Class Test: The Construction of Modern Histories: The Holocaust (Answers)

CLASS TEST
The Construction of Modern Histories:

the Holocaust (answers)
Instructions to students
• You have 50 minutes to complete the test.
• Please answer all questions in the spaces provided.
• There is to be no talking during the test.
Name: ________________________________________________________ Score: /20
Class: _________________________________________________________ Grade: %
Comments:
© Oxford University Press 2018 1

Permission has been granted for this page to be photocopied within the purchasing institution only.
1 What does the term ‘Holocaust’ refer to in history?
Students need to make two points to attain two marks.

• The Holocaust was the systematic murder of the Jews and other minorities in Europe by the Nazis
during the Second World War.
• More than 6 million people, mostly European Jews, were murdered over the course of the Holocaust.
• The word ‘Holocaust’ means ‘sacrificed by fire’.
/2 marks
2 Give examples of two types of sources of evidence that could help historians studying the Holocaust
and what type of information these sources can reveal.
Students need to identify two sources of documentary evidence. They need to explain how each can be
used by historians. These might include the following examples from the Student book:
• Holocaust survivors are a source of evidence. There were 100 000 survivors still alive in 2016.
Survivors provide a primary source of evidence of the event. The workings of time upon an
individual’s memory need to be taken into account by historians.
• Gestapo documents reveal the planning and scope of the event. These documents illustrate how
Nazi authorities carried out radicalised Nazi racial policies.
• Documents made by the German Railway (Reichsbahn) carry specific details regarding the numbers
of Jews transported to death camps.
/4 marks

3 Identify the four main approaches to studying history mentioned in the book and briefly explain each
approach.
• Narrative history: relies on a chronological or linear approach to move the historical narrative forward.
• Biography: historians examine a particular historical context or event through the lens of the life of a
particular person. Judgements are made as to how the person influenced the time or how events
influenced the person.
• Social history: emerged in the 1960s in an attempt to tell the stories of the everyday man and
woman. Social history emerged as a reaction to the domination of ‘history from above’ and the focus
mostly on great men.
• Cultural history: examination of all forms of cultural texts to make judgements about a particular
society.
• Multiple approaches: a historian may use an approach that combines a number of ways of looking at
the past, e.g. social, economic, transnational. The aim of these historians is to widen the scope of the
study and reveal a deeper understanding of the past.
/4 marks
4 How is the source below useful for an historian studying the historical context of the Holocaust? Use
the source and your own knowledge to support your answer.
This 1935 chart shows racial classifications under the Nuremberg Laws. There are three classifications: German,
Mischlinge (mixed blood) and Jew.

Students need to use the source and explain how it illustrates the historical context of the Holocaust to
earn two marks. They then need to support their answer with an explanation and example from their own
knowledge to attain a further two marks.
From the source:

• formalised national laws articulating a separation of races
• introduced in 1935 in Nuremberg
• Germans able to identify who is Jewish
• people’s worth and place in society determined by blood.
A students’ own knowledge could include:

• The antisemitic Nazi racial policy was formalised throughout German society.
• These laws came as an escalation after the Nazis came to power and began to target Jews, e.g.
1933 economic boycott of Jewish shops.
• Jews were removed from all influential and societal positions in universities, the civil service, the
army, etc.
• The historical context of Nazi racial policy escalated after Nuremberg with Kristallnacht, an organised
state-sponsored attack on Jewish synagogues and businesses in 1938.
/4 marks
5 Account for the approach taken by Richard Evans in his construction of Holocaust history. What
evidence does he present to support the idea that taking a long-term historical view is an effective
way of studying the Holocaust?
Students are required to identify Evans’ approach to German history. Evans takes a long view and
provides a significant study of events before the Holocaust in his book The Third Reich at War.
Evans explored the seeds of Nazism in nineteenth-century German history in The Coming of the Third
Reich. Evans explores the roots of German racial thinking and practice in Africa in the nineteenth century.
As a colonial power, Germany fought a war of extermination against tribes in present day Namibia using
the following tactics:
• employing the use of ‘concentration camps’ to hold survivors of defeated tribes; these camps were
designed to ‘exterminate through labour’
• performing experiments on inmates of these camps, injecting them with experimental drugs; this
foreshadowed Nazi experimentation on Jewish inmates of extermination camps in the 1940s
• introducing the term Rassenschande or ‘racial defilement’; banning mixed marriages in Germany’s
African colonies.
/4 marks

6 What is the argument that David Irving used to justify his denial of the Holocaust? If this argument
was to be considered valid, how would this line of historical justification impact the construction of
Australian settlement histories?
Irving’s argument is that if an event has not been documented in an archive, then it did not take place.
This is not a valid approach to the construction of history. If it were applied to a study of the First
Australians it would eliminate Indigenous perspectives from the study, as theirs was an oral tradition and
there are no archival records.
/2 marks
Total marks:
/20 marks


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CLASS TEST

The Construction of Modern Histories:

• You have 50 minutes to complete the test.

• Please answer all questions in the spaces provided.

• There is to be no talking during the test.

Name: ________________________________________________________ Score: /20

Class: _________________________________________________________ Grade: %

© Oxford University Press 2018 1

Students need to make two points to attain two marks.

© Oxford University Press 2018 2

© Oxford University Press 2018 3

From the source:

A students’ own knowledge could include:

© Oxford University Press 2018 4

© Oxford University Press 2018 5

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