23/01/2023
Holocaust Memorial Day falls this year on Friday, 27th January. The date is now a formal observation of the British government and commemorates the attempt by the fascist government of Germany after 1941 to murder the entire Jewish population of Europe. They killed over six million Jews. The official position of the Board of Jewish Deputies is that only Jewish people can be said to have experienced the holocaust, or Shoah as it is known in the Hebrew language. However, they acknowledge that grave human rights violations were also committed against other groups. Disabled people, LGBT people, particularly gay and bi men, mentally ill people, people with neurological disabilities, Sinti and Roma gypsy people, Slavs, socialists and social democrats, political and religious dissenters were all targetted during the German Nazi state’s reign of terror across Europe. The late gay writer Paul Monette stressed the fact that the Nazi state’s first target on assuming power in 1933 was the gay library of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. From there they launched their pogroms against other groups. The website of the Holocaust Memorial Day trust in Britain says “An estimated 10-15,000 men who were accused of homosexuality were deported to concentration camps. Most died in the camps, often from exhaustion. Many were castrated and some subjected to gruesome medical experiments. Collective murder actions were undertaken against gay detainees, exterminating hundreds at a time.” Holocaust Memorial Day is marked on 27th January each year because it is the anniversary of the liberation and closure of the most notorious death camp operated by the Nazis in 1945. By that time, the Allied powers had decided that Nazism was an aberrant, evil regime and that Germany should be forced to total and utter surrender. That came on 8th May 1945, ending the Second World War in Europe and finishing the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy. To learn more about this terrible period in European history, visit our website for a link to the Holocaust Memorial Day website.
