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45% of Britons Have Never Heard of Auschwitz

  
 
FinderWolf
20:13 / 02.12.04
HUH?? Are the Brits as dumbs as us Americans? And I'm not talking just Bush and Blair here, I'm talking education levels... at least the UK doesn't have a super conversative religious Bible thumping movement like the USA does...I think.

However, all joking aside, they only surveyed 4000 people. Still, kinda weird...

Nearly half of Britons never heard of Auschwitz

Thu Dec 2, 8:20 AM ET
Yahoo News/AFP

LONDON (AFP) - Nearly half of Britons have never heard of the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in southern Poland, according to a BBC television poll that was conducted just ahead of the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation.

Forty-five percent of the 4,000 people questioned for the survey by BBC Two said they had never heard of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, the television channel said Thursday.

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is due to broadcast several documentaries on the "Final Solution", the Nazi's plan to obliterate European Jewry, including on Auschwitz, for the 60th anniversary of the concentration camp's liberation on January 27, 2005.

"Our series is not only about the shocking, almost unimaginable pain of those who died, or survived, Auschwitz. It's about how the Nazis came to do what they did," said producer Laurence Rees.

The documentary based on statements from nearly 100 survivors and officials from the camp took three years to make.

The BBC has also produced a musical show at the site of the camp dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust.

Between 1940 and 1945 more than one million men, women and children -- most of them Jews from around 20 European countries -- died in horrific circumstances at Auschwitz, one of the most infamous of World War II concentration camps.
 
 
Aertho
23:32 / 02.12.04
Three kinds of lies:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Remember that, my friend.

So anyway, still in my ranting temperature, I'll dive into this one as well. 4000 people could easily be a section of a larger number.... like the ages 15-18 in a major city. Or perhaps a cross-section of a populace with little to no education . It's still a shocking number... 45% But I don't doubt that it's a doctored figure. But look! Silver! This instance allows for the media to hit us young kids with shaming announcement and a reminder of an absolute atrocity. See? It makes us smarter. I'm an optimist.
 
 
sleazenation
06:26 / 03.12.04
When I was in school we watched the film they made of the liberation of Bergen Belsen, the concertration camp that was liberated by British forces during the war and the one that Anne Frank died in. However this was taught in an English class rather than history class, which focused on the industrial revolution.

I'm curious, how is the Holocaust taught in the US? Is it part of a standard history cirriculum - is it even taught? or is it left to individuals to discover for themselves?
 
 
sleazenation
07:04 / 03.12.04
To clarify, the film I watched at school wasn't just 'a film about Bergen Belsen' it was the documentary footage the British forces took as they liberated the camp - and it was taught in relation to studying The Wave by Morton Rhue.
 
 
_pin
10:23 / 03.12.04
I'd liek to know how this survey was conducted, adn what the questions were. Many people don't know how to spell Auschwitz, and many more may have been confused if it was called Auschwitz-Birkenau. Or maybe the makers were being smart, and were asking if people knew what was so special about Oswiecim.

Maybe I'm totally wrong on this, but it could just be some fiddling about with the figures to get more people to watch their show, as market saturation surely means that every World War Two documentary needs a really big USP by now.
 
 
Foust is SO authentic
10:31 / 03.12.04
I'm a Canadian, and in my ninth grade history classes, we were shown pictures of bulldozers dumping bodies into mass graves, as well as the usual skinny-person-behind-barbed-wire.

I thought that was pretty much standard for grade school history courses? Anybody think differently?
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
10:44 / 03.12.04
It depends on the curriculum the school is following. Now the Key Stage system is in place, schools tend to teach to the exams. Obviously this has always been the case to a certain extent, but I think there are probably very few schools which run a general history curriculum at any stage now. Also, I don't think history is regarded as one of the core subjects, and is probably optional after KS3 in most if not all schools.

I covered the Holocaust three times at school: in the third form (14), at GCSE (15-16), and for A-level (17-18). I also have distressing memories of the Holocaust exhibition room at the Imperial War Museum. So, anyone who attended my school at the same time as me is unlikely not to know what Auschwitz is. However, I think anyone who did the same courses as I did is not very likely to know anything about other aspects of history - e.g.the American War of Independence, colonisation of India, you name it, really. Other peers of mine at university had done no twentieth-century history at all... (though I must say they did all know what Auschwitz was).

So I would be inclined to ascribe this to failings on the structure of the curriculum, and also the focus on exam results at the expense of a broader, more holistic education; and to a lack of interest in the wider culture (if such a thing can be said to exist) in such things as history.

It does depend rather on who they asked, as well, but other people have said that. I think the figure is probably not that wide of the mark, though.
 
 
Hattie's Kitchen
10:57 / 03.12.04
I think my school was pretty unusual in that at age 14, we were shown the documentary Shoah, as part of an RE lesson covering different faiths. Almost no-one else in my peer group had heard of Auschwitz before that...
 
 
Loomis
11:28 / 03.12.04
I'm rather surprised that someone can exist in the modern world without having come across the idea in a book, movie, tv show, song, newscast, conversation, whatever. Even without covering it at school, the knowledge that this thing called the holocaust happened seems to be something that comes up all the time, even as an off-hand reference.

There will no doubt be fewer references as time goes on and a tv show for instance is less likely to have a character who survived the camps, or whose parents died there, or whatever. But that's natural I guess. In a hundred years time there will unfortunately be fresher atrocities for people to remember and far fewer people will be studying this period.
 
 
FinderWolf
13:25 / 03.12.04
>> So anyway, still in my ranting temperature, I'll dive into this one as well. 4000 people could easily be a section of a larger number....

Yeah, as I said above, I thought this sounded kind of fishy. And 4000 is not that many at all...
 
 
■
16:50 / 03.12.04
Four times as many as Fox News use for their presidential approval ratings.
 
 
Jack Fear
18:34 / 03.12.04
Interesting, but I don't know how much to read into it. I'd have asked the same sampling if they'd ever heard of Bergen-Belsen, which, by the same token, I would wager would have a relatively low recognition rate in the US.

I think the images of Auschwitz are so powerful in the American psyche because its liberation was an American operation--and consequently would be less so in Britain. It might have been a World War, but Britain and America experienced it far, far differently.

Let me float a crackpot theory: When an American thinks "death camp," he thinks first of Auschwitz. When a Briton thinks of the same concept, s/he thinks of Bergen-Belsen: a Russian would probably think of Treblinka.

If there's a relatively low overall awareness of the Holocaust in Britain, it may also have a lot to do with the fact that proportionally more Holocaust survivors resettled in America, as opposed to Britain, after the War.
 
 
Jef396
05:02 / 04.12.04
I'm from the US and I'm Jewish. I have also never met anybody that didn't know about the Holocaust. I went to a Jewish elementary school and I know we studied it there. I also studied it in 10th grade. We read "Because of Romek," which was written by a survivor of Auschwitz. The writter also came to my school in both 10th and 11th grade. In 11th grade we had a genocide project and the teacher didn't allow anybody to study the Holocaust, because we all knew about it already.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:10 / 04.12.04
I would caution against thinking that 'not having heard of Auschwitz' is necessarily the same thing as 'not having heard of the Holocaust'. Though, having said that, Jack, I think that Bergen-Belsen would be even less recognized by the GBP - Auschwitz is much the most well-known of the death and concentration camps (perhaps because of the influence of American media?).

I dunno, I think it's a pretty shocking stat, but it doesn't surprise me because this kind of pop quiz is regularly whipped out by the media to show things like '69% of British 14-18 year olds can't recognise the leader of the opposition/American president/Nelson Mandela/the Pope' - you'll notice that this is being used to publicise a BBC TV series - in an effort to fill newspaper space.
 
 
_pin
11:40 / 04.12.04
I would caution against thinking that 'not having heard of Auschwitz' is necessarily the same thing as 'not having heard of the Holocaust'. Kit-Cat.

See? This is better. I have to say yr first post did kinda seem to be erring towards implying they knew nothing whatever about the Holocaust.

I must say I don't really understand why "knowing Auschwitz" is the minimum standard for knowing about the Holocaust, especially given that many people don't know it's called Auschwitz-Birkenau, that it's seplt like that, that it consisted of three camps and is still known by its German name for a Polish town.

Arguing that people must know these facts (especially arbitarily chosen facts) is probablly not going to help a vision of holistic teaching of history, which seems to me to depend upon knowing a rough chronology, etc., but simply doesn't leave much room for detail in most places. This may or may not be a bad thing.

All that said, surely teaching to exams would make people more willing to teach Nazis? There is an enermous ammount of free material out there, and its better even than Tudors for getting people to watch historical documentaries and develop basic historiographical skills. On the other hand, it makes people more prone to writting "Gays kill Jews" in their homework...
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
12:07 / 04.12.04
Yeah, you'd think that the Nazi period would be one of the most taught, wouldn't you? It probably is. I was just trying to square the idea that 45% of people in this survey didn't know what Auschwitz was with my own experience of history at school, when we studied it quite intensively. However, as you say, the question might well have been phrased in such a way as to confuse people.

I think the thing that bothers me is that, as lots of people in this thread have said, according to this survey at any rate, it seems to have passed out of the common pool of knowledge (or at least to be passing out of...). Perhaps (as someone else has said, sorry I can't remember who you are) it is a question of 'the further away it gets, the less important it is'. Having said that, you'd think with the amount of history documentaries on the war etc, that are being produced, it would be widely known. Probably just a matter of the poll questions...
 
 
Ganesh
13:22 / 04.12.04
I'm a Canadian, and in my ninth grade history classes, we were shown pictures of bulldozers dumping bodies into mass graves, as well as the usual skinny-person-behind-barbed-wire.

That's pretty much what we got - in History and, I think, in English too. I remember myself and everyone around me being shocked by the imagery, whether or not we'd already been told about the Holocaust in detail.

I cannot, however, recall which death camp was featured. It was probably Belsen-Bergen, although we read about Auschwitz too.

Does not having registered the name of the actual camp generalise to not being aware of the Holocaust? I wouldn't have thought so, necessarily, but I'm not sure.
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
20:56 / 04.12.04
The Holocaust was not on our history curriculum at school, but we covered it nevertheless. Gaps were found in the teaching schedules and we were taught very thoroughly about everything- the camps, the Kristallnacht, the statistics, the SS murder squads, et.c. By the age of fifteen we were well versed in it. We knew what had happened, but we knew it as a kind of horror story from the past, peopled with caricature SS officers and grisly anecdotes. It seemed as distant as the people buried in lava at Pompeii who featured prominently in our Latin classes.
However, we were also unusual amongst British schools in that one of our old boys had survived the Holocaust. He came and gave a speech about his experiences. Afterwards there were questions and I remember someone asking what it was like to leave Auschwitz after the liberation. He said "I never left." and started to weep. Which is one moment in my historical education that I don't think I will ever forget. It changed the Holocaust from a nasty fairy story to something concrete and troubling. But of course this kind of experience is available to fewer and fewer people as the years pass.
There are clearly different ways of knowing about history; it is possible to know quite a lot about the Holocaust without really appreciating its significance& equally the reverse is also possible. The horror and empathy arising from a certain historical event inevitably diminishes when those who experienced it die out. After the last survivor is dead the history of an event becomes a different kind of beast, something that semi-attentive listeners (such as schoolchildren) easily confuse with literature, at least on an emotional level.
The Holocaust is the most extreme instance of genocide in the history of the world, and as such should never be completely excised from the syllabus. But it is reasonable to see its importance diminishing as time passes, particularly in the context of school classes with limited time and materials. I believe future history teachers should concentrate on more immediate horrors, with many living witnesses, the better to convey the dangers of apathy and intolerance. There are plenty of examples around. People still in the formative stages of their lives should be clobbered with the most emotionally & intellectually resonant history to hand. It should be made unavoidably obvious that the inhumanity of humanity is an ongoing problem relevant to everyone. Details are less important.
 
 
Ganesh
04:14 / 05.12.04
The Holocaust is the most extreme instance of genocide in the history of the world

It's certainly one of the most extreme instances of genocide in recorded history - which isn't quite what you said, but doesn't necessarily diminish your point.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
21:14 / 05.12.04
The Holocaust is the most extreme instance of genocide in the history of the world, and as such should never be completely excised from the syllabus

I don't think that anyone should necessarily know what Auschwitz is, anymore than they should know where Victoria Falls is or be able to point to Ukraine on a map. I just don't think that type of information is necessary, an awareness of the concentration camps is enough.

The thing that bewilders me is that the holocaust isn't taught in schools, the Shoah is. I'd like to see more of an effort go in to the entire period, we know there are gypsies alive today who have a lot to tell us about an event in history that they lived through as well. I wish that their was more information, not information about Auschwitz but information about the holocaust.
 
 
I'm Rick Jones, bitch
07:02 / 06.12.04
I heard a figure someplace of 11 million murdered in the camps total, could someone better versed in the history confirm or deny this for me?
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
07:38 / 06.12.04
Just to put this in context:

almost half of UK adults lack basic maths

24% have only poor literacy

6% apparently believe Gandalf defeated the Spanish Armada.

Yes, I tend to think they were taking the piss as well, but who can tell?

My point is that this probably isn't out of kilter with the general ignorance level. Alas.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
08:13 / 06.12.04
That article's quite bizarre - did Drake defeat the Spanish Armada? Err... not really. He captained one of the ships, but he wasn't the commander... He did singe the King of Spain's beard, but that's a slightly different thing.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
10:39 / 06.12.04
Yeah, you'd think that the Nazi period would be one of the most taught, wouldn't you? It probably is.

Certainly, if you study history past GCSE-level in Scotland, it's very difficult to study anything else. Of all the people I knew who did 5th / 6th year history, only one of them studied anything else. And, in common with most other people who've replied to this, I was taught about it in R.E. and English before we were taking any exams at all, so they would have been a standard thing the entire school was taught at one point or another.

There's more on the survey at the bottom of this page, but there's not more information about the survey on their site -MORI are generally quite good at publishing the actual reports online, but not, it seems, these guys.
 
 
■
16:50 / 06.12.04
I don't think that anyone should necessarily know what Auschwitz is, anymore than they should know where Victoria Falls is or be able to point to Ukraine on a map. I just don't think that type of information is necessary, an awareness of the concentration camps is enough.

On the money, there, I think. It's right to bemoan a single statistic like this, but there are plenty of other atrocities which most of still know pretty much nothing about, even if I understand the principles, methods and (hopefully) lessons learned. I could do a reasonable job of pointing to Siberia, but have no idea how many million people died there under Stalin. No concept at all of how many innocent people were killed in all the recent wars in the far east (Sino-Soviet, Sino-japanese, Korean, Vietnam, WWII etc. etc.). What does seem to be missing from the syllabus is teaching people to link such history to current reality.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
20:10 / 06.12.04
The "poor literacy" thing's probably an issue as well... (as well as being a fucking shameful embarrassment for the country that's always banging on about how it produced Shakespeare et al)-

I wonder if this was a written survey? Cos I bet a lot more people have heard of Auschwitz than would recognise the word...
 
 
_pin
10:20 / 08.12.04
On the history teaching point, the only teachers I know of who don't teach it at GCSE (from what I can tell this sort of attitude seems widespread, from teachers who have it talking about other teachers) are those who teach it at A Level and are bored. It's the second most taught unit after Medicine Through Time if my university history... thing... is anything to go by.

And I have memories of pre-GCSE learning the natures of Hitler's and Stalin's regime and comparing them, so I'm sure genocide would have come up too.

This could be, as Stoatie and Kit-Cat are hinting, a problem with education; of literacy and attendency.
 
 
_pin
12:12 / 08.12.04
To clarify, I meant that if there is a problem with people leaveing school nt knowing about the Holocaust, then the blame probablly doesn't lie just with history, but with wider issues.
 
 
NotBlue
21:42 / 10.12.04
GCSE's dont exist in scotland, it's standard grades, and within it you learn about ww1 and ww2 at a VERY high level i.e. There was some national socialism and the hitler tried to take over everywhere, but "we" won.

No Final Plan, no Japan/USA mention other than pearl harbour = more guns for "us". That is all. Combined with act of union, wallace, scots invasion of alba etc... .
 
 
Benny the Ball
06:47 / 11.12.04
I didn't go to a great school (or schools) but we studied Ann Frank at primary level (aged around 9-10) then looked at very basic 2nd WW stuff at GCSE level, only getting more advanced at, um, A level.

But my nephew looked at the Great War in more detail at his school, at around the 12 mark (age rather than year).

However, education isn't doing a great job at the moment, mainly because it lacks support. Most of my education was bolstered by my mum coming home from work and making me do more work, and by spending holidays with my nan, who worked in a library, and reading as much as I could. The schools that I have assisted in over the last few years have spent a lot of time complainin that home support has almost died, most parents themselves lacking literary skills etc, or just don't have time for their kids.

British history tends to focus on industrial revaloution and reform acts.
 
  
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