What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
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geography. However, the challenge is not necessarily
that students have inadequate access to such
information (although this may also be true). A more
fundamental challenge is that students may then
attempt to accommodate any such new information
within underlying schemata that actively prohibit the
recognition that this is pertinent knowledge at all.
Definitions of the Holocaust
Neither the survey nor focus-group interviews
specifically asked students to define the Holocaust.
Instead, the more open invitation to ‘describe’ the
Holocaust was always used. However, as Chapter 1
has already identified, the coexistence of competing
and potentially contradictory definitions of ‘the
Holocaust’ is another important characteristic of
how this history is currently framed and previous
commentators such as Russell (2006) and Salmons
(2003) have noted with concern that there are often
important distinctions between historians’ definitions
and popular understandings of the term.
For the purposes of our discussion here, there
are two significant axes along which opposing
definitions of the Holocaust may divide. The first
concerns the term’s inclusivity or otherwise as
regards the identification of variously targeted victim
groups. Again, as Chapter 1 has already detailed,
most contemporary academic historians use the
particular term, ‘the Holocaust’ to refer exclusively
to the targeting of European Jews (see, for example,
Bauer 2002; Cesarani 2004; Hilberg 1993). Here, the
experiences of other groups of people persecuted
and in many cases murdered by the Nazis and their
collaborators are recognised as critically important
to an understanding of the Holocaust, but they are
not themselves denoted by the use of this specific
term. More inclusive definitions might use the term
to reference the experiences of other groups, most
commonly the Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), disabled
people, Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah’s
witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, Black people
and/or other political or minority ethnic groups (for
an expanded discussion of variously articulated
definitions of the Holocaust, see Niewyk and
Nicosia 2002).
The second axis concerns the totality of the
Nazis’ exterminationist objective for European Jews.
For historian Yehuda Bauer, for example, what
makes the Holocaust an unprecedented historical
phenomenon was the Nazi’s intention to kill every
Jew across all of Europe – a genocide that extended
beyond boundaries of national sovereignty (Bauer
2002). There is some evidence that this could
also have been the Nazis’ ultimate intended fate
for Europe’s Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) population.
From this perspective, an explicit recognition of this
exterminationist objective is seen as an important
requirement with regard to defining the term.
The polar contrast to this position is an entirely
decontextualized definition made without reference
to any distinguishing feature of this history. Thus, in
some contexts, the term ‘holocaust’ is used as a
generic term synonymous either with mass murder
and genocide or with processes of discrimination and
prejudice more broadly.
Such generic definitions are not commonly used
in the putative field of Holocaust education in the
United Kingdom, but they do circulate more widely.
Across all 6,094 student descriptions only a very
small minority of students appeared to interpret
the Holocaust in such a way:
I think it is when a big group of people are murdered
even if they are children or women (Year 9 student).
Slaughter of a massive scale of people
(Year 9 student).
When lots of people are killed because of their
religion, race or sexuality (Year 9 student).
A handful of others wrote simply ‘mass killing’ or
‘genocide’, while two more presented ‘the Jewish
Holocaust’ as ‘an example of’ a holocaust – a more
general category. The question of whether or not
the students in this study were likely to interpret the
Holocaust to refer exclusively to Jewish victims is, on
the basis of available data, harder to discern. As has
already been emphasised, Jewish people very firmly
occupied a central position in students’ collective
conceptions of the Holocaust. Other named victims
were identified far less frequently. However, where
other victim groups were included alongside Jews
in students’ descriptions, they tended to be listed
somewhat indiscriminately, for example,
‘The Holocaust was the mass murder of people
because they were either Jewish, disabled, gypsies,
homosexual, mentally ill’ (Year 12 student).
In other cases there appeared to be slippage
– or perhaps confusion – in students’ thinking,
for example in the case of a Year 12 student who
described the Holocaust as ‘the mass genocide
of Jews during the time of the Second World War’
before continuing: ‘which was an attempt from Hitler
to wipe-out the Jews, gays, disabled and any others
who didn’t conform to his ruling’ (Year 12 student).
Elsewhere, some students clearly recognised the
centrality of the Jews in relation to the Holocaust but
appeared uncertain as to how to distinguish this from
the experience of other victim groups:
The Holocaust was the event where Jews were
discriminated against by Nazi Germany under the
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust