Auschwitz is a beer, schoolchildren tell researchers

[Carlos Spicy Wiener]

Some schoolchildren believe Auschwitz is the name of a type of beer or a religious festival, rather than the notorious concentration camp, research has shown.



Around 1.3 million people perished in the Nazi death camp during the Second World War, but a survey of more than 1,000 secondary school pupils aged 11-16 revealed that a quarter still did not know its purpose.

Of those, about 10 per cent were not sure what it was, 8 per cent thought it was a country bordering Germany, 2 per cent thought it was a beer, the same proportion said it was a religious festival and a further 1 per cent said it was a type of bread.


Miramax and the London Jewish Cultural Centre, which commissioned the survey to mark the DVD release of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, said that, as there are around 4.5 million 11 to 16-year-olds in the UK, this is the equivalent of 90,000 youngsters wrongly identifying Auschwitz as a drink and 45,000 mistaking it for bread.

The poll found that six in 10 youngsters did not know what the Final Solution was, with a fifth claiming it was the name of peace talks held to end the war.

And it revealed that, despite the Holocaust being specified on the secondary National Curriculum as a subject that pupils must be taught, only just over a third (37 per cent) knew that the Holocaust claimed the lives of six million Jews, with many drastically under-estimating the death toll.

While 97 per cent of those questioned could identify Adolf Hitler from a photograph, those who could not mistook famous figures such as Winston Churchill, Salvador Dali and Albert Einstein for the dictator.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas tells the story of a German boy's friendship with a Jewish child held in a concentration camp.

Miramax is working with the charity Film Education to encourage the film to be used as a way of improving children's knowledge about the Holocaust.

The survey conducted by Dubit questioned 1,200 secondary school children aged 11-16 between February 9 and 27.

[Liquid]

I accidentally drank a beer one of my friends used as an ashtray... It won't work. Sorry kids.

[MillyMc]

but do they know that it was all started over a klondike bar?