What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the perpetrators and who was responsible?
and children executed close to their homes through
mass shooting. In certain areas mobile gas vans,
developed during the ‘euthanasia’ programme,
were also employed. In the main, however, killing
was conducted at close quarters, leading in
effect to a ‘Holocaust by bullets’ (Desbois 2008).
Essential to this operation was logistical support
provided by the German army and the cooperation
of local populations – the latter of whom would, on
occasions, brutally massacre their Jewish neighbours
with little or no prompting.
The number of people killed by the Einsatzgruppen
is estimated to have been more than 1.5 million.
This phenomenal scale of killing raises a plethora
of questions about who the perpetrators were
and how they were able to complete their grim
work. Numbering only 3,000 at its height, the
Einsatzgruppen comprised four groups, sub-divided
into smaller commandos. The four leaders of the
Einsatzgruppen were all intellectuals, hand-picked
for the job by Heydrich and Himmler. Many of the
officers below these men were also highly educated,
with years of loyal service in the SS and security
police. The bulk of Einsatzgruppen personnel were
drawn from various sources within the SS.
Over time, these units were supplemented and
supported by battalions of regular uniformed police
officers. Among these were 21 battalions of Order
Police – ‘a manpower pool of some 11,000 men’
(Browning 2004: 229) – who since the outbreak
of war had been ‘transferred to the occupied
territories, charged with the task of pacifying
Figure 6.3 Percentage of students who responded
‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘don’t know’ when asked if the
Einsatzgruppen were connected to the Holocaust
(survey question 31)
their locale’ (Lawson, 2010: 194). Crucially these
were not ideological fanatics, but rather ‘ordinary
men’ (Browning 1992). This insight, together with
Christopher Browning’s findings that these men
wilfully participated in killing out of peer-pressure and
self-interest more than ideology or bestiality, evidently
has much to contribute in developing students’
thinking on agency and accountability.
While the men of the Einsatzgruppen were
undeniably ‘perpetrators’, their involvement in the
Holocaust was fundamentally of a different nature
to the likes of Eichmann and Himmler. In turn, the
questions they raise – particularly in terms of role
and responsibility – are not necessarily the same as
bureaucrats and leading policymakers. Exploring
these with students clearly opens up numerous
teaching and learning opportunities, but such an
exercise requires knowledge of the Einsatzgruppen
in the first place. On this, the results of student
responses to survey question 31, shown in Figure
6.3, are extremely revealing.
The majority response of ‘don’t know’ (59.1
per cent) speaks plainly of a chasm in student
knowledge, although it was evident that the number
of students who did link the Holocaust and the
Einsatzgruppen generally grew year-on-year from a
low of 13.1 per cent in Year 7. That said, by Year 10
this was still less than a quarter of students (24.4 per
cent) and it was not until Year 13 that the majority
(51 per cent) correctly linked the Einsatzgruppen
to the Holocaust.
During focus-group interviews with 11 to 16 year
olds, reference to the Einsatzgruppen was strikingly
absent. Only once did a student use the term
correctly, indicating that these were ‘death squads’,
but not making further remark on what they actually
did (Allie, Year 9, NE1). A handful of others did refer
to or motion towards mass shootings, but with a
distinct sense of uncertainty and noticeable absence
of detail. Illustrative here is the following exchange
among a group of Year 10 students (NE1):
59.1
24.3
16.6
Sarah: But didn’t they shoot Jews, like before they
gassed them they shot them and they ended up in
mass graves because they just shot them dead.
Tom: Then Hitler decided that that wasn’t very efficient,
it was using up too many bullets and therefore they
decided to make it cheaper which is…
Sarah: More efficient.
Tom: Yes, which is more efficient because, but that is
even worse because he didn’t really care about how
the people died, he just wanted to make sure that
they died.
■ Yes ■ No ■ Don’t know
Percentage of students
Of note, this same interview also saw Annie (Year
10, NE1) talk of ‘a process of the killing stages’,