What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
different religion to him. I think this was wrong. (Year
10 student)
The killing of people because of their religion or
belief during the war (Year 11 student).
The Holocaust was caused by a person who was
prejudiced and didn’t respect other religions
(Year 11 student).
The Holocaust was the death of millions of people in
religious groups because other people didn’t believe
what they did and wanted them punished
(Year 10 student).
Other students said the Holocaust was about
conflicting lifestyle choices or opinions:
The massacre of millions of Jews performed by the
Nazis in second world war because they believed
that they were different and didn’t fit into the Nazi
way of life (Year 11 student).
The mass killing of jews because of their views and
way of life (Year 12 student).
A mass killing of the jewish people by the nazis
because the nazis disapproved of the jewish people
and their views (Year 9 student).
Yet other students said the Holocaust was rooted
wholly in racism and racial ideology:
The Holocaust was when Hitler sent many people
who he considered was not to be perfect aryan
race. This people included Jews. He wanted to
create the next generation of Germans, so they
could follow this perfect race. The people who
were not considered to be this race were killed
(Year 10 student).
The Holocaust was a mass killing which the Nazis
did in 1942. The Holocaust was when the Nazis
killed the jewish race, not only Jews but others such
as African, gypsies, and basically all people who
weren’t just like one aryan race (blonde hair blue
eyes) pure Germans (Year 10 student).
The Holocaust was the killing of Jews by Adolf
Hitler because he believed there should only be
one ‘perfect race’ which were white Germans with
blonde hair and blue eyes (Year 11 student).
The holocaust was the mass killing of the Jews due
to racism from German nazis (Year 9 student).
A framing of Nazi racial ideology as a fixation
with deviation from a ‘blonde-haired and blueeyed’
Aryan ideal was particularly pronounced here
(again, this will be discussed in detail in Chapter
5). Students made 118 individual references to
‘blonde hair and blue eyes’, and 125 to the notion
of an Aryan race. Often this specific imagery was
articulated with implicit reference to the building of
a German nation but it is perhaps surprising that
the term ‘nationalism’ itself was entirely absent from
student accounts and there were only 31 references
made to nations or nationality.
While there were clear distinctions in some
students’ prioritising of ‘race’ and/or ‘colour’ over
‘religion’ and/or ‘faith’, many appeared to work with
a considerably more inclusive – and in a number of
cases muddled – conflation of these:
It’s when people go and kill other religion[s] because
of their colour (Year 7 student).
The holocaust was when Hitler invaded all the other
religions, example: Jews and Muslims for not having
blue eyes or blonde hair (Year 7 student).
The holocaust was were the jews would get killed
for being Black (Year 10 student).
A mass slaughter of one religious race
(Year 8 student).
The Holocaust was a riot/war that had happened
because of race, gender, religion and culture
(Year 10 student).
The Holocaust was when Adolf Hitler lost the
war so he blamed the Jews, Black people and
homosexuals (everyone that was different)
(Year 8 student).
The Holocaust was when Hitler took people that he
didn’t think were ‘normal’ (Jews, homosexuals etc.)
and put them in concentration camps
(Year 10 student).
It was when people from different groups, like the
Jews, the disabled etc. were seen as different
to a normal person, therefore were out casted
and treated differently and killed or either sent
concentration camps and death camps
(Year 10 student).
The repetition of ‘etc.’ in descriptions such as
these is particularly telling. In fact, on 146 separate
occasions this shorthand was used as if to suggest
students believed the list of those marked by their
shared ‘otherness’ and victimhood was either
infinite or self-evident. In a number of students’
descriptions, this imprecise inclusivity led to
erroneous understandings, as for example where
‘gender’, ‘age’ and ‘social class’ were listed as bases