What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the perpetrators and who was responsible?
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to 13). Among students in Years 10 and 11, for
example, more frequent reference to the Nazis as
‘a political party’ (Fahima, Year 10, LON5) emerged.
Furthermore, these older students generally offered
more contextual knowledge about the Nazis and
Hitler’s rise to power. Typically, they knew that
the Nazis were a political party which enjoyed
considerable electoral success during the early
1930s. They often appreciated that the failings of the
Weimar Republic and the devastating consequences
of the economic depression that engulfed Germany
after 1929 led to increasing popular support for Hitler
and the Nazis. Many older students also realised
that, at this time, Hitler and the Nazis proved an
appealing political alternative to large numbers of
Germans and that they did not simply impose their
will by force.
Nevertheless gaps in understanding remained.
For example, the following exchange between
a group of Year 10 students offers a good
demonstration of both the extent and limitations of
students’ understanding of the relationship between
Hitler and the Nazi Party:
Interviewer: And did he go round killing people?
Daniel: No, not him.
Sarah: Not him directly, no. He didn’t get his hands dirty.
Interviewer: So, sorry, you were saying…
Samantha: He gave orders to other people to do it, but
he didn’t do it himself.
Sarah: The people that followed him did it.
Tom: Yeah, there was the SS, like, were Hitler’s main,
well he had politicians in the party and the SS was his
little army, sort of, and then they had generals and that
… so he gave them orders and then they gave the
soldiers orders.
Interviewer: Okay, tell me more about this, the SS.
Who were these people?
Sarah: It was basically Hitler’s force, the Nazi Party.
Tom: Yes, it was his manpower sort of that gave him
the power to do what he wanted. And they were
very violent and very unforgiving towards people that
didn’t…
Sarah: They followed him, his every word. And they
thought that was the right thing to do because he was
the leader.
Tom: And they, like, they didn’t let … their job was to
deal with people that didn’t agree with Hitler
(Year 10, NE1).
On the one hand this dialogue revealed that some
students did have some rudimentary understanding
of the Nazi Party incorporating different factions
(generals, politicians, the SS). On the other hand,
it suggested that Hitler’s will was carried out by a
‘violent’ and ‘unforgiving’ elite group who followed
‘his every word’. While there is no denying that
violence played a key role both in the years before
Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor and in the
immediate weeks and months afterwards, the notion
that power was exercised only through these means
neither takes account of nor explains the evolution of
anti-Jewish policy.
Evidence of some of the oldest students having
a more sophisticated understanding of the Nazis
as a political entity was provided in interviews with
students in Years 12 and 13. Here, nearly all students
spoke of the Nazis as a party; some listed certain
figures, like Himmler, Goering, Hoess and Goebbels;
others added descriptors like ‘extremist’ (Paul, Year
12, LON7) and ‘far right-wing’ (Isaac, Year 13, EE1),
with one student even suggesting that ‘it’ [National
Socialism] was ‘Bolshevik in style’ since it was ‘a small,
extreme group, working together to then seize power
and then spread the ideas’ (Mike, Year 12, LON7).
A sizeable number of other students also
emphasised that the Nazis had once been small and
marginal. In one example, a student claimed that ‘the
Nazi Party used to be just a movement; they weren’t
after the Munich Putsch, when Hitler’s organised
himself and made this party into like an official
political party’ (Damien, Year 12, LON3). On another
occasion, a student asserted that ‘the Nazi Party
wasn’t just this faceless organisation that was always
the same throughout all of its history, it changed
radically from the start to the end’ (Lucas,
Year 12, LON7).
In particular, students in Years 12 and 13
noted that the Nazi Party grew in significance and
influence after 1933 when Germany ‘became a
one-party state’ (Cassie, Year 13, EE1) under Hitler’s
leadership. Other older students also distinguished
between those who supported the Nazis because
of the promise of a better future and those who
were fervent members of the party. Accordingly,
one Year 13 student commented that people ‘who
aren’t ideologically aligned to the party joined for the
benefits and not the ideology, those people would be
called Nazis, but they wouldn’t be ideologically Nazis’
(Aimee, Year 13, EE1).
Insights like these were testament to the
breadth and depth of the historical knowledge and
understanding shared by some students in Years 12
and 13. This enabled them to not only demonstrate
a more secure and accurate grasp of ‘who were the
Nazis’ at a basic level, but to also position National
Socialism as a phenomenon into a temporal context.
In turn, ideas of Nazis as disciples, ‘robots’, or
foot-soldiers did not feature during interviews with
17- and 18-year-old students. Instead, in one
interview, these notions were countered. For
example, one student reasoned: ‘Didn’t they start
as a political party, and then they basically created
different segments of their party, which were basically
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