About half of young Americans can’t name a single Holocaust site, repeating a pattern of ignorance seen in postwar Germany |
In 2025, 48% of Americans ages 18-29 could not name a single concentration or death camp, according to a survey by the nonprofit Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which works to secure compensation and restitution for Holocaust survivors.
Another 53% of surveyed Americans said that they had encountered Holocaust “denial or distortion while on social media.”
Given their ages, approximately 70% of living Holocaust survivors will likely die by 2035. As they do, more and more people will never hear firsthand experiences about the atrocities Nazis perpetuated during the genocide of European Jews.
My research shows that Holocaust education and awareness, though, doesn’t always follow a linear path.
Teaching a dark chapter
In my 2024 book, “Teaching a Dark Chapter: History Books and the Holocaust in Italy and the Germanys”, I study how Holocaust education evolved in East Germany, West Germany and Italy from the 1940s through the 1980s. In particular, I focus on the content of history textbooks that schools used for middle school students.
I also explore how two antisemitic incidents, one in 1959-60 and then another in 1977, revealed West German students’ lack of Holocaust knowledge.
Both times, international and domestic West German news outlets expressed alarm about students’ ignorance.
These antisemitic incidents also led to a series of educational reforms, in which educational leaders affirmed the need for Holocaust education and specified how educators should teach about the Holocaust.
The ‘swastika epidemic’
All of the synagogues in Cologne, Germany, were either destroyed or badly damaged during the Nazi pogroms of 1938, sometimes called Kristallnacht, or the “Night of the Broken........