What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
student who described the Holocaust in its entirety
as ‘When Nazi’s experimented on the jewish people
killing most of them with these experiments’ – and
the use of torture (225 references), for example:
Holocaust was where the Jews were kept and
brutally tortured (Year 9 student).
When Hitler put the Jews in concentration camps
and tortured them (Year 10 student).
In World War 2 Hitler took people to camps to
torture them (Year 7 student).
For the majority of students who provided
descriptions of the Holocaust, the camps appear to
be understood and are framed as places of death, as
tools used by the Nazis to kill Jews and other victims.
However, for a smaller but nonetheless significant
number of students, the whole camp system – and
indeed the whole Holocaust – is presented as though
the enslavement and forced labour of victims was
its primary – in some cases its exclusive – function,
for example:
When the Nazis (in WW2) captured slaves (Jews
mainly) and made them produce weapons until they
died of either lack of nutrition or exhaustion (Year 9
student).
I think Holocaust is a place that the Germans took
their slaves in the world war. I believe it was just
Jewish people they took there (Year 9 student).
The holocaust was when Hitler kept the Jews in
slavery (Year 9 student).
The holocaust was when the germans turned
Jews into slaves and then eventually killed them
with a gas (Year 10 student).
It was when Hitler locked up all the Jews and made
them into slaves (Year 7 student).
Such a perspective also goes some way to
accounting for the 69 references that characterised
victims of the Holocaust as ‘slaves’ (see Figure
3.4). In many of these accounts, the actual killing of
Jews or other victims is not even mentioned while in
others, students only appear to recognise the deaths
of those who were ‘too old or too weak’ (Year 9
student) to work:
A holocaust was a place where all the Jews had to
go when they was either old, too young or had a
disability. Hitler was the one that said the Jews had
to go into the holocaust. Only the healthy Jews was
allowed to stay alive (Year 10 student).
And so, while the idea of a concentration camp
was familiar to most students and awarded central
significance by many, the accounts provided
suggest this was not always underpinned by very
comprehensive understanding. Indeed, here it
is possible to identify an ostensibly common but
important misconception – that the camp system
was primarily motivated as a means to exploit
Jewish labour. This serves to undermine, or at least
confuse, any understanding that the Holocaust was
unambiguously murderous in its intent.
Again remembering Bartlett and Moscovici, it is
also instructive to consider what this overwhelming
focus on the camp system in students’ collective
conceptions of the Holocaust might serve to
obscure. Arguably there is a lot missing from the
short accounts that students chose to provide.
For example, while there were over 750 individual
references to the Nazis’ use of gasses as a means
to murder victims, only 65 references were made to
people being shot. Yet, as Chapter 6 will describe
in further detail, the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing
squads), assisted by thousands of local auxiliaries
from the occupied lands, are estimated to have killed
more than 1.5 million people, the overwhelming
majority were Jews who were shot. Nor is there
any significant evidence of students awarding
attention to, or placing any emphasis upon, the
actions or responses of the victims of the Holocaust.
In all except a very small handful of responses,
perpetrators are positioned as the only active agents
within students’ accounts.
There is, however, an important methodological
argument here: observations made on the basis of
what students did not include in their descriptions
can only be tentative at best. To reiterate, at no
point in the survey were students asked to outline
everything they knew about the Holocaust, and so it
is only possible to draw inferences on the basis of the
implied significance of what they chose to include.
In order to address this limitation, question 31 of
the survey presented students with a list of named
events, people and places and asked them which
they considered to be connected to the Holocaust.
This data will be examined again and in closer
detail in Chapters 6 and 7, but a few overarching
trends are worth highlighting and reflecting upon in
relation to the commentary here. First, as Figure 3.7
illustrates, 91.4 per cent of the students responding
to the survey identified Adolf Hitler as connected to
the Holocaust.
The second most commonly identified connection
was Auschwitz. Seventy-one per cent of students
recognised Auschwitz as related to the Holocaust
while two other named camps, the concentration
camp Bergen-Belsen and extermination camp
Treblinka, were only recognised by 15.2 per cent
and 14.9 per cent, respectively. Indeed, a greater