In this week’s “Kev’s Column” Kevin discusses why it is so important to remember the Holocaust 70 years after Auschwitz was liberated.
It has now been 70 years since Allied Troops began liberating the Concentration Camps which had been at the centre of the Nazis regime of terror.
Millions had died in the camps before Allied Troops arrived to see images of horror that would remain with them for the rest of their lives. Richard Dimbleby’s famous report of what British Troops found at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 is as heart wrenching today as it was when first broadcast. If you have not heard it just click here to do so.
For many the camps were the epitome of what Britain and its Allies had been fighting for since 1939, to rid Europe of the evil that would create such scenes. Yet it is not just the horror of what had been done that makes it so shocking, it is the fact that this was meticulously planned and orchestrated years before.
Those who carried out the murders were not fools or just unthinking thugs. The Deaths Head Regiments of the SS who guarded the campswere seen as an “elite” in the perverse ideology of Nazi Germany due to their ability to be so merciless. The architects who planned the camps literally designed in the suffering and administrators planned how to round up and transport people across Europe, without a thought for the dreadful fate that awaited them. A unit made up of Police Officers, trained to uphold the law, became a killing squad that shot thousands of men, women and children in cold blood.
It is these facts that make it so important we remember the Holocaust today. In 1929 no-one would have predicted that within only 16 years such horrors would be committed in a modern European country. Yet the first steps towards the nightmare that followed were taken when in difficult times following World War I many Germans began to view “The Jews” as different to them.
In remembering the Holocaust we not only commemorate the victims of the greatest crime in history, but we also remind ourselves that despite the promises of “Never Again” in 1945 history could repeat itself. In Rwanda and Cambodia it already has, plus recent scenes from massacres of Christians in Nigeria are harrowingly similar to the photos taken by war reporters in 1945.
By remembering the Holocaust in 2015 we remind ourselves not just how many died, but how a society started down and then followed the path to mass murder. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.