More than one-fifth of millennials in the U.S. — 22 percent — haven’t heard of, or aren’t sure if they’ve heard of, the Holocaust, according to a study published Thursday, on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. The study, which was commissioned by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and conducted by Schoen Consulting, also found that 11 percent of U.S. adults overall haven’t heard of the Holocaust or aren’t sure if they did.
Additionally, 41 percent of millennials believe two million Jews or fewer were killed during the Holocaust, the study found. Six million Jews were killed in World War II by Nazi Germany and its accomplices.
Two-thirds of millennials could not identify in the survey what Auschwitz was.
“The survey found there are critical gaps both in awareness of basic facts as well as detailed knowledge of the Holocaust,” said a news release on the findings.
A majority of American adults surveyed — 70 percent — agreed with a statement reading: “Fewer people seem to care about the Holocaust as much as they used to.” And 58 percent of Americans believe that something like the Holocaust could happen again, the survey found.
The study on Holocaust awareness and knowledge in the U.S. was conducted between February 23 and 27 and involved 1,350 interviews with American adults 18 and older.
“This study underscores the importance of Holocaust education in our schools,” Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference said in a statement. “There remain troubling gaps in Holocaust awareness while survivors are still with us; imagine when there are no longer survivors here to tell their stories.”
A third of the world’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
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5 Responses
The other 6 don’t know anything at all.
6 million jews were not killed by germans!…they were slaughtered, buried alive
,baked in ovens, gassed to death, tortcherd to death, death marched etc etc
cnt’d…..mashine gunned to death, frozen marched to death!! ‘killed’ is to a nice term
This is sad, but maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that non-Jews haven’t heard of this. I assume most YWN readers, like most of the US population, haven’t heard about the genocide in Cambodia in the late 70’s that killed between 1.5 and 3 million people, or that in Rwanda in the 90’s that killed over half a million people. Should a farmer in Iowa care about 6 million Jews more than we care about 2 million Cambodians?
To put this in context, ask them to identify the sides in World War II (US, Britain, Russia and China versus Germany, Japan and Italy). If they never heard of World War II, they probably never heard of the holocaust. The problem might be less one of anti-semitism, as opposed to general ignorance of history (which has always been a characteristic of Americans relative to most other countries).