What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the perpetrators and who was responsible?
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to hold on to or operate with complicated ideas or
themselves contest misconceptions prevalent within
contemporary culture. On the contrary, as noted
earlier, excellent examples of younger students’
ability to engage in reflective thinking was clearly
evidenced in conversations about the character and
characteristics of ‘Nazis’. However, it was evident
that, overall, a large proportion of students had
substantial gaps and/or flaws in their contextual
understanding of just ‘who the Nazis’ were.
In a country where it is often said there is ‘too
much Hitler’ in English secondary schools, that there
has been a ‘Hitlerisation’ of the post-14 curriculum,
or that ‘you should study your own history first’
(Ferguson, 2010; Smithers, 2005; Rowley, 2011),
these findings into students’ general knowledge and
understanding of ‘the Nazis’ are striking. And they
are not without consequence. If students do not
‘know’ that Nazism was, first and foremost, a political
movement it becomes impossible for them to
understand the configuration of events and
circumstances that led to their rise to power. Not
appreciating the political dynamics of the ascension
of the Nazi Party also potentially inhibits knowledge
and understanding of how far-right, extremist views
can develop and take root in any society. More
specifically with regard to the Holocaust, not fully
appreciating the pivotal role played by millions of
Nazi Party members undoubtedly impairs students’
ability to comprehend the possibility and enactment
of genocide.
What do students know about the
actions and reactions of the German
people to the Holocaust? How do they
explain these actions and reactions?
Framing the actions and behaviour
of the German people
As the home of many of the leading individuals
behind the Holocaust, the culpability of the German
nation – and, by extension, the German people
– would appear to be self-evident and beyond
doubt. Here, according to Hilberg (1993: 196),
‘the difference between perpetrators and bystanders
was least pronounced; in fact it was not supposed
to exist’.
For a large proportion of the postwar period
however, understanding of the role of Germans
in the Holocaust and their reactions to it tended
to be filtered through political prisms rooted in
judicial proceedings enacted by the Allies in the
aftermath of the war. Themselves part of Allied
‘re-education’ policy, the postwar trials – in
particular the International Military Tribunal held in
Nuremberg – were not only not concerned with
the extermination of the Jews in itself, but were
also centred on presenting a particular reading of
Nazi Germany. The defendants at Nuremberg, for
instance, were principally accused of a criminal
conspiracy to wage aggressive war – a framing
which saw ‘the homogenization of the motivations for
Nazi genocide, and the simplification of the decisionmaking
structure of the agencies of the Third Reich’
(Bloxham 2001: 185–6).
As Donald Bloxham (2001: 11–12) has explained,
the ‘Nuremberg legacy’ played itself out in the early
Cold War climate where ‘Allied policy shifted rapidly
from enforcing the idea of collective German guilt to
differentiation between Germans, then, somewhat
more gradually, to appeasement of German indignation
at the earlier punishment of war criminals’.
Well into the 1970s the ‘obviously central issue: the
behaviour, attitudes, and opinion of the German
non-Jewish population towards the Jews during the
era of Nazi persecution’ (Kershaw, 2008: 140, 210-
211) was thus both under-researched and narrated
through generalising frames of collective guilt or
collective paralysis in the face of totalitarianism.
However, major scholarship conducted during the
1970s and 1980s underlined the inadequacy of these
interpretations. Thanks to the work of Lawrence
Stokes, Ian Kershaw, Otto Dov Kulka and Aron
Rodrigue among others, it became clearly apparent
that rumours about the fate of the Jews were rife in
German society throughout the war years – so much
so that in 1980 Walter Lacquer (1998: 30) would
argue that ‘knowledge about the fate of the Jews …
was widespread even in early summer of 1942’.
Precisely what this knowledge in German
society was, its means of transmission and the
response of those who encountered it were enquiry
questions that drove new research, resulting in more
sophisticated understanding and debate over the
attitudes and responsibility of the German people.
Where the likes of Kershaw (2008: 5–8) placed
weight on the notion of ‘indifference’ as a means of
capturing the response of German society, Kulka
accented ‘passive complicity’ (Marrus 1987: 93).
Meanwhile, Browning’s (1992) work on ‘ordinary
men’ catalysed new deliberation around the role
of societal pressures in inducing participation in
genocide – a trend given added pungency following
Daniel Goldhagen’s (1996) assertion that, contra
Browning, the Holocaust was to be explained by
an ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ embedded within
German society and, by implication, shared by
all Germans.
While these discussions continued – in both
public and scholarly arenas – further research only
magnified the looting and plundering of German
(and European) Jews, raising new questions about
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