What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

When and where did the Holocaust take place?
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that decision was taken. Once again, however, the
student interviews reveal that – while a few younger
students and many in Years 12 and 13 displayed
some awareness of key events in the Holocaust
– substantive and chronological knowledge was
generally limited and often imprecise.
How do students understand and
explain Britain’s response to the
Holocaust?
Students’ knowledge of the chronological
devel opment and geographic focus of the
Holocaust potentially has a significant impact on the
understanding of their own history, and in particular
Britain’s role during the Holocaust. To assess this role
and locate Britain’s response to the Holocaust within
a historical context, young people need a clear
grasp of:
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the timing and stages of the radicalisation
of Nazi policy
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when and how much Britain knew about
the mass murder
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what scope of action was available to the Allies
when these details were known and understood.
The issues of when and what Britain and the
Allies ‘knew’ about the extermination of Jews have
long been the subject of deep historical interest
and debate (Breitman 1998; Gilbert 1981; Lacquer
1980; Wyman 1984). News of the systematic mass
killing reached the Allies as early as the summer of
1941, as the British were able to understand secret
German radio signals reporting the actions of the SS
murder squads following the invasion of the Soviet
Union. What is less clear is what the Allies made
of this information, how much they understood,
and how quickly the intent and scale of Nazi mass
murder became clear to them. Where some have
highlighted the importance of a ‘liberal imagination’ in
filtering and conditioning British responses (Kushner
1994), others have intimated that Britons were more
concerned with what news of atrocities said about
the Germans than with the plight of the victims
(Wallis 2014).
Throughout 1942, reports of an emerging Nazi
plan to murder all of Europe’s Jews began to
reach the West, from the Bund (a Jewish socialist
organisation) in the Warsaw ghetto, the Riegner
telegram from Switzerland, and from Jan Karski –
a courageous Polish courier who reached London
and provided the first eyewitness account.
There is no question, then, that by the summer
of 1942, the British government had a sufficiently
reliable body of information about the ongoing mass
murder of Europe’s Jews. There is more debate over
its attitude and response to this, which acquired
its first – and last – articulation with the Allied
Declaration of 17 December 1942. Delivered in the
House of Commons by Foreign Secretary Anthony
Eden, the declaration condemned ‘in the strongest
possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded
extermination’ of Jews by Germans in occupied
Europe. Eden also made a ‘solemn resolution to
ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall
not escape retribution’ (Hansard 1942).
It was publicly evident, then, that by the end of
1942 the British government knew in detail how the
Jewish ghettos were being ‘systematically emptied’
and how the transportation of Jewish men, women
and children to Eastern Europe was being carried out
‘in conditions of appalling horror and brutality’. Eden
also revealed a sense of grasping the bigger picture,
declaring that all such actions were aimed at carrying
out ‘Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the
Jewish people in Europe’ (Cesarani 1996: 607–8).
Yet the extent to which these words translated into
meaningful action over the remainder of the war
remains open to debate. Just how much could be
done given the circumstances, and how far anyone
in Britain truly understood what was taking place,
are continued points of interpretation. However, that
the historical connections between Britain and the
Holocaust are highly complex and controversial is
certainly irrefutable – more than is often the case in
popular representations and memory-work.
To understand what secondary school students
knew and understood about Britain’s role in the
Holocaust, the issue was explored in both the
student survey (see Figure 7.3) and focus-group
interviews. For example, in the survey students were
asked, ‘What happened when the British government
knew about the mass murder of Jews?’
Figure 7.3 clearly shows that the most frequently
selected answer, chosen overall by 34.4 per cent
of students, was that Britain ‘declare[d] war on
Germany’. As the bar chart illustrates, this erroneous
understanding was more prominent among younger
students, although around a quarter of students in
Years 12 and 13 also held this view. The answer is, of
course, incorrect as Britain declared war on Germany
in September 1939 following the German occupation
of Poland, whereas the Nazi policy of systematic
mass murder did not begin until the summer of 1941.
The second most frequently selected answer was
that Britain ‘didn’t know anything until the end of the
war’ about the mass killing of Jews and so the British
government was not motivated to act. In total,
this view was shared by 23.8 per cent of students.
Notably, approximately a third of students in Years 12
and 13 selected this answer, significantly more than
the younger age groups. However, as mentioned
above, it is evident that, at some point during 1941
and in 1942 the British government did know about
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