A poll has revealed one in three Europeans know just a little or nothing about the Holocaust.

The survey also found one in 20 across the continent have never even heard of the Nazi regime's mass murder of six million Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.

Anti-Semitism campaigners have described the findings as 'appalling' and 'frightening'.

Some 7,000 people were interviewed for the survey, carried out by pollster ComRes for CNN across Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Sweden.

A poll has revealed just one in three Europeans know a little or nothing about the Holocaust. Pictured: The 'Gate of Death' at Auschwitz concentration camp where more than a million people were killed

In Austria, Adolf Hitler's country of birth, 12 per cent of young people said they had never heard of the Holocaust while the country had the highest number of people who knew only 'a little' about the Second World War atrocity.

But lack of Holocaust knowledge was particularly prevalent among the young in France.

One in five in France aged between 18 and 34 said they had never heard of the mass slaughter of Jews during the war.

The poll found 34 per cent of the Europeans questioned knew just a little or had never heard of the Holocaust.

Half of all respondents across the seven countries said they had a 'fair amount' of knowledge of what happened.

Just under a third said commemorating the Holocaust 'distracts from other atrocities and injustices today', CNN reports.

Some 40 per cent said Jews were at risk of racist violence in their countries and half said commemorating the Holocaust helps combat anti-Semitism today, according to the survey.

Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt told CNN the poll demonstrated in 'frightening detail, how traditional anti-Semitic motifs persist in Europe.'

The survey also found only one in 20 across the continent have never even heard of the Nazi regime's mass murder of six million Jews in the 1930s and 1940s

The director of the Auschwitz Memorial, Piotr M. A. Cywiński, highlighted the importance of education in tackling anti-Semitic views.

'The anti-Semitic or xenophobic ideologies that in the past led to the human catastrophe of Auschwitz seem not to have been erased from our lives today,' Cywiński told CNN.

Hitler’s Final Solution, known as Shoah in Hebrew, six million Jewish men, women and children died in ghettos, mass-shootings, in concentration camps and extermination camps.

More than a million people were killed at the Third Reich's largest concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Around 90 per cent were Jewish and the rest were a mix of Romany people, Soviets and Poles.

In April, a separate survey released on Holocaust Remembrance Day found 31 per cent of Americans and 41 per cent of millennials believed two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

The New York Times reported that 41 per cent of Americans could not say what Auschwitz was.