As they gather today at Auschwitz-Birkenau to mark the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust world leaders must reflect on whether the lessons of the genocide have been learned so that it can never, never happen again.
There can, alas, be no certainty about that. One has only to recall the mass killings in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur over the last decade to realise this. But the state-sponsored persecution and industrially-organised murder of 6 million Jews and millions of other minorities and opponents of Nazi Germany from 1933-1945 has so profoundly affected European and world politics that there is room to hope its memory has become a universal symbol rejecting the ideology of racist, exterminist supremacy on which the Holocaust was based.
The lessons must be learned from a universalist perspective. The Holocaust was a crime against all humanity. Only in this way can we ensure such crimes are never again perpetrated against ethnic or religious categories of people by dehumanising and stereotyping them as enemy others to be eliminated. The Holocaust is centrally a symbol of Jewish extermination, resistance, survival and identity. It is increasingly, too, a symbol of repentance and memory for a uniting Europe in which the continent's racist, bellicose and imperial past is rejected in favour of values based on peaceful and multicultural interdependence. For the rest of the world it is a standing warning about the possibility of state-sponsored genocide, the conditions in which it can arise, and the need for constant vigilance against it.
The history of Auschwitz-Birkenau during the second World War bears out these lessons. The original camp was used as a lethal prison for Polish political prisoners, including socialist, communist and nationalist opponents of Nazi Germany. Poland lost some 6 million people in the war, 2.8 million of them Jews. Hitler's racism was directed against Slavs as well as Jews. The decision to murder the entire European Jewish population was taken after the rapid conquest of eastern Europe by the German armies and the unleashing of paramilitary and SS units against all its inhabitants. The huge Birkenau camp was added to Auschwitz in October 1941 to proceed with that task, immensely expanding its exterminating capacity. Some 1.2-1.5 million people were murdered there, one million of them Jewish, the rest mainly other Poles.
About 200,000 people survived incarceration in the camp, but few of them are still alive. Before they die their memories should be listened to with the greatest attention, just as the circumstances which gave rise to these terrible events should be revisited by succeeding generations. They have been vividly described in a series of articles in this newspaper and in other media over recent days. Auschwitz is symbolic of the capability of humanity to inflict unspeakable horror amongst ourselves. The concern now, 60 years later, is that that lesson is being forgotten.