BBC poll: Nearly half of Britons never heard of Auschwitz

Idi Amin was WAY more successful at exterminating his enemies than Pinochet. Let's not leave him out...

Anyway, it's sad that there isn't a level of familiarity with what happened in Germany during WWII, but I've got to go with Rick on this: the kids aren't going to care about something that doesn't effect them. As far as the others people have listed (Stalin, Pol Pot, & Pinochet), Eddie Izzard postulated that when a dictator kills his own people there isn't the same level of shock. Pol Pot is in the top 3 in terms of body count but I would be willing to wager that no more than 10% of high school students could even tell you what country he was from much less why he is so infamous.

 

I don't agree with that, either. One of the main problems that today's educators are responsible for is that they equate "teaching" with "being engaging" without putting sufficient subsequent thought into what is or is not actually going to engage someone. "Snazzing it up" mostly is not the answer.

Primarily, it's about relevance. Which, in turn, means it's about what is deemed to be relevant, both by those who teach and those who learn. And that brings us full-circle to the endemic fault I was first addressing - there is no excuse for this particular topic to be sliding into irrelevance whilst other learning, contemporary to this history, retain prevalence.

 

Education? And you never sat in a class with people who had no interest and would rather be anywhere else except in school being educated?
Just look about you, there are plenty of people who don't care about a great deal that many of us hold true to our hearts. It's a sad fact of life. Hence the results.

 

Add Henry Kissinger to that.

 

If you persist with as narrow a definition of education as that, then you cannot possibly be wrong. But where's the point in that? Remember, I began this by saying that ignorance on this scale, and of this nature, cannot be viewed solely from the perspective of formal education.

 

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

 

I don't want it to drink, I want it to take a bath.

<SHOVE>

 

Since the question was about a SPECIFIC death camp, I don't find this news disturbing. I really don't. The question wasn't, have you heard of the Holocaust?

I think this thread is a case of people looking for something to get outraged about.

 

I think we can add the Spanish Inquisition to that list of "Dark ends of the human spectrum".

Perhaps a better question for the survey to ask wouold have been "Do you know what the Holocaust was" instead of specifically asking about Auschwitz. I'm sure many people know what happened during WWII in Germany but don't know the specific names of the camps. Outside of Auschwitz and Dachau I'd be hard pressed to come up with more names off the top of my head.


(EDIT: SuperDave beat me to it)

 

But it is the most infamous, so usually you would expect it to be known. However, as I and others have previously mentioned, we should not be too surprised by this failure by many.

 

To put it into perspective, a few Germans I know where talking about Paris and places visited a while back. They had visited Versailles, which i a highly recommended place to visit. I happened to mention the Hall of Mirrors and that it is significant to "German" history. All I got back was blank stares until I informed them.
To me that is shocking too.

 

Don't countries focus on what affects them, primarily?

There's the USA, with a sizable jewish minority (they control the emdia, movies, publishing, education, and pretty much everything, right?) - a community that has been very outspoken on Holocaust issues and education.

Is England the same? It doesn't seem so to me.

Also, look at the cause for war. America, with a sizable community of german descent, was never really united against Germany until late in WW2. And after WW2, you could justify all US involvement because of the concentration camps. America needed to see Germany/Hitler as evil to unite the country behind WW2. Holocaust issues certainly were a good tool for that.

Contrast that to England, where, well, fighting Germans has been a hobby for centuries. I mean, do you need to mention the camps to inspire the english to give germany a good kicking? heck no, all they gotta point to is the blitz.

Add that to the way that countries focus on what they did/saw in the war. An American may know the Ardennes/Normandy, but may draw a blank when you mention Gold/Juno/Sword. And frankly, I can't even think of how the tune to dambusters goes, and I think you look like a bunch of retards with your fingers making those aviator goggle thingies, but I'd be in a minority in England.

So no, I'm not surprised the anme of one concentration camp doesn't ring a bell. Now if 50% had no clue about the holocaust, well, that would be slightly more disturbing.

 

Banks. You forgot banks.

It wasn't always though. The first Jews who had any influence tried very hard to remove the image of themselves as Jews. A Gentleman's Agreement, a movie about anti-semitism (although with a very odd viewpoint) was produced by the ONLY non-Jewish studio, and the other studio heads tried to buy it from him.

Erm, this from the country of Disraeli, Rotschild, and a club called the "Yids"? (Never mind that most of Arsenal's command structure is Jewish these days.) England's hardly a Jew-free zone.

What? Sorry, but that's just not true. The US didn't even KNOW about the Holocaust until pretty late. Jews like Felix Frankfruter refused to believe it as late as 1942. The Germans were "evil", and war propaganda made sure they were seen that way. I don't think the US used the Holocaust at all in the way you're suggesting.

Really? When was that? The current British royal line is Hanoverian!

That's true.

Gold/Juno/Sword is pretty inconsequential in the long scheme of things. Names of the beaches? Come on. Who remembers "Operation Torch"? Do you think German kids learn about "Operation Barbarossa"?

I'm not particularly shocked, but it is strange. I would think the Holocaust is considerably more well known than Auschwitz, but that's a bit like knowing about the Civil War without knowing who Lincoln was. (Not exactly the same, but how do you not hear the other name if you've learned about one?)

 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnew...e=45--never-heard-of-auschwitz-name_page.html

'It follows a Mirror poll in June in which 73 per cent of under-25s did not know what D-Day was or who was involved.'

And we were directly involved in that!!!

 

How come everybody forgets Mao? Mao was right up there with Stalin and Hitler, Pol Pot only gets in that company for percentage-wise depopulation.

 

My thoughts exactly.

I'm also interested in the context the word was used. For instance, If it was asked in the context of a load of questions about boy-bands and hair styles and the responder was promised a free picture of 'New Kids On The Block' or whatever, it puts a rather different complexion on the numbers, doesn't it.

The point is that there have been many, many films and TV programmes about this subject for years - don't forget, we get the same ones that the US does. Most kids will have seen Schindlers List or any one of the dozens of history programmes and dramas over the years.

I can quite believe they won't remember anything from school, but from THE TV???

 

Wasn't Samuel Goldwyn named Samuel Goldfish by the guy on the immigration desk because he couldn't pronounce his name... later changing it, not to his original one, but to Goldwyn.

Marks and Spencers superstore, Thatcher adviser Keith Joseph, Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson, Tory cabinet minister Leon Brittan, Labour MP Greville Janner, Lord Levy, Tony Blair's envoy on the Middle East, Peter Mandelson's father was Jewish, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary has Jewish ancestry... hell, even the current leader of the opposition, Michael Howard, is Jewish or of Jewish extraction.

It never ceases to amaze me the number of Americans think everyone in Britain is anti-semitic when I doubt the proportion is much different from the US. Not agreeing with the policies of the current Israeli leadership? Ah, now that's a different matter.

No, I think yer man DJP is right about the fact that we've never really got on with the Germans... but then we've never really got on with anyone particularly. Having said that it could be worse... they could be French.

I heard a statistic recently that 50% of people didn't know what 50% meant. I mean, they knew it meant half but didn't know why. And, let's get it straight... we usually score ABOVE most other countries in international comparisons for educational standards.

 

(smacks head) Of course, how obvious!

maybe its my lcoation, or the communities that I grew up near, but with a sizable jewish minority, well, us non-jews definitely got our share of holocaust rememberence stuff. "never forget" was more a holocaust reference than a Vietnam MIA reference, at least with the people I knew.[/quote]

It certainly is not. But england is ruled by white protestants, and as was obvious from above, america is ruled by jews in the media, and of course, banks and Wall Street. (Of course I'm joking here - but perhaps there is some element of truth...today, are there more "leaders" of hebrew extraction in England or America? Millions of americans turned out every week, and every day, to watch Seinfeld, a picture of "jewish" NYC life - as opposed to what, Father Ted? and BTW, I see nothing wrong with the situation in America)

I did not express myself well - The holocaust was not used as a primary justification for war...until well after 1945. Think of the grade school history classrooms after 1945. Were the lessons based around how bad fascism was? Or were we taught that the war was right because of (a) Pearl Harbor, and (b) Holocaust. Germans did the Holocaust, which was evil, ergo, our war against them was right. Japanese sneak attacked us, which was wrong, so our war against them was right. Sure, later on, better and deeper explanations are learned, but the first things you learn shape the way you view later information.

OK but, in my defense, the british have been fighting just about every nation in europe at one point or another in the past 700 years, so can easily be riled up against any of them.

 

Watch out - per the BBC, this camp is being exterminated.

 

Again, the name of the camp is just the lemon next to the pie. If they said that they had no idea what the holocaust was, or that they believed it never happened, then I think there would be reason to worry.

 

Not sure how old you are, but that's a relatively recent phenomenon, and you likely grew up in a suburb of a large city. I don't think its universal in the US at all.

Proportionately? I'm not really sure; hard to know. But England eliminated restrictions on Jews holding office sometime in the 1850s, iirc, and Disraeli was Prime Minister twice. There's a fairly long list of famous British Jews.

Well........Seinfeld was written by Jews, but it wasn't really about Jews. Only one character on the show was Jewish (jerry) and he never made that big a deal about it. (Jason Alexander and Julia Louis Dreyfuss are both Jewish, but I don't think George was Jewish. Elaine had shiksappeal, after all.)

Again, I think the school you went to emphasized this point more, but I do agree with your point that there probably is somewhat more holocaust material available in US popular culture. Although, Life is Beautiful was a European film.

Well.......not really. England and Germany didn't really have any conflicts until WWI. The closest I can think of was the very short lived Prussian French alliance, but Mdme. de Pompadour scuttled all those plans by helping to forge an alliance with Austria. I don't think you could find any hatred of "the Hun" before WWI.

 

George was Catholic, but he converted to Latvian Orthodox. Because of the hats.