In January 1979, the American mini-series "Holocaust" aired in West Germany. The series, which was watched by 20 million people or 50% of West Germans, first brought the matter of the genocide in World War II to widespread public attention in a way that it had never been before. After each part of "Holocaust" was aired, there was a companion show where a panel of historians could answer questions from people phoning in. The historians' panels were literally overwhelmed with thousands of phone calls from shocked and outraged Germans, a great many of whom stated that they were born after 1945 and that was the first time that they learned that their country had practiced genocide in World War II. By the late 1970s, an initially small number of young people had started to demand that the "Länder" governments stop neglecting the sites of the concentration camps, and start turning them into proper museums and sites of remembrance, turning them into "locations of learning" meant to jar visitors into thinking critically about the Nazi period.