http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1160503/The-children-think-Auschwitz-brand-beer.html
Last updated at 8:04 AM on 09th March 2009
Some schoolchildren believe the Nazi death camp Auschwitz was a brand of beer, a religious festival or a kind of bread.
Research released today shows that a shocking number of pupils aged between 11 and 16 have a poor understanding of the Holocaust.
Around 1.3 million people perished in Auschwitz during the Second World War and six million Jews were killed in total. But a survey of 1,200 youngsters revealed that 23 per cent have no idea what the camp was.
Yet of those questioned, as part of research by the London Jewish Cultural Centre (LJCC), 8 per cent thought Auschwitz was a country bordering Germany, 2 per cent thought it was a beer and the same proportion said it was a religious festival.
Bizarrely, a further 1 per cent believed the concentration camp was a type of bread.
About 10 per cent said they were not sure what Auschwitz was.
The LJCC explained that as there are around 4.5 million 11- to 16-year-olds in Britain, this is the equivalent of 90,000 youngsters wrongly identifying Auschwitz as a drink and 45,000 mistaking it for bread.
The poll also found that six out of ten of the pupils did not know that the Final Solution was the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population. A fifth thought it was the name of peace talks held to end the war.
Only just over a third (37 per cent) knew that the Holocaust claimed the lives of six million Jews, with many drastically underestimating the death toll.
However, most of the children were able to identify Adolf Hitler from a photograph. The 3 per cent who could not mistook famous figures such as Winston Churchill, Salvador Dali and Albert Einstein for the dictator.
The LJCC and film producers Miramax commissioned the survey to mark the DVD release of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas. The film tells the story of a German boy's friendship with a Jewish child held in a concentration camp.
Karen Pollock, of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: 'Last year alone, the trust enabled 30,000 students to hear the powerful testimony of a Holocaust survivor, took 3,000 students and teachers to visit Auschwitz, and provided resources and support to thousands of schools in the UK.
'Whilst having not seen the survey, these findings suggest that our work is succeeding but clearly there is more to be done.
'That is why we are proud to support a groundbreaking research initiative by the Institute of Education, which will assess how the Holocaust is being taught in schools across the country. This will be instrumental in our work in years to come to educate students about the Holocaust.'
Auschwitz is 50 miles west of Krakow in Poland. Around 90 per cent of its victims were Jews, many killed in the camp's gas chambers.
Others died because of starvation and forced labour. Among those who died at Auschwitz was the teenage diarist Anne Frank.
Recently Richard Williamson, a British Roman Catholic bishop who caused uproar by denying the scale of the Holocaust, apologised for his comments.
But his apology, after claiming that no more than 300,000 Jews died in the Nazi camps, failed to appease the Vatican which said he had not met a demand for a 'full and public recanting'.
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