The Holocaust and Ethnic Intolerance

Abstract

For this study, I have researched the link between the Holocaust and European people’s attitudes towards immigrants. My theory was that the Holocaust has created feelings of collective guilt about ethnic intolerance, in countries where Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust. Therefore, I expected that the higher the percentage of exterminated Jews in a country was, the more tolerant its population nowadays is towards immigrants. By doing a multilevel analysis within 21 European countries, I looked if there existed such as relation. Though, my results show the total opposite effect: in countries where a lot of Jews were exterminated the population is less tolerant towards immigrants than in countries where no or not so many Jews were exterminated.