What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the victims?
and Read 2004: 76), but without an appreciation
of how this animosity waxes and wanes, changes
and develops, students are unlikely to grasp the
particularities of Nazi antisemitism or to understand
how it was possible for a continent to descend
into genocide.
Historical knowledge alone cannot therefore
help students explain the Holocaust. Students
require conceptual understanding of second-order
disciplinary concepts, such as causation, and of
substantive concepts, like antisemitism, if they are
to get beyond fragmented descriptions of the events
and ideas that enabled the Holocaust to happen.
It is only with this conceptual apparatus that
students can become able to move from description
to explanation. Some explanations are, of course,
stronger than others. As Lee and Shemilt
(2009: 42–9) have shown, explanations that are more
rigorous and nuanced tend to take better account of
links between causes, the contextual and conditional
quality of human behaviour and the general
contingent nature of human existence.
Improving the quality of students’ explanations
thus requires not just extended content knowledge,
but the development of conceptual understanding.
This has particular relevance for the question ‘Why
the Jews?’ because, as this chapter has repeatedly
shown, the majority of students work with concepts
and conceptions that are either invalid or inadequate.
Further demonstration of this came from students’
positioning of Hitler as an explanatory factor for the
Jewish experience specifically, and the victim groups
more generally.
More will be said on this in Chapter 6, but the
centrality of Hitler to students’ understandings of why
particular groups were targeted has been apparent
throughout this chapter. In the case of each of the
non-Jewish victim groups, for example, we’ve
encountered strong evidence of students explaining
and attributing policy to Hitler and Hitler alone. With
regard to the Jewish experience this was no different.
In focus-group interviews with younger students,
Hitler was repeatedly framed as the key causal
factor in the persecution of the Jews. Attempting
to account for Hitler’s own personal hatred, the
vast majority of students cited personal history.
Many suggested his antisemitism was in some way
related to his parents. This ranged from Kristy (Year
9, LON6), who wondered if ‘like was his stepdad a
Jew or something?’, to Grace (Year 9, LON6) who
thought ‘his mum … kind of taught them, she kept
saying “oh those Jews”’.
However, most students framed the familial
connection in terms of Hitler’s mother dying at the
hands of a Jewish doctor. In its most rudimentary
form this took the shape of the comment, ‘Hitler
was, like, annoyed at the doctor and that is why he
went out and killed all the Jewish people’ (Allie, Year
9, NE1). Although this straight line was generally not
so explicitly drawn by students, the notion that ‘he
blamed the Jewish doctors for allowing his mother
to die’ (Paul, Year 12, LON7) and that this had a
bearing on his world view was one gestured to
even by some at top end of the age range.
The tale of Klara Hitler’s death in 1907, and
the notion that Hitler levied blame at her Jewish
physician Dr Bloch, is one with roots in popular
history. There is no doubt his mother’s death had
a profound impact on Hitler, but the idea that this
somehow contributed to the development of his
antisemitism has no empirical foundation, nor was
it an interpretation ever forwarded by him. That this
common myth has such currency among students is
revealing, but it was by no means the only personal
narrative evident in the focus groups. At least as
prominent were references to Hitler’s failure to secure
a place in art college. It was notable that many
references to this disappointment were framed in a
self-consciously speculative fashion, with students
qualifying their remarks with ‘I think that’ or ‘I’ve
heard that’. Yet even the oldest students still gave
some credence to the idea, for example Samad (Year
12, LON3), who remarked, ‘I think he had a hatred
for the Jews because he didn’t get accepted into art
college or something like that, and the art college
was Jewish’.
Alongside the death of his mother and his
aborted artistic ambitions, students invoked other
supposed reasons for Hitler’s antisemitism, including
his experience of homelessness and having a
Jewish person as a superior officer in the army.
Even where students did not refer directly to any
of these, there was still a palpable sense of trying
to rationalise Hitler’s ‘personal hatred’: ‘maybe
something happened with a Jewish person when
he was younger and he just felt that every Jew was
the same’ (Annie, Year 10, NE1). According to Kristy
(Year 9, LON6), this elusive negative experience
prompted Hitler to project his trauma on to the Jews
‘because, like, he suffered a lot in his life I think he
wanted the Jews to actually suffer all that he had
been through’.
The desire of students to establish the origins
of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews is an understandable
and worthy endeavour. But it should be seen in
conjunction with the impulse of many to perceive
the persecution and murder of the Jews through
Hitler’s thoughts and deeds. Since this is addressed
further in Chapter 6 it is enough to say here that
this tendency reveals ‘common-sense conceptions
of intentional action’ among students. This in turn
leads to understandings of causation that are simply
‘agency-based’ (Howson and Shemilt 2011: 81),
where the answer to ‘Why the Jews?’ is reduced