What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Considerations and recommendations
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modern European society. Efforts to understand
and explain how this genocide occurred can only
be addressed by a more nuanced and intelligent
understanding of the perpetrators, their motivations
and the sociopolitical context in which their crimes
unfolded.
The dominance of a Hitler-centric view of the
Holocaust demands a serious challenge. Not all
students indicated that the Holocaust began and
ended with Hitler; as students got older, it became
more likely that they would append ‘the Nazis’ to
their conceptions of the perpetrators. However,
deeper enquiry revealed that many students either
did not know who (or what) ‘the Nazis’ were, or
conceived of them in wholly erroneous ways. Many
students believed the Nazis to be Hitler’s elite
guards who unquestioningly carried out his will. Few
of the younger students interviewed, for example,
appreciated that the Nazis represented a mass
political party which enjoyed popular grassroots
support in the early 1930s.
This finding is even more significant in light of how
students apportion blame and responsibility for the
Holocaust. Chapter 6 outlines how having little or no
knowledge and understanding of National Socialism,
of its course to power and system of rule, reinforces
erroneous ideas that responsibility extended no
further than an omnipresent Hitler and hard-core elite.
As a result, the complex and uncomfortable question
of the role of ‘non-Nazis’ in the genocide was either
unaddressed or answered in simplistic ways. This
was captured in students’ depiction of the German
people as a collective who were poignantly adjudged
to be either brainwashed, forcibly compelled to
participate or totally ignorant of the Holocaust.
In the past 40 years, major academic advances
into German culture and society under Nazism
have helped reveal a rich picture of ‘everyday life’
during the Third Reich. This has furthered what
we know of the relationship between the
National Socialist German Workers’ Party and
the German people, revealing greater awareness
of and response to persecutory policies among the
population than previously thought, and showing
how knowledge of genocide was circulated and
received in Nazi Germany.
Tellingly, our research shows that this dense
corpus of historical knowledge has yet to find its
way into classrooms, suggesting an urgent need for
educators to ensure that the results of this important
scholarship are introduced into their teaching. Here,
broader issues of complicity and responsibility are
key and should raise profound questions about what
the decisions and choices made by individuals in the
1930s and 1940s reveals about the human condition.
As Welker (1996: 102) reminds us, the Holocaust
‘provides stark and chilling evidence of the fragility of
character and the susceptibility of ordinary people to
acts of unspeakable cruelty’.
3. Space and place in the Holocaust
Chapter 7 illustrates that many students do not
have a secure understanding of how the Holocaust
developed over time or of its geographical scope and
scale. For example, many students were
unable to reference significant and relevant events
from either the pre-war period or the war years.
Very few younger students knew much (if anything)
of the 1933 April Boycott, the Nuremberg Laws
of 1935, or Kristallnacht in 1938. As a result, they
could not identify or say much about the nature of
the Jewish experience during these years or of the
regime’s policy.
Simply knowing the sequence of historical events
and being able to chronicle them does not mean
one understands their relationship or significance.
Without such knowledge, though, students’ ability to
consider how policies were formulated, developed
and revised, or to identify the possible forces that
affected these processes, is severely curtailed. This
was exposed in how unaware younger students
were of the nature of the relationship between the
Second World War and the Holocaust. In interview,
few could provide any noteworthy events or developments,
and it was only among older students that
reference was regularly made to the seminal moment
of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. That nearly
all younger students (11 to 16 years old) did not refer
to this event and its importance was further evidence
of their limited chronology of the Holocaust.
As mentioned above, knowing about an
event does not necessarily mean that broader
understanding is derived from it. Understanding
also operates at different levels of sophistication.
However, it is possible for all teachers to emphasise
the important distinction in the development of the
Holocaust between events before and after the
outbreak of war in 1939. Furthermore, students
should be aware that the Nazi invasion of the
Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 prompted a
further step in the radicalisation and development
of the Holocaust. These fundamental events and
frameworks are accessible to even the youngest
students in secondary schools and suggest
that it would not be too much of a challenge
to improve students’ understandings of some
of the fundamental aspects of the Holocaust’s
chronological development.
Helping students to appreciate that, as the
Holocaust developed over time, so too did its
geographical location, is also an important aspect
of securing a more robust understanding of the
Holocaust. Extending and expanding students’
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