What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the victims?
many students cannot talk with confidence about
the particularities of each group’s experience.
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What students present as knowledge is often the
product of assumption and/or deduction, with
guesswork sometimes employed as well. As a
result, what students think happened to each
victim group is usually not commensurate with
historical reality. For example, most students
believe the victim groups ultimately shared a
common fate, namely death.
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When attempting to explain the reasons why
victim groups were targeted, students tend
to invoke notions of ‘difference’. Difference is
understood to take various forms, but ‘Aryan’
and religious paradigms tend to dominate.
As students try to fit victim groups into one of
these, they often run into explanatory difficulties.
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Students do demonstrate awareness that
there were distinctive dimensions to the Jewish
experience, although there is confusion around
just what this was. For instance, most students
(70.7 per cent) indicated in their survey responses
that Jews ‘were the first victims of the Nazis’
mass murder programme’, while only 14.4 per
cent recognised this was in fact true of disabled
people not the Jews. Similarly, a large majority
of students (86.6 per cent) correctly noted the
intended totality of Nazi anti-Jewish policy – that
the Nazis planned to kill every last person from
this group, wherever they could reach them.
However, just under a third intimated that this
also applied to homosexuals, and over a quarter
believed it to be true for disabled people as well.
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Students also struggle to articulate the
particularities of the Jewish experience. Since
most believe all victim groups were killed en
masse, many students do not see the scale
of death experienced by European Jewry to
be a primary point of distinction. This is related
to substantive knowledge as well: the survey
indicated that a large swathe of students do
not realise the extent of killing enacted against
the Jews. While a majority (53.2 per cent)
correctly indicated that around 6 million Jews
were murdered, a notable proportion of these
expressed a lack of certainty about their answer.
Furthermore, over a third of other students
dramatically underestimated the number of
Jews who died. Younger students (up to and
including Year 9) were the most likely to do this;
older students by contrast were more familiar
with the figure of 6 million.
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In trying to identify what was specific about the
Jewish experience, younger students are likely
to gesture towards Jews as having a greater
aggregate of ‘bad’ or unpleasant experiences, or
to the strength of anti-Jewish feeling being higher
than that felt towards other victim groups. Older
students, principally those in Years 12 and 13,
point instead to the regime’s fixation with Jewry
and tend to characterise the Jewish experience
with reference to ‘extermination’.
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The use of Jews as scapegoats tends to be
highlighted by many students as something which
set the Jewish experience apart from other victim
groups. In describing some of the ways in which
Jews were subjected to scapegoating, many
students show themselves to be familiar with the
charge of Dolchstoss – the ‘stab-in-the-back’
myth – made against the Jews in the aftermath of
the First World War.
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Many students demonstrate awareness that
Jews were blamed for the economic turmoil of
the 1920s and 1930s. In describing this process,
a significant number of students displayed a
tendency to offer stereotypes and rehearse
misconceptions in distinctly uncritical ways.
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Generally speaking, students are able to offer
explanations for why the Jews were targeted by
the regime, but the quality of these accounts is
far from ideal: they frequently lack depth and
nuance, and invariably fail to note the multiplicity
of causal factors.
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In accounting for ‘Why the Jews?’, students
draw on their knowledge and understanding of
‘who the Jews were’. However, many were found
to have skewed, distorted or plain incorrect
ideas about how many Jews lived in Germany,
about their socioeconomic status and their
personal beliefs.
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Findings from both the survey and the focus
groups indicated that a large number of students
understand Jews and Jewishness in religious
terms, with Nazi persecution of the Jews seen
as an exercise in religious intolerance.
This is related to a discernible lack of student
understanding of antisemitism – either as a
substantive concept or as a particular form
of Jewish hatred within Nazi ideology.