What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Considerations and recommendations
of their lack of substantive knowledge, a tendency
exists to lump all victims groups together and adopt
a more universal and generalist view of victimhood.
Furthermore, in lieu of important knowledge,
students often resorted to – even depended upon –
informed guesstimation and/or popular mythology.
This was true even of ‘the Jews’: the victim group
with which, surface appearances would suggest,
students are most familiar.
These shortcomings had two direct
consequences. First, as students struggled to fill
the gaps in their knowledge, their explanation of
a given victim group’s experience often became
distorted and inaccurate. Illustrative here is students’
framing of the persecution of homosexuals (who they
incorrectly see as victims of systematic mass murder)
and disabled people (whose murder is erroneously
located within concentration camps). Through this
process came a secondary, related consequence:
namely, the amalgamation of all groups into one
critical mass. In other words, the victims were not
recognised as separate groups or individuals –
often with distinctive experiences – but perceived
as a homogenous and universal collective whose
experiences were indistinguishable from one another.
The practice of lumping all victims together has a
strong tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries (Kushner
1994), but a distinctive development of recent years
has been the collating of these victims under the
banner of ‘the Holocaust’. As a process this does
not preclude the naming of individual groups, but it
carries the connotation that all groups were victims
of the same policy, for the same reasons, with
all ostensibly sharing the same (or a very similar)
experience. Not only does this broader approach
raise serious issues about what the Holocaust was,
it also ignores the historical reality that different
crimes were often enacted against different victim
groups for differing reasons.
It matters, therefore, that students have a much
better understanding of the particular experiences
of different victim groups and why the Nazis and
their collaborators targeted them. Consequently,
educators need to find ways to ensure that students
have greater knowledge and understanding of what
happened to each victim group, how they were
treated, and why. A need also exists for students
to have a better appreciation of who the groups
actually were. Student narratives of the Roma and
Sinti (Gypsies) and their experience under Nazism
are indicative here, for as is seen in Chapter 5,
misunderstanding of the Roma and Sinti culture and
lifestyle renders students unable to explain why they
were murdered and persecuted.
Arguably, students’ widespread inability to explain
why the Jews were persecuted and murdered was
one of the most important findings of this research.
Many students lacked understanding of Nazi
antisemitism and racial ideology, and some
worryingly showed a tendency to uncritically adopt
various myths and misconceptions widely circulated
in contemporary culture (for example, the sense that
Jews did well in economic crisis when others suffered,
and the irrational sense that Jews posed a ‘threat’ to
Germany in the 1930s). Others, meanwhile, presented
only monocausal explanations, attributing the murder
of six million Jews to Hitler and/or the Nazis.
It is critical, then, that teachers are able to explain
to students why the Jews were specifically targeted
by the Nazi regime. The answers to that question
lie within an understanding of the perpetrators’
motivations and of the social and cultural fabric of
early twentieth-century European history rather than
in any sense that it was somehow related to Jewishness
or what it means – or meant – to be a Jew.
2. Perpetrators and issues of responsibility
An equivalent process is required for students’
knowledge and understanding of the perpetrators.
The impulse to believe that the horrors of the
Holocaust were primarily the work of Hitler and a
small group of leading Nazis, rather than the result of
the actions (and inaction) of hundreds of thousands
of people across Europe, is understandable.
Such an explanation is also culturally ingrained,
in keeping with the trend seen in the last two
decades where victims are understood as ‘just
like us’ and perpetrators are always, ultimately,
‘Nazi(s)’. Furthermore, the process of ‘othering’
Nazism, of rendering it antithesis through ‘negative
definitionalism’ (Bloxham 2008: 243), is strongly
featured in British culture and is tied up both with
the collective identity construction and vestiges
of anti-German sentiment.
Student approaches to the question of ‘Who
were the perpetrators?’ confirmed the influence of
cultural representations. The research suggested that
students were not fully aware of even some of the
most central agents and agencies of perpetration.
This is starkly outlined in Chapter 6, which reveals
students’ distinctly limited knowledge of individuals
like Eichmann and Himmler, of organisations like the
SS, and of groups such as the Einsatzgruppen. While
some of these appeared to sit on the margins of
students’ consciousness, others were conspicuous
by their absence.
The findings of this study suggest that educators
would also do well to consider an approach to teaching
and learning which ‘rehumanises’ the perpertrators.
This is certainly not a call to sympathise or
empathise with them; rather it is an approach
towards education which appreciates that the
Holocaust was perpetrated by human beings in a