What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
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Perhaps this observation seems self-explanatory
and unremarkable. However, the relationship
between students’ confidence and the accuracy of
their knowledge was not as clear-cut or predictable
as it might first seem. Figure 3.17 charts the
percentage of students who were at least fairly
confident that they had given the right answer to all
11 multiple choice questions in the survey against the
comparable proportion who actually gave the most
accurate answer in each case.
A broadly consistent proportion of students
both knew – and knew that they knew – when the
Holocaust happened, what the purpose of the
Nazi ghettoes was and approximately how many
European Jews were killed. However, confidence
outstripped actual knowledge in a further eight of
the eleven responses they were invited to provide.
For two of these questions – ‘Approximately what
percentage of Jewish children in Nazi-controlled
Europe were murdered?’ and ‘In 1933, what
percentage of the German population was Jewish’
– students expressed considerable uncertainty over
their answers. Even here there were respective gaps
of 11.6 and 21.3 percentage points between the
proportion of those who were confident they had
answered correctly and those who actually had.
For other questions this same gap was striking:
45.2 percentage points where students were asked
which historical event immediately preceded the
Holocaust and almost 55.8 where they were asked
to identify the most likely consequence if a member
of the military or police refused an instruction to kill.
This chapter began by outlining the implications of
students’ collective conceptions of the Holocaust
for classroom practice and it is appropriate to
return to that endeavour here. If, as educators, we
ultimately want to challenge and dispel some of the
most pervasive misunderstandings that concern the
Holocaust, it is instructive to recognise the strength
with which these conceptions may be held.
Moreover, as has been argued in this chapter,
it is important to reflect upon where such
misinformation might come from. Why is it that so
few people are familiar with the weight of available
historical evidence suggesting an officer who refused
to kill would most likely have been reallocated to a
different task (see Chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of
this historiography and students’ responses)? And
what wider frameworks for deriving meaning from the
Holocaust might this and other such misconceptions
reflect or serve?
Summary
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This chapter has reported widespread recognition
of the Holocaust, even among students who
stated that they had never learned about the
subject in school. In total, more than 85 per cent
of all students surveyed recognised the term,
‘the Holocaust’ and a further 9 per cent were
familiar with the history to which it refers. Of those
unfamiliar with both the term and this history,
90 per cent were still in Year 9 or below.
■■
When invited to provide their own description of
the Holocaust, a clear majority of students across
all year groups included at least one reference to
Jewish people.
■■
The second and third most consistently referenced
terms were ‘killing’ and ‘Hitler’, respectively.
‘Nazis’, ‘concentration camps’ and ‘the Second
World War’ were also frequently prioritised.
■■
Further content analysis revealed a relatively stable
core structure within students’ descriptions of the
Holocaust: across all year groups, students were
most likely to identify an action or series of actions
committed by named perpetrators upon named
victims. They were considerably less likely to make
reference to a specific timeframe or geographical
location in their description. Within a subsample of
2,987 student responses, 73.7 per cent identified
at least one perpetrator, 92.5 per cent at least
one victim and 93.2 per cent at least one action,
while only 24.7 per cent referred to a timeframe
and only 14.9 per cent located the Holocaust
geographically.
■■
Across all student descriptions, a much more
extensive and varied vocabulary was used in
relation to those identified as the victims of the
Holocaust than those positioned as perpetrators.
While victims were very regularly described as
‘Jewish people’, ‘Black people’, ‘people with
disabilities’ and so on, perpetrators were much
more commonly presented in abstracted terms.
■■
The chapter suggested that ‘camps’ – and in
particular, concentration camps – appear to play
a centrally important role in students’ conceptions
of the Holocaust and, in many students’
descriptions, the two terms seemed to be used
and understood interchangeably. While some
students emphasised that the Nazis operated a
variety of different camps with varying form and
function, the majority did not acknowledge – nor
perhaps recognise – such distinctions in their
accounts.
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