Whenever there’s an analysis or discussion about how much people know about the Holocaust, the focus is often on what they don’t know.
For instance, a 2018 survey of 1,350 people age 18 and older found that 11% of U.S. adults and 22% of millennials had not heard of – or were not sure if they had heard of – the Holocaust.
Almost half of U.S. adults – 45% – and millennials – 49% – could not name one concentration camp or ghetto that was established in Europe during the Holocaust, the survey found.
Today’s students may be more apt to find a Hitler meme online before they discover testimonies of Holocaust survivors.
The survey also showed how there’s an overwhelming lack of personal connections to the Holocaust. Most Americans – 80% – had never visited a Holocaust museum and two-thirds – 66% – did not know, or know of, a Holocaust survivor. A significant majority of American adults believed that fewer people care about the Holocaust today than before.
As troublesome as these statistics may be in terms of what they show about how little people know about the Holocaust, there’s another aspect to Holocaust knowledge that often goes overlooked.
And that is, at a time when the Holocaust has “taken on a virtual dimension” and images from the horrific era are prevalent online, there is now a risk of what author Gavriel Rosenberg refers to as the “normalization” of the Nazi past in contemporary culture.
Desensitization
As the number of Holocaust survivors continues to dwindle, today’s students may be more apt to find a Hitler meme online before they discover testimonies of Holocaust survivors.
Rosenberg argues that this normalization of the Holocaust will downplay its horrific nature. In some cases, people have seemingly taken to celebrating the Holocaust. For instance, at the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, one participant wore a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie – a macabre acknowledgment of the most infamous of the Nazi concentration and death camps.
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