One of the world's leading Holocaust education centres has accused British school teachers of committing an "offence" against the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis by failing to teach the genocide properly due to political correctness.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre used Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is today, to write an open letter to Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, claiming it is "horrified" by a report funded by his department which revealed that teachers often avoided dealing with the Holocaust because they did not want to cause offence to children from other races or religions.

The report, entitled Teaching Emotive and Controversial History, said some schools were reluctant to teach the subject because teachers did not want to challenge "contentious or charged versions of history" taught to children at home - an apparent reference to an unwillingness by teachers to confront Holocaust denial among extreme elements of the British Muslim community.

In his letter Dr Shimon Samuels, director for international relations at the Paris-based centre, which has 400,000 members worldwide and which teachers tolerance, education and anti-racism initiatives, urged Mr Johnson to take action to ensure schools teach the Holocaust properly.

"Teachers' mistreatment or exclusion of the Holocaust is an offence to the memory of its six million victims and to the British soldiers who liberated the Nazi death camps," he wrote.

The letter came as Israel marked its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, with sirens wailing and traffic grinding to a halt during a two-minute silence this morning.

Vehicles stopped in the middle of the street with drivers getting out of their cars, while pedestrians - ranging from young khaki-clad conscripts with M16s strapped to their backs to Holocaust survivors - stopped on pavements at 7am GMT (9am local time).

Radio played melancholic Israeli folk music throughout the day, while Israeli television carried round-the-clock documentaries detailing the rise of Nazi anti-Semitism which led to the genocide.

In his letter to the Education Secretary, Dr Samuels said that the UK education system could not afford to abandon the teaching of truthful historical events just because they caused offence to some groups within society.

"One may well wonder whether Magna Carta, the Suffragette movement, the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention are next in line, to placate or - in the words of the report - for teachers 'to avoid causing offence or appearing insensitive to individuals or groups in their classes,'" he added.

Dr Samuels added that by describing the Holocaust as a "contentious" subject within history classes, the report effectively cast doubt on its existence.

"Both the European Commission and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have found Holocaust denial to be a euphemism and a vehicle for incitement to Jew-hatred," he added.

"Yet, the report justifies complicity with this form of anti-Semitism by stating: 'In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.'

"By this, we may therefore conclude that the Holocaust is 'contentious' and 'a version of history.'"

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education claimed that schools were clearly instructed to teach the Holocaust, and that it was a compulsory part of the curriculum.

“Teaching of the Holocaust is already compulsory in schools at key stage three (for pupils between the ages of 11 and 14) and such is the importance of it, it will remain so in the new key stage three curriculum from September 2008," she said.

In total, 11 million people were murdered by the Nazis, mostly in concentration camps, of which six million were Jews. The others murdered included gays, communists, gypsies, political prisoners, and Adolph Hitler's enemies.

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