What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the perpetrators and who was responsible?
163
In many respects, students’ responses to survey
question 62 echoed this commonly held view. The
question asked, ‘If a member of the military or police
refused an instruction to kill Jewish people, what
do you think would be the most likely to happen
to them?’ From a historical perspective, leading
academics (e.g. Browning 1992; Friedlander 1998;
Goldhagen 1996) suggest that the most likely
consequence was that a soldier would be excused
from the killing and given other duties. Indeed,
although at the Nuremberg trials threat of death was
considered as a possible line of defence for how and
why senior Nazi figures acted during the Holocaust,
no record has ever been found that a German
soldier was killed or sent to a concentration camp
for refusing an order to kill Jews.
However, as illustrated in Figure 6.8, most
students did not share this historical understanding.
In fact the vast majority of students incorrectly
assumed that a member of the police or military
would be shot for refusing an order to kill Jews.
Moreover, two-thirds of students who provided this
answer were at least fairly confident it was correct.
By comparison only 5 per cent of students provided
the most appropriate answer, ‘given another duty’.
What these findings potentially reveal is that
many young people hold misconceptions about
the Holocaust that are prevalent in public discourse
about the period. Arguably, these misunderstandings
have important consequences for how students
make meaning of the Holocaust. For example,
a commonly held and widely articulated goal of
learning about the Holocaust is that students
should ‘learn the lessons of the Holocaust’ by
understanding how and why people acted in the
past. Fundamentally, however, there are very different
‘lessons to be learned’ if students believe that
Nazi perpetrators faced a real risk to their lives if
they did not carry out orders from above. In recent
decades historians have paid increased attention
to the complex behaviours of those involved in the
Holocaust (Bankier 1992; Browning 1992; Cesarani
2005). The findings from this research study suggest,
however, that the fruits of this important historical
scholarship have not been passed on to students in
many English school classrooms.
Furthermore, it was abundantly clear in all the
interviews with students in Years 7 to 11 that
few had a clear sense of how the Nazi state was
organised and controlled and what freedoms
and agency ordinary Germans enjoyed. Students
typically believed that the German people had little
room for manoeuvre in a society controlled by fear
and intimidation. However, for the most part their
understanding of life under Nazi rule was both
limited and dominated by a Hitler-centric view of
authority. Many such limitations were also in evidence
in interviews with students in Years 12 and 13.
Nonetheless, understandings did generally prove
more developed in two fundamental ways.
First, in terms of language used, the words
‘dictatorship’ and ‘totalitarian’ were exclusive to older
students. Moreover, unlike younger students, Year
12 and 13 students were not as prone to personalise
authority in terms of Hitler. In this vein, one student
observed, ‘Hitler was smart in a sense because he
created that platform of fear, he’s got his SS and …
this whole basis of fear that kind of kept people in
check’ (Damien, Year 12, LON3).
The notion of there being an apparatus in place
Figure 6.8 Student responses to survey question 62, ‘If a member of the military or police refused an
instruction to kill Jewish people, what do you think would be the most likely to happen to them?’
(percentage by year group)
Percentage of students
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
Shot for refusing order
Sent to
concentration camp
Given another duty
Sent to Eastern Front
■ Year 7 ■ Year 8 ■ Year 9 ■ Year 10 ■ Year 11 ■ Year 12 ■ Year 13
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