What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
51
Figure 3.7 Students’ recognition of people, events and places associated with the Holocaust
(percentage of students)
Percentages below 5 per cent are not labelled on the chart
Percentage of students
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Adolf Hitler (n=7,491)
91.4
6.3
Auschwitz (n=7,408)
71.0
6.7
22.3
The SS (n=7,303)
44.4
16.3
39.3
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (n=7,319)
42.6
17.1
40.3
Kristallnacht (n=7,310)
36.1
14.8
49.1
The Nuremberg Trials (n=7,319)
35.0
17.0
48.0
Oscar Schindler (n=7,302)
33.9
18.6
47.5
The Einsatzgruppen (n=7,274)
24.3
16.6
59.1
Adolf Eichmann (n=7,373)
23.2
30.8
46.0
Wannsee Conference (n=7,232)
15.2
25.9
58.9
Bergen-Belsen (n=7,260)
Treblinka (n=7,246)
15.2
14.9
21.7
24.7
63.0
60.4
Primo Levi (n=7,209)
7.2
27.2
65.6
■ Yes ■ Don’t know ■ No
proportion rejected the premise that either was in any
way related to the Holocaust (63.0 per cent and 60.4
per cent of students with regard to Bergen-Belsen
and Treblinka, respectively).
Returning to students’ own descriptions, across
all 6,094 responses given, Auschwitz, or Auschwitz-
Birkenau was referenced 56 times. Dachau
and Bergen-Belsen were the only other camps
individually identified and each was mentioned on
only one occasion. Taken together, the responses
given by students to both question 30 and question
31 suggest that, while a generalised notion of ‘the
camps’ features prominently in students’ thinking,
their actual knowledge of the camp system is likely
to be partial and incomplete. This is a contention
explored in considerably further detail in Chapter 7.
Figure 3.7 also offers further evidence to support
the argument that students readily associate the
killing of Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution
with the camp system – and in particular with the
use of gas chambers – but are much less likely to be
aware of what Desbois (2008) has characterised as
‘the Holocaust by bullets’. Even when given it as a
prompt, only 24.3 per cent of the students surveyed
recognised that the term ‘the Einsatzgruppen’ was in
some way connected to the Holocaust.
Finally, in spite of the total absence of any
discussion of Jewish resistance within students’
own descriptions of the Holocaust, it is significant to
note that well over a third recognised the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising as part of this history. Arguably,
this suggests that the idea of resistance was not
entirely unfamiliar to these students nor antithetical
to their understanding of the Holocaust itself. Rather,
resistance was simply not something that they chose
to prioritise within their short accounts.
Scale
Among the subsample of 2,987 student responses
analysed in relation to overarching patterns of form
and content, across all year groups, only 23.4 per
cent included reference to the scale of the Holocaust
in terms of the number of people killed. This varied
between 14.9 per cent of Year 7 students to
approximately 25 per cent of students from Years 9,
11 and 12. The issue of the number of Jewish victims
killed during the Holocaust was in fact the focus of a
separate survey question, as will be discussed much
more fully in Chapter 5.
However, a closer examination of students’ freetext
and unprompted responses is again important
here. For, what quickly becomes apparent, is the
difficulty in adequately capturing – and in return
reporting upon – students’ understanding of the
magnitude of this event.
The specific figure of 6 million was included 365
times across all 6,094 student responses. This in
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