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The World Is Forgetting the Holocaust
(Boston Globe) Jeff Jacoby - When World War II was over, the mind-boggling scope of the Final Solution was fully grasped: the Germans and their collaborators had annihilated 6 million Jews from every corner of Europe, wiping out more than one-third of the world's Jewish population. Germany had constructed a vast, industrial-scale campaign and committed immense financial resources to track down and murder every last Jew in Europe. Never before had a world power, deranged by anti-Semitism, made the eradication of an entire people its central aim, or gone to such exhaustive extremes to achieve it. That is what makes the Holocaust so grotesquely, terrifyingly unique. Hitler set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was in flames. But now there is evidence aplenty that the Holocaust is already fading from common knowledge. In 2013, a survey of more than 53,000 respondents in 101 countries found that only 54% of the world's adults had even heard of the Holocaust - and of those, one-third believe it is either a myth or has been greatly exaggerated.