What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
41
Concentration camps (Year 9 student).
Hitler killing Jews (Year 9 student).
The holocaust 1 was disgraceful and almost
unbelievable (Year 9 student).
It was something to do with Hitler (Year 7 student).
Hell on earth, people were dying in gas chambers
and burnt (Year 10 student).
The remembrance of the millions of people who
died in the nazi camps for being different
(Year 10 student).
The targeted genocide of Jews, homosexuals,
Gypsies and others deemed ‘undesirable’ by
the Nazi regime (Year 12 student).
The Holocaust was during World War Two where
Jews were blamed for losing the war, therefore they
were kept hostage all over Germany. Many people
did not realise the conditions they were living in
(Year 8 student).
I think that it was a terrible affair which took place in
an unfortunate time for my people and could have
been avoided if people thought through a little more
as to who they follow and what they are doing. It
was when the Nazis led by Hitler decided to attempt
to kill all Jews in their territory (Year 10 student).
Table 3.1 Summary of student responses to survey
question 30 ‘Please can you describe in one or two
sentences what you think the Holocaust was’
Year group
Number of
responses
Range of
number of
words used
Average
number of
words used
Year 7 533 1–74 19
Year 8 854 1–138 20
Year 9 2,299 1–245 20
Year 10 1,074 1–258 20
Year 11 472 1–92 22
Year 12/13 862 1–197 22
Totals 6,094 1–258 20
1 Throughout this chapter, the spelling used within students’
responses has been edited for clarity only. Individuals’ use of
capital letters – or otherwise – for terms such as ‘the Holocaust’
appears as in their original text.
The holocaust was a historical moment when
the Nazis persecuted the Jews and ended up
sending them to death camps and killing them.
The holocaust was in 3 stages. The 1st one was
the ghettos, 2nd one was killing the jews in public
places and sending them to concentration camps
and then the 3rd and final one was the ‘Final
Solution’ which was the Nazis sending the jews and
other types of people like gypsies to death camps
(Year 11 student).
It is important to emphasise that question 30 of
the survey, did not ask students to demonstrate
everything they knew about the Holocaust; it only
invited them to provide a short description. Therefore,
the data presented here is not intended as a reliable
measure of whether or not students know specific
things. Instead, the chapter reports the ‘knowledge’
that students’ themselves chose to prioritise in just
one or two sentences as a basis from which to
identify the most commonly shared conceptions of
the Holocaust.
The descriptions provided by students ranged
from single-word answers to short paragraphs of
up to 250 words (as summarised in Table 3.1) and
contained a wide variety of descriptive, evaluative
and ‘factual’ content as is also evident in just the
handful of examples already quoted. Across all 6,094
responses, this translates into an enormous amount
of complex data. Nonetheless, through close textual
analysis of commonly recurring words, phrases and
related terms, it is possible to discern a clear shared,
core content.
Table 3.2 summarises the ten most commonly
occurring words and phrases used within student
descriptions across individual year groups. Although
caution must always be taken with any attempt
to quantify what are essentially interpretative
phenomena – in this case, people’s words – it
is striking to note that the three most commonly
occurring words or phrases remain constant across
all year groups.
As Table 3.2 clearly demonstrates, students were,
by some margin, most likely to make at least one
reference to ‘Jews’, ‘Jewish people’ and/or ‘the
Jewish ‘faith’ in their descriptions. The second most
likely term to be referenced was ‘killing’, while ‘Hitler’
was the third. Indeed, in a number of students’
responses, these were the only individual terms
referenced, for example:
Where Hitler killed lots of jewish people
(Year 7 student).
When jews were killed by hitler (Year 9 student).
Hitler had the jews killed (Year 11 student).
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust