Haunted Statistics for Holocaust Remembrance

January 30, 2012 6:20 AM

A survey (apparently) published last Friday for Holocaust Remembrance day has whipped various news outlets into a sound-bite frenzy:

The Independent: "one in five Germans under 30 did not know what Auschwitz was" The Daily Mail: "more than a fifth of young Germans do not know the name of Auschwitz or what happened there." The Voice of Russia: "one fifth of German citizen aged between 18 and 30 had never heard of Auschwitz" The Jerusalem Post: "While 90 percent of the 1,002 surveyed by the German weekly magazine, Stern, said they were aware that Auschwitz was a concentration camp, 21% of those between 18-30 said they had never heard of the place."

Before a statistic becomes a sound-bite, shouldn't we agree exactly on what it is that we're saying?

I post this here, rather than in AskMefi, because I believe it's a story of wider interest than "how do we read statistics?". An attempt to cut through this particular soundbite and get to the source of, what seems to be, an important analysis. But also an attempt to address a wider problem of how statistics are portrayed by the media, and read without further thought by the public.

posted by 0bvious (1 comment total)

Auschwitz was in present-day Poland. I imagine Germans would be more familiar with the concentration camps that were in present-day Germany.
posted by LogicalDash at 6:26 AM on January 30, 2012