What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the victims?
different religion’; or ‘a whole religion of people’
(Fadil, Year 13, LON3). A couple of students (Year 9,
EE1) had something to say about the nature of this
religion: ‘Because of their beliefs they didn’t really
want to fight back’, said Catherine, to which Harry
added, ‘According to their religion they can’t
fight back’.
Jews as a collective ‘religion’ or as adherents
to a form of ill-defined (and, one suspects,
misunderstood) belief system, was thus seen by
some students as an explanation for ‘Why the Jews?’
A few younger students like Chloe (Year 8, LON5)
were quite clear on this: ‘Jews were persecuted
simply because of their religion’. Similarly, Una (Year
8, LON5) suggested that Jews were victimised
because Hitler ‘didn’t want any other religion’ while
Jim (Year 13, LON7) took a slightly different tack by
saying ‘he doesn’t really like the religion itself’.
These were notable occurrences, of course, but they
were not as frequent as the references that
approached religion from the perspective of the perpetrator
rather than the victim. This was the charge of
deicide – that is, the myth, widely cited by students,
of Jews being responsible for the death of Christ.
References appeared in a number of focus groups
with students of various ages. Some younger
students merely alluded to the legend: ‘I think that
it was that they [Christians] believed that the Jews
killed Jesus or something like that’ (Rachael, Year 10,
LON6). Others, like Lara (Year 9, SE1), hinted at the
consequences of this idea: ‘Jews have always been
picked on because Christians believed it was the
Jewish people’s fault that Jesus died on the cross.
So basically everyone is blaming the Jews’.
A larger number of students who referenced
deicide attempted to tie this to Hitler. A few, like
Courtney (Year 9, LON5), did so by indicating
that Hitler ‘had his reasons because of the Bible,
somewhere in the Bible it says that the Jewish
people killed Jesus’. Meanwhile, Hamish (Year 9,
SE1) offered a more insightful assessment. For him,
Hitler was lucky in a way because Germany was
quite a Christian country and … the Christians really
blamed the Jewish people for the death of Jesus.
Because there were so many Christians it wasn’t
hard to convince them to hate Jewish people.
This noteworthy instance of drawing on broader
knowledge in the attempt to both contextualise Nazi
persecution and offer some sort of long-term causal
factor for it was echoed by one or two older students.
However, some elemental misunderstandings
remained evident, such as in the ideas expressed
by Gian (Year 12, LON7), who said:
There’s also a religious aspect there, because
most of the countries in Europe are Christian …
so obviously the church played a large role, and
because I suppose it was the Jews who killed
Jesus there was a clash in religion and that meant
they were convenient scapegoats for them.
Taken together, the survey and focus-group
data indicates that religion – in the broadest
sense – plays a very important role in shaping many
students’ understandings of ‘Why the Jews?’ It
equally operates as an influential viewfinder through
which a sizeable number of students perceive Nazi
persecution and extermination. Although the notion
of religious intolerance as a causal factor does lose
currency as students get older, the endurance of this
idea is nonetheless telling.
In theory, the awareness of many students that
anti-Jewish hostility is related to religious doctrine
could allow for nuanced understandings; it could
direct students towards thinking in terms of longterm
causal factors, considering what was distinctive
about Nazi anti-Jewish sentiment and contemplating
the multifaceted nature of anti-Jewish feeling in
Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. However,
findings from both survey and focus groups indicate
that students rarely think along these lines.
Antisemitism
So far, it has been demonstrated that students
approached the question of ‘Why the Jews?’ by
drawing on varying degrees on ‘knowledge’ about
who ‘the Jews’ were: the number living in Germany,
their social and economic situation, the beliefs they
held. For each of these, this chapter has shown
‘knowledge’ to be inseparable from concepts and
conceptual understanding. Moreover, the evidence
has suggested that students do not often interrogate
or reflect on the overarching ideas they hold.
Antisemitism is a key concept for any explanation
of the Holocaust, and in particular the specifically
virulent form of Nazi antisemitism. While on the
surface this may appear obvious, it is made more
complex by the complicated relationship between
Nazi antisemitism, racial antisemitism more generally
and the long history of Christian anti-Judaism, all
of which coexisted in Europe during the 1930s
and 1940s.
As Christian Wiese (2010: 167–8) notes,
according to the ‘classic’ approach antisemitism is
distinguished from anti-Judaism on account of the
former’s self-perceived objectivity and ‘murderous
hatred’. This distinction is not uncontested.
Wiese writes:
In today’s historical research the term ‘antisemitism’
is frequently applied to all the periods and varieties
of Jew-hatred, while distinguishing, say, ‘religious’,
‘political’ or ‘racial’ antisemitism. However, the clear