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While I agree with Professor Lindemann that polls are a crude instrument for measuring students' knowledge of the Holocaust I would take exception to one line in his posting: "Far more students know that 6 million Jews were killed by the nazis than [that] 5 million non-Jews were killed by them." Five million is either much too low (for all non-Jewish civilians killed by the Third Reich) or much too high (for non-Jewish groups targeted, like Jews, for murder). Though there's no detailed paper trail, it's generally agreed that the notion of 11 million victims of the Holocaust (6 million Jews plus 5 million non-Jews) originated with Simon Wiesenthal. Where did this figure come from? The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer reports that Wiesenthal acknowledged to him in a private conversation that he simply invented it, to avoid "dividing the victims." Over the past generation the 11 million figure (6+5) has received wide currency, but it is meaningless. (For more on all of this, see my THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE, pp. 214-226). Peter Novick University of Chicago
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