What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the perpetrators and who was responsible?
employment as a means of categorisation presses
against the reality that human behaviours do not lend
themselves to static templates applied retrospectively
with the benefits of hindsight. Eschewing historical
complexity in order to fit people into delineated
and distinct categories potentially has severe
repercussions for historical understanding.
Advances in scholarship over the last quarter
of a century together with a ‘flood of revelations’
around Allied knowledge and widespread ‘economic
collusion’ has brought an ‘erosion of [the] preexisting
conceptual partitions’ of perpetrator-victimbystander
(Cesarani and Levine 2002: 2). Meanwhile,
for a number of years some educationalists have
emphasised the need for teachers and students to
‘assiduously avoid accepting stereotypical views
regarding the motives and actions of individuals and
groups’ (Totten 2002: 105).
Yet these developments have not necessarily
filtered down into popular consciousness nor
found their way into many classrooms. Instead, in
much cultural representation, memorial work and
educational activity, ‘the seeming moral clarity of
the Holocaust’ – both in terms of ‘its overarching
wrongness’ and ‘the clarity of its actors’ roles’ –
is commonly upheld and perpetuated (Schweber and
Findling 2007: 2).
There is, therefore, a strong case and urgent need
to problematise the categories that are commonly
employed to order and organise individuals and
groups involved in the Holocaust. At a fundamental
level this requires knowledge of ‘what people did’
and contextual understanding of the possible
reasons for their behaviour. In terms of perpetration,
developments in knowledge and understanding
of the agents of genocide continue apace, having
passed through various stages since the end of the
Second World War. In the process, perspectives
have changed from ‘early images of habitual
murderers and social outcasts’ to now ‘encompass
a range of people, functions, actions, and motives’.
As a result, ‘the blurred, monochrome picture of
earlier decades with Himmler’s black elite as its most
prominent feature has been replaced by a multicoloured,
complex, but no less depressing mosaic’
(Matthäus 2008: 327) where hardened, fanatical
Nazis sit alongside ‘ordinary’ men and women from
all walks of life.
This development has not been restricted to
knowledge of German perpetrators. As long ago as
1987, Michael Marrus – in his imperious survey of
secondary literature – emphasised that ‘the Nazis
were heavily dependent on foreign help in carrying
out the declared purpose of the “Final Solution”’
(Marrus 1987: 56), and in the years since, further
research has only served to underline the point.
While the importance of ‘collaborators’ to the
enactment of the Holocaust has never been in doubt,
the lines separating collaboration from perpetration
have become even more blurred with greater
knowledge of how events unfolded on the ground,
and many of those previously assumed to be mere
‘bystanders’ are now recognised to have been
accomplices to genocide. The spate of regional and
nation-specific studies to emerge since the 1990s
has been considerably influential in this regard. It
has opened up, for example, new debates over the
relationship between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’
in the formulation and implementation of anti-Jewish
policy. In this way, perpetrator research has not just
shed light on the behaviour of individuals and groups;
it has also added sophistication to long-standing
debates over the decision-making process and
dynamics of continental genocide.
Cumulatively, these advances have produced a
‘wealth of detail’ which makes it ‘almost impossible
to make any sort of general statements about
perpetrators, so varied and heterogeneous do
they appear’ (Stone 2010: 96). While there remains
much work to be done (Matthäus 2008: 337), the
weight of evidence suggests that students need
to ‘understand the concept of the Holocaust
perpetrator as a collage, rather than a uniform image
claiming universal validity’ (Windham 2009: 57).
This subtlety of understanding requires, therefore,
a broad knowledge and understanding of the range
of individuals and agencies involved in the genocide.
As a starting point, students should be familiar
with major figures like Adolf Hitler, Heinrich
Himmler, Josef Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich.
Deeper understanding might also be enhanced by
knowledge of a potentially much larger cadre of
key lieutenants such as Odilo Globocnik, Christian
Wirth, the Einsatzgruppen commanders and the
commandants of the principal death camps.
The ideological fervour of these and others was
the central dynamo in driving events, so it follows that
not knowing about such individuals might severely
limit understanding.
At another level, students should acquire
knowledge of the role played by the Nazi Party as
well as key organisations, like the SS. As the political
vehicle for people like Hitler, Himmler and others,
the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was
indispensable in securing access to the organs of
the state and its resources – elemental components
of genocide. Meanwhile, since the actual act of
mass murder requires willing and able personnel,
students need to appreciate the nature of the SS as
the ideological well of Nazism and its core function
as a recruitment pool for those willing to commit
genocide. Furthermore, it is arguable that students’
core knowledge should also include the crucial role
played by other, theoretically non-political entities,