Young people are increasingly denying the facts of the Holocaust or downplaying its horrors, according to the head of the Anne Frank Center in Berlin.
In remarks made to the Catholic news agency KNA ahead of the 88th anniversary of the November pogroms in Germany, Veronika Nahm said that people attending traveling exhibitions organized by the center sometimes asked, “Is that even true?”
She said that people downplaying or denying the Holocaust was particularly apparent in social media posts connected with the center.
She said there were comments such as, “Why do you commemorate Anne Frank, why not a child in Gaza?”
Lack of information, not bad intentions
Nahm attributes the rise in such opinions to ignorance rather than bad intentions on the part of young people, saying they were not as well-informed on the topic in schools as they were 15 years ago.
“There has been a generational change of teachers. For many older teachers, it was close to their hearts, and it was mentioned in many places and subjects during lessons. That is different today,” she said.
Nahm said it was important that visits by young people to sites commemorating the Holocaust be used to strengthen their feeling of empathy, something that worked particularly well with the story of Anne Frank.
The Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin is a partner organization to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who hid in that house during the 1940-1945 German occupation of the Netherlands and wrote a famous diary, later published, about her experiences and feelings.
She was discovered and deported by the Nazis and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945.
The November pogroms, during which Jews and Jewish property and institutions were attacked, took place on November 9-10, 1938, across the German Reich at the instigation of Germany’s Nazi regime.
Source: www.dw.com
