What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

When and where did the Holocaust take place?
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the Holocaust, students’ understanding of the
geographies of the Holocaust should be particularly
underpinned by substantive knowledge of ghettos,
the actions of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing
units) and the development of the camp system.
The ‘ghetto phenomenon’, for example, was not
only ‘central to Jewish life under the National
Socialist regime’, it is also ‘a keystone of Holocaust
consciousness and memory’ (Michman 2011: 1).
Tellingly, it is partly in servicing this latter function that
popular knowledge and understanding of the ghettos
has incorrectly framed the nature and purpose of
these sites. To address this, it is imperative that
students understand that ghettos were established
in different places, at different times, for different
reasons. Chronologically they were first set up soon
after the German invasion of Poland in September
1939 and typically the Nazi leadership in Berlin
regarded them as a provisional measure to control
and segregate Jews who they considered an
existential threat. Understanding what the ghettos
were and why they were established in the places
they were located allows young people more fully to
comprehend the cumulative radicalisation of anti-
Jewish policy over time and its evolutionary, at times
ad hoc, nature.
The key agents in the transition to widespread
murder was, as outlined in previous chapters, the
Einsatzgruppen. Accordingly, absent knowledge
of these mobile killing squads and their actions
has numerous repercussions since it impedes
understanding of how genocide unfolded.
Following the invasion of Poland in September
1939, Jews in this German-occupied territory
were exposed to unprovoked and random acts of
violence, including murder. However, systematic
mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe began
with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the
summer of 1941. This was in part a product of the
realisation that mass deportation of Europe’s Jews
to ‘reservations’ in the East or Madagascar was
impossible. More obviously it was also the result
of the Nazis’ growing insecurity and their longestablished
and virulent antisemitism.
Furthermore, knowledge of the camp system
is also essential if students are to understand the
progressive development of the Holocaust. As with
ghettos, much representation of the camp system
in popular history encountered by students is
counterproductive so that, ‘instead of the intricate
detail and subtle shades of historical scholarship,
we see broad brushstrokes and vivid colours’
which uphold ‘one-dimensional’ understandings
(Wachsmann 2015: 14). In place of these, students
should be aware that the concentration camps
established from 1933, and the subsequent
expansion of a vast network of slave labour camps
– however murderous they became – still served a
very different purpose from the very small number
of death camps, the first of which (Chelmno) began
killing in late 1941.
While huge numbers from many victim groups
suffered, and tens of thousands died in the
concentration and slave labour camps, the death
camps were established with the explicit purpose of
murdering Jews as quickly as possible. The Einsatz
Reinhardt camps of Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka and
(for a short period) Majdanek were employed for the
total annihilation of Jews living within the General
Government – that area of Nazi-occupied Poland
that had not been incorporated directly into the
German Reich.
In the case of the death camps, students
must confront the confluence of geography and
chronology, for their creation cannot be understood
without reference to their geographical and temporal
contexts. Knowledge and understanding of the death
camps also allows students to appreciate how the
history of the camp system was complex and fluid,
with the ‘murder of the Jews … a later development
and one that changed the shape of the camp system
altogether’ (Stone 2015: 11).
As the killing programme expanded to encompass
all of Nazi-dominated Europe, so Auschwitz-Birkenau
became the major site for the murder of Jews from
across the continent. In this respect, it would be
instructive if students appreciated that Auschwitz,
though the most iconic of all camps, was not typical
of the Holocaust’s killing centres.
While the narrative we have from Auschwitz of
arrival, selection for the gas chambers, registration
in the camp system, undressing, tattooing, showers,
barrack life, extreme brutality and death has become
the dominant iconography, in fact this was the
experience of those who survived. While the multiple
function of Auschwitz (as a concentration, labour and
death camp) led to a small but significant number of
survivors, the other death camps killed trainload after
trainload without selections. We know little of them.
As such, Auschwitz looms large in the collective
memory, but the picture that it gives us is by no
means typical of the ‘six million’ (Snyder 2009).
There are compelling reasons, then, why students
need knowledge and understanding of when and
where the Holocaust took place. These domains
do not exist in isolation from knowledge and
understanding of ‘who were the victims’ and ‘who
were the perpetrators’ of the Holocaust; rather, they
are intimately and intrinsically entwined.
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