What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
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The Holocaust was when Adolf Hitler killed around
Eleven million people and six million were jews. He
killed them because he felt as if they were taking
over the country he lived in (Germany). This was the
cause of the second world war. (Year 10 student).
In another type of confused schemata, the
Holocaust was explained primarily in terms of
objectives of war (again, emphasis added):
The Holocaust was when Hitler invaded the world
by capturing Jewish people [and] killing them. He
kept them in concentration camps (Year 7 student).
holocaust is when the Germans invaded the Jews
country’s and captured them and treated them
badly and put them in concentration camps and gas
chambers (Year 10 student).
The Holocaust was a war between a lot of
countries; Hitler was the cause because he didn’t
like Jews, homosexuals, etc. Countries would be
bombed and Hitler sent innocent people (Jews,
homosexuals, etc.) to concentration camps and
then killed them in gas chambers (Year 9 student).
I think that the Holocaust was a war between
different countries because a man called Hitler had
this idea of a ‘perfect race’ and he thought that
Jewish people weren’t part of that race. He then
started being very violent towards them and tried to
create his perfect race (Year 9 student).
At its most extreme, in descriptions from 10
individual students, this form of entangled framing
led to the Holocaust being explicitly presented –
and ostensibly understood – as a war or ‘conflict’
between the Nazis and/or Germans and the Jews.
Perhaps the most subtle but, in the context
of our research, the most numerically significant
consequence of a fused association between these
two distinct schemata occurs where understanding
of one is subsumed within the latter, for example
where the Holocaust is described as ‘a kind of effect
that made the world war worse; something that
triggered the war even more’ (Year 9 student).
In many cases, students’ (often faulty)
understanding of the chronology of the Second
World War appears to stand in for an understanding
of the specific chronology of the Holocaust. Students
were considerably more likely to frame the Holocaust
simply as an ‘event within’ – or ‘period’ coterminous
with – the Second World War than to outline the
significance of any points that were important
in the development of the Holocaust itself. For
example, across all 6,094 student responses there
were just two individual and very brief references
to Kristallnacht, one reference to the passing of
the Nuremberg Laws and one to the Wannsee
Conference. Both Kristallnacht and the Wannsee
Conference were, however, included in the list of
named people, events and places already reported
above. Here, too, only a minority of students
recognised either event as in any way connected
to the Holocaust: 36.1 per cent recognised a
connection with Kristallnacht and 15.2 per cent a
connection with the Wannsee Conference.
Figure 3.10 Most commonly used words and phrases which refer to geographic locations of the Holocaust
across all 6,094 student descriptions.
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust