Holocaust is a myth, say a quarter of young Dutch Bruno Waterfield
Almost one in four Dutch people born after 1980 think the Holocaust is “a myth” or that the number of Jewish people killed by the Nazis is “greatly exaggerated”.
Research by the US-based Claims Conference, an organisation representing Jews in negotiations with Germany for compensation and restitution, has found “shocking and disturbing” ignorance among millennials and Generation Z in the Netherlands, which ranked the worst for Holocaust denial from a selection of Western countries surveyed.
Almost a third (32 per cent) of Dutch millennials do not know that Anne Frank, whose diary written while hiding under Nazi occupation is a worldwide bestseller, died in a concentration camp.
A total of 2,000 Dutch people were polled last December following similar surveys in the United States, Britain, France, Austria and Canada.
More than half of those surveyed in the Netherlands, and up to three out of five younger people, do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, while 23 per cent said the crimes of Nazi Germany were untrue or exaggerated.
Twenty-nine per cent of Dutch people believed that two million or fewer Jews were killed, a number that rises to 37 per cent of millennials and Generation Z.
“The number of Dutch adults who believe the Holocaust is a myth was higher than any country previously surveyed,” said Gideon Taylor, president of Claims Conference.
“We must put a greater focus on Holocaust education in our schools globally. If we do not, denial will soon outweigh knowledge, and future generations will have no exposure to the critical lessons of the Holocaust.”
Three quarters of Dutch Jews were murdered during the Second World War with the assistance of local Nazi sympathisers and many collaborators in the civil service and police. Most went unpunished after the war.
The Jewish population fell from 154,887 in 1941 to just 14,346 in the 1947 census.
Max Arpels Lezer, a Dutch Holocaust survivor, said he was “upset and deeply concerned that many of my countrymen do not even know their own national history”.
He added: “Without education, future generations will not understand the full impact of the Holocaust in my country. It is of utmost importance for us who survived that the future generations carry forward our testimonies even when we are gone.”
While 12 per cent of Dutch people said the Holocaust was a myth or greatly exaggerated, less than one in ten British people hold that view.
The Holocaust and Anne Frank’s fate in a Nazi death camp symbolise one of the darkest chapters in Dutch history.
Frank and her family were arrested after a raid by two Dutch policemen, Gezinus Gringhuis and Willem Grootendorst, who were collaborating with the Nazis, under the command of Karl Silberbauer, a Gestapo and SS officer.
The 15-year-old girl and her family were sent via the national railways to a transit camp at Westerbork in the Netherlands from where 102,000 Jews, including her, were shipped to Nazi death camps.
In 2019 the Dutch state-owned rail company Nederlandse Spoorwegen paid compensation worth over €40 million (£35 million) to Holocaust survivors after resisting reparation demands for decades.
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