Readers have pointed out other Holocaust howlers on the BBC site (see post below). On a page which provided a Q&A on Prince Harry’s Nazi fancy-dress costume, the following appeared:

‘And this picture has been published just two weeks before an occasion to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz prison camp, which will be led by his grandmother, the Queen.’

‘Auschwitz prison camp’! Oh dear. As a reader wrote to the BBC:

‘Auschwitz was not like Wormwood Scrubs or the north sea open prison camp where Archer or Aitken wrote diaries and strolled leisurely. The Auschwitz camps (there were several sub-camps) were concentration camps, extermination camps or death camps. They were not “prison camps”. Second World War prison camps were for prisoners of war and the distinction is clearly important. At Auschwitz Jews, and others, were exterminated’.

Despite a comment from BBC News Website that this reference was ‘inappropriate’, it has still — at time of writing this — not been changed.

Another page aimed specifically at children, entitled ‘Who were the victims’ in the series ‘Guides: the Holocaust’ says the following:

‘The largest group of victims were Jewish people. It is estimated about 6 million died - nearly 7 out of every 10 Jews living in Europe. But we will never know exactly how many died, or who they all were and there are lots of different estimates. The Nazis also killed other large groups of people who they thought were inferior races, including: Other large groups of people murdered were: • Civilians and soldiers from the Soviet Union • Catholics from Poland • Serbians • Romany Gypsies. They also murdered politicians, journalists, teachers and anyone else who spoke out against Hitler. There were many millions of non-Jewish victims.’

Well, yes the Nazis did kill many others during the war, from the Soviet Union and elsewhere. But however dreadful that was – and of course we should remember them as victims of tyranny -- they were not victims of Nazi genocide. That was reserved for the Jews alone, who were singled out for extermination from the face of the earth. The Holocaust was different from other crimes of mass murder in history, and as such it was a specific atrocity against the Jewish people. To say merely that the Jews were ‘the largest group of victims’ seriously downplays the centrality of Jewish suffering and therefore the nature of the Holocaust itself. And while it is true that the actual death toll is not known, the only people who play the numbers game in suggesting ‘lots of different estimates’ tend to be Holocaust revisionists.

This is almost certainly not some deep-dyed plot by the Beeb to rewrite history, but is the product of dismaying ignorance – as is further illustrated by yet another clanger on another children’s page in this series, ‘Why did it happen?’

which says of the Nazis:

‘To them, an Aryan was anyone who was European and not Jewish.’

Not so — to the Nazis, various east European peoples were ‘untermenschen’, or sub-human, and treated accordingly.

Lord Reith must be turning in his grave.