Holocaust Is Fading From Memory, Survey Finds

[SummerMadness]

Holocaust Is Fading From Memory, Survey Finds

For seven decades, "never forget" has been a rallying cry of the Holocaust remembrance movement.

But a survey released Thursday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, found that many adults lack basic knowledge of what happened — and this lack of knowledge is more pronounced among millennials, whom the survey defined as people ages 18 to 34.

Thirty-one percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. Forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was. Only 39 percent of Americans know that Hitler was democratically elected.

 

[grandvizier1006]

Education might be abke to fix this. I know that sounds obvious, but I mean to say that education about history is vital for society.

 

[Hammster]

ADMIN HAT ON


Thread cleaned. No Holocaust denying allowed.


ADMIN HAT OFF

 

[alsughasoughaiuyfygh]

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[Goonie]

People on this forum are doing that?

For shame.

Sadly yes. And with the passing of the witnesses and immediate relatives, and with the whole ‘fake news’ distrust of mainstream information it is more likely to get worse, than better. In general not only on this forum.

 

[trunks2k]

Really, it's not a huge surprise. You're talking about an event which has few survivors remaining.

 

[alsughasoughaiuyfygh]

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[John 1720]

ADMIN HAT ON


Thread cleaned. No Holocaust denying allowed.


ADMIN HAT OFF

Yeah, thanks for moderating.
My uncle was an MP in Patton's 3rd Army when they came upon the camps. He was dropping me off at the train station on my way back to the base and we had one of those chats about our experiences. He told me those camps were the worst thing he ever saw during the war, and this was a guy who had been through the battle of the Bulge. He just couldn't believe how people could turn so cruel to do that to other human beings. He said much more which I'll not repeat but that put an exclamation point on the Holocaust for me.

 

[alsughasoughaiuyfygh]

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[MehGuy]

Holocaust denial is annoying. Even more strange when my own grandfather liberated a major concentration camp and was horrified to see first hand furniture made out of concentration camp victims.

 

[alsughasoughaiuyfygh]

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[MehGuy]

Furniture... Out of Holocaust victims? Was Ed Gein a former Nazi officer who escaped or something?

No, might have been some of Ilse Koch's doing.

My Grandfather never spoke up much about the war, he just said the the Germans were sadists.

 

[John 1720]

Your uncle must have been one tough son of a gun to see something that horrendous. I can't even imagine fighting in a war, let alone fighting the second world war where the stakes are insanely high. If the war wasn't enough, he had to witness one of the purest forms of human cruelty and that would no doubt stick with him for life.

This is why I have so much respect for both my great grandfathers. They fought a war to make sure I didn't end up getting gassed by the Action T-4 program for simply being the way God made me.

Yes, I'm a standing member of a City Veteran's council and I can say that we have lost nearly all our WWII vets in recent years. World War II and the Holocaust are fading from memory at a very rapid pace because it was the eye witnesses to that debacle that kept those memories alive. We lost my uncle a few years back. He was 96. I have to say I have the greatest respect for that generation because they were all great guys. Despite the things they had seen and been through they really never let themselves get desensitized. They became scout leaders, were active in their communities, in their families, in their churches, etc. They all seemed, at least to me, to have an even greater appreciation for life after coming home and they instilled a respect for life in us, their kids. I'm not sure I can say those things about my own generation. Herb Adams, one of the WWII vets in our Post, was in the 82nd airborne and was a bodyguard for Eisenhower. This guy did everything for the community and he had a plethora of medals to boot. He also suffered from nerve damage due to frostbite from lying night after night in the sub zero snow defending the Bulge as they were completely surrounded. I once asked him what his biggest take way from his experience and he told me, "Pat, my biggest take away is that by God we have to find a way to stop killing one another." I miss all these guys and that whole generation and it is sad that we are losing their stories and the stories of the Holocaust - may it never happen again! I think that would be their rallying cry they'd want us to keep alive.
In Christ, Patrick

 

[Ringo84]

This has been my worry for the past couple of years. I think part of the reason we're seeing such a resurgence of white supremacy/Nazism here in the US and abroad is that we're getting so far away from the atrocities of WWII that we're forgetting what happened.

I don't know what the cure is for that, but education can probably help.
Ringo

 

[PreviouslySeeking...]

It isn't a shock. Most of my knowledge of WWII came from personal study outside of school. The attrocities of Nazi Germany were a bullet point, but not prioritized over any other historical event. I'm old enough that movies & various other media about that time was produced during my childhood and young adult years. Now we have had more recent wars. Kids now have more recent attrocities (Bosnia, Rwanda) to learn about as well.

What concerns me more than people not knowing how many people were murdered, is people not understanding how Nazi Germany came to be. That ignorance will cost us.

 

[Tanj]

It's more likely a "don't care enough to remember" than an education thing. WWII happened a very long time ago, why would a Millennial care any more about it than they do about the 100 years war?

 

[MyOwnSockPuppet]

Holocaust denial is annoying.

As well as being an explicit criminal offence in seventeen countries (and an implicit one in several more, as well as being career suicide in academia pretty much everywhere).

Most of my relatives were fortunate enough to be in relatively "clean" campaigns in WW2 (mostly North Africa of the North Atlantic) but even so... The British in particular did take lots of film following the liberation of Belsen. Far more so than would make sense for it to be propaganda against the Germans (given that their unconditional surrender was less than a month later).

 

[Trogdor the Burninator]

People on this forum are doing that?

For shame.

It's part of the modern conspiracy trend. There are people who run with a narrative that many famous events are all part of some giant US government conspiracy.

And if people think that 9/11 was fake and the moon landings were fake, then how much easier is it to believe that the mass murder of people you never knew on the other side of the world never happened.

 

[USincognito]

I took this photo at Dachau back in 82 or 83.

 

[Nithavela]

Really, it's not a huge surprise. You're talking about an event which has few survivors remaining.

You might think that, but you don't find a lot of people denying the murder of Julius Caesar, or the 30 year war, or the massacre of little big horn.

Only when people have an agenda that makes it convenient to forget do they become sceptics.