What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

184
When and where did the Holocaust take place?
Figure 7.3 Student responses to survey question 64, ‘What happened when the British government knew
about the mass murder of Jews?’ (percentage by year group)
Percentage of students
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
Declare war
on Germany
Rescue plans
to save Jewish
Punish killers
after war
Bomb
Auschwitz
Attack Jews
in Britain
Ignore it
None of above:
knew nothing
■ Year 7 ■ Year 8 ■ Year 9 ■ Year 10 ■ Year 11 ■ Year 12 ■ Year 13
the systematic mass murder of Jews. Indeed, by the
end of 1942 these crimes had become very public
knowledge (Kushner 1994: 172–7).
The third most popular answer (selected by 17.6
per cent of students) was that the British government
drew up ‘rescue plans to try and do everything to
save the Jewish people’. While it is true that the
British played a role in supporting Jewish people before
and after the war, actions to save or rescue Jews
during the war years were extremely limited (Wasserstein
1988). Although many people in Britain were
sympathetic to the plight of the Jews, few took part in
campaigns to save them. The Bermuda Conference
convened by the British and Americans in April 1943
failed to produce any new plans to rescue the Jews
of Europe; indeed, saving Jews never became an
explicit war aim of the British government.
Significantly, the most appropriate answer (i.e. the
British said ‘they would punish the killers when
the war was over’) was only identified by 6.7 per
cent of the 7,166 students who answered this
question. Overall, then, survey responses suggested
that students of all ages had a limited and often
erroneous understanding of Britain’s response to
the Holocaust. Accordingly, subsequent interviews
with students endeavoured to explore this finding
in more depth.
The issue of the extent to which Britain knew
about the mass extermination of Jews was the
subject of all student interviews. Students shared
a variety of perspectives on this, however it was
very clear that the majority believed the British
government either didn’t know or, alternatively, only
knew about mass killing at the end of the war. For
example, Catherine (Year 9, EE1) said simply, ‘They
didn’t know about it. People didn’t know about it’.
Similarly, Fahima (Year 10, LON5) reasoned:
I don’t think they knew a lot. I mean they knew Hitler
was passing laws but I don’t think they knew the
extent of the genocide really. I mean they probably
would have known that people had been killed but
not the scale.
As the survey results suggested, this
understanding was not only confined to younger
students. A number of students in Years 12 and 13
also believed that Britain and the Allies knew very
little about the full extent of the Holocaust until the
end of the war, as the following extracts illustrate:
They [the British] only really found out about it
towards the end of the war, so initially … they didn’t
really think it was, like, this massive killing spree and
tragedy of killing all of them [the Jews]; it was just
they found out towards the end when they started
discovering the camps (Paul, Year 12, LON7).
I know a lot of them [British people] weren’t aware
about the concentration camps and the mass killing,
because when they discovered it they were quite
shocked about what they found
(Jim, Year 12, LON7).
I don’t think anyone knew until they’d sort of
liberated them, and then they saw what was
happening (Max, Year 12, EE1).