Why we need holocaust education - some UK students think Auschwitz is a brand of beer...

Yes, the amazing state of education in the UK - and probably getting worse by the minute...

Some schoolchildren think 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 1.3million 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 4.5million 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.