What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the perpetrators and who was responsible?
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such as the Wehrmacht (the German army), the
police force and the German bureaucracy more
generally. If taken to mean ‘people who played a
specific role in the formulation or implementation of
anti-Jewish measures’ (Hilberg 1993: ix), then of
course not all Holocaust perpetrators were German.
Indeed, one of the telling outcomes of recent
research has been the expansion of ‘the community
of perpetrators’ (Lawson 2010: 163) which now
spans a host of countries. The most spectacular
and visceral examples of non-German perpetration
are to be found throughout the ‘bloodlands’ of
Central and Eastern Europe (Snyder 2010). Here, in
places like the Baltic States, local populations were
not only important in facilitating genocide, but were
themselves keen participants.
On a larger scale, research has uncovered various
instances where ‘local participation went beyond
engaging in a German-led project’; on this Dan
Stone (2010: 32) has identified Slovakia, Croatia and
Romania as examples of ‘indigenous Holocausts’ –
a notion by no means limited to ‘the East’, but which
can very much be extended westwards as well.
Taking ‘perpetrators’ simply at face value, it is
clear to see there are a great many individuals and
organisations that students could – and arguably,
should – ‘know about’. To this has to be added
a much larger swathe of people across Europe
whose actions and behaviour were instrumental in
the successful implementation of the Holocaust.
Traditionally, this multinational cohort of hundreds
of thousands is crudely divided up between the
categories of ‘collaborators’ and ‘bystanders’ –
although what distinguishes these two from each
other, or from the ‘perpetrator’ grouping, is frequently
unclear. This traditional and potentially inappropriate
division of roles requires critical examination, not least
because it can inhibit students’ understanding of
complicity, culpability and responsibility.
Given the passing of the perpetrators – for none
but a tiny handful are likely still to be alive – determining
who was responsible for the Holocaust for the
purposes of punishment and retribution will lamentably
only have increasingly limited practical outcomes.
Whether or not there are moral and ethical
imperatives for doing so is another matter, and one
not beyond the comprehension of young people.
This aside, there remain other compelling
arguments for why students should consider
questions of responsibility that arise from the
Holocaust. On one level, there is the need for
students to contemplate responsibility in the pursuit
of historical understanding: determining who did
what, why, and the consequences of these actions
is essential if students are to comprehend how
the Holocaust happened. It is also paramount in
devel oping students’ more general understanding
of the relationship between the individual and the
collective. On another, much broader level, many
of the objectives of much Holocaust remembrance
and education – preventing the repetition of
genocide, encouraging tolerance, and the like
– cannot hope to be realised if students do not
have an understanding of how agency relates to
accountability and responsibility.
The question of who was responsible for the
Holocaust necessarily draws on substantive
knowledge and understanding of what happened
– where, when, and why. It follows then that,
where one or more of these facets is missing or
underdeveloped, understandings of responsibility
will be less refined and sophisticated. Yet the
question of responsibility also requires students to go
beyond ‘conventional treatments of the Holocaust’
which ‘emphasize a three-dimensional analysis
that concentrates on perpetrators, victims, and
bystanders’ (Hayes and Roth 2012: 3). Students
should come to recognise the complexities of
behaviours during the Holocaust and their contextual
nature, and contemplate the forces and motivations
which informed (or determined) the choices people
made. This is particularly necessary in the case
of the perpetrators where, in much memorial and
educational work, ‘the dead end of demonizing’
(Schilling 1996: 199) tends still to hold sway.
In the analysis that follows readers will notice
a fundamental incongruity between the rationale
presented here and the subsequently narrow focus
on Hitler, the Nazis and the German people. While
this may appear contradictory, the structure actually
reflects the student responses encountered in
schools. This is particularly true of the focus-group
interviews in which students were asked directly
about perpetration and responsibility. On these
questions there was an overwhelming tendency to
centre responses exclusively on these three ‘agents’
(i.e. on Hitler, the Nazis and the German people).
By contrast, references to the brutal actions of local
people, fascist paramilitary organisations and other
collaborationist regimes in the Axis
(e.g. in Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and
Vichy France) were conspicuous by their absence.
There are various possible explanations for this,
but two are of particular note. First, it seems likely
this gap in student knowledge is at least partly the
result of teaching practices, and potentially also a
reflection of trends within Britain’s Holocaust culture.
Second, and related to these, is how knowledge of
perpetration relates to students’ understanding about
‘where’ the Holocaust happened, a topic discussed
in greater depth in Chapter 7.
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust