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One in five young Germans ‘unaware of Auschwitz’

One in five young Germans has no idea that Auschwitz was a Nazi death camp, a poll released Wednesday showed, two days ahead ofHolocaust memorial day.

Although 90 percent of those asked did know it was a concentration camp, the poll for Thursday’s edition of Stern news magazine revealed that Auschwitz meant nothing to 21 percent of 18-29 year olds.

And nearly a third of the 1,002 people questioned last Thursday and Friday for the poll were unaware that Auschwitz was in today’s Poland.

The poll comes ahead of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945, which Germany has marked since 1996 with official memorial ceremonies for Holocaust victims.

According to a report by independent experts commissioned by the German parliament and published earlier this week, about one in five Germans is latently anti-Semitic.

Pretty fascinating as far as cultural memory goes. 

That’s really fucking depressing. It’s only going to get worse as the last of the survivors—and soon enough, their children—die off over the next decade.

Isn’t this shit important enough to teach in school? 

But then, sometimes I think the only reason U.S. schoolkids are taught about the Civil Rights movement, or even slavery and abolition, is because of the imperitives of Black History Month. 

HOLY SHIT!!

I thought Germany was supposed to be on top of this shit?

Whatever happened to Never Again?

It depends on how you define “on top of this shit”. Bureaucratically, the Germans are very, very hardcore. It was, somewhat ironically, one of the main reasons the Olympic Hostage Crisis was such a disaster. But in schools they tend to … take a somewhat detached stance.

In fairness to the Germans, I’m pretty sure that most people in England couldn’t place Auschwitz either. And while it’s obviously way worse that Germans don’t know about the Holocaust, I’d be willing to place money on far less than 75% of English people knowing about the firebombing of Dresden or Operation Demetrius.

And that’s just the stuff I know of. Considering most English people can’t tell the difference between Pakistan and India, I’d say that they probably have little more than a passing knowledge of Partition too.

Germany being kind of clueless is admittedly horrifying. But Britain doesn’t even pretend to have its shit together, and you can see the results every day.

Muslims Against Crusades were roundly attacked for burning poppies in protest over the continuing invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Not 6 months previously, David Cameron had publicly apologised after the Saville Report declared that the British Army had murdered 14 peaceful, unarmed protestors - and then covered it up - in 1972. This was also only 3 years after Britain had found one soldier guilty of war crimes for their actions in Basra. The “enhanced interrogation” they used was suspiciously similar to the Five Techniques used in Northern Ireland, banned as “inhuman and degrading” by the ECHR, again, in 1972.

Germany, on the other hand, has largely spent its time as a military power after WWII taking part in peace keeping missions, and I mean the relatively legitimate UN and NATO sanctioned ones, not the “peace keeping” missions the US and the UK take part in.