What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the perpetrators and who was responsible?
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related recognition (however implicit) that ‘others’
were participants in a process. This suggested
many would have disagreed with the student who
reasoned that ‘he [Hitler] just put forward policies,
he just gave orders and the people that supported
the Nazi Party followed’ (Samad, Year 12, LON3).
Although Hitler clearly remains ‘the leader of it all’
(Fadil, Year 13, LON3) for the majority of these
students, it would appear this does not preclude
more dynamic understandings of the workings of
power within the regime.
On the other hand, there is the paradox that these
insights come from a fundamental misunderstanding:
namely, that the ‘Final Solution’ began at Wannsee,
and was made manifest in some sort of physical
document appended by signatories. Year 12 and 13
students’ positioning of Hitler vis-à-vis the Wannsee
Conference is a good demonstration, then, of how
knowledge and understanding is not a fixed entity: it
is possible to ‘know’ and ‘understand’ more in some
respects, and at the same time also hold incorrect
‘knowledge’ and invalid ‘understandings’. What
can also be observed is that, where older students
can have a more sophisticated appreciation of the
power structure of the Third Reich than their younger
counterparts, this does not fundamentally alter
their understanding of the decision-making process
behind the Holocaust.
In their depiction of Hitler and fixation on a
signed document, these older students still present
an interpretative account of his role which is
skewed much more towards intentionalism than to
structuralism. Consequentially, there is no sense
that other forces beyond Hitler had any influence
on the resolve to embark on genocide. Distinctly
absent in this respect was any appreciation of what
Hans Mommsen famously described as ‘cumulative
radicalization’ – either in terms of the ‘dynamic
process’ of ‘improvised bureaucratic initiatives’
(Kershaw, 2000: 99) or the static electricity generated
by those groups and individuals implementing policy
‘on the ground’. This unavoidably has repercussions
for how students understood and ascribed
responsibility.
Hitler’s responsibility
The student survey contained very few open-text
questions in which students were invited to provide
their own unmediated responses. However, not
wishing to influence students’ responses in any way,
question 42 provided a blank box in which students
could write down their responses to the question,
‘Who was responsible for the Holocaust?’
A response to this question was provided by
6,897 students. Responses ranged in length, detail
and variety. Some students offered single-word
or short answers to the question of responsibility,
for example, ‘Hitler’; ‘Nazis’; ‘Hitler and the Nazi
Party’; ‘Hitler, Himmler and the SS’; ‘Hitler and the
Germans’. Other students offered more multifaceted
answers, for example:
■ ■ ‘The Nazi party was responsible for the Holocaust.
However their ideas came from Adolf Hitler –
their leader.’
■ ■ ‘Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, the SS, the
Gestapo and Nazi collaborators.’
■ ■ ‘The leading members of the Nazi Party for
example Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich
Himmler.’
■ ■ ‘The German people and those who would turn in
their own people to survive.’
In addition, a number of students offered more
detailed and, at times, impressive explanations as the
following two examples illustrate:
Adolf Hitler began the persecution of Jews and
caused people to believe they were an inferior and
evil race. However, it was the population of Germany
at the time that followed his orders and carried out
the persecution of the Jewish race, so ultimately it
is a vast number of soldiers and Gestapo that are
responsible for the slaughter of millions of people.
Hitler was clearly the main reason for the
Holocaust’s happening, although there were a
multitude of people who allowed him to obtain
power. For instance, the Germans got him elected,
countries such as Great Britain took too long to
prevent Hitler and throughout history there were
many incidences of Anti-Semitic oppression, causing
general prejudice against the Jewish religion.
All responses to the question, ‘Who was
responsible?’ were carefully analysed and coded
in both qualitative and quantitative ways. As an
example of how the responses were coded in a
quantitative way the Table 6.1 provides an overview
of how student responses were categorised to reflect
different agents of responsibility.
As Table 6.1 reveals, in responding to the survey
question of who was responsible for the Holocaust,
the overwhelming majority of students (79.4 per cent)
made some reference to Hitler. Half of all students
(50.7 per cent) ascribed responsibility to Hitler alone
and one in five students (20.6 per cent) claimed
that Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust in
association with the Nazis.
As a general trend the majority of students
(56.1 per cent) in Years 7 to 9 deemed Hitler solely
responsible for the Holocaust. In Years 7 and 8, for
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