It received generally positive reviews from critics for its emotional weight, but was panned by scholars for misrepresenting elements of the Holocaust.

Bruno, an eight-year-old German boy living in Berlin, is uprooted to rural occupied Poland with his family after his father Ralf, an SS officer, is promoted.

Ralf organises Herr Liszt, a private tutor, to teach Nazi propaganda and antisemitism to indoctrinate Bruno and his elder sister, Gretel.

This, along with Gretel's crush on Lieutenant Kurt Kotler, a young colleague of her father's, makes her fanatical in her support for the Nazi agenda.

Elsa inadvertently discovers from Kurt that the smell from the camp is in fact burning prisoners, and she angrily confronts her husband.

A short time after, Bruno clandestinely watches his father and other officers reviewing a propaganda film depicting the camp's conditions as positive.

At the funeral, Elsa tries to remove a wreath from the Führer out of respect for Nathalie and her beliefs, but Ralf stops her, causing them to fall out after the service.

The site's critical consensus reads, "A touching and haunting family film that deals with the Holocaust in an arresting and unusual manner, and packs a brutal final punch of a twist.

[8] Manohla Dargis, of The New York Times, said the film "trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked [the Holocaust] for a tragedy about a Nazi family".

[9] In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half out of four and said that it is not simply a reconstruction of Germany during the war, but is "about a value system that survives like a virus".

[11] In spite of some criticism, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe filed this conclusion: "what saves The Boy in the Striped Pajamas from kitsch is the cold, observant logic of Herman's storytelling".

[12] Scholars have criticised the film, saying that it obscures the historical facts about the Holocaust and creates a false equivalence between victims and perpetrators.

[16]: 125  Michael Gray wrote that the story is not very realistic and contains many implausibilities, because children were murdered when they arrived at Auschwitz and it was not possible for them to have contact with people on the outside.

[19]: 173 Research by Holocaust educator Michael Gray found that more than three-quarters of British schoolchildren (ages 13–14) in his sample had engaged with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, significantly more than The Diary of Anne Frank.