Almost a quarter of Dutch people born from 1980 onwards think the Holocaust is "a myth" or that the number of Jews who were killed has been greatly exaggerated, according to a survey conducted by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (the Claims Conference) last December. The findings are higher in the Netherlands than in other countries.
Some 2,000 people were surveyed by the Claims Conference, which advocates for the rights of Holocaust survivors. The survey of knowledge and awareness about the Holocaust had previously been conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria and Canada. Nowhere were the results more "shocking" than in the Netherlands, according to the Claims Conference.
As many as 54% of all respondents do not know that six million Jews perished during the war (among younger people the figure is 59%). A majority of Dutch people (53%) also do not name the Netherlands as a country where the Holocaust took place in the Second World War.
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Although almost everyone knew Anne Frank’s name, 27% of Dutch people do not know that she died in a concentration camp. The Claims Conference calls those figures "alarming", also because 22% of those surveyed under the age of 42 called individual viewing of neo-Nazi expressions acceptable.
At the same time, those surveyed think neo-Nazism is much more common in the United States than in the Netherlands.
Among Dutch Millennials and Gen Z, only 44% support recent efforts by Dutch public figures to acknowledge and apologize for the Netherlands’ failure to protect Jews during the Holocaust. The number is slightly higher for all Dutch people, at 50%.
