In linking issues of wealth with perceptions of
difference and the proclivity towards scapegoating,
this student was hinting at what could have been an
impressive explanation for why Jews were targeted
by the regime. But, despite the merits of the account,
its inaccurate and potentially injurious conceptual
framework meant it could never be a wholly
satisfactory explanation.
The above findings make it clear many students
hold a number of highly problematic ideas about
the socioeconomic status of Jews in Nazi Germany.
A large proportion of focus-group participants
had clear misconceptions about the work done
by Jewish people and the financial rewards this
work supposedly brought. Furthermore, there was
a concerning tendency to talk about the impact of
economic turmoil in Weimar Germany in ways that
differentiated and distinguished Jews from Germans
– as if one could be either, but not both. This process
of ‘differing’ may be interpreted as students having
some understanding of the Nazi perception of
Jewish ‘difference’, but the lack of reflexive thinking
was concerning.
As for wealth, a lot of student understandings
were far removed from historical reality, and
these were often combined with assumptions
that upheld common stereotypes. While students
were in some ways correct when they cited the
perception of wealth as a causal factor for ‘Why the
Jews?’, the repeated failure to explicitly refute or
challenge stereotypical notions is highly unnerving.
If assumptions about Jewish wealth are accepted
uncritically, there is a risk that students will come to
regard the Jews’ apparent socioeconomic position
as a causal factor rather than the defamatory work
of the Nazis’ propaganda against the Jews.
Belief
The third dimension of students’ understandings
of ‘Why the Jews?’ concerned ideas about belief,
and it was possible to get a sense of these from
their responses to question 56 of the survey (see
Figure 5.4). The intended purpose of this question
was to discover students’ understanding of
perpetrator intentionality, although the findings
yielded something else as well. The fact that 41.6
per cent of respondents thought Jews could avoid
persecution ‘if they gave up their beliefs’ suggested
that a substantial proportion of students understood
Nazi policy to be predicated on religious grounds.
In turn, this implied that students understood Jews
(and Jewishness) to be defined by religion alone.
Broken down by age, this statistic gained a
different complexion as the percentages were
found to be age related, with 52.6 per cent of Year
7 indicating that Jews could avoid persecution by
relinquishing their beliefs, 41.5 per cent doing so in
Year 9 and 30.1 per cent in Year 11. Although there
was a small increase in Year 12 (to 33 per cent),
by Year 13 just 23.1 per cent of students indicated
that the statement applied to Jews. Meanwhile,
this reduction in the number of students answering
‘Jews’ was mirrored by an increase in the percentage
correctly ascribing the statement to Jehovah’s
Witnesses (22.7 per cent in Year 7, 48.4 per cent
in Year 10, 63.3 per cent in Year 13).
The most common-sense explanation for these
results is that, as students get older, they come to
recognise that Jews were not persecuted because
of religious intolerance and that Jewishness is not
just an article of faith. This account would align
with trends noted in Chapter 3 regarding student
descriptions of ‘what the Holocaust was’, where
older students became less prone to depicting Jews
or Jewish persecution in terms of religion or beliefs.
Nevertheless, even on this question the religious
optic did not disappear completely, as seen by
instances in which Year 12 or 13 students rejected
the Nazi attempt to define Jewishness in racial terms
by actually reasserting a religious frame. As one Year
12 student put it in the survey, ‘Hitler attempted to
end the Jew race, however he was wrong as they
were a religion not a race’.
The persistence of religion and/or belief as
explanatory frames was observable in focus-group
discussions. There were numerous examples, for
instance, of Jews being framed as, defined by or
seen to be fundamentally religious. ‘They are normal
people really,’ said Suzie (Year 9, SE1), ‘just of a
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