Holocaust Numbers

From a nuance-lacking report from The Guardian on the results of a survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference):

The survey, the first to drill down to state level in the US, ranks states according to a score based on three criteria: whether young people have definitely heard about the Holocaust; whether they can name one concentration camp, death camp or ghetto; and whether they know 6 million Jews were killed.

My gut instinct is that whoever conducted this survey didn’t know what they were doing, or they were trying to produce clickbait-y results.

In regards to the first question:

One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.

I can’t imagine a single person in the United States has “definitely not heard” about the Nazi’s genocide. My K-12 education focused enormously on it, from grade four, to eight, to ten. Collectively, we spent months covering it. It makes me wonder about the surveyors’ definition of “Holocaust”, as well as whether the survey was conducted in a way that treated people like they were stupid and compelled them to give incorrect answers out of spite. I simply do not believe that 12% of people aged 18-39 years in the USA have “definitely not heard” about the Germans’ extermination campaigns. You’d have to be immaculately stupid to not know anything about it.

In regards to the second question:

According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.

I don’t think we ought to expect people who haven’t studied the third reich to be able to list off their concentration/death camps: they’re German names that people here have no idea how to pronounce, and they all served roughly the same purpose, so it’s hardly fair to fault people for not committing the names of the camps to memory when they aren’t of integral importance to their lives or careers. It’s worth noting that 44% of people surveyed were able to identify the Auschwitz camp; I would’ve expected that number to be a little bit higher.

In regards to the third question:

Nationally, 63% of respondents did not know 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and more than one in three (36%) thought 2 million or fewer had been killed.

I also don’t think we ought to blame people for not knowing the number of millions of people who were killed. Any number that large is too difficult for people to visualize, so the best way to understand it is by comparison, but to compare it to the general population of Europe or of specific countries (the most natural comparisons to make) would portray the number of people killed as a small percentage, and discounting the number of people who were murdered just isn’t an acceptable outcome when trying to educate people about a genocide. It’s a difficult problem for educators to tackle.

Another reason I don’t expect people to know the exact number is because different numbers get thrown around a lot, and that comes back to the definition of “Holocaust”. The vast majority of people think the word “Holocaust” refers to the genocide in general, not realizing that it’s a more specific term that ONLY applies to the extermination of the Jews. So while it is accurate to say “the Holocaust was the event/time period/operation where the Nazis killed 6,000,000 Jews in concentration camps”, it misses the big picture, and excludes form the conversation everyone the Nazis killed who wasn’t Jewish. In total, 11,000,000 people were killed by the Nazi state.

It’s possible that the survey could’ve have a number of respondents give close-to-accurate numbers like 10 or 11 million, but counted those responses as incorrect on the grounds that they were only asking about Jewish victims. Given the wide misunderstanding of the term, if the surveyors intended to use the technical definition of “Holocaust”, then they should’ve taken the time to explain the term to the people they surveyed before allowing them to answer. I doubt any such effort was made.

Obviously, I don’t make that distinction to diminish the gravity or significance of the Jews who were killed — the Nazis certainly had it out for them — but I do find it oddly judeocentric and frankly and irresponsible that the number most frequently thrown around when we talk about the Nazis’ genocide is 6,000,000. Yes, they killed that many Jews, but again, they killed 11,000,000 people in total. I find it disrespectful to focus only on the Jewish victims. Let’s not lose sight of the forest for the trees and forget about the other 5,000,000 political opponents, homosexuals, Russians, and people with physical/mental disabilities that the Nazis imprisoned and exterminated.