What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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When and where did the Holocaust take place?
the war they began to lose it, so they speeded
everything up to sort of a desperate last attempt.
The following extended dialogue further illustrates
the significance placed by some Year 10 students on
US entry into the war:
Lauren: I think it was harder because when the US got
involved, because they were like a powerful country I
think the Nazis were killing the Jews faster so that the
US army wouldn’t find out what they had been doing.
Interviewer: Okay so you think that America entering
the war was an important turning point in this, or
important because … why is it important do you think?
Lauren: I think it is important because people started
to see that it wasn’t right what they had been doing. But
then the Nazis were just killing the Jews faster.
Interviewer: Okay, so they increased the speed at
which they were killing them?
Lauren: Yes.
Interviewer: Why did they do that? Why was there this
kind of escalation?
Lauren: Because they knew that they might not win,
so they decided that if they were not going to win they
might as well kill them faster.
Interviewer: Is that an idea that you would all agree
with? Do you think that they just thought that well we
are going to lose so we should kill people anyway?
Rebecca: I think they were scared of other countries
finding out what they were doing, I think, and they were
going to be treated more harshly. It would stand out
what they were doing, because it was so terrible,
so they thought if they could just get rid of the Jews
and get rid of the camps then they might be treated
slightly nicer?
Interviewer: So even though they were losing the war
they thought they still needed to kill these people, is that
what you are saying?
Rebecca: Erm, I think that they were trying to hide what
they were doing.
Interviewer: Okay.
Rebecca: So, well, they had all these Jewish people
and, well, they couldn’t really return them to their homes
because they would tell everyone what was going on
so, as they thought they were just going to kill them,
then they would.
Rachael: Maybe when they started to find out that
the war was almost over and that they were losing
there was obviously a time limit on it because, once
the war was finished, then people would maybe start
investigating and then realise what they were doing so
they had to speed up (Year 10, LON6).
Certainly, there was a concerted effort by the
Nazis and their collaborators to cover up these mass
crimes. In August 1942, Himmler appointed SS
officer Paul Blobel to lead Aktion 1005, an attempt
to destroy all evidence of mass murder. Over the
next couple of years, mass graves were exhumed
in order to cremate the bodies of the victims, gas
chambers were torn down, crematoria blown up
and incriminating documents were destroyed. In
addition, in the final months of war, particularly with
the advance of the Red Army from the east, Jews
and other prisoners were forced to journey west in
the infamous ‘death marches’.
The deliberate hiding of the crimes, as well as
the complexity of overlapping organisations and
jurisdictions within the Nazi system, all make it
difficult to be certain precisely when the decision was
taken to kill all of the Jews of Europe, and historians
still debate this issue of timing (Cesarani 1994). For
Christopher Browning (2004), the decision was taken
in the autumn of 1941 – in the ‘euphoria of victory’ –
when startling military successes in the Soviet Union
promised a quick end to the war and elements of
the Nazi leadership turned their attention to the final
and complete destruction of their ‘Jewish-Bolshevik
enemy’. During this period, Browning argues, Jewish
emigration from the Third Reich was forbidden, the
first extermination sites were chosen and experiments
were made with different killing methods.
However, Christian Gerlach (1998) has argued
that US entry into the war in December 1941 was
indeed crucial; this was the moment at which the
war became global and (with the slowing down of
Operation Barbarossa in the East) Germany had to
face the prospect of a defeat for the first time. In
this context, the imagined fear of ‘the Jew’ as an
existential enemy of the German people became an
even greater ‘threat’ in the distorted world view of the
Nazi ideologues.
Peter Longerich (2010) has a different view. While
recognising the summer and autumn of 1941 as
crucial for the systematisation of mass murder in the
East and for the formation of the plan to murder all
Jews in the General Government (Einsatz Reinhardt),
he argues that a decision for total, continent-wide
mass murder was not taken until the summer of
1942, when the leadership realised there would
be no imminent victory over the Soviet Union.
At this point, the idea to deport Europe’s Jews to
conquered territories in the USSR was abandoned
and the extensive killing programme already
underway in the Eastern territories was expanded
to include every Jewish man, woman and child
within the Nazi grasp.
Given there is no consensus on this crucial
issue, it is not surprising that young people disagree
about when and under what circumstances the
decision to murder was taken. However, if their
ideas are to have substance and if they are to have
some understanding about how modern Europe
could descend into genocide, they need to know
something about the broader context in which