Holocaust Memorial Day 2025: Remembering the Terrible Legacy of Nazi Genocide and Reflecting on Growing Holocaust Denial

Holocaust Memorial Day, on 27 January 2025, marked the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, and also the 30^th anniversary of the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by their Serb compatriots in Srebrenica. An afternoon service in Auschwitz was attended on the day by around 50 Holocaust survivors, several heads of state, and members of royal families. King Charles III became the first British monarch to visit the former concentration camp, at what is now locally known as Oświęcim in Upper Silesia in southern Poland, close to the city of Krakow. 

Auschwitz was in operation between February 1942 and November 1944, only to be liberated in January 1945 by soldiers of the 60^th Army of the First Ukrainian Front. Today it stands as a memorial and museum to remind us of the terrible atrocities committed on the site, including casual flogging, deliberate torture, criminal medical experimentation, and gas chamber killings.

At the time it took place, knowledge of the Holocaust appears to have been patchy outside of Germany and its allies. On the other hand, the persecution of Jews in the form of social, educational, professional, economic, and political exclusion, attacks on individuals, homes, businesses and synagogues, and enforced segregation was well documented and reflected in growing emigration to safer countries. For many British viewers, Richard Dimbleby’s moving report from Belsen, the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by the British on 15 April 1945, was the first time they were made aware of the “gradual breakdown of civilisation” that led to the unspeakable atrocities shown on television screens. Subsequent investigations confirmed the extent of the systematic genocide of European Jews. Other victims of the Nazi killing machine included such diverse groups as “enemies of the state” (Communists, Socialist, Social Democrats), Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, disabled people, various European nationals, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other “undesirables.”

Implementation of the “Final Solution” (Endlösung) of the “Jewish Question” (Judenfrage) was decided upon at a secret, high-level, 90-minute meeting of fifteen Nazi Party officials, civil servants, and SS leaders at an elegant villa overlooking Lake Wannsee in the south-west Berlin suburb of that name on 20 January 1942. Even before setting up six extermination camps in German-occupied Poland, Nazi Germany had already started to build up an infrastructure from 1933 onwards of what was to comprise 44,000 camps, ghettoes and other incarceration sites, including forced-labour camps, 23 major concentration camps (with 1,500 satellite and subcamps), several transit camps, and six euthanasia centres (T4 facilities). The first concentration camp, established at Dachau, near Munich, in March 1933, was the only one to operate until 1945. Mass murders of Jews predated the extermination camps, beginning with the activities of Einsatzgruppen, SS mobile killing units, in German-occupied Soviet Union and Serbia in 1941.

Evidence for a systematic massive state-organised genocide can be found in the Nazis’ own archives, testimony from survivors and eyewitnesses, confessions by perpetrators, disappearances of millions of people, the corpses and skeletal remains of the dead, and more recently in archaeological surveys of incarceration sites and mass graves. Despite this substantial corpus of irrefutable evidence, Holocaust denial continues to grow. According to the Holocaust Memorial Trust, “Holocaust distortion, denial, and trivialisation are all increasing”- the Holocaust either never happened, was not quite as made out to be, or can be attributed to the Jews themselves.

Holocaust denial began soon after the conclusion of the Second World War, and was primarily driven by anti-Semitism. French fascist art critic and journalist Maurice Bardèche introduced “historical revisionism” with his 1948 book ‘Nuremberg ou la terre promise’ (Nuremberg or the Promised Land). Revisionist thinking featured in many subsequent books and pamphlets, with such self-explanatory titles as ‘The Myth of the Six Million’ (David Hoggan, 1969), ‘The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses’ (Austin App, 1973), ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’ (Richard Verrall, 1974), ‘The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry’ (Arthur Butz, 1976), ‘Debunking the Genocide Myth’ (Paul Rassinier, 1978), ‘The Diary of Anne Frank-A Forgery’ (Robert Faurisson, 1985), and ‘The Leuchter Report: The End of the Myth: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Gas Execution Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek, Poland’ (1988). The United States, with its home-grown neo-Nazis and First Amendment protections, proved a particularly important source of Holocaust denial, courtesy of such organisations as the Institute of Historical Review, which published the Journal of Historical Review from 1980 to 2004, and the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, with its Journal for Free Historical Inquiry. The case of David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt (2000) was to provide a legal setting in which the plaintiff’s misrepresentation of the Holocaust was discredited.

Holocaust Memorial Day will be commemorated today in many events and activities across the world. Unfortunately, later genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and elsewhere only confirm that the lessons of the Holocaust have yet to be learned. Meanwhile, neo-Nazi sentiments continue to grow in the birthplace of Nazism, elsewhere in Europe, and across the Atlantic. We can only but live in hope that people will one day, not too far in the future, begin to feel comfortable coexisting in peace and mutual understanding with each other.

Ashis Banerjee