The Holocaust Memorial Bill returns to Parliament for its report stage in the House of Lords today. The legislation marks the end point in a – so far – eleven-year process that began when David Cameron set up a commission in 2014 to consider what Britain should do to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and ensure its lessons are never forgotten.
The commission recommended building a memorial and learning centre, with a site chosen next to Parliament, in Victoria Tower Gardens. The proposal has been deeply controversial, both because of the site – which Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terror laws, described as a ‘self-evident terrorism risk’ – and, even more so, because of the likely content of the learning centre.
We can only properly understand the lessons of the Holocaust if we acknowledge why it was unique
As usual, there are a host of amendments to the Bill which may be considered today. But one, proposed by Baroness Deech, Lord Strathcarron and Lord Verdirame, leaps off the order paper: ‘The sole purpose of any learning centre must be the provision of education about the genocide of the Jews and anti-Semitism.’ This might seem a pointless amendment. Why, one might ask, does it need to be spelt out that the purpose of a Holocaust learning centre is to educate about the genocide of the Jews and anti-Semitism?
But the need for the amendment goes to the heart of what has been happening to Holocaust education and remembrance in recent decades: a concerted, deliberate and increasingly successful attempt to deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust and to treat it as just another crime, rather than as the most thoroughgoing and explicit demonstration of humanity’s capacity for evil.
There have been other horrific crimes, of course. The scale of the Holodomor (the Ukrainian word for ‘death by hunger’) is unfathomable: Stalin was responsible for the death of four million Ukrainians. Estimates of the deaths from Mao’s Great Chinese Famine go up to 55 million. But as Churchill put it: ‘The Final Solution is probably the greatest, most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.’
This is not about some contest of suffering in which the Jews are declared the winner. The critical point is that we can only properly understand the lessons of the Holocaust if we acknowledge why it was indeed unique. It is essential that the Peers who vote today (and, later, MPs when the Bill returns to the Commons) understand this.
In this context, Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim (himself a survivor) outlined four characteristics which explain why the Holocaust was different from other examples of mass murder and should not be considered alongside them as if they are all variations on the theme of human evil.
First, simply being born Jewish was enough to demand one’s extermination, with as wide a definition as possible to ensure no trace of Judaism would be left. Secondly, the sole purpose of the Final Solution was to exterminate the Jews. Other genocides have targeted groups or races but have not been intended to remove every living trace of them.
Thirdly, there was no economic, political or territorial goal which the Final Solution was designed to leverage. The Final Solution was its own purpose. It was not part of the Third Reich’s expansionist aims but was nonetheless fundamental to its purpose. For the Nazis, it was thus no less important to use resources to exterminate the Jews than to fight the Allied powers.
And fourthly, the Holocaust was not carried out only by committed ideologues or soldiers but by ordinary Germans – what Fackenheim called ‘ordinary job holders with an extraordinary job’. Doctors, architects, writers and other civilised Germans tortured and murdered Jews while listening to Bach and Wagner, testing to see what levels of pain could be survived.
But the uniqueness of the Holocaust is being deliberately diluted – not least in the field of Holocaust Studies and remembrance. Most recently and notoriously, the official invitation to January’s Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony sent out by the organiser, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT), included a reference to ‘devastating violence against Palestinians in Gaza’ as a result of Israel’s war against Hamas, as if this was another genocide, to use the word that is now the currency of anti-Zionists and anti-Semites to describe civilian casualties in a war provoked by a terror organisation. As Baroness Deech – one of the sponsors of the Lords amendment – put it at the time:
The Holocaust is being used to tell a nationalist or politically convenient story. It was shocking and insensitive to see how far HMDT has gone along that road. It is time for the Jewish community to reclaim the memory of our unique tragedy and explain its antisemitic roots our way.
The HMDT apologised and set up a review into the circumstances surrounding the invite. The review concluded that a major factor behind the inclusion of Gaza in the invite was that HMDT’s staff were overworked, ‘in part due to its own success in raising the profile of Holocaust Memorial Day’ – as if a basic lack of understanding of the uniqueness of the Holocaust among staff at an organisation promoting Holocaust remembrance, and the grotesque inappropriateness of linking it to Gaza, could be explained by tiredness.
The reality is that HMDT typifies a general pattern. On the front page of its site, HMDT invites readers to ‘learn about the Holocaust and genocides’. It continues:
We remember the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust. We also commemorate the millions more people murdered through the Nazi persecution of other groups and in the more recent genocides recognised by the UK government, and the genocide in Darfur.
Last year, the HMDT’s board of trustees discussed focusing solely on the Holocaust and rejected the idea, but their discussion was futile because it is not within their power to make this change. The HMDT was set up by the government in 2005 and its remit is now to commemorate the ‘Holocaust and subsequent genocides’ – itself an example of the dilution of the uniqueness of the Holocaust in the very statutes of the body charged with Holocaust remembrance.
The establishment of the Holocaust memorial and learning centre opens up another front. The tide is very much with those who see its purpose as being to provide a general lesson in hatred and morality rather than focusing on the Holocaust itself. It has long been the aim of anti-Zionists and anti-Semites to remove the Holocaust from the Jews. We are now seeing Gaza being used for a deliberate inversion of the Holocaust, with the actual victims of a genocide themselves branded as the perpetrators of one – giving licence for the community of the good to hate the Jews.
Who is to say there will not soon be a push to create the ultimate dissociation of the Jews from the Holocaust, with the Holocaust memorial and learning centre ‘educating’ people in the genocide committed by Israel?
If the memorial is to be a genuine Holocaust memorial, the amendment proposed by Baroness Deech, Lord Strathcarron and Lord Verdirame should be incorporated in the Bill.
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