A survey shows that many Americans—particularly the younger cohorts—do not have a solid grasp on the events of the Holocaust.
“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,” the New York Times summarizes [emphasis added].
96% of those polled said that they did believe that the Holocaust took place, so outright Holocaust denial remains extremely low. But the survey shows a need for greater education about the enormity of the genocide and, as prominent conservative commentator Ben Shapiro notes, other evils of the 20th century that ought to be learned from:
“[The survey is] also informative, because it helps explain just why younger Americans seem so comfortable embracing identity politics and large, intrusive government. If you’d never heard of the genocide of the Jews by an all-encompassing state focused laserlike on race-based differences between people, you might be warmer to the notion that racial hierarchies in politics ought to exist. You might also be warmer to the claims of genocidal Islamist terror groups who claim that Israel is a land of victimizers. And if you’d never heard of the Soviet Union, you might be more sanguine about the possibility of socialism in the United States.”
