An opinion poll conducted amid the rise in popularity of the extreme right shows that one in eight young Germans has never heard the terms “Holocaust” and “Shoah”, the DPA agency reports. In Romania, this proportion is even higher among the countries analyzed in the study, reaching 15%.
Women and children in the concentration camp. PHOTO: archive
In Germany, 12% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 said that these terms were completely unknown to them. Similar proportions were recorded in Austria (14%) and Romania (15%), while in France the percentage is much higher, reaching 46%, writes Agerpres.
The survey, commissioned by the Jewish Claims Conference, was conducted on a representative sample of 1,000 people from eight countries: Germany, France, Austria, the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, Romania and the United States.
The data also show that a significant number of young people in all these countries do not know that during the Nazi period approximately 6 million Jews were exterminated. In Germany, 40% of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 do not know this fact, and 15% of them believe that the number of victims does not exceed 2 million. In Romania, this proportion is 32%.
In the vast majority of countries participating in the study, many of those interviewed said that an event similar to the Holocaust could happen again in our day.
