In UK poll, most respondents don’t know how many Jews perished in the Holocaust

Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(JTA) — In a survey among 2,000 adult Britons, 52% did not seem to know how many Jews died in the Holocaust and 22% couldn’t name a single concentration camp.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, on Wednesday published the results of the survey, which it had conducted in the United Kingdom in October ahead of Nov. 10, the anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms in Germany and Austria.
“We are very concerned to see the profound gaps in knowledge of the Holocaust,” said Gideon Taylor, the president of the Claims Conference, which is the body representing Jewish communities and organizations in reparations talks with Germany.
The organization’s findings about levels of Holocaust awareness in Britain suggest Americans are less knowledgeable than Britons.
In a Claims Conference survey in the United States last year, 31% of respondents said they believed that substantially fewer than 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Almost half of Americans, or 45%, couldn’t name a single concentration camps. The survey had a 2% error of margin.
In the same survey, 76% said they had never heard of the Kindertransports, the name of an operation in which the U.K. government in 1938 granted life-saving visas to 10,000 Jewish children whose parents sent them from Europe to relative safety in Britain months before the Nazis took over the mainland.
—
The post In UK poll, most respondents don’t know how many Jews perished in the Holocaust appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
