What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

When and where did the Holocaust take place?
195
‘a couple, like three, four or five death squads …
it wasn’t huge I don’t think’. This is partially correct –
there were four groups, Einsatzgruppen A to D.
In overview, while many Year 12 and 13 students
were aware of the Einsatzgruppen and their actions,
specific detail of the huge numbers involved and the
devastation they caused was not readily apparent.
Nor was there evidence of knowledge about the
vital role played by locals in these mass killings; the
level of local complicity and perpetration seems to
have been missed by students and is an essential
part of the picture. Arguably of greatest significance,
however, is the fact that very few students were able
to connect the invasion of the USSR in June 1941
with the actions of the Einsatzgruppen. Students’
general inability to geographically situate ‘where’
the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ chiefly occurred and how
it related to the chronological development of the
Holocaust was particularly revealing.
The camp system
As explained earlier, during interviews students
were asked where the Holocaust took place and
responses often focused on countries (e.g. Poland
or Germany). However, students often referred to
locations that were not national boundaries, such
as the ‘camps’. Indeed, as discussed in Chapter
3, ‘camps’ and ‘concentration camps’ featured
prominently in students’ collective conceptions of
the Holocaust.
Here, Auschwitz was considered the ‘main one’
or, as John (Year 9, EE1) remarked, ‘the main
one you get taught’. The primacy of Auschwitz
in students’ thinking was evident in most student
interviews. As Matt (Year 9, SE1) explained: ‘The
main one that everyone knows of is Auschwitz
because that was where the gas chambers were.’
Their locating of the gas chambers exclusively
within Auschwitz suggested that many students did
not know about other camps and this was borne out
in both interviews and survey responses. Although a
couple of younger students hinted at the existence
of ‘other camps’ – Erin (Year 9, SE1) even noted,
‘I had to do this for homework a couple of weeks
ago and there were loads’, while Kayley (Year 9, SE1)
explained, ‘there’s another one; there’s one beginning
with M … I don’t remember’ – no students below
Years 12 and 13 were able to name another camp
in interview.
Interviews with students in Years 12 and 13 did,
however, produce references to camps other than
Auschwitz. Several students referred, for example,
to the Nazi concentration camp established in 1933
at Dachau in Bavaria. Students from one school,
several of whom had recently been to the site of
Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin,
also provided brief details of this camp and its
function and history. Two students referred to
Treblinka, although they were unsure where it was
located and what type of camp it was. Additionally,
Amelia (Year 13, EE1) said, ‘I read a book about
Sobibor and it talked quite a lot about death camps.’
Another student declared that his knowledge of
Sobibor came from reading Horrible Histories
(James, Year 13, EE1). Of potential significance,
given its celebrated liberation by the British Army
in April 1945, only one student referred to Bergen-
Belsen, and even then he struggled with its
pronunciation.
In general, across all age groups, the centrality
of Auschwitz in students’ consciousness was
striking. This was echoed by student responses to
question 31 of the survey in which 71 per cent of all
respondents associated the word ‘Auschwitz’ with
the Holocaust: the second highest connection after
Hitler (91.4 per cent of respondents).
Meanwhile, only 14.9 per cent of students
correctly associated Treblinka with the Holocaust,
while the overwhelming majority (60.4 per cent) said
they didn’t know if it was. Given the Bergen-Belsen’s
strong place in the collective memory of Nazi crimes
among earlier generations (Kushner 1994, 2008;
Reilly et al. 1997; Pearce 2014), it is surprising that
just 15.2 per cent of young people connected it
with the Holocaust.
Although the survey data suggested that most
students ‘know about’ Auschwitz, student interviews
complicated this picture. For example, when asked
what Auschwitz was, Hannah (Year 9, EE1) replied,
‘it’s a concentration camp or a death camp’, while
Beth (Year 9, LON5) said, ‘Auschwitz was actually
hidden from everybody in the more outskirts, not
the outskirts, but in Germany, but in a small area of
Germany’. Further insights into understandings of
Auschwitz came out of another exchange with
Year 9 students about the very nature of a
concentration camp:
Tim: Didn’t they make them all work there really hard
and it was mainly like a prison for them; make them
work and…
Catherine: Hardly any food.
Tim: Just … nothing.
Interviewer: So tough conditions … but earlier we said
they got gassed and killed.
Tim: Yeah. It is sort of…
Interviewer: So is it both?
Catherine: Didn’t they use them and use the ladies
for prostitution, and then when they got bad or old or
weak, then they killed them. When they were useless.
Harry: The men were used for, like, builders and …
like really hardly … like other people didn’t need…
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust