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The BBC has sparked fury after penning a “pathetic” biography of Adolf Hitler, which fails to address the Holocaust.
Key events and figures from the dictator’s regime were excluded from the broadcaster’s narrative of Adolf Hitler: From Childhood to Dictator, which was designed as a learning resource for GCSE pupils.
The short biography attempts to draw a comprehensive timeline of events of the Nazi’s life, from birth, to the rise of the Nazis, to his rule over Germany until his death – but appears to omit a number of atrocities committed against the Jews.
As a result, the corporation has been urged to revise the “woefully inadequate” resource, stressing that combatting antisemitism begins at school.
A spokesman for Campaign Against Antisemitism told GB News: “How can the BBC teach about Nazi Germany with no meaningful reference to the Holocaust?
“This pathetic attempt at educating students is so alarmingly vacant of key historical references that it almost reads as a whitewash of the Nazi dictator’s brutality.
“At a time when antisemitism in schools is at a record heigh, how can we expect the situation to improve if our resources even on Holocaust education – let alone contemporary antisemitism – are so woefully inadequate Combatting antisemitism starts with education, and the BBC must urgently revise this resource.”
The document stresses the Austrian “was not born a brutal tyrant”, urging readers to “explore Hitler’s life and discover the road that led to destruction”.
The biography also excludes any mention of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the night the Nazis ordered violent riots against European Jews.
Overnight, the SS, the SA and Hitler Youth destroyed around 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms, murdering 100 Jews as rioters smashed windows of around 7,500 Jewish-owned stores.
The police and SS arrested roughly 30,000 Jewish men, deporting them to concentration camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
But the BBC Bitesize depiction of Hitler’s life opted to sweep over the night altogether.
The document says that the Nazis “tried” to exclude Jews and other groups from public life since 1933, when the Nuremberg Laws were in place.
It adds: “Hitler characterised the laws as an effort to ‘achieve the legislative regulation of a problem which, if it breaks down again, will then have to be transferred by law to the National Socialist Party for final solution’.”
In its entirety, the page mentions “Jews” or “Jewish” on five occasions, none of which relate to the Holocaust.
It then goes on to omit that Hitler’s invasion of the USSR led to the systematic shooting of more than a million Jewish men, women and children in 1941.
Nor is there any mention of the Wannsee Conference which took place the following year where senior Nazi officials planned the logistics of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” – as well as a number of other key events.
High-ranking Nazi officials responsible for the Holocaust were ommitted from the learning resource, including Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels.
A BBC spokesman claimed the timeline of Hitler’s life was not a biography – despite the 2,400 document appearing to cover events from the failed artist’s childhood, adolescence and military career up until his death.
They added: “It is a single page, which includes reference to the horror of the Holocaust, and is designed for teachers to be used alongside extensive materials covering the Second World War, Hitler’s rise to power and a range of resources on the Holocaust.”
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