What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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When and where did the Holocaust take place?
of the Jews into Madagascar, and it was only about
1940 to 1941 he and the top Nazis started thinking
about actually implementing a ‘Final Solution’.
They had debates about this, so it wasn’t always
the same policy and they got a bit more hard line
towards the end (Steve, Year 13, LON7).
Similarly another student commented that attacks
on the Jews were:
slowly building … they were stripped of citizenship
and had businesses taken away, and they had to
wear the yellow stars and then they got sent to
the concentration camps, and in eastern Europe
they did just kill them, like the Einsatzgruppen just
went into villages and shot everyone, basically, and
put them into mass graves, and then they started
building death camps towards the end of the war,
and then they sent loads of people there as well
(Jake, Year 12, LON7).
It should be noted that all the Year 12 and 13
students involved in focus groups were studying for A
level history. As such, while none were taking courses
that explicitly focused on the Holocaust, they had a
particular interest in the past and were among the
small number of students (around 6 per cent of all
A level students entered for exams in England) who
had consciously chosen to study history in Years 12
and 13. Their relatively mature understanding of the
development of the Holocaust should not be seen
as typical of other students of their age; the survey
results for students in Years 12 and 13 showed that
many 17 and 18 year olds continue to have only
sketchy knowledge of the Holocaust. However, the
focus groups provided an indication of the level of
understanding that can be attained by the end of
school education without studying the Holocaust as
part of an examination course.
Overall, most students interviewed across all age
groups appeared to understand that things did get
significantly worse for all Jews during the 1940s.
Students in Years 12 and 13 were not only able to
understand this development, but could also provide
specific examples and details to explain it.
In contrast, younger students generally found it
more difficult to provide precise details, although
generally they understood the Holocaust as a
changing process. For example, as Rob (Year 9, EE1)
explained, ‘He started making restrictive laws for the
first couple of years, set up camps where he sent
people; but things only really got really bad when he
started exterminating people in the 1940s’. A feature
of the interviews, therefore, was to explore more fully
with students why the Holocaust occurred when it
did and what relationship the Second World War had
to the unfolding genocide.
What do students understand about
the relationship between the Second
World War and the Holocaust?
Key dates and events
Despite ‘the immediate context of the war’ being
‘key to historical explanations of the origins of the
Holocaust’ (Stone 2010: 73), it was abundantly clear
during interview that most younger students (Years 7
to 11) did not have a general chronicle of significant
events of the Second World War on which to draw
in order to make sense of the Holocaust.
Although many history students in Years 12 and
13 noted the significance of the invasion of Poland
in September 1939 in the development of more
widespread and murderous policies against the
Jews, very few younger students made this important
connection. Notably, while 60.6 per cent
of all students selected the correct multiple-choice
definition of what ‘Nazi ghettos’ were in the survey
(question 58), during interviews very few placed the
establishment of ghettos – originating in Nazi-occupied
Poland in October 1939 – into a robust chronological
framework. Thus, although many students did
know what ghettos were and had some knowledge
of conditions within them, few connected their establishment
to developments in the Second World War.
Students in Years 12 and 13 differed slightly
from their younger counterparts in this regard.
Typically, these older students were able to identify
what ghettos were and, despite some difficulty in
identifying the precise year in which ghettos were
first created, were often able to appropriately link
their establishment to events following the invasion
of Poland. Similarly, during interview, a number of
Year 12 and 13 students were able to appreciate
the significance of Operation Barbarossa (the Nazi
invasion of the USSR in June 1941) in the shift to
mass killing.
More students in Years 12 and 13 than in younger
age groups were also aware of the actions of the
Einsatzgruppen in occupied Soviet territory.
For example, Mike (Year 12, LON7) noted that the
‘Einsatzgruppen were SS soldiers who followed
behind the main German advance going into Russia’,
and added that they were ‘specifically tasked with
looking for Jews just to shoot them, and I think
incorporating that into an offensive in a battle shows
just how seriously the Nazis took exterminating the
Jews’. Other Year 12 and 13 students interviewed
shared similar understandings and it was evident
that, although many underestimated the numbers
killed by the Einsatzgruppen, knowledge of their
actions was widely held.
These findings were especially encouraging
given how important such substantive knowledge