What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the perpetrators and who was responsible?
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before and after January 1933, the notion of Hitler
being elected to power as part of a democratic
process also ignores how authoritarian the last
years of the Weimar Republic had already become
and obfuscates understanding of the grounds on
which the National Socialist German Workers’ Party
acquired popular support. Given how prevalent
‘intentionalist’ ideas were among students, the
assumption of many that Hitler was clear, from the
beginning, of his wish to target Jews could lead
students to equate electoral support for Nazism as
a glowing endorsement of Nazi antisemitism.
Unlike younger cohorts, students in Years 12 and
13 generally exhibited deeper contextual knowledge
and spoke more assuredly about the Nazis ‘coming
to power’. Having a greater awareness of the party’s
origins and early history was important here, as
was familiarity with sociocultural turmoil and the
implications of economic crises such as the Wall
Street Crash. And yet, despite these improvements,
a noticeable proportion of these older students still
advanced the idea that Hitler and the Nazis were
elected into government. Indeed, only one student
explicitly spoke of this with a measure of scepticism
– ‘they [the German people] sort of elected the Nazi
Party’ (Alex, Year 12, EE1) – although it can’t be
determined if this was intentional or otherwise.
For older students it seemed the notion of the
Nazis being ‘voted in’ (Samuel, Year 12, LON7)
was commonplace.
The second activity that most young students
ascribed to the Germans was, in fact, that of
inaction. As one Year 10 student commented, ‘they
[the German people] did nothing; they just went
along with it and didn’t try to fight it’ (Lauren, Year
10, LON6). Students’ explanation of the actions of
the German people is addressed more fully in the
next section. It is, however, worth noting here that
many students saw the German people as passive
actors on the historical stage. For many students
it was if the Holocaust happened around the
German people, with events unfolding without their
involvement or engagement.
The idea of German people not ‘doing’ anything
stands, of course, in sharp relief to the weight of
agency that students accord to Hitler. As much
as this may reflect more generally on students’
attitudes towards and understanding of historical
agency, it can also be read as an illustration of how
they perceive the role played by other ‘non-Nazi’
collectives in the Holocaust.
The reasons behind students’ interpretation of
the Germans as a passive mass are closely related
to their comprehension of the Third Reich more
broadly, and to their knowledge of the Holocaust
more specifically, both of which are detailed below.
That many students saw the German people as
passive bystanders, with the events of the Holocaust
developing without their involvement or engagement,
also evidently has considerable consequences for
ascriptions of responsibility. In the main, it can lead
to the presumed inactivity of the German people
being framed as resulting from ignorance, disinterest
or paralysis – a deduction that shows little regard for
context or complexity.
The final set of actions and exercises which
students designated to the German people was
that of actually helping Jews. More specifically, it
was revealing to discover some students talked of
Germans ‘hiding’ Jewish people – one student even
suggested ‘I think some of them … had Jews in their
houses, like in their attics’ (Rachael, Year 10, LON6),
while another (Samantha, Year 10, NE1) offered
Anne Frank as an example. Although some
Germans did indeed help Jews to hide, or while in
hiding, this practice was by no means as widespread
as most young students appeared to presume;
according to Hilberg (1993: 197), of the few
thousand ‘who found refuge or help’, the majority
were ‘relatives of the rescuers by reason of a mixed
marriage, or they were of partial German descent
or converts to Christianity’. That students held a
different perception may perhaps be accounted
for by familiarity with the story of the Frank family:
a family which, of course, went into hiding not in
Germany but in the Netherlands, and did so in an
annex within their own property, not a German’s.
Unlike younger students, those in Years 12 and
13 were less likely to place such emphasis on
Germans helping Jews. Offering shelter or supporting
hiding was mentioned by a few, but by no means as
frequently. Indeed, on one occasion this was actually
in reference to Germans who ‘used to denounce
people, like, if they had someone who was hiding
next door … they used to report it to the Secret
Police’ (Cassie, Year 13, EE1). This was echoed
by another student who said, ‘Lots of the average
German people would do the sort of dobbing people
in to the SS or whatever if they weren’t being Nazi
enough, or were Jewish, or gay, or whatever’ (Alex,
Year 12, EE1).
Such observations demonstrated greater
familiarity with the workings of a totalitarian state
and hinted at an awareness of choice and agency
which went beyond ideas of Germans wanting, but
not being able, to act for fear of the consequences.
An insightful example of this complex understanding
came with the perceptive remark of Alex (Year 12,
EE1), who highlighted that ‘the Germans really stayed
loyal to the Nazi Party even, you know, towards
the very end in 1945, whereas in World War I they
started to get mutinies, like 1918’.
Inherent in all three of these behavioural frames
employed by students were questions of explanation,
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