What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

When and where did the Holocaust take place?
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is to grasping the symbiosis of war, ideology and
genocide (Bartov 2003: 3–8). In stark contrast,
only one younger student in Year 7 to 11 interviews
explicitly mentioned Operation Barbarossa. Most
did not articulate the profound and devastating
relationship between the Nazi prosecution of the
war in the East and the subsequent mass murder
of Jews.
Students’ responses to survey question 60 further
emphasise this point. As Figure 7.2 (page 175)
shows, the most accurate answer to the question
asking students to identify the historical event that
triggered ‘the organised mass killing of Jews’ (the
German invasion of the Soviet Union) was only
selected by 7.4 per cent of students across all age
ranges. Indeed, it was the least likely to be selected
by students and, even by Year 13, more than 70
per cent of students did not provide this answer.
Significantly, not a single student interviewed in
Years 7 to 11 explained that, as the German army
advanced east and millions more Jews came under
Nazi control during 1941 and 1942, this proved a
catalyst for mass murder.
Other iconic events and developments in the
history of the Holocaust which very few younger
students referred to in interview included the
Wannsee Conference of January 1942 and the
‘Final Solution’. Where these historical phenomena
were mentioned the details were sketchy, as
illustrated in the exchange below:
Daniel: I can’t remember when it was but they decided;
there was a meeting in a room where they had all big
Nazi leaders and when they decided that they would
use the ‘Final Solution’, which was killing people in
death camps.
Annie: But didn’t they shoot Jews, like before they
gassed them they shot them and they ended up in
mass graves because they just shot them dead.
Daniel: Then Hitler decided that that wasn’t very
efficient, it was using up too many bullets and therefore
they decided to make it cheaper which is…
Annie: …more efficient.
Daniel: Yes which is more efficient because but that is
even worse because he didn’t really care about how the
people died, he just wanted to make sure that they died
(Year 10, NE1).
Clearly, some of these students recognised that
Nazi decisions were often underpinned by the need
for brutal ‘efficiency’, and that both bullets and gas
chambers were used in the extermination process.
Nevertheless, not one student interviewed in Years 7
to 11 was able to provide any details of the actions of
the Einsatzgruppen or the events which occurred at
the Reinhardt camps (Witte and Tyas 2001). Typically
mass shootings and mass gassing were lumped
together in the consciousness of most younger
students, in a brutal killing period that occurred in
unspecified places some time in the early 1940s.
This apparent lack of precise historical and
contextual information was also revealed by
responses to survey question 31, which asked
students to identify words connected with the
Holocaust. Notably, only 24.3 per cent of all students
associated the Einsatzgruppen with the Holocaust
(see Figure 6.3) and only 15.2 per cent of students
across all age groups believed the Wannsee
Conference was connected with it. Knowledge of the
Wannsee Conference was limited even at Years 12
and 13, with only about 30 per cent of the 17 and
18 year olds surveyed associating the term with
the Holocaust.
Despite these findings, the research indicated
detailed and accurate understanding of the course
of events and of the decision-making process is not
beyond school-age students, particularly if they have
been given the opportunity and curriculum time to
study the subject in some depth. Typically, the Year
12 and 13 students who were interviewed had not
studied the Holocaust for the past two years and yet
they often referred to both the Wannsee Conference
and the ‘Final Solution’. One student remarked that
‘rather than putting the Jewish population into huge
camps, the “Final Solution” was basically the initiation
of death camps and the extermination of the Jewish
population’ (Simon, Year 13, LON7). He went on to
say: ‘The Wannsee Conference was, I think, the 20th
January 1942’ and ‘from that time onwards … the
systematic persecution of Jews reached new levels
[and] … in terms of the Holocaust the Wannsee
Conference is when it started to take shape’.
The relationship between the Second World
War and the Holocaust
For the most part, younger students (Years 7 to
11) found it difficult to offer a clear and rational
explanation of the connection between the Second
World War and the Holocaust. This was curious, as
large numbers of students seemed aware that the
Holocaust happened ‘around the time of World War
II’ and, as illustrated in Figure 7.2, (page 175) 27.7
per cent of students explicitly indicated that ‘the start
of the Second World War’ was the catalyst for the
‘mass killing of Jews’ (answers to survey question
60). However, students typically struggled when
asked to offer a description of or explanation for
the relationship between the Second World War
and the Holocaust.
This may be because, as noted elsewhere in this
study, most students’ picture of the Holocaust is
German-centric. They overestimate the number of
German Jews killed, believe that the perpetrators
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