Survey: Nearly half of Canadians think US has a large number of neo-Nazis

A survey released Thursday finds that nearly 5 in 10 Canadians believe the U.S. is home to a significant number of white supremacists and followers of neo-Nazi ideology.

In a Schoen Consulting poll commissioned by the Azrieli Foundation and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, 47 percent of Canadian adults said that “a great deal” or “many” neo-Nazis exist in the U.S.

{mosads}Just 17 percent said a “great deal” or “many” neo-Nazis live in Canada by comparison, according to the survey. Many Canadians, however, lack basic knowledge about anti-Semitism’s history. Forty-nine percent of Canadians could not name one former Nazi prison camp active during World War II, a number that included 52 percent of millennial respondents.

“The results of this study should cause great concern about Holocaust education and the gaps we have again uncovered,” said Greg Schneider, vice president of the Claims Conference, in a press release accompanying the survey.

“We must do all we can to educate about the horrors of the Holocaust; it is incumbent on us to ensure that those who suffered so greatly are remembered, while their stories are told and taught by future generations.”

The survey, which was taken in September, comes months after another survey commissioned by the same organization found that 41 percent of Americans were unable to identify Auschwitz, the most infamous Nazi death camp.

That survey also found that 58 percent of Americans believe a genocide like the Holocaust could potentially happen again and that 7 in 10 Americans believe people do not care about the Holocaust like they used to.

Schoen Consulting’s poll for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany collected results from 1,100 Canadian adults from Sept. 1 to 8, 2018, and carries a margin of error of 3 percentage points.