What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

When and where did the Holocaust take place?
189
fully appreciate or understand Britain’s multifarious
roles in, responses to and representations of the
Holocaust (Sharples and Jensen 2013).
Where do students think the
Holocaust took place?
Jewish victims: origins and nationalities
Both the survey and the focus-group interviews
provided opportunities to explore students’
understanding of the geographic range of the
Holocaust. As a starting point it was deemed
important to find out from which country the students
believed the largest number of Jewish victims of the
Holocaust originated. The correct answer to this
question is Poland, from where more Jews were
murdered than from all of the rest of Europe combined.
Estimates of the numbers killed vary among
historians, unsurprisingly given that numbers
were not always recorded by the killers and many
documents that did exist were later destroyed as the
perpetrators attempted to conceal evidence of the
genocide. Still, it is commonly believed that around
200,000 German and Austrian Jews, more than half
a million Hungarian Jews and up to two million Jews
from the Soviet Union were killed. The number of
Jews from Poland estimated to have been killed is
some three million (Benz 2001). Student responses
to this question are recorded below in Figure 7.4.
Half of the students surveyed (50.7 per cent),
incorrectly thought that the largest number of Jewish
people murdered during the Holocaust were from
Germany. Furthermore, 59.8 per cent of these
students were at least fairly confident about their
answer. However, despite this prevailing Germancentric
view of the Holocaust, the correct answer
(Poland) was identified by a just over a third of
students (35.6 per cent); of these students, twothirds
were at least fairly confident in their answer.
A very small number of students indicated that the
USSR was the correct answer (2.8 per cent).
Figure 7.4 also shows that the likelihood of
students selecting Poland as the correct answer
typically increased as they grew older. For example,
whereas only 20.2 per cent of Year 7 students
selected Poland, 47 per cent of Year 13 students
made that choice. Figure 7.4 also highlights that the
percentage of students who selected Germany as an
answer is broadly similar across most year groups,
ranging from 48.6 per cent to 55.6 per cent, except
for Year 13 students, among whom only 40.6 per
cent believed the answer was Germany.
In interviews with students in Years 12 and 13,
frequent reference was made to the fact that a high
proportion of Jews lived in countries to the east
of Germany. For example, older students referred
to the existence of significant Jewish populations
in ‘countries’ which ‘became Eastern bloc Soviet
Countries’ (Damien, Year 12, LON3). Other students
in Years 12 and 13 frequently referred to Jewish
populations in ‘Poland’, ‘USSR’ and across ‘Eastern
Europe’. Less common, but equally consistent with
the more detailed knowledge of some older students,
were references in interview to Jewish settlement in
‘the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania’,
‘the Czech Republic’, ‘Bosnia’, ‘Romania’, ‘Hungary’
and other ‘Slavic areas’.
Figure 7.4 Student responses to survey question 50, ‘Which country did the largest number of Jewish
people murdered during the Holocaust come from?’ (percentage by year group)
Percentage of students
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
Germany France Poland Hungary The Soviet
Union
■ Year 7 ■ Year 8 ■ Year 9 ■ Year 10 ■ Year 11 ■ Year 12 ■ Year 13
The USA
Israel
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust