What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

When and where did the Holocaust take place?
199
Figure 7.7 Student responses to survey question 66, ‘Why did the Nazi-organised mass murder of the
Jews end?’ (percentage by year group)
Percentage of students
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
No more Jews to kill
Nazis realised made
a mistake
Hitler committed suicide
Allied armies
liberated lands
■ Year 7 ■ Year 8 ■ Year 9 ■ Year 10 ■ Year 11 ■ Year 12 ■ Year 13
came and they found the concentration camps and
they let the people inside them free and then, yeah,
I think that is what happened but I don’t know when
it happened, but I think that was the case how most
of the Holocaust ended, like, with the concentration
camps and gas chambers (Daniella, Year 9, LON6).
During interviews with Year 12 and Year 13
students it was abundantly clear that the vast
majority appreciated that the Holocaust ended
because the Allied armies liberated camps that stood
on land previously controlled by German authorities.
Equally, most students appreciated that the Red
Army in the east and British and US armies in the
west often liberated the camps. Indicative of the
responses of other students of his age, Alex
(Year 12, EE1) reasoned:
Well, Germany starts to lose the war, really, and
when they start getting pushed out of the Soviet
Union in sort of ’43 and then ’44, the Russians, you
know, liberate lots of the death camps, and so do
the Americans and the British from the west as well,
and then basically the Germans can’t
continue doing the Holocaust when they don’t
control the camps any more, and then when
they finally lose in ’45.
Overall, as was the case with other elements
of the Holocaust, while older students studying
history in Years 12 and 13 had a reasonably robust
understanding of how and why the Holocaust ended,
many younger students did not. Gray (2014a: 278–9)
noted in a recent research study that knowledge of
the end of the Holocaust among 13- and 14-year-old
students was replete with ‘serious misconceptions’,
and suggested ‘that this is perhaps the area of the
Holocaust where pupils know and understand the
least’. Certainly, findings from both the survey and
student interviews broadly concur with this concern
and suggest that students’ understanding of how the
Holocaust ended is often fragmentary and limited.
Summary
■■
The majority of students (68.5 per cent) correctly
identified the main decade in which the Holocaust
happened (the 1940s). Students’ correct responses
improved with age. For example, whereas 55.3
per cent of Year 7 students offered an accurate
response, this rose to 90.5 per cent in Year 13.
■■
Typically, students in Years 7 to 11 did not have
a secure or confident understanding of the
chronology of the Holocaust. By contrast, during
interviews, students studying history in Years 12
and 13 were able to provide a much more robust
chronological framework of the Holocaust and
were also more likely to precisely detail a number
of significant historical events.
■■
When asked about the start of the Holocaust,
40.2 per cent of students incorrectly believed that
the ‘organised mass killing of Jews’ began when
Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933.
By contrast many older students appreciated, at
a basic level, that the persecution and murder of
Jews increased in intensity and scale throughout
the late 1930s and early 1940s.
■■
Very few students in Years 7 to 10 were
able to detail specific policies or events that
dramatically impacted on the lives of Jews in
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