What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
Across all year groups, the terms ‘Nazis’,
‘concentration camps’ and ‘Second World War’ also
consistently featured among the ten most frequently
occurring words or phrases. Among the Year 7–11
students who took part in our survey, ‘Nazis’ and
‘concentration camps’ repeatedly ranked as the
fourth and fifth most common terms while among the
Year 12 and 13 students, reference to the Second
World War was prioritised.
If ‘Jews’, ‘killing’ ‘Hitler’, ‘Nazis’, ‘concentration
camps’ and ‘the Second World War’ appear to
comprise a relatively stable core content across
all year groups, it is also possible to identify
variation between the responses given by the
oldest and youngest students in terms of the next
most frequently appearing terms. For example, a
vocabulary of movement – of victims being ‘sent’
or ‘taken’ from one place to another – was most
regularly shared by students in Years 7 to 10.
Younger students were also more likely to make
specific reference to the killing of victims through
gassing whereas students in Years 12 and 13 were
considerably more likely than others to employ the
term ‘genocide’. Students from Year 10 onwards
were most likely to incorporate a language related to
‘race’, ‘racism’ and/or ‘ethnicity’.
The chapter will make a closer examination of the
precise content of students’ responses shortly but, in
addition to producing frequency counts on individual
words and phrases, our analysis also attempted
to characterise the form that student descriptions
were most likely to take. A subsample of 2,987
responses was analysed against a coding frame in
order to record whether or not individual students
made reference to each of the following within their
descriptions:
1. Named or otherwise identified victims of the
Holocaust.
2. Named or otherwise identified perpetrators of
the Holocaust.
3. Specific actions undertaken during the Holocaust.
4. An indication of the scale of the Holocaust.
5. A timeframe for the Holocaust.
6. A geographic location associated with
the Holocaust.
7. Any indication of a possible cause of the
Holocaust.
8. A recognition of the Nazis’ exterminationist
objective – that is, their intention to kill every
Jew in Europe.
A summary of coding against dimensions 1 to 7
of this frame is illustrated in Figures 3.2 and 3.3.
Again – as Figures 3.2 and 3.3 illustrate – across
year groups there is striking consistency in the form
that students’ responses take. Irrespective of age,
the students completing the survey were most likely
to describe the Holocaust in terms of a named action
(or series of actions) involving named victims and
perpetrators. They were significantly less likely to
position the Holocaust within a specified timeframe
or geographical location, or to make reference to
either its scale or possible cause. And so, while
73.7 per cent of students aggregated across all
year groups identified at least one perpetrator, 92.5
per cent identified at least one victim and 93.2 per
cent identified at least one action, only 24.7 per
cent referred to a timeframe and only 14.9 per cent
located it geographically.
Broadly speaking, as they progressed through
school, students became increasingly expansive in
their responses and the likelihood of all components
being included in a student’s description increased.
The greatest variation was found in relation to
students’ referencing of place: while only 5.9 per
cent of the Year 8 students whose responses were
sampled made reference to a specific geographical
location, 37.9 per cent of the Year 13 students did.
However, reference of place even by the oldest
students was relatively infrequent. By comparison,
nearly 96.9 per cent of Year 13 students identified
victims in their descriptions, while 97.8 per cent
included actions associated with the Holocaust.
It is important to reiterate that the claim here is
not necessarily that students do not know when,
where or why the Holocaust happened or how
many people it involved. Rather, it is to argue that
these dimensions of understanding do not seem to
be as significant to students – or at least they are
not as likely to be spontaneously recalled – as their
understanding of specific aspects of what happened
and who was involved.
Victims of the Holocaust
As seen in Table 3.2, the single strongest association
that students made in their descriptions of the
Holocaust was with ‘Jews’ or related references
to ‘Jewishness’. What Table 3.2 does not capture,
however, are the many and varied ways in which
students identified this group, for example as
‘Jewish people’, ‘Jewish citizens’, the ‘Jewish race’,
‘Jewish religion’ and ‘Jewish community’.
This variety is better reflected in Figure 3.4 which
also indicates the extensive vocabulary used by
students in describing those they conceived of
as ‘victims’ of the Holocaust in broader terms.
This contrasts strikingly with the significantly more
truncated list of terms employed by students when
accounting for those who perpetrated the Holocaust
(as is illustrated in Figure 3.5).
The issue of whether or not other named victims
of Nazi persecution should be conceived of as
victims specifically of the Holocaust will be addressed