Memory of the Holocaust Study By Tom W. Smith

The Memory of the Holocaust Study, conducted in seven nations in the spring of 2005, was commissioned by the American Jewish Committee to gauge the state of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli attitudes in the contemporary world and how those attitudes are related to people’s knowledge about the Holocaust. Last month in Public Opinion Pros, we looked at the country by country responses to questions pertaining to respondents’ knowledge of the Holocaust; their views on the importance of knowing about, teaching about, and keeping remembrance of the Holocaust strong; their opinions on the likelihood of another Holocaust occurring and the degree of anti-Semitism prevailing in their countries; and their own sympathies with and negative feelings toward Jews.

In this issue, we report the results of these questions according to demographic groups for the different countries. The groups included here are gender, education, income, age, and political party.

In virtually all countries, men were more knowledgeable about the Holocaust than women were. Men gave fewer don’t know responses when asked to identify concentration camps and were more likely to indicate correctly that about six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis during World War II. The gender differences were especially large in the United States, with 39 percent of men and 52 percent of women unable to identify the named concentration camps, and with 44 percent of men and just 24 percent of women knowing that about six million Jews were exterminated.

Attitudes towards remembering and teaching about the Holocaust bore no relation to gender in most countries, nor was gender consistently related to seeing greater problems for Jews in terms of either the occurrence of a second Holocaust or of anti-Semitism. While women in Austria, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States did see anti-Semitism as a greater problem, women in Sweden and the United Kingdom were more likely to be unsure of how serious it was; in Poland there were no gender differences.

Patterns were very scattered on the possibility of another Holocaust happening. Men expressed greater concern in the United Kingdom, and women more in Austria and Sweden. In Germany and Poland, men were more likely to see it as both very likely and not very likely, with women giving middle and don’t know responses. There was no relationship in France and the United States.

There was some tendency for men to endorse negative statements about Jews more frequently than women did. Men were more likely than women to agree with the statement that “Jews are exploiting the memory of the Nazi extermination of the Jews for their own purposes” in Austria, France, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Women were more likely to say don’t know in Germany, and there were no gender differences in Sweden. The notion of Jews “exert[ing] too much influence on world events” was more accepted by men in Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, with no differences apparent in Austria, France, or the United States.

Memory of the Holocaust: A Seven-Nation Study