Nearly Half of Britons Unaware of Auschwitz?

There was a man living in Willamantic Connecticut in the 1930's who was a survivor of Andersonville. I have talked to people who knew him and could repeat the stories he told. Andersonville is still (marginally) within the memory of oral tradition.

Yes, timber. It's truly horrible how we treat/ed prisoners. I read an essay on Andersonvill and it blames both sides with equal measure. Seems about right, soldiers are so often forgotten and left in abysmal situations.

Well, actually, English history teachers (excluding those, I know!) are blamed for a stress on the Nazi era when teaching German history by Germans.

Useful overview of concentration camps (and similar detention camps) in different countries in wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp

Just to clarify:

Concentration Camps (in German: Konzentrationslager, KZ) were rison camps constructed to hold Jews, Gypsies, political and religious opponents, resisters, homosexuals, and other Germans considered "enemies of the state." Before the end of World War II, more than 100 concentration camps had been created across German-occupied Europe.




Extermination Camps (in German Vernichtungslager) were Nazi camps, equipped with gassing facilities, for mass murder of Jews. Located in Poland at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek-Lublin, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Up to 2,700,000 Jews were murdered at these six camps, as were tens of thousands of Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, and others.

All of above quotations from Nazi Camp System


List of Camps (not all of the more than 15,000, but the most complete [online] list)

The Diary of Anne Frank and the study of it, made my students quite aware of the holocaust, but I always tried to balance the equation by providing a list of required reading that included all views of the First and Second World Wars.

As far as Andersonville goes, Ralph Ellison's The Invisible man, also made the young people aware of the situation that faced the black man in all givens.

Until we are able to view history from all perspectives, and make certain that no biases are included, we will keep coming full circle, and the world's social conscience will become only guilt with no chance for betterment.

As a product of one of England's best schools (truth, not bragging), I can honestly say that the holocaust never formed part of my formal education.

However, by the age of 18 I had already watched several TV programmes about it (notably "The World at War"), read books by Primo Levi and visited Dachau in person.

I know I'm unusual in the extent of that knowledge but I am AMAZED that such an iconic camp as Auschwitz is not known by half the population.

One of the most moving elements of my working life was to see photocopies of the arms of two sisters, with tatoos of the numbers given to them in Auschwitz. I was conducting an investigation into assets deposited by victims of Nazi persecution ("Nachrichtslosen Vermoegen"). I managed the investigation of the affairs of one private bank in Zurich, Switzerland.

Here is a link to the claims site which uses information collected during that project: Claims Resolution Tribunal

Also keep in mind the large number of old people suffering from dementia and alsheimers who were killed in experimental gas chambers prior to them being used in the concentration camps. Hitler used them as guinea pigs as he wanted to be sure they worked effectively before using them on enemy's of the state.

I suppose, you are referring to Euthanasia, the so-called T4 program.

Six concentration camps were used for this purpose, and about 10,000 psychiatric ill people killed in these camps, beginning in 1940.
(The first one ever was in January 1940 in Brandenburg, the most known gaschamber in Grafeneck, Baden-Würtemberg.)

why?
Did't the british education system tell it to the students?

I really can't answer the "why", but:

Telegraph (you have to register)

True, but the Germany of WWII, and the Germany of today are two entirely separate issues. I think that it is very important, no matter how embarrassing to Germans, that young people understand what can happen when people put their lives in the hands of a madman.

Well, Phoenix, I would really wonder, why the German history taught at schools should stop at 1945, even when I accept your reasons.

While the Holocaust was a singularly ghastly episode, it was far from the only episode of mass extermination and cruelty in human history. The things that have made its unholy reputation so vivid arise mostly from two factors; (1) it occurred in a thoroughly modern nation, indeed one closely associated with the very greatest Western intellectual and cultural achievements, and modern methods were used in the extermination - this gives us all an unsettling reminder that modernity is no guarantee that the capacity for humans to do evil has been eliminated; (2) its victims still exist and have organized themselves very efficiently to preserve the memory of the event and its victims in the interest of preventing a reoccurrence.

Innumerable equivalent slaughters have occurred, even in recent years. I am sure that in some towns and regions of Bosnia the mindless slaughter seemed to victims and observers alike, no different from the Holocaust. The death tolls from Stalin's removal of the Crimean Tatars, the Ukrainian ?'kulaks', and other political "irreconcilables" was a good deal greater than that of the Holocaust. The casualties of the Communist revolution in China and the subsequent Cultural Revolution have been estimated in the tens of millions. Then of course there is Rwanda and the continuing slaughter in the Eastern Congo and in southern Sudan.

Reaching farther back in history one comes to the ravages of the Goths on Rome; the elimination of the Albagensian heretics in southern France; the slaughters of the Mongol Hordes; the slaughter by the Crusaders after the fall of Jerusalem; the Reign of Terror under Robspierre during the French Revolution, local exterminations of indigenous Indians in the North American colonies, and later the United States; famines in English-controlled Ireland. Even Fidel Castro did his bit executing about 25,000 Cubans following his takeover (considering the available population, this was on the scale of the Holocaust.).

The list of such atrocities in human history is indeed a very long one, and I don't know of any period or place that has been entirely free of it. Interestingly there is a generally poor correlation between the degrees to which our history books emphasize these events and their actual magnitudes. Spain, in particular comes off very badly in all of this. The Inquisition had at most a couple of thousand victims while the contemporaneous religious slaughter in England took far more lives. The survival of indigenous people in the Americas was far greater in the Spanish colonies than those in the English ones, New Zealand and Australia included.

In one of the more perverse ironies of history, one can find some elements of similarity to past evils in some elements of the treatment of Palestinians by Israelis.

While we certainly remember the history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, it is both appropriate and important to recognize this as just a particularly vivid example of murder and cruelty that can be found throughout human history and in every culture.