Posted on 12/02/2004 9:14:19 AM PST by Darnright
LONDON (Reuters) - Nearly half of Britons in a poll said they had never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland that became a symbol of the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of the Jews.
The results of the survey conducted by the BBC were released on Thursday as Britain's public broadcaster announced it will show a new series next January to mark the 60th anniversary of the concentration camp's liberation.
"We were amazed by the results of our audience research," said Laurence Rees, a producer on the series, "Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution."'
"It's easy to presume that the horrors of Auschwitz are engrained in the nation's collective memory, but obviously this is not the case," Rees said.
The survey found that 45 percent of those surveyed had not heard of Auschwitz. Historians estimate that anywhere from one million to three million people, about 90 percent of them Jews, were killed there.
Among women and people younger than 35, 60 percent had never heard of Auschwitz, despite the recent popularity of films such as "Schindler's List," "Life is Beautiful" and "The Pianist," which depict the atrocities of the Holocaust.
"The name Auschwitz is quite rightly a byword for horror, but the problem with thinking about horror is that we naturally turn away from it," Rees said.
The BBC said the research was based on a nationally representative postal survey of 4,000 adults 16 and older.
The broadcaster is marking Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27, with a variety of television and radio programs.
The Auschwitz series for BBC2 is based on nearly 100 interviews with survivors and perpetrators and is the result of three years of research with the assistance of professors Ian Kershaw and David Cesarani.
*slaps himself in the forehead*
oi...its going to be a long day...
thanks for the corrections (I forgot "Sanger" was polluting society in the 10s and 20s... before Mein Kampf)
Unbelievable, but I bet all these people have heard of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay thanks to the liberal Brit media.
Teaching the history of Hitler is inconvenient to the left because he thrived because of Britain and France's appeasement policies. The same policies the left advocates today.
And how many of them are totally unaware that the current development for euthenasia in Holland fits the Fascist template more perfectly than the Socialist one?
Anyone that took GCSE History (14 -16 year olds) would know this. But our school system is mucked up. Nowadays you dont have to take a language or history as well as many other things yet they still make them play rugby.
Normally, you can't go through high school without an intensive session about WW2.
I don't know if it's in Great Britain (as I suppose it is), but in France you spend time studying the Holocaust, and usually you get to see a documentary like Lanzmann's "Shoah", or "Nacht und Nebel", so there should be absolutely no way such a high percentile of people would not know Auschwitz or Dachau.
Mind you most people are idiots so we should not be surprised.
Most people do not know thatthe British Channel Islands were inaveded and massive death/work camps set up on them.
It was te only part of Britain to be conquered in Europe by the Nazis. My family lived there during that time and it was very very bad yet you will hear very little about it now. They used to have to smuggle what food scraps they had to the prisoners of war as the Nazis did not even feed them.
I wonder how many have heard about Oswiecim.
Of course the know nothings would form a big part of the anti American vote. They're idiots.
Survey them on "The Nanking Massacre". I bet fewer than 1 in 20 has ever heard of it. It's likely as bad in the US.
Thanks for using the right place name. Auschwitz is a German name. I wonder how many haven't heard of the others in Poland: Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, and Chelmno?
She and her socialist cronies saw it more as a 'cleansing' of society. Removing the 'undesirable' genetic material. And, of course, they get to pick who will be classified as undesirable.
Exactly. The Nazi Party is alive nd well. It's just been redefined as "progressive".
I seriously doubt that even 25% of Americas over 18 know about Auschwitz.
I'm well aware of the popular name of this event.
Are you trying to make some intelligent point with that change? Was it not a massacre? Were not 300,000 people murdered? That is not a rape, that's a massacre.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Unbelievable is all that comes to mind.
They weren't called "National Socialists" for nothing.
Belsen used to be the camp Brits knew about, because it was liberated by the Brits, just as Buchenwald was best known (after Auswitz), in the US. I don't know if that make would have made a difference in the survey results.
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