There is real danger to letting them fade. While most respondents first learned about the Holocaust in school, the survey's findings suggest that education may be incomplete. Ten percent were not sure, 5 percent said the Civil War, and 3 percent said the Vietnam War. Certain states mandate Holocaust education in school , and the majority of survey participants said the subject should be compulsory.
But there was not a direct correlation between states that mandate Holocaust education and positive survey results, Schneider said. Respondents in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Massachusetts ranked highest in Holocaust knowledge, even though those states do not require Holocaust education, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Respondents in New York, Indiana and California — which do require Holocaust education — were most likely to believe the Holocaust is a myth or has been exaggerated, at rates higher than 20 percent of the surveyed population. In general, teachers can be overwhelmed in classrooms with the content and the lack of time and resources. Really, what we're trying to do is make sure proper training and resources and support is available to teachers across the country.
Eyewitness testimony is the most powerful tool available to educators, said Gretchen Skidmore, director of education initiatives at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Still, educators are preparing for the day when there are no more living Holocaust survivors to join the classroom, including efforts to digitize their stories.
There are a lot of things students can learn from the past and from those who experienced the Holocaust. There are also contemporary connections to be made, and students can apply what they learned to their world today.
These days, Holocaust education is about teaching more than just facts, Behrman said. Students with Holocaust education reported themselves to be more likely to stand up to negative stereotyping, for example, and more willing to challenge incorrect or biased information. Learning about the Holocaust is valuable, adults overwhelmingly agreed in the survey. Eighty percent of the Claims Conference survey respondents agreed that it was important to learn about the Holocaust partly so it never happens again.
Jews are more likely than atheists and agnostics to know how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust. In addition to religious affiliation, several other factors are associated with how much Americans know about the Holocaust.
For example, college graduates get an average of 2. Another factor linked with how much Americans know about the Holocaust is whether respondents have ever visited a Holocaust memorial or museum. By comparison, those who have never visited a Holocaust memorial or museum answer 2.
The survey included a question that asked respondents whether they personally know someone who is Jewish. Compared with those who say they do not know anyone who is Jewish, Americans who know a Jewish person answer about one additional question right, on average 2.
There are modest differences in levels of knowledge about the Holocaust based on gender, race and ethnicity, age, and region.
For example, men correctly answer 2. In addition, Americans ages 65 and older correctly answer an average of 2. And U. Politically, Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party 2. The four multiple-choice questions about the Holocaust also were included in a recent Pew Research Center survey of U.
On average, teens correctly answer slightly fewer questions than U. This may reflect disparities in education. Among adults, those with a college degree correctly answer about one question more than those with a high school degree or less.
Of course, teens between the ages of 13 and 17 have not yet had a chance to pursue post-secondary education.
Overall, U. However, one difference between teens and adults is the relationship between gender and Holocaust knowledge. While adult men answer slightly more questions right than women, teen boys and girls correctly answer a similar number of questions about the Holocaust 1. The Pew Research Center survey is not the first research conducted to assess how much American adults know about the Holocaust.
Even though some of the questions asked on the new survey are similar to those asked on previous surveys, these questions were not always asked in the exact same way. For example, all three surveys included a question asking approximately how many Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
The respondents also took the surveys in different ways. The Pew Research Center survey was administered online on the American Trends Panel, a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U. The Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study was administered mostly by interviewers over the phone, but also included some interviews administered online.
In its bulletin of February 1, , the Red Cross declared that it had never compiled, much less published such statistics. The , figure was actually taken from the Swiss paper, "Die Tat", in This estimate, however, was only a figure for the number of Germans who perished in the concentration camps.
No mention of any Red Cross figures, however, was ever made by the paper. Despite the obvious deception, Holocaust deniers continue to peddle it, hoping that few people will actually check the sources. Nazi policy towards the Jews was emigration, not extermination. From the beginning, the Nazis made no secret of their goal of creating a "Jew-free" Germany and Europe. One of the earliest methods was, indeed, forced emigration. But on November 10, , precise instructions from Berlin to kill the Jews in his area were received by Higher SS and police leader, Friedrich Jeckeln from Berlin, stating, that pursuant to the Fuehrer's order, Jews would no longer be allowed "to emigrate", instead they would be "evacuated".
In the Spring of , 1, mental patients had been transferred from sanitoriums in Eastern Prussia for "evacuation" near the Soldau concentration camp. They were never heard from again. The Nazis attempted to hide their intentions by the use of codewords. Despite the attempts at deception, Victor Brack, one of the chief architects of Hitler's "euthanasia" experiments testified to the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, that it was no secret among the Nazi hierarchy that "the Jews were to be exterminated.
This is true. Hitler was not about to repeat the mistake he had made earlier when he initialed his "euthanasia order," condemning over 70, German mental patients to death at so-called "charitable care facilities" such as Hadamar and Grafineck. Ironically, the first victims of Nazi gassings were actually non-Jewish Germans. Popular protest which threatened his popularity, eventually forced Hitler to abandon his euthanasia experiment, or at least take it underground.
Never again would Hitler initial any document connecting himself to mass killings. Nevertheless, historians have been able to establish with convincing certainty that the order to exterminate millions of Jews came directly from Hitler.
He was informed by his superior, Hinrich Lohse, that it was "the Fuehrer's wish. The Fuehrer has placed the execution of this difficult order on my shoulders. On October 25, a directive addressed to Hinrich Lohse regarding the use of special "gassing vans", came by way of German judge, Dr. Erhard Wetzel. Wetzel had been summoned to the Chancellery and informed that the directive he was to prepare was, in fact, a "Fuehrer order. Zyklon B was a fumigant.
It wasn't a practical agent for mass murder. Ordinarily, Zyklon B a hydrogen cyanide preparation was used as an insecticide. Hydrogen cyanide, however, is actually more dangerous to humans than insects.
When the level of HCN reaches only parts per million, it will kill a person within a few minutes. The amount of hydrogen cyanide required to kill a person of average weight is only 60 mg. Because Zyklon was, in fact, so toxic, its manufacturers warned personnel not to reenter a room fumigated with the gas for 20 hours after airing. In addition, a compound was added to the preparation emitting a powerful, intolerable odor - a warning agent that the gas was present.
When purchasing Zyklon B for the death camps, the SS ordered the manufacturer to remove the warning compound, a clear indication of its intended use.
The death chambers were outfitted with special ventilation systems to remove any remaining gas. In addition, those prisoners charged with removing the bodies the sonderkommando wore gas masks. Zyklon B will explode - at 60, parts per million. It only takes a concentration of parts per million to kill a person in just a few minutes. Less than half that amount will kill in less than an hour.
Clearly, the concentration of Zyklon used in the gas chambers was far below flammability or explosion levels. The use of gas chambers by the Nazis is proven by a wide array of evidence. Testimony by the perpetrators themselves as well as the first-hand accounts of prisoners, especially members of the "Sonderkommando" groups of inmates forced to remove the dead from the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies constitute only a part of the evidence.
Documents including blueprints of the killing installations as well as orders for construction materials and Zyklon B the deadly hydrogen cyanide preparation used for gassings at Auschwitz and Majdanek Photos clandestinely taken by prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau even show the disposal of corpses removed from the gas chamber.
The manufacture, distribution and use of the deadly gas was clearly demonstrated at the "Zyklon B Trial" in March , Hamburg, Germany. Two of the defendants, Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, the owner and a major executive of a company that manufactured the gas were sentenced to death after notes of their trips to Auschwitz disproved their contention that they were unaware that the poison was used to kill inmates. Jean-Claude Pressac, a one-time skeptic of the gas chambers, had undertaken a careful study of Auschwitz in which he analyzed a wide variety of camp documents, photos, reports and blueprints.
Pressac, who had at one time been intrigued by the Holocaust-denying theories of Robert Faurisson, concluded that his original skepticism could no longer be supported in the face of the evidence. In , the Klarsfeld Foundation published his study, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, in which Pressac demonstrates the use of the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the murders of hundreds of thousands of people. Incidentally, Jews were not the first people gassed by the Nazis.
The first victims of Nazi gassings were German mental patients condemned by Hitler's "Euthanasia" order of Zundel was on trial on charges stemming from the distribution of Holocaust revisionist literature. With his client footing the bill, Leuchter visited the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek death camps.
Upon returning to the United States, he published a lengthy report which concluded that the facilities he examined "could not have then been Leuchter had no credentials as an engineer, and in fact, held only a Bachelors Degree in history.
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