What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the perpetrators and who was responsible?
151
Figure 6.5 Percentage of students who named Hitler as solely responsible for the Holocaust when answering
survey question 42 ‘Who was responsible for the Holocaust?’ (by year group)
Percentage of students
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
Year 7 Year 8 Year 9 Year 10 Year 11 Year 12 Year 13
Year group
structure was too neat and too simplistic to fully
explain issues of responsibility. Indeed, one student
vigorously challenged what he termed ‘the Great Man
Theory’ of history that accords primary responsibility
for historical events to a single individual (in this
case Hitler). Recognising a degree of complexity not
mentioned by younger students, he reasoned that
Hitler was ‘an expression of the German people’ and
that ‘Hitler couldn’t have come to power if a large
portion of Germany didn’t want him to’ (Lucas, Year
12, LON7). For this student, then, and for many other
older students interviewed and surveyed, while Hitler
played a significant role, he could not be held solely
responsible for the Holocaust.
How do students conceive of ‘the
Nazis’? What role and responsibility
do they ascribe to them?
As noted above, in the course of detailing students’
knowledge and understanding of Hitler’s role it was
apparent that, in spite of Hitler’s pre-eminence in
most students’ consciousness, other individuals
and agencies also featured. One of the key groups
mentioned in this regard were the Nazis.
To many readers, the fact that students linked
‘the Nazis’ to the Holocaust will be of little surprise
and regarded as self-explanatory. Moreover, given its
cultural familiarity, most would understandably expect
the phrase ‘the Nazis’ to itself require no explanation.
However, Richard Overy’s (2013) recent critique of
the ‘indiscriminate use of the term “Nazi”’ should not
be dismissed out of hand. There is, indeed, much
to suggest that ‘uncritical use of “Nazi” distorts the
German reality during the Hitler years’, and at the
same time ‘obscures more than it explains’. This is
only more salient when Nazism seemingly continues
to ‘have a strong hold over us’, in part because ‘the
world of the Third Reich and the people who lived
through it all appear as a kind of moral drama’
(Evans 2015).
An added complication to cultural understandings
of ‘the Nazis’ concerns their relationship to
Hitler. While Hitler-centrism as a framework for
understanding National Socialism has long been out
of fashion in academic circles, there nevertheless
remains a strong tendency in culture, politics and
society to frame Hitler and Nazism as one and the
same. What makes this problematic, as Kershaw
(2000: 45) has observed, is:
…the equation Nazism = Hitlerism unnecessarily
restricts the vision and distorts the focus in explaining
the origins of Nazism; deflects away from rather
than orientates towards consideration of the political
manifestations in other European countries which
shared (and continue to share today) important
affinities and common characteristics with Nazism.
Put differently, the abstraction of National
Socialism – either to the status of a cipher of evil or
simply the expression of Adolf Hitler – is potentially
very problematic. With this in mind, students’
repeated reference to ‘the Nazis’ as being in some
way related to the Holocaust prompted the question
of exactly to whom, or to what, they were referring?
Who were the Nazis?
Determining who the Nazis were, what they did,
and what they were responsible for were key
discussion points in all focus-group interviews.
Students were initially asked ‘who’ the Nazis were,
and – depending on their answers – various lines of
enquiry were pursued.
In some instances, students were asked to
describe or depict ‘a Nazi’. Responses from 11 to
16 year olds were varied and diverse. Words used
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