More than half of UK doesn’t know 6 million died in Shoah

MORE THAN half of Britons do not know how many Jews died in the Holocaust, with more than one in five believing that the figure was two million or lower.

The disturbing results were contained in a survey which also revealed that 76 percent of respondents did not know about the Kindertransport, which rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis and brought them to the safety of the UK.

The poll, conducted for The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, showed that 52 per cent of Britons did not know that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, and 22 per cent thought that up to two million were killed.

Nearly one in 10 UK respondents believed that the Holocaust was a myth, or that the number of Jews killed in the Shoah had been greatly exaggerated.

However, the study also found that 89 per cent of people said they had definitely heard about the Holocaust, and 75 per cent knew that the Holocaust referred to the extermination of Jewish people.

Gideon Taylor, president of the Conference, said he was “very concerned to see the profound gaps in knowledge of the Holocaust in this and in previous studies including about events connected to the UK”.

Mr Taylor said that it was encouraging to see the overwhelming majority of UK respondents say the Holocaust should be taught in schools. “This is where we need to focus our energy. Education will not only fill the gaps in Holocaust knowledge, but it will also make for better, more empathetic citizens,” Mr Taylor said.

A spokesperson for the Conference said that across all five of the countries studied – France, Austria, Canada, the United States and Britain – more than half of respondents did not know that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

The UK study also found that 56 per cent of those asked believed that something like the Holocaust could happen again today. When asked about the present-day threat of neo-Nazism, UK respondents believed the US to have more of a NeoNazi threat than the UK.

In the UK, 15 per cent of respondents said they thought that there were”a great deal of or many neo-Nazis in the UK today”.

When asked the same question about the US, the figure came in at 39 per cent.

The national study of Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in the UK, which was commissioned by the Conference, was undertaken by Schoen Cooperman Research. It was based on 2,000 interviews with adults aged 18 and over between 29 September and 17 October this year.