>

It’s rubbish.
Don’t bite.
What percentage of that 23% actually knew what the holocaust was, and did not need it explaining or doing a search? >


More than half the respondents to the American organisation’s survey did not know six million Jews were murdered and 29% believe the death toll was below two million. >

I wonder how the survey was done. To assert something is exaggerated versus not knowing the true number are very different things. >

There's a big difference between "How many people do you think were killed during the Holocaust?" as an open ended question as opposed to "Do you think the number of holocaust deaths were exaggerated"?
There's a big difference between someone that is just ignorant and someone that believes in lies.
That being said, far too many people deny how big and horrible it was. >

Sadly I'm one of those people who doesn't know the number of people who died during the holocaust. I probably heard it at some point, but it's just not something I kept in memory. Now that I hear it's 6 million people, without any context, it sounds like a really big number. I can see why some people might think it's actually less if just randomly asked in a survey. >

They killed so many people - that using a single bullet per person was deemed too costly and slow.  Think about that for a second - they industrialized genocide - it gives you a different perspective to think about it as a factory designed to produce dead bodies.
The horror is so hard to wrap your head around - the level of dehumanizing that occurred is frightening. >


The doctor looks around and says, "Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?"
There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.


Rod Serling, Deaths-Head Revisited, The Twilight Zone >

Damn. Just...damn.
I'm Gen X. I suppose the last generation to grow up with the WWII gen. I had all four of my grandparents until I was in HS when I lost the first. I lost the last when I was fifty. I was a total white bread American...and then I married a Jewish girl with grandparents of her own with Auschwitz numbers on their arms. 
I can't begin to explain what it was like to listen to their stories. Luckily, I speak very bad German and even have a litle Yiddish under my belt. So,I spent HOURS upon hours sitting and listening to these two. They were SO gracious and so forethcoming and willing to tell their experiences.
The odd thing was that neither my future wife at the time nor her sister were interested in the least to hear the stories. (I think it was both painful and a little bit embarassing to them at that age.) I remember one of the most embarassing moments of my life was when I overheard my wife's grandmother talking to her one day. She said, "Marry him! Will a good Catholic boy have a Jewish girl?"
I felt like complete dirt. This woman had been beaten into a kind of crap that was never going to leave her by a bunch of shitheads that claimed to be protecting my "race". 
If anything, the monuments to the past need to stay as reminders that. even when we try to do good, we still carry the guilt of the dickheads in our past. We should never let that go. We should be willing to bear it  because it is what reminds us that we - all of us -  have a responsibitlity to do better every day. Guilt can be a powerful motivator if we keep in mind that - even if we didn't do the things of the past - we could always fail to do the right thing in the present if we aren't very, very careful. >

Thank you for sharing this, it's touching :) >

❤️ >

Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.
Dwight D. Eisenhower >

You would need to demonstrate that Eisenhower really existed, then that he said it and in what context.
If you are not a bot. >

Sadly, the sarcasm in your comment will be lost on the ignorant.
My Source: Witness of the COVID mask/vaccine debates of 2022. >

There are still people that believe covid is a hoax..just think about how stupid that is. Let alone thinking that mask don't work when we've already covered that over a century ago. And yet here we are, stuck in the stupidest timeline >

As a Dutch person, we learned about this at Pre-school and middle school. Idk how tf you can be this stupid >

Read this comment on the Dutch subreddit about it. Seems the way the responses are being interpreted by the study is pretty questionable. >

Since most people here can't actually read dutch, one of the major news organizations basically changed the entire original article to be more critical of the study after the outrage bait. A lot of it is just people not knowing the exact details, rather than questioning aspects of it. It likely isn't nearly as malicious as some of these headlines make it seem. >

"Can you name the exact formula of the chemical that was used for the industrial extermination of the people in the death camps?"
"Uuhhm, no..."
"NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE HOLOCAUST WAS ANYMORE! THEY ALL THINK THIS WAS A HOAX!" >

But that company that made the gas is still around. It was BASF I believe. >

Imagine what the order for that was like.  How many people in the administration and manufacture thought about what it meant. >

That's a... high number. Here we go again with the fuckin' Nazi crisis I suppose. >

It's no coincidence that we're seeing a resurgence of the far right as the world wars generations die out. >

This is a leftist sub so I'll choose my words carefully, but the amount of young Americans brandishing hammer and sickle symbols and preaching communism is alarming as well.   
I think this has less to do with a particular ideology and more to do with the decline of Western living standards and influence. Radicalism is in vogue, whatever flavor you like. A lot of people simply feel they've been abandoned and forgotten by the mainstream, so they are looking at whoever can provide them with answers. >

i guess but they are more frustrated by the current economic environment rather than you know wanting to kill minorities. >

How about killing the well-off? That's how the communists started, and we know what happened later. >

Maybe the rich should stop being dicks.   Maybe they need to realize how many their harm through their greed. >

You are proving my point. There's a lot of emotion in your comment but not a lot of substance.
How am I supposed to quantify ''being dicks'' and ''Greed''? Should all countries just scrap their constitutions and replace them with ''Stop being greedy dicks!'' ? >

The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report today. During the past decade, the richest 1 percent had captured around half of all new wealth
Fixing this would be a good way to start >

That does not really apply to the West. A more equal distribution of global wealth would make the West even poorer and more likely to descend to chaos. >

If you're only worried about the rise of extremism in the west. But equalizing distribution within the west is also possible, given that they hold the majority of the wealth globally and that the income inequality in western countries is also extremely high. If we accept that wealth disparity generates radicalism (which I think is a reductive framing) then the solution is to adress wealth disparity as first steps. >

Holocaust was less than 100 years ago and it’s already being denied by non middle eastern countries >

Lemme share you a little story about planes taking down buildings that happened recently and all the back and forth it caused. >

Looking through this survey i can understand that some participants became confused.
They asked about historical figures in question 11 and some of those names are pretty uncommon to know unless you deep dive in to the dutch occupation.

Fritz Schmidt, one of 4 assistants to Seyss-Inquart.
Victor Kugler, Employee and helper of the Frank family.
van Pels family, hide with the Franks in het achterhuis.
Etty Hillesum, kept a diary during the occupation.
Joop Westerweel, dutch resistance member.
Corrie Ten Boom, dutch resistance member.

I doubt many would know these individuals and to ask that during a survey together with people like Hitler and Himmler in the same question? 
This survey was working to get this outcome, shame shame shame. >

Confusion about other questions can in no way explain the response to question 42. >

6% denial is 6% too much, 17% think that the numbers are exaggerated is not that weird since people question every number these days.
Why does that question pops up so far in the survey? It is the main focus of the survey so it seems weird to ask it that late.
Also Q40, 9% believes that the Holocaust did not happen, Q42, 6% think it is a myth.
That is 3% difference after questions that almost follow up? 
Some participants were pretty done with the survey at that time and to think that they had to go to Q91..
After reading the survey i think that you could have done it in 15 questions so you would still have the attention of the participants.
Question out of my own interest, how many claimants are still alive these days and what are your plans for your organization after they are no longer with us? >


what are your plans for your organization after they are no longer with us?

Why do you think I have any connection with the organization behind the survey? >

WHO DO YOU WORK FOR >

I have a guess as to which end of the bell curve we’re talking about. >

I remember a book I read decades ago, that was mediocre at best, but one bit stuck with me: a representative of an advanced alien federation observed Earth, and is shocked by movies and entertainment television. 
“They show videos that are false? How do they expect their young to learn to distinguish truth from fakery when this is all they see?”
On reading articles like this, those words come back to me. >

Surely you don't think Gilligan's Island was real?
Those poor people... >

I guess you can't stop ignorance >

A worrying amount of younger people I talk to in the US also seem to think it's "American propaganda" or something. Like I get being skeptical about who's telling you your history but Germany is literally over there admitting it and apologizing for it >

This is what’s downstream of conservative tactics to undermine trust in media. Once trust is undermined, truth becomes whatever you choose to believe, and they have utter control over what people believe. People are already completely immersed in a parallel universe of lies. >

I think the lack of trust in media is more due to the fact that they lie about pretty much everything. >

Oh dear. This dudes profile says:

GenZ, Paleoconservative, Constitutional Republican, Confederalist, Floridian, Southern Nationalist, Let's Go Brandon

No more questions I guess. I'll just cite Schopenhauer, fitting just as well as it used to in the past:
“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.” >

How?!
I find it really sad that people are more prone to believe in a mythical being than something horrible that has actual verifiable proof. Seriously? >

All high schoolers must be taken on a “field trip” to a concentration camp. >

That's a mind-boggling figure, jesus. >

Holy shit, why would you even think something like that? >

As a part of Gen Z myself (or a millennial depending on your definition), what I’ve noticed amongst some teenagers and young adults is that they are unable to mentally comprehend the idea of millions being systematically murdered in only a couple years, that the Nazis could build a giant system of camps and literal factories of death, all while getting away with it. It doesn’t help that the Nazis were blatantly and cartoonishly evil, so young people subconsciously start to question the entire thing. ”Like they couldn’t be THAT evil.” type of thinking. 
And as others pointed out, this makes young people vulnerable to conspiracies on the internet and social media. >

I think much of it has to do with the public losing trust in the government and media. People don’t know what to believe anymore now that they’re being spoon-fed propaganda 24/7 by fox and cnn.
I’m a history buff and the holocaust is well-documented. But I doubt that the average Joe is as well-informed. >

The Average Joe doesn’t have to actually be well informed on the actual historical documentation though, he just needs to trust the people who are experts on this subject (he also needs to be educated enough to be able to tell who trusted experts are). It’s not really possible to become informed enough on every subject to figure all this stuff out yourself 
But unfortunately a society with low social trust breeds these “do your own research” types who refuse to believe anything they can’t personally understand. >

I even disagree with this. Literally just google it, its on wikipedia well documented. If you dont trust google results and wikipedia in general then its probably already late for you. But I dont want to believe thats 20% of the population
Edit: The fact that about 6 million jews were murdered is literally in the first sentence of the english wikipedia holocaust article. You dont even have to read the article, just the first sentence. >

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
― George Carlin
Saying that as a Dutch. We got allot of stupid people here who struggle to pass school subjects like Maatschapijleer and Geschiedenis and never had Critical thinking subjects. Result: This. >

This is what happens when certain countries use the term "genocide" for geopolitical propaganda purposes even though it doesn't fit the imagery that everyone is use to and as a result waters down down the term. >

Well the Holocaust just kicked off the modern genocide ball, sadly. >

Well, no, not really; Hitler was specifically inspired by the Armenian Genocide. But that’s a technicality I suppose >

ya, and they probably believe the world is flat >

Well Netherlands is at least >

I was about to say I’d forgive anyone from the Netherlands for assuming the earth was flat. >

Looks like we’re doomed to repeat history again… and this isn’t just a Dutch problem, it’s pretty much global. It’s absolutely ridiculous how fast we’ve lost the lessons of history. So much for “never again”. >

I say open the archives and let them count it for themselves. Some people still think the moon landing was faked and won't be convinced until you send them there. >

Maybe we should send all the holocaust deniers to the moon. >

Oh yeah Nazis in space...what could go wrong? 😅 >

While distressingly high, this is actually fairly low for these sort of vague polls.
It seems like there's about 20 to 30% of any human population that either doesn't know shit, or will happily pretend they don't know shit just out of spite. >

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 80%. (I'm a bot)


Some 12% of Dutch adults believe the Holocaust was a myth or that the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated and a further 9% are unsure, according to a survey of some 2,000 people by an international organisation supporting Holocaust survivors.
The Claims Conference, which describes the findings as shocking and disturbing, says the figure is even higher among the under 40s, with 23% saying the Holocaust was a myth or the death toll was exaggerated.
The survey did show that two-thirds of Dutch respondents agree that Holocaust education should be compulsory in school.


Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: Holocaust^#1 survey^#2 respondents^#3 Dutch^#4 school^#5 >

I lived in Amsterdam for 6 years in the 90’s and all I can say is “what the actual fuck?”