TO: Juvenile journos
SUBJECT: The Holocaust
1. Please try to ensure you use accurate terms when referring to the extermination camps specifically set up under Operation Reinhard for mass killing of Jews. These were mainly in Poland and include Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.
2. Please do not show film of rows of prisoner huts and mass prisoners in striped pyjamas when illustrating pieces about the extermination camps. Extermination camps were designed to move trainloads of Jews straight from the unloading ramps to the gas chambers without a residential stay. The overwhelming majority of jews killed never wore stripey pyjamas.
3. Please try to understand that Auschwitz was two camps - an extermination camp, and a concentration camp. The extermination camp dealt with trainloads of Jews as the other Reinhard camps, the concentration camp accommodated Jews, politicals, homosexuals, criminals, Russians, the disabled etc.
4. Yes, people were individually executed and starved and worked to death in the concentration camps, and they also had cremation ovens, but they were not designed for mass killing but for detention.
5. The use of terms such as 'death camps' is lazy reporting and exhibits a poor grasp of Holocaust history. They were by no means homogenous; concentration camps were even visited by the International Red Cross whilst the extermination camps were a State Secret.
6. The extermination camps were nearly all sited in Poland and largely staffed by Ukrainian SS volunteers with German officers and NCOs. The successors of these Ukrainian nazis now hold power in Kiev.
7. If you are looking for modern successors with a similar fascist mindset to the Nazis - a similar disregard for human life, belief in their own racial superiority and embrace of mass judicial murder as a policy instrument, it would be remiss of you and poor journalism to exclude Islamism from mention.