The issues are that a) it is horseshit and b) the author KNOWS that it's horseshit and yet is writing another book.

Let's address those one by one, but first a bit of background:

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a novel by the Irish writer John Boyne, was published in 2006. To quote Boyne's website,

Nine year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution or the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no one to play with. Until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Bruno’s friendship with Shmuel will take him from innocence to revelation. And in exploring what he is unwittingly a part of, he will inevitably become subsumed by the terrible process. [NOTE: He's "subsumed" because he accidentally follows Shmuel into the gas chambers.]

The book sold millions of copies in 46 languages, won several awards and was shortlisted for a few more, and in 2008 it was made into a movie (with Bruno played by Asa Butterfield, now better known as Otis from Sex Education on Netflix) which was also very popular. Though the book and film were commercially successful, they got mixed reviews- some loved the message and felt that it was an effective way to introduce children to the idea of the Holocaust, and others... very much did not. (We'll get to them in a minute.)

Not only were people reading the book and watching the movie for entertainment- it became a very popular option in the classroom as well for Holocaust education. In the UK, the movie's distributors aggressively marketed it in schools (as Spielberg had with Schindler's List)- which made it unsurprising when a research study in the UK uncovered that, of their sample of several hundred 13- and 14-year old students in the London area, 75% had read the book or seen the movie, compared to 45% for The Diary of Anne Frank and 9% for Schindler's List. While it might be natural for Schindler's List, an R rated film, not to have been seen by young teens, the fact that nearly twice as many students had been exposed to a fictional work about the Holocaust than a (very popular and well-read) memoir by a victim was remarked upon. (One interesting note- more girls than boys read Anne Frank, more boys than girls watched Schindler's List, but equal numbers of boys and girls read/watched Striped Pajamas.)

What was more remarkable than the outsized popularity of the book and movie was the fact that the students surveyed believed that it was based on true events, and therefore educational, and praised it for the amount of information they learned. One student even believed that the plot of the book/movie (German son of a high up Nazi official killed in the camps accidentally) was explicitly based on a true story. But even the majority of the students who understood that the book/movie were fictional stated that they learned about the Holocaust from it. Indeed, the students indicated that the part of the Holocaust that they were most familiar with was the concentration camps, and on both the surveys and in in-person interviews multiple students explicitly referred to concentration camp uniforms as "pajamas" or "striped pajamas."

Some of this information was accurate, if skewed by the book- at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter THAT much whether you call the uniforms pajamas or not. But students were also gaining incorrect/misleading impressions of the Holocaust from the book. While some were flagrant, like "I think [the Holocaust] ended when one of the Nazi children died in the poisonous gas in the Jew camp," others were similarly problematic, with claims such as:

• that Bruno's mother (as the wife of the commander) wouldn't have known what was going on in the camp, and by extension that even the adults didn't know what was happening
• that the camps were advertised as vacation camps, the Jews chose to go there, and then it wasn't what was advertised (this is apparently based on a scene in the film, not the book)
• that Auschwitz was in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization
• that Jewish Sonderkommando were involved in closing the victims in the gas chambers, and that they did it for "extra food and protection"

None of the above is accurate. We know that the wives of camp officials were perfectly aware of what was going on, and there is no reason to believe they wouldn't be- it took many thousands of people's complicity and cooperation to enable the mass extermination of the Holocaust. While one particular camp (Theresienstadt/Terezin) was staged to seem like a "model camp" for children and the elderly, no other camps- including Auschwitz- were positioned as such, and certainly the Jews did not go willingly. Auschwitz (or Oswiecim) was a large town on several rail lines in Southern Poland, far from "the middle of nowhere." The Sonderkommando for the most part only disposed of victims' bodies- they didn't actually kill them- and they did so because their lives were at stake.

All of the above is just one particular study that was done about the effects of the book/film on students' knowledge of the Holocaust. The actual inaccuracies go deeper. There would be no way that a son of a German commander like Bruno wouldn't know who Hitler (who he calls the "Fury" because he mishears the word "Fuhrer") was or that he wouldn't have been indoctrinated for literally his entire school life (not to mention home life) against Jews. It would be nearly impossible for a nine year old boy like Shmuel to not only survive even ONE day at Auschwitz (most children were gassed on arrival) but certainly for him to wander around at the perimeter to meet with Bruno. (In the book, Shmuel says that there are "lots" of them.) Even if Shmuel had survived as long as he does in the book/movie, he would have been absolutely emaciated given the conditions. At its core, the entire premise of the book makes no sense and is ahistorical.

Fundamentally, Striped Pajamas gives readers the impression not only that the Holocaust was perpetuated secretly, with innocence and ignorance a plausible possibility, but that even antisemitism wasn't the inherent and well-publicized part of Nazi ideology that it in fact was. In truth, antisemitism and anti-Jewish laws were baked in with Hitler's overall rise, and many Germans benefited directly or indirectly as Jewish property was seized, industries were Aryanized... The book tries to make a statement about how ignorance can mean complicity by pretending that German complicity came from ignorance.

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