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.
When you stop teaching history with facts and start teaching it with feelings and P.C. you are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Food for thought for San Diego county California.
"The Final Solution" was not fully implemented until Margaret Singer and the advent of Planned Parenthood.
amazing....
I agree that it's important that people know the history of the holocaust and death camps like Auschwitz, but there seems to be an implication that those who don't know specifically about Auschwitz are unaware of the holocaust. I would be more interested in a poll about the holocaust in general. I suspect the number unaware would be more like 10-15%.
I think you mean "Sanger", but you have the teacher and pupil reversed. Sanger was busy with her program while Hitler was still painting postcards. And what is now Planned Parenthood was operating while Hitler was still ranting in beer halls in Munich. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/msbio.htm
I doubt you'd achieve a worse result if the test were conducted in Compton, CA.
Wait a sec, hold up. Aren't these the nitwits that wanted to know how some 60 million Americans were so dumb as to vote for George Bush? The same nitwits that thought they should be able to tell us how to vote?
Maybe they should crack open a history book and find out a little bit about world history before they start instructing us on how to be a super power.
100% of Britons also unaware of toothpaste
I wonder if perhaps this helps explain what is perceived on this side of the Atlantic as a relative European callousness toward the death machine Saddam ran in Iraq.
>there seems to be an implication that those who don't know specifically about Auschwitz are unaware of the holocaust. I would be more interested in a poll about the holocaust in general.<
That's a very good point. I hope you are right. With luck, young folks will be educated by the BBC's planned series this January.
True but Auschwitz is the most notorious of the camps. It's hard to be aware of the holocaust in general and not Auschwitz specifically.
How many Americans even know who the Nazis were and what they did?
Vastly Superior European Intellect Ping
A number of these same people would likely parrot that Bush is a Nazi.
>I wonder if perhaps this helps explain what is perceived on this side of the Atlantic as a relative European callousness toward the death machine Saddam ran in Iraq.<
It very well could. In addition, taking this survey into account highlights the utter stupidity of the average young Briton's comparison of our President to Hitler.
It's un-PC to teach students about the Holocaust, lest they remember and prevent another one from happening when the time comes. It's as bad in the IS as in Briton, and it is VERY frightening.
I was thinking the same thing. When these morons scream "Bush is a Nazi!!" they're spitting on all of the graves of Hitler's victims.
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