Understanding the experience of the victims of the Holocaust is crucial to understanding the Holocaust as a whole.  Learning about who the victims were in the first place is also important; we must be careful not to assume that our students really understand who Jews were.  Although students usually have learned some important facts about the Holocaust, we need to be aware of the limitations of their general knowledge  

What Do Students Already Know about the Holocaust?

In order to determine what students in introductory composition classes at my own university already think about the Holocaust, I composed a statement that summarized what happened during the Holocaust and offered a few reasons for why it occurred.  I tried to compose a statement that accurately reflected the beliefs that my own freshmen students seemed to hold as we began our study of the Holocaust a year earlier.  I then distributed this statement to 86 other students in four other sections of introductory composition and asked them whether the statement was accurate.

The statement I composed contained some information that was not accurate because my earlier experience had suggested students often had somewhat mistaken notions about the Holocaust.  I began by describing World War I because some of my students would volunteer this connection between World War I and the rise of Nazi Germany.  I then tried to put a great deal of emphasis on Hitler as the chief perpetrator, and I overemphasized the perverted or sadistic nature of the perpetrators.  I gave the impression that most of the victims came from Germany and that most were killed in gas chambers.  I tried to stress the cruelties of the Nazis, including the detail of how they made us of the hair of the victims (correct) and also how they processed the bodies to make soap (not true) or leather (also not true).[1]  I tried to be accurate about the numbers and classification of the other victims, but I deliberately misstated the fact that it was the largest number of people every murdered by another government.  In the last paragraph, I gave the Americans more credit than is necessary for rescuing the survivors and establishing the state of Israel. Here is the statement that the students I gave the students:

 The Holocaust arose from the imperfect peace that resulted from World War I.  The victorious nations imposed conditions that were too harsh on defeated Germany.  Hitler, a mesmerizing speaker, who came to power during a time of economic depression in Germany, was able to capitalize on the feeling that Germany had not really lost World War I and did not deserve to be punished for it.

 The most important thing about Hitler, though, was that he hated Jews.  Many other people hated Jews too, of course, but Hitler really hated them.  Many Jews had become wealthy after World War I, and ordinary Germans envied their economic success.  Hitler also felt that his race—the Aryans—was superior to the Jews.  He wanted to make his society pure, and the way he did this was by killing all the Jews.  He also started World War II because he wanted to dominate the world.  The Final Solution was successful because Hitler was a very powerful speaker; he could make people obey him, even when they knew they were doing the wrong thing.  And he had lots of sadistic asocial criminal types working for him.  Although these people were evil, they were fanatically devoted to Hitler.  When he told them to kill the Jews, they organized it and did it.

 There were many Jews in Germany, and they were killed in gas chambers.  The Germans would put them on trains, and they tricked them into thinking that they were just going to get a de-lousing shower.  Instead of water, the people were showered with gas.  The Germans also put to death lots of Jews who lived outside of Germany.  These death camps were located in Germany and in nearby countries, mostly to the east of Germany. 

 The Nazis were merciless, savage monsters—this is the main explanation for why they could be so brutal to the Jews. The Nazis made soap out of the bodies of the victims, leather from their skins, and cloth and other fabrics from their hair.  The Nazis also performed lots of terrible medical experiments on people, especially children.  The main doctor who performed these experiments was Dr. Mengele. 

 The Nazis killed about 6,000,000 Jews—a gigantic number—practically all the Jews there were in Europe.  This is just about the largest number of people that any government has ever killed.  The Nazis also killed large numbers of other groups—Gypsies, handicapped persons, homosexuals, Soviet POWs, and even Jehovah’s Witnesses—but most of their victims were Jews.

At the end of the war, the American armies came and rescued the Jews from the death camps.  Everyone in America was very happy that the end of the war had finally come, but they were shocked to find out that the Germans had killed so many Jews.  The films that they made at this time are terrible.  The people were often very sick, but the Americans brought them back to health.  Then the Americans established the State of Israel for the survivors to live in.  The Holocaust is the main reason that the State of Israel exists today.

 Here are the results of how the students characterized the accuracy of the statement:

 The most interesting results came from the students’ reasons for characterizing the statement as inaccurate.  I asked the students to tell me which lines they thought were inaccurate and to explain why.  These reasons can be divided into “good” and “bad” ones.  By a “good reason,” I mean that the student challenges some information that is probably false or offers an alternative reason that that is generally consistent with how most major historians would describe.  I characterized as “bad” reasons in which the student said something that is probably not thought to be true by most historians.  Here is a list of the objections that students made for good reasons:

Here are some “bad” reasons for why students objected to the passage:

 The students who patiently analyzed this passage were not studying the Holocaust in their writing class.  Almost all of them were in their first year in college, and they made their responses based only on their general knowledge.  They live in an area of the country that has a very low Jewish population.  One might expect that of all college students who are in writing courses, they would be relatively unknowledgeable about the Holocaust.  In spite of some of the more obvious gaps in their knowledge, it appears that they are all familiar with the Holocaust to some extent.  None of them appeared to doubt whether it had actually occurred.  The remarks of one student who participated in this survey show the problem of being only partially educated on this subject:  “Unfortunately, I am not educated on the subject of the Holocaust enough to determine what information was accurate.  I have in some way been exposed to much of this information, but I can not differentiate between what is true and what are myths.”

After students had handed their responses back, I carried on a brief discussion with them in order to be sure that I was not leaving them mistaken impressions.  I also distributed a statement that corrected and elaborated on the statement that they read; it was in a way the “answer” the question of whether the original statement was accurate, even though it only represented my best summary of what I thought historians felt about the Holocaust.

On the next two pages are the actual survey I distributed: