HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2026

This year Tuesday 27 January 2026 is Holocaust Memorial Day, which is commemorated each year on the 27th January because this is the day ( some 81 years ago this year ) when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.  

Now perhaps more than ever, we need to take time to remember the millions of people who have been murdered or whose lives have been changed beyond recognition during the Holocaust, and other more recent horrors in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Syria and during the war in the Ukraine.

 

It is important that we remember the earlier genocides that inflicted on the Armenians and the Ukrainians. It is only right and proper that we honour the survivors and continue to challenge ourselves to use the lessons of their experience to inform our lives today.

 

By the end of the Holocaust, six million Jewish men, women and children had perished in ghettos, mass-shootings, in concentration camps and extermination camps along with millions of other minorities. As Allied troops made progress across Nazi-occupied Europe, they began to uncover concentration and extermination camps and the remains of camps. 

 

The camp of Majdanek in Poland was the first to be liberated, in summer 1944. Faced with defeat and advancing Allied armies Nazi forces burnt the crematoria and the mass graves in attempts to hide the crimes that they had committed. The Operation Reinhardt camps of Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka were dismantled by the Nazis from 1943, and Auschwitz itself was evacuated in late 1944. 

 

The surviving prisoners, weak from starvation and ill-treatment, and poorly clothed against elements were forced to walk into the interior of Germany, away from the Allied armies, many thousands died on the enforced ‘death marches’. When Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27^th January 1945,  they found several thousand emaciated survivors, and the smouldering remains of the gas chambers and crematoria. 

 

In the following months, the Soviets liberated Stutthof, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck. In the west, US troops liberated Buchenwald in April 1945, followed by Flossenburg, Dachau and Mauthausen. British Troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15^th April 1945. It is estimated there were over 60,000 prisoners in Belsen by April 1945. Approximately 35,000 prisoners died of typhus, malnutrition and starvation in the first few months of 1945.

 

Back in 1999, Jewish leaders, were once asked  Tony Blair (the then UK prime minister) whether we needed Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain? Jonathan Sacks (the then former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth for 22 years, until 2013) noted that that, when it was proposed that the UK have a Holocaust Memorial Day, Blair wanted the opinion of British Jewish leaders. They explained that they did not need a specific day to remember as Jews.

 

When it comes to remembrance Jewish people already had Yom ha-Shoa, their own memorial day, which falls soon after Passover in the Jewish calendar. Every Jew literally (or figuratively) lost family in the Holocaust. For Jews, Yom ha-Shoa is a grief observed. 

The Jewish leaders have repeatedly said that the Holocaust was not just a crime against Jews and other victims – Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political opponents of the Nazi’s among them; it was an assault on all of humanity.  

A recorded rise in antisemitism has been described as the canary in the coal mine - it is a warning sign that society’s principles are weakening - with society prepared to scapegoat, to dehumanise, to exclude. As has been said elsewhere, what begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews. 

The Nazi’s murdered the disabled, the Roma, Gay men, political dissidents and anyone who did not fit their vision of racial purity. In Bosnia, the genocide targeted Muslims. In Rwanda, the Tutsis. There is a disturbing pattern to this. 

First you convince people that one group is less than human. Once that has been accomplished, the rest can follow with frightening rapidity. It is important not to take our society’s tolerance and decency for granted. 

As has been said previously by a survivor perhaps we need is an additional eleventh commandment along the lines of – Don’t be bystander!  

THE END OF ATLANTICISM

Actually if you think about the apparent American disengagement from Europe - and we put aside the histrionics from the current incumbent in DC - one interpretation of current events could be that US involvement outside of the Americas ( as defined by the Monroe doctrine ) is actually the aberration and non involvement outside of the Americas is actually the normal.

If you examine relatively recent history then the USA spent more time avoiding foreign entanglements than seeking them - this was certainly the case between  1801 - 1896 ( a period which saw foreign interference in the Americas with French involvement in Mexico and the supply of arms, supplies and ships by the UK and others between 1861 and 1868 ). 

From 1912 until 1916 the USA stayed out the first world war, the 1916 Presidential election ( between Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes ) took place against the background of the conflict raging in Europe and unrest in Mexico - with most Americans wanting to avoid any involvement. Woodrow Wilson won - using the slogans “He kept us out of the war” and “America First”. 

Wilson won the popular vote by 3.1% the lowest margin by any winning President between 1812 and 2004. The sinking of the Lusitania and other American merchant ships in the Atlantic and the return to unrestricted submarine warfare and the leaking of diplomatic cables which showed the German interference in Mexico and a promise to return Mexican territories that had been lost too the US in 1848 - finally led to the USA entering the war on the Allied side in April 1917.

For a President who had been elected to keep the USA out of the war, Wilson ended uo advocating hikes fourteen points, the independence of Poland and self determination for the peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the freedom of the seas and the establishment of a League of Nations to play a key role in the post war world. 

Wilson established the USA as one of the big four Allied powers, but a combination of events, including a badly demobilisation of US troops, discontent over the rise of power and influence of the Federal government and  political divisions over the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, and Wilsons refusal to compromise and his illness combined to see the rejection of the Treaty and led, with election of a Republican President led to non participation in the League. 

President Roosevelt long associated with the new deal and his leadership of America during the Second World War, was re-elected for the third time in November 1940 - with a very public commitment to not getting involved in the Second World War. 

This position was particularly articulated during the run up to the November 1940 Presidential election. At the Democratic Concession, the Democratic platform adopted in Chicago, in 1940, stated: “We will not participate in foreign wars, and we will not send our army, naval or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of attack.”

And again on October 30, 1940, in Boston, Mass., the President said: “And while I am talking to you, mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again, and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars. They are going into training to form a force so strong that, by its very existence, it will keep the threat of war far away from our shores. The purpose of our defense is defense.”

Once America was attacked everything changed and the American’s pulled together and worked and home and overseas to win both the military and production battles. Even Charles Lindbergh ( an arch isolationist ) supported the war and passed his aviation knowledge and skills to aviators in the South Pacific. 

Once the war in Europe and Asia was over ( at least for the Americans ) they rapidly disbanded the vast armed forces they had created, and converted many of their factories back to peace time production. One of the long term consequences of the new deal and the war years was a massive expansion of the Federal government and its agencies. 

In 1948 Presidential election between Truman and Dewey was an election that delivered a real change in American policy - not due to the result but more down to what followed.  Dewey was an ally of Senator Taft ( an isolationist ) - while Dewey and Taft had put their shoulders to the wheel when the USA was attacked, they did not necessarily seek a wider role in the world for the USA outside of the Americas once the war was over. 

The 1948 Presidential election set the scene for a real change in American policy and commitment, when Truman unexpectedly beat Dewey which was significant shock in itself. What followed rapidly was the Korean War, the Berlin Blockade, the marshal plan and the establishment of NATO ( to defend democracy in Western Europe ) along with a US commitment to role in the wider world followed.  

"It must be a policy of the United States," President Harry Truman announced, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure." This in essence became the Truman Doctrine - the idea that helping to defend democracy abroad was vital to US national interests.

It is easy to see this as the moment that leadership of the western world passed from an exhausted Britain to the United States. Perhaps more accurately this was the moment that revealed that it already happened. The USA previously traditionally isolationist and safely sheltered by two vast oceans, emerged from the Second World War as the actual rather than default leader of the free world. 

America projected its power around the globe, it spent the post-war decades remaking much of the world in its own image. The boomer generation grew up in a world that looked, sounded and behaved more like the United States than ever had previously as the USA became the western world's cultural, economic and military leader.

There were moments when US resolve weakened, the traumatic Vietnam war, which focused American interests away form Europe and the instability in the Middle East where protecting American oil interests was a prime motivator, still failed to dent the US commitments to a wider world. 

Yet for a few years after the end of the Vietnam war, there was a period of drift which ended the USA under President Reagan after 1980 rearmed and took a much are aggressive stance against the Soviet Union. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the Cold War reignited and the deployment of the Cruise and Pershing missile systems alarmed Europeans and the Soviet Union upped the anti even more. 

The missiles like the the Soviet SS20’s were perceived as tactical strike weapons rather than weapons of deterrence. There were worries that the Americans and the Soviets could fight a limited nuclear war in Europe as tensions between the Americans and the Soviets got worse. 

In fairness, the Americans never quite realised how alarmed the Soviets were until informed by spies and defectors - armed with that knowledge Reagan moved to tone down the rhetoric, and started talking seriously to the Soviets about disarmament and within a few arms serious reductions in nuclear weapons followed. 

During the Clinton years there was more of a focus on the Pacific and some domestic option to expanding NATO eastwards with the addition of former Warsaw pact members - during various votes on the House - there was some vigorous opposition.One of the founders of a popular ice cream company funded posters opposing NATO expansion - the vote went through and some years later some of the same people actively backed Donald Trump in 2016. 

President Trump’s election in 2016 was perhaps a long time coming, but, not much changed save for the pullout from Afghanistan, and the warnings to NATO members about paying their fare share towards collective defence - this sentiment has also been uttered by previous Presidents both Democratic and Republican.

President Biden’s term of office briefly put the political rise of isolationism of hold in the wider world, President Trump’s victory in the 2024 Presidential election, on a campaign largely focused on pocketbook issues. This time round as far a foreign policy goes President Trump hit the ground running, pulling support from the Ukraine and starting to pull rug out from under Europe and reseting the relationship between the USA and Russia. 

Very public spats with Canada and Mexico and threats of tariffs have followed. Since President Trumps inauguration the US isolationists dislike of Europe has been very manifest. The isolationists have little interests beyond commercial benefits for the USA outside of the Americas and no love of any foreign entanglements in a modern day version of the Monroe Doctrine.

This can be interpreted as a reset of American foreign policy to its old pre 1941 position, something that understandably has the many of the Europeans on the mainland are very worried, as are the Anglo-Brit elite, as one of the main pillars of geo politics since 1948 - the American commitment to Europe is effectively gone - and any relationship ( special or otherwise ) with the US is history. And for the first time since October 1941 the Anglo-Brit elite are potentially well and truly on their own…

STANDING WITH UKRAINE

Today is the 31st anniversary of the Ukraine’s independence from the former Soviet Union, an empire by any other name. The independence of Ukraine followed the collapse of the Soviet Union following the hardliners failed coup attempt on 24th August 1991. 

The Ukrainian’s with their land split between Imperial Russia and Austria-Hungry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stood little chance, of achieving statehood or independence. The chaotic end of the First World War saw at one point at least two Ukrainian governments in existence, during the existence of the Soviet Union the possibilities of Ukrainian becoming independent were minimal. 

The horrors of the famine, collectivisation, and the Second World War inflicted horrendous casualties on Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The emergence of the Soviet Union, under Stalin, emerging as one of the worlds two new post war superpowers and the start of the Cold War confrontation effectively locked the Ukraine into the USSR. 

For all the fiction that surrounded the myth that that the Soviet Union was a socialist republican paradise it was and behaved liked an Empire, with the Russians on top and the Ukrainians somewhat lower in the pecking order, not at the bottom of the heap, but, not quite at the top. 

The collapse of the coup attempt by communist hardliners 24th August 1991 was the final straw that broke the camels back, partially free elections in 1990 had seriously weakened Communist control in the Baltic Republics, Georgia and Armenia. The Russian Federation under its newly elected President Boris Yeltsin reached out to take power. 

At the same time, on the 24th August 1991, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukraine passed a resolution calling for a national referendum on the independence of Ukraine from the Soviet Union. Russia effectively became independent and the USSR began to collapse.

The Ukrainian independence vote took place on December 1st 1991, worth 28,804,071 ( 93.3 p% ) voting for independence, and 2,427,554 ( 7.7% ) voting against independence ( with 670,117 invalid of blank votes. 31,891,742 electors ( 84% of the electorate voted ) out of an electorate of 37,885,555. 

Interestingly enough when you drill down through the votes by region in Lughansk on a 68% turnout 83.86% of the people voted for independence, in Donetsk on a 64% turnout 83.90% voted for independence. On December 2nd 1991 much of the rest of the world recognised the independence of the Ukraine. 

Achieving actual independence was only half of the struggle. The transition towards a non Soviet economy was economically and socially grim, eight years of recession followed independence. And just as the Ukraine emerged into more prosperous times in ended up being enveloped, along with everyone else in the banking crash of 2008 and its consequences. 

Aside from economic turmoil there has been a long struggle to create a stable representative non corrupt democratic state. The Euromaidan Revolution of February 2013 saw the overthrow of pro Russian oligarchs, within days Russian stoked unrest began in the Crimea and in Donetsk and Luhansk - and the rest as they say is history. 

Today is also the sixth monthly anniversary of the unprovoked Russian attack on the Ukraine. For years before the Russian attack the Ukrainian government had been asking for assistance and defensive weapons to protect their state people and their state from Russian attack, although to no avail. 

The Wests support moral and material to the Ukraine during the current war is vital and our support in every possible way is important. This is going to be a long war, and simply forcing the Ukraine to compromise its sovereignty and independence is completely unacceptable.