What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
47
Perpetrators of the Holocaust
We have already identified the dominance of Hitler
as a point of reference in students’ descriptions of
the Holocaust, and Chapter 6 explores focus-group
discussions to offer a detailed analysis of students’
understandings about his responsibility. Even so,
such is Hitler’s significance in student accounts that
it is helpful to take a look now at how he was most
commonly positioned in even the briefest of their
responses.
Some students, especially among older year
groups, purposefully problematised the idea that
Hitler alone was responsible for the Holocaust,
emphasising, for example, that:
Hitler is the most popular figure associated
with this … however other countries in europe
also contributed greatly to the genocide
(Year 11 student).
However, in the descriptions provided by many
others, Hitler appears to be awarded singular
agency. Many, if not all, of the actions identified in
Figure 3.6 were repeatedly attributed by students to
Hitler himself. For example, the following answers
were provided in response to survey question 30
(emphasis added):
When Hitler sent many Jews to concentration
camps where they were killed (Year 10 student).
The Holocaust was when Hitler tortured and killed
Jews (Year 11 student).
It was when Adolf Hitler attempted to wipe out the
Jews by committing Genocide (Year 10 student).
When Hitler captured the Jews, put them in a
concentration camp and gassed them (Year 10
student).
Where Hitler took Jews to a concentration camp
and said they were going to work but he killed them
all because he didn’t like jews (Year 10 student).
The holocaust was a period in time where the
German leader Adolf Hitler discriminated against
everyone who was different and tried to kill them
all (Year 10 student).
The holocaust was the part of the war when thousands
of Jews died at the hands of Hitler.They were
gassed in concentration camps and were buried in
mass graves. The gas chambers where like showers
and Hitler made them look nice (Year 7 student).
There are a number of possible explanations
for the central importance awarded to Hitler in
students’ conceptions of the Holocaust. Adopting
the language offered by Moscovici, we could argue
that he operates as a useful personification of the
Holocaust: that a single, vividly drawn figure is
easier to conceptualise and hang your thoughts
and interpretations upon than the complex and
confronting reality of vast networks of shared
culpability and complicity and of individuals
positioned within – but not ultimately reducible to
– wider structures of social, political and economic
power. This conflation certainly appears to be active
in the most extreme of all the students’ descriptions,
in which the Holocaust is described precisely and
exclusively as a person; specifically as ‘an evil man
that wanted to rule the world and make it his own’
(Year 9 student).
Again, the perspective shared by both Moscovici
and Bartlett – and adopted here – is that ‘errors’ like
this in students’ thinking, are not primarily a function
of faulty information-processing or of inadequate
knowledge-acquisition. Rather, they are very likely
to reflect and represent individual interpretations
of a wider social framing in which it is common
and potentially advantageous to bestow a solitary
figure with such enormous representational and
explanatory power.
Whatever the cause, the dominance of Hitler
within students’ thinking about the Holocaust
could significantly compromise both the depth and
accuracy of their understanding. This contention is
developed further in Chapter 6, but it is interesting
to note here that – when given entirely free rein to
‘describe what the Holocaust was’ – in addition
to the 2,781 references to Hitler across all 6,094
responses, students also made 6 references
specifically to his moustache, but only 3 to the
Einsatzgruppen, 8 to the SS and 8 to any form
of collaboration with the Nazis.
Actions undertaken during the Holocaust
A related ‘cognitive shorthand’ or conceptual
conflation also appears to be at work when we
examine more closely the action – or actions –
that students most commonly describe.
Alongside the clear recognition that, essentially, the
Holocaust involved the mass killing and attempted
extermination of Jews, the second most prominent
point of reference here is a noun rather than a verb:
the ‘camps’ where victims, in students’ descriptions,
were ‘sent’, ‘taken’, ‘captured’, ‘imprisoned’ or
otherwise ‘held’. Indeed, in one Year 9 student’s
description, the camp system itself becomes the
principal action of the Holocaust:
[The Holocaust was] the Nazi way of killing all Jews
by concentrating them into fortified camps to do
hard labour or be killed (emphasis added).
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust