What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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When and where did the Holocaust take place?
the past. After all, the mass murder of European
Jewry did not occur in the abstract and ‘is not
beyond space-time’ (Katz 1992: 173). Rather, ‘the
Holocaust was a real historical event, in real time, in
our own lifetime; in real space marked in every child’s
geography book’ (Dawidowicz 1990: 29).
Understandings of when the Holocaust happened
therefore go hand in glove with understandings of
where it took place. Absolutely central to an informed
understanding of the relationship between the ‘when’
and the ‘where’ of the Holocaust is that students have
a clear knowledge of the distinction between before
and after September 1939. In order to fully appreciate
the development of the Holocaust they should be
aware that, before September 1939, Nazi persecution
against Jews and others – while often extremely violent
and in many cases lethal – did not yet amount to
programmes of systematic mass murder. Moreover, it
is crucial that students recognise these discriminatory
policies were contained within a particular geographical
space – Greater Germany – albeit one which had
emerged during the course of the 1930s as a result of
the Nazi regime’s foreign policy.
During the pre-war years, Nazi anti-Jewish
policy focused first on excluding German Jews
from society, politics and the economy and, later,
on the enforced migration of Jews out of the
Reich (Friedländer 1997). However, in the years
immediately after September 1939, as the German
army conquered more territory across Europe during
the Second World War, Nazi anti-Jewish policy
acquired continental dynamics and became more
murderous. Increasingly, policies of persecution
and murder engulfed a host of European countries,
proving particularly catastrophic in Eastern Europe,
the Baltic states and the Nazi-occupied territories of
the Soviet Union, but also devastating in the Balkans,
in some countries of Western Europe such as the
Netherlands and, of course, in Germany itself.
The reality that Nazi persecution of all victim
groups markedly increased during 1939 to 1945,
and in some cases descended into genocide, only
confirms how knowledge of the outbreak and course
of the Second World War is crucial in accounting
for the radicalisation of Nazi policy. However, as
Confino (2012a: 31–2) notes, when it comes to the
Holocaust, ‘the question is not whether the context
of a brutalizing war is important (of course it is), but
in what way and what it explains’.
For example, it is not only essential for students
to recognise that the conquest of new lands in
the East caused millions of Jewish people to fall
under Nazi rule, they also need to understand the
consequences of this development: that for a variety
of reasons it led to the enactment of increasingly
radical and brutal policies towards Jews in a variety
of countries. The precise nature of these policies
was affected by multiple factors, including the terms
of Nazi occupation, administration or collaboration;
sociocultural and political factors at a local level; and,
of course, broader contextual issues such as the
course of war.
Having a clear understanding of the Second World
War’s chronological and geographical development
is thus fundamental for students’ acquisition of
an informed understanding of how and why the
Holocaust happened. So too is an appreciation of
how the war context itself relates to the years which
preceded the conflict (Confino 2012b: 93).
With awareness of these contexts, students will
become more able to move beyond erroneous or
undeveloped understandings of who did what during
the Holocaust. They will also be better equipped to
deal with complex questions surrounding levels of
responsibility and complicity than those who view the
Holocaust through a narrow German-centric or Hitlercentric
lens. Accordingly, students who appreciate
that the Holocaust developed over time to become
a continental genocide in which the perpetrators
ultimately sought to kill every Jew, everywhere, will be
more able to understand the significance, impact and
true enormity of its scope and scale than those who,
for example, believe it was confined solely to Germany.
At another level, how much – or how little –
students know about the geographic sweep of
the Holocaust can also directly affect the manner
in which they order and organise their historical
knowledge. This can be exemplified in various ways
at various levels. For example, knowing that the
greatest number of Jewish victims came from Poland
and not Germany forces students to reassess and
rethink presumptions they might have about the
size of the Jewish population in Germany. Similarly,
knowing that the bulk of killing took place not in
Germany but in Poland requires students to consider
the accuracy of the chronological knowledge with
which they are working. In this way it is indeed
possible to ‘see new chronologies emerging from
close geographical study of the Holocaust’ (Giordano
et al. 2014: 6).
Taking these examples further, it is evident that
students’ geographical awareness of the Holocaust
will also have consequences for the accounts and
explanations they construct. Understanding that
the largest number of Jews killed came from and
were murdered in Poland, for instance, calls into
question the notion, expressed by some students in
our research, that ‘Hitler’ only ‘attacked’ the Jews
because they held ‘power’ in Germany. Likewise, it
follows that a student who knows most Jews killed
came from and were murdered in Poland, is less
likely to believe that organised mass murder began
as soon as Hitler became leader of Germany in 1933.
To fully appreciate the scope and scale of