What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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When and where did the Holocaust take place?
appeared to understand that the establishment of
ghettos was part of the developing process of the
Holocaust. Often, students acknowledged that
ghettos were established after the invasion of Poland
and before the accelerated mass killing of Jews in
death camps in the early 1940s. For example, Cassie
(Year 13, EE1) noted that, ‘they put the Jews in the
ghettos before they took them to the extermination
camps’, while Amelia (Year 13, EE1) said, ‘I think they
began to clear people out from the ghettos and into
the death camps’.
However, even in Years 12 and 13, not all
students shared these understandings. A number
thought that ghettos were established before the war,
some were uncertain where they were situated and
others were unclear about how ‘ghettoisation’ fitted
into the chronological sweep of the Holocaust. In addition,
some students appeared not to know how the
ghettos operated. As one Year 12 admitted, ‘I know
they had ghettos where several groups lived, which
were persecuted, but other than that I am not sure
how they were segregated’ (Mike, Year 12, LON7).
In overview, even though some students –
particularly older students – demonstrated an
elementary understanding of the establishment
of ghettos, knowledge and understanding of this
phenomenon was typically limited. The majority of
students, for example, did not appear to fully grasp
the relationship between the invasion of Poland and
the process of ghettoisation, and few were able to
place it into a coherent chronological framework of
developments within the Holocaust.
The Einsatzgruppen and the ‘Holocaust by
bullets’
As mentioned above and in Chapter 6, student
knowledge of the Einsatzgruppen and the
devastating role played by these mobile killing
squads in the Holocaust was very limited. In fact,
over three-quarters (75.7 per cent) of students
either did not associate the Einsatzgruppen with the
Holocaust or did not know they were connected.
This is a telling finding, given that the mass shootings
committed by them are estimated to have killed more
than 1.5 million people, of whom the overwhelming
majority were Jews. Furthermore, it is potentially
significant that students were unaware of the actions
of the Einsatzgruppen because they were primarily
centred in Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet
Union. As demonstrated elsewhere in this chapter,
many students considered the Holocaust to have
taken place in Germany (and to a lesser extent
Poland) and so unfamiliarity with killings in Eastern
Europe is not surprising. Indeed, taken together, they
appear to confirm that the narrative of the Holocaust
‘in the East’ is not familiar to most students.
Group interviews with students from Years 7
to 11 supported this finding. For the most part,
direct references to ‘death by shooting’ were few
and far between, and even on the sole occasion
when a student did invoke the murders of the
Einsatzgruppen, this knowledge was muddled. For,
after suggesting some Jews were gassed but others
were beaten or shot, Rosie (Year 8, NE1) explained
that they were not shot where they lived, but ‘like,
in the camps, they would just shoot them and they
would fall into a pit thing’. It is not clear whether
she had precise knowledge of an areas such as
the Lazaret in Treblinka or if she was confusing
the methods of the Einsatzgruppen to that of the
death camps.
The absence of the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ in
younger students’ historical consciousness not
only reduces their geographical understanding of
the genocide but is a product of it. Furthermore,
it limits – even removes completely – the capacity
to comprehend how the Holocaust evolved and
developed. As a result, comprehension of what
the Holocaust was becomes telescoped; focus is
concentrated on the camps and gassing so that the
far less ‘industrial’ process of mass shooting at close
quarters – a procedure which necessarily touched
and involved non-Jewish populations in various ways
– is disregarded and left out of the stories students
construct about the Holocaust.
However, some students who were studying
history in Years 12 and 13 did recognise and
understand the term Einsatzgruppen, and added
appropriate detail. For example:
The death squads that were sent to Eastern Europe
and they just round up Jews and shoot them … it
was when they invaded Russia so, like, in the early
1940s (Amelia, Year 13, EE1).
The Einsatzgruppen … were the SS soldiers
who followed behind the main German advance
going into Russia [and were] … specifically tasked
with looking for Jews just to shoot them (Simon,
Year 12, LON7).
Killing squads … who shot Jews … put them into
mass graves (Luke, Year 12, EE1).
In general, though, many older students did not
know the scope and scale of the operations involving
the Einsatzgruppen (see Chapter 6). Some believed
these killing squads killed ‘thousands’ and others
suggested ‘hundreds of thousands maybe’, but
no student claimed the number of those murdered
exceeded a million. Furthermore, students typically
underestimated how big the military operation was.
As Luke (Year 12, EE1) remarked, it consisted of