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Waiting in a Westminster security queue, I chatted recently with a couple of West Country history teachers who had come a long way with their flock to visit political London. Their trip

would include entry through the heavily-guarded gates of Downing Street, so that they could have a lesson in front of the famous black-lacquered door of Number 10. “That will be a special

thrill,” I ventured. “I doubt it,” answered one of the teachers. It was hard to get these GCSE students interested in anything, they said. The Holocaust is a compulsory part of the national

curriculum for all state schools. Many teachers will know little about what happened apart from basic knowledge of gas chambers, six million dead Jews, Hitler, Auschwitz and anti-Semitism.

They have many other topics to teach, so how can they be expected to convey this history to every pupil? The most effective method, probably, is to invite a Holocaust survivor to speak. This

will not remain an option much longer. This week’s Holocaust Memorial Day, marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, will be the last round figure commemoration in the

lifetime of most of the remaining survivors of the camp and of other Nazi atrocities. The essential condition of maintaining knowledge of the Holocaust will be scrupulous attention to

factual truth. Obviously, there will continue to be legitimate questions for debate. Why did the Holocaust happen? Was anti-Semitism the root cause, or was a perfect storm of economic

depression and a series of other factors to blame? Did the Allies do enough to provide a safe haven to endangered European Jews? Could more have been done by Allied forces while the Second

World War was still in progress to deter the Nazis from implementing the policy of extermination of the Jews? Could they and should they, for example, have bombed the Auschwitz gas chambers

and crematoria in 1944? But it is vital to distinguish between matters of interpretation and questions of plain fact. Major broadcasters have a heavy responsibility to get their facts right,

to specify their sources and where necessary to issue corrections. Since last September, I have been looking at archives and secondary sources to check on a film commissioned by the BBC and

by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States on the oft-repeated Auschwitz bombing debate. It certainly made compelling viewing, with statements by expert interviewees,

fast-paced soundbites and dramatic scenes composed by a playwright. I have no quarrel with the arguments presented by the interviewees for and against the bombing, which the Allies refused

to undertake. Yet something was very wrong with the documentary. This might not matter much except that its defects were all too common and potentially damaging to the enterprise of

remembrance. The film sacrificed accuracy for drama. It showed scenes of things that did not happen. It included egregious errors, made worse by claims made in the blurbs issued, in

particular, by the BBC. While fact-checking the documentary, I have encountered a worrying response. One expert at a major Holocaust museum argued that such presentations are justified in

finding “the least wrong way to show something”. A producer at PBS argued, in the context of my questions about some factual issues that “it would be difficult to declare something to be an

absolute historical truth”. So what are some of the disputed facts? The film shows the undoubtedly brave and significant escape from Auschwitz on 7 April 1944 of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred

Wetzler. Their detailed information about the camp complex and about preparations to murder the Hungarian Jews there led, once it reached the Allies in the summer of 1944, to various

suggestions about bombing: either of the camp, or the railway lines leading to it, or of Hungarian cities. Yet US Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy remained determined to “kill” — his

very word — the idea. This is uncontroversial. But the documentary is in trouble from the start. We are told in the opening interview soundbite that escape from the camp was “almost

impossible”. In fact, research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum has revealed at least 928 escape attempts, of which between 221 and 475 were successful. Research by Professor Michael Fleming

published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press details dozens of reports about the camp transmitted to the Allies earlier than that derived from Vrba and Wetzler. One of the most dramatic

scenes in the film shows Rabbi Michael Weissmandl in Bratislava, Slovakia, using a clandestine radio transmitter to send information from the Vrba/Wetzler report to Allied-controlled

territory, which it implies was in Switzerland. No evidence has been produced that the Jewish underground in Slovakia possessed any such equipment. History would have been very different if

it had. The core information would have reached friendly hands much sooner, before the regular deportations from the Hungarian provinces to Auschwitz started on the night of 14 May 1944.

According to an archival specialist on the relevant documents, the film “simplifies” dates when the Vrba/Wetzler report reached the US authorities in Bern, Switzerland. It also mistakes the

time when bombing Auschwitz was first proposed. Rather than Rabbi Weissmandl in May 1944, the action had already been requested by the Polish exile leadership in London in 1941. The film

portrays the Washington head of the US War Refugee Board, John Pehle, as a great man for finally endorsing the bombing of Auschwitz in November 1944 and for publishing Vrba and Wetzler’s

full report, when McCloy once again rejected the idea. Yet it took Pehle five months from the time the War Refugee Board received copies of the Vrba/Wetzler report in Bern to the time he

took this action, when he was about to leave the Board. By this time Soviet forces were about to overrun Auschwitz. The reason given in the film for this delay was that it was impossible to

send documents out of Switzerland while the country was surrounded by Nazi-occupied territory. The implausibility of this emerges in several ways, not least in a declassified Central

Intelligence Agency report on the legendary head of US intelligence in wartime Bern, Allen Dulles. The report states that it had been possible to send documents out of Switzerland since the

previous year. This sample of errors does not extend to mentioning the controversial omission of a number of important aspects of the story. One cannot expect the general adult public or

schoolchildren to be aware of such details. The heavy responsibility to check their facts and to be more transparent about their sources rests on the shoulders of the BBC, the PBS and other

information providers. The Holocaust is simply too important and too painful to be subjected to the doctrine that simplification and popularisation require and justify factual error. The

producers with whom I have been in contact argue that it takes too long to convey correct facts. I don’t see why that should be the case. It may be tempting for producers of documentaries to

claim that escape from Auschwitz was “almost impossible”, rather than to inform the viewer that on average there were one or two successful escapes per week. The truth evidently seem less

interesting to those seeking large audiences. In reality, there is nothing more “interesting” than the truth. In this case, the fact that there were many escapes, many previous reports

raises the painful question — explored by Fleming but not considered in the BBC/PBS film — of why the Allies ignored and censored them. Reviewing a different Holocaust production, an

American rabbi commented that “the use of Hollywood ‘magic’ to make history more palatable to modern audiences is not without its justification”. Even if some of the facts are “stretched”,

he argued, this was a price worth paying, provided that what remains was “in its essence” a true story. That will not do. At a time when BBC standards are already under scrutiny, the

Corporation cannot afford to endanger its reputation for trustworthiness. We ought not to be too obsessed with the fear that stretching the facts could provide useful material for malign

Holocaust deniers. But nor is it realistic to ignore the dangers of making the facts fit the story, rather than making the story fit the facts. Memory and rigid attachment to the highest

standards of historical truth must go hand in hand.