Learning from the past?

It remains the central reference point in any serious discussion of human capacity for cruelty and systematic killing. It remains a focal point for debate and intense disagreement, for rationalisation and even for denial and dismissal three- quarters of a century later. It also provides the inspiration for some of the finest literature on what it means to be human in a world of profound injustice and threat.

The Holocaust (often referred to as the ‘Shoah’ or ‘catastrophe’) is marked tomorrow by International Holocaust Remembrance Day. A day that highlights the calculated killing of approximately six million Jews simply because they were Jews. Additionally, the Holocaust witnessed the murder of, at least the same number of Soviet citizens, Soviet prisoners of war, ethnic Poles, Serbians, Roma and gay men, as well as political opponents in Germany and elsewhere.

The significance of the Holocaust is hinted at in the fact that the Jews killed represented approximately one third of the world population of Jews and some two-thirds of European Jews. The nature of the event itself was such that Champetier de Ribes, the French Prosecutor at the subsequent Nuremberg Trials argued “this...