Ashley Church: The hollow refrain of “Never Again”

Why Holocaust remembrance is more important than ever

The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Treblinka. It began much earlier, with ideas, laws, exclusions, and the slow normalisation of cruelty. The part that history often forgets.

When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, there was no plan to exterminate the Jews. What did exist was a heavily racist worldview: that Jews were alien, that they were a corrosive presence within society – and that the economic hardship, moral decay, and national humiliation that the Germans were facing was their fault.

Brendan O'Neill: The rise and rise of Holocaust envy

A new generation drunk on victim politics is desperate for a piece of the Holocaust action.

Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is not famed for its astuteness. These omnipresent public-school leftists, who rock up to every radical demo to holler facile chants in fake accents they learnt from EastEnders, are about as far from scholarly as you can get. Yet a few years ago they did something that was world-beatingly dumb, even by their famed low standards. They handed out a leaflet about the Holocaust that described it as an unspeakable tragedy in which ‘thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people were slaughtered’. Spot the omission?

Karl du Fresne: Playing the blame game over "Polish" death camps

Truth can be elusive. Consider the recent furore over the Polish government’s introduction of a law that, according to some critics, will greatly restrict public discussion of Poland’s involvement in the Holocaust during World War Two. The new law prohibits mention of “Polish death camps” – on the face of it, an interference in the right of free speech. Yet it’s hard not to feel sympathy for Poland’s lawmakers.

Auschwitz (or Oswiecim, as it’s properly known in Polish) and other notorious extermination camps – Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek – may have been sited on Polish soil, but they were not put there by Poles. They were built and administered by Nazi Germany, which preferred to conduct its programme of genocide outside its own borders. Perhaps that was the Nazis’ way of pretending their hands were clean.

Ron Smith: Holocaust Revisited

In recent days the world has been remembering the holocaust.  Quite right, too!  We should recall to mind atrocity on this scale, and ask ourselves what, if anything, could have been done to prevent it.  

Whatever conclusions we come to on this point, we need also to ask whether it could happen again, and if it could, what we would need to do to make sure it doesn’t.  In a broader sense, I am talking about industrial-scale genocide/ethnic cleansing of whatever kind but I am also thinking specifically of the possibility of a second Jewish holocaust on broadly the same scale as the first.

Mike Butler: Cannons Creek guide to social reform

Andy Oakley grew up in a troubled family in a state house on the mean streets of Cannons Creek, a suburb of Porirua City approximately 22km north of Wellington. The cultural mix at his school was half European New Zealander and half Maori/Polynesian. There, everyone had an equal opportunity either to end up in prison or become the mayor.

Oakley, who dropped out of Porirua College without a qualification and became a father at age 16, became an engineer, a racing driver, and a businessman, achievements that could be the subject of a riveting biography. Instead he wrote Cannons Creek to Waitangi – Te Pakeha's treaty claim for equality.