A recent poll revealed that 1 in 20 Britons don’t believe the Holocaust took place. Historian and ‘Nazi hunter’ Efraim Zuroff told RT that the results show a combination of “anti-Semitism and abysmal ignorance.”

Sunday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK, marking 74 years to the day since the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz extermination camp. Despite extensive documentary evidence, and testimony from survivors and perpetrators, Holocaust denial is on the rise in Britain.

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One in 20 Britons believe the Holocaust never happened, according to a poll published on Sunday. Eight percent believe that the official death count of six million is exaggerated and one in five believe less than two million Jews were murdered. 45 percent simply don’t know how many died.

“It’s quite shocking and surprising,” Efraim Zuroff of the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told RT. The results, Zuroff said, combine “anti-semitism with abysmal ignorance.”

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“Holocaust denial is simply a new form of anti-Semitism,” Zuroff added. Aside from the latest British survey, a recent study conducted by the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights, found that 89 percent of Europe’s Jews feel that anti-Semitism has increased since 2012. The study found that social media allowed anti-Jewish conspiracy theories to spread, and the recent influx of millions of Muslim migrants has revived an ancient religious conflict in the streets of modern Europe.

Zuroff recommends continued efforts to teach schoolchildren about the Holocaust, but claimed that the relatively small number of trials and convictions for those involved could have contributed to the multiple genocides that have occurred since. These include the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which is also commemorated on Sunday.

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“I think that people who contemplate joining genocidal movements...the first question they ask themselves is ‘will I be caught?’” he explained. “Will I be held accountable?”

Zuroff himself has helped bring dozens of these Nazi war criminals to trial, including notorious Croatian camp commandant Dinko Šakić, and Hungarian war criminal Dr. Sándor Képíró, said to have been responsible for the murder of around 2,000 civilians in Novi Sad, Serbia, in 1942.

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