What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

When and where did the Holocaust take place?
177
questions revealed significant gaps in knowledge
and understanding among many students in Years
12 and 13, the older students who took part in
interviews were generally able to articulate how
things became ‘progressively worse’ for Jews as
events unfolded (Danielle, Year 13, EE1). As one
Year 12 student remarked, in the early years of
Hitler’s rule:
…they boycotted lots of Jewish shops … and
there were the Nuremburg Laws where they sort
of outlined that Jewish people didn’t get German
citizenship and they couldn’t marry, and lots of other
things. [There were] areas they couldn’t go into, like
they couldn’t go into the same parks as German
people, couldn’t sit on the same benches. It was
complete separation to increase the hate
(Alex, Year 12, EE1).
Other students in Years 12 and 13 also variously
described ‘restrictions on where Jews could go’
(Paul, Year 13, EE1), the imposition of ‘curfews’
(Cassie, Year 13, EE1) and the ‘burning of Jewish
books’ (Anna, Year 13, EE1). In one school,
Year 12 students referred to the development of
the Holocaust as analogous to a whirlwind that
intensified over time:
Jack: Well, we were taught it’s like a whirlwind – there’s
four solutions to deal with the Jews, and then each time
it’s not good enough for Hitler, so it goes to the ‘Final
Solution’ which is like using the concentration camps
to kill them.
Interviewer: OK, that’s interesting, so this whirlwind
starts at some point, and it gets worse does it?
Jack: Yeah, there’s more serious like discrimination
against them.
Interviewer: So what would be the levels? Tell me
more about that.
Max: Starts with, like, boycotting their shops and
eventually works up to violence, after the non violence,
just boycotting shops, and like sort of just affecting them
other than violence, like economically or
something, and then it eventually progresses to
the ‘Final Solution’.
Interviewer: OK, so it starts with a bit of smashing of
shops, and the violence.
Max: Taking away property.
Interviewer: Taking away property.
Max: They weren’t allowed to have their own
businesses, or be doctors, I think, all of them.
Interviewer: OK, so this was happening in the earlier
days of Hitler’s rule?
Jack: Yes, they were all fired on one night, the Jewish
doctors.
Interviewer: So this is your whirlwind analogy, it starts
off and it gets worse over time.
Max: Yeah.
Interviewer: So can you give me any sense of when
this is, then? Any dates, any time, any years?
Max: 1933 until 1939.
Jack: It’s like escalating treatment, so it starts off literally
just they are not allowed to use public services that
the German people can, and then it gradually gets
to separation, where, like, Jewish children shouldn’t
be with German children, then it keeps on going to
boycotts, then violence, then…
Max: Ghettos.
Interviewer: Ghettos, yeah, tell me about ghettos.
Max: It’s where they, it was like a separate town with
walls around it where they’d send the Jewish population
from a different town into there and they’d sort of put
lots of people in there so that they weren’t with the
German population, so that they couldn’t interact or be
together, so they had to run their own towns, so they
could be controlled.
Interviewer: OK, so when does it get to mass killing?
You mentioned earlier, gas chambers and mass killing,
when does that, any idea when that happens in this
whirlwind, just roughly?
Max: 1942, and after.
Interviewer: So in the ’40s.
Max: The last three years of the war (Year 12, EE1).
This interview exchange is indicative of other
similar discussions with students in Years 12 and
13, all of whom were studying history. Typically,
these history students understood the progressive
developments of Nazi persecution and were
often able to identify key events. For example, the
Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and Kristallnacht were
referred to in every group interview and students
were often able to provide additional contextual
information about their significance. Indeed, in the
example above, it is noticeable that Max resists the
generality of the interviewer who asks ‘when does it
get to the mass killing … just roughly’ by confidently
stating ‘1942, and after’. He further insists on the
point when the interviewer summarises, ‘So in the
’40s’ with his more precise and accurate response:
‘The last three years of the war’. The older students’
more sophisticated understanding of the process of
history and how circumstances change over time
was thus apparent during interviews. For example,
another student said:
…the Nazi Party wasn’t just this faceless
organisation that was always the same throughout
all of its history, it changed radically from the start
to the end. Hitler and the Nazis didn’t always want
to exterminate the Jews, it can clearly be shown by
the fact that Hitler let thousands of Jews escape his
Nazi state. He did take their money but he let lots of
them go to America and Britain and he was thinking
about setting up a sort of Jewish colony to send all
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust