HOLOCAUST Memorial Day, marking the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz by the Red Army on January 27 1945, must never be downplayed or misrepresented.
The Nazis’ “final solution” planned the extermination of the whole Jewish race, setting in motion the worst crime committed by any government in history.
Six million Jews were gassed in death camps or rounded up and shot as the German armies advanced. No quarter was given to women or children, however young: the job description of Ukrainian collaborator Fyodor Fedorenko at Treblinka, later tried and executed in the USSR, was to shoot “the elderly, disabled and babies” who were too infirm to be herded into the gas chambers.
There have been other genocides, but no other state has officially adopted the extermination of a race as policy and proceeded to systematically carry it out.
Hundreds of thousands of Roma were also murdered, as were millions of Soviet and Polish prisoners of war.
The Nazi “Generalplan Ost” would have killed many millions more had the Red Army not triumphed.
It planned the slaughter of over 60 million Slavs and the forced starvation of another 30 million in the “Hunger Plan,” so a greater Germany could be established stretching to the Urals. Percentages were set for the killing or expulsion of individual nationalities: 50 per cent for the Czechs, 85 per cent for the Poles and Lithuanians; the remainder would serve the “master race” as slaves.
We should be clear on the scale of the crimes of the Third Reich, because routine comparisons of opponents to Nazis have cheapened the term.
This is partly due to the lack, in popular consciousness, of other villains. The crimes of the British and other colonial empires are whitewashed, making the Nazis the go-to racist empire for comparative purposes.
Britain’s manufactured amnesia about its own history of colonial plunder and aggression is deployed cynically by politicians, who compare every passing bogeyman — Milosevic, Saddam, Gadaffi, Putin — to Hitler and every failure to bomb, invade or rush weapons to a warzone to capitulation at Munich.
The left must do better.
We must reject weaponisation of the Holocaust, whether by racist politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu claiming his genocidal assault on Palestinians is about protecting Jews, or by counterproductive (and to many Jews offensive) exaggerations that depict Israel as a new Nazi Germany. Its settler expansionism and ethnic cleansing, echoing the behaviour of European empires in the Americas, Australasia and parts of Africa, can be condemned and resisted more effectively without that.
We must reject too the hypocrisy of our political class, who invoke the Holocaust only to smear Palestine solidarity activists as anti-semites, while fuelling anti-immigrant bigotry and slamming the doors shut to refugees as so many countries did to Jews trying to flee Nazism in the 1930s.
We must oppose the historical revisionism that hides the horrific reality of Generalplan Ost in order to rehabilitate Nazi collaborators like Yaroslav Hunka, the Waffen SS veteran given an ovation by Canada’s parliament for fighting Russia in World War II.
Arming and training explicit neonazis like Ukraine’s Azov Battalion will have consequences, and as we saw in recent leaked talks on mass deportations between Germany’s fascist AfD and politicians including two Christian Democrats, the far right are on the march across Europe and gaining in audacity.
The left must strike back. The Nazis were defeated in a people’s war that liberated Europe.
Hopes ran high that that defeat would end the age of empires and racial hierarchies. It prompted a wave of decolonisation and the formation of institutions like the United Nations intended to prevent future wars.
When we say “never again” we must commit to protecting the legacy of anti-fascist victory and extending it to a decisive struggle against racism and war, two persistent products of the capitalist order taken to their nightmarish extreme by the Nazis.
