Holocaust Memorial Day 2025
Holocaust Memorial Day: 80 years
Each year on 27 January the UK observes Holocaust Memorial Day. Every year since its introduction communities, individuals, organisations and institutions have been encouraged to mark the day and remember it. The history of what is remembered is straightforward: on 27 January 1945 the Soviet Army entered into a Nazi concentration and death camp called Auschwitz and were presented with the survivors and evidence of one of the worst crimes imaginable – the intentional murder of people who had committed no crime. But why are we marking it?
Even before 27 January 1945 knowledge of the genocide that was being committed was widespread, but for those outside of the Nazi machine, that day provided incontrovertible evidence. It wasn’t just at Auschwitz that the wholesale murder of Jewish people, Roma and Sinti, and those the Nazis deemed unacceptable and not worthy of life took place; the Nazis and their sympathizers were killing their victims across Europe and beyond – but Auschwitz and the other death camps stood out for their industrial capability to murder people on a mass scale – usually without any interaction between the murderer and the victim.
It is not just the scale of the Holocaust that makes it stand out in history; if anything that is a distraction – making the victims appear as countless numbers rather than real people with real lives and feelings – but the scale is a factor when you take in the range of people involved with the killing and the number of countries that the victims and perpetrators came from, as well as those killed. It is also the methodology, the build up and the complicity of those who knew but did not act that make it stand out in history. In fact perhaps the most important insight that this history can provide us with is the Edmund Burke quote: “All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men (and women) to do nothing”.
When the soldiers entered into Auschwitz 80 years ago they saw the damage that can be done when good people, or just ordinary people, do nothing to stop it. In the years of growing state-ordained antisemitism and racism in Germany and its satellite countries, the nations around it did nothing to counter that hatred. When the legislation decitizenizing Jews and others was introduced, the good people of Germany did little to prevent it – in fact its lawyers enforced the new rules of hatred. When that hatred escalated to round-ups, imprisonment, removal and murder it was practically too late. If the history of that time teaches those in the present anything it is that inaction is as dangerous as action itself.
For 2025 the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day is ‘For a Better Future’ – a glorious idea. To make that idea a reality and to really learn from the past a key lesson has to be – do not wait for someone else to stop hatred, or to not spread lies and denigrate people; it is the responsibly of everyone to uphold diversity and respect others. After 80 years people need to work together for ‘a Better Future’.
Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture 2025:
Mapping uncertainty: retracing trajectories of young survivors in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust
Free online lecture by Dr Antoine Burgard
3 February 2025, 5pm
As Allied Forces began their advance further into Europe 80 years ago they began to uncover places of unimaginable horror. They had known about the Concentration Camps and the Labour Camps before the war but the discovery of how those places had been used as killing centres was only surpassed when the Death Camps were discovered and the testimony of those that survived and witnessed was heard. To commemorate the victims of Nazism and ensure that the history of that period is not forgotten we are hosting a free online talk by a leading academic working in this field.
Free webinar: Enrichment resources for Holocaust Education
In partnership with Generation 2 Generation and Northern Holocaust Education Group
Thursday 9 January, 4pm–5pm
Join this free webinar for teachers of Years 6 to 13 to learn about the work of two Holocaust Education charities, Generation 2 Generation (G2G) and Northern Holocaust Education Group (NHEG), which provide accredited speakers to schools and other organisations across the UK throughout the year. G2G and NHEG speakers share their own families’ Holocaust/Nazi persecution stories and experiences using eyewitness testimony.