Never again: why we must always remember the Holocaust
26 January 2025
On this day, January 27, in 1945, the Red Army arrived at Auschwitz. Its horrors shocked even those battle-hardened troops, many of them veterans of Stalingrad. Auschwitz was the darkest moment of the 20th century, perhaps of world history.

It was the epitome of the Nazi Holocaust, which involved the state-organised murder of six million Jews, over one million Roma, and mass atrocities towards a further seven million civilians.
The Holocaust evokes for most people the ultimate in inhumanity, hence the outrage and revulsion towards Holocaust distorters, deniers and modern-day fascists. They insult the memory of survivors and other eyewitnesses who are the spokespersons of those millions without voice, who collectively tell us a story of systematic and ongoing brutality. The Holocaust must be remembered.
Firstly, the Holocaust demonstrates how genocide was committed as a “normal” routine. Holocaust scholar Hannah Arendt referred to it as the ‘banality of evil’, planned and carried out by ordinary people, like us. Secondly, the Holocaust demonstrates how a technologically advanced country used its scientific and industrial innovations for the mass extermination of people. Historian and author Zygmunt Baumann argues that the decisive factor that made the mass murders possible was not only Nazi racial policy per se but modernity itself.
These two points were cemented by bureaucratic planning by the SS, the army, the industrialists, and the civil servants. This is one of the most frightening aspects of the event: the planning and execution of the Holocaust resembled normal industrial activity. As one camp commander of Auschwitz commented it was "murder by assembly line".
Although the Jews and Roma were the main targets of the genocide, the Holocaust was a genocidal crime against all humanity. The German philosopher Theodore Adorno wrote that "the main aim of education is that there should never be another Auschwitz". That is why programmes such as Vision Schools Scotland designed to support Holocaust education in schools is so important.
The events in Israel and Gaza should not stop Holocaust education, although some teachers fear it quickly leads to discussions about events there. Yet, paradoxically, these events make discussing the Holocaust more important and teachers need to use these "teachable moments" to have a rational and informed discussion about Gaza, the ceasefire, the future of the area. And this needs to be done without without the dangerous bandying about of critiques of Israel and indeed Zionism as antisemitic.
Whilst the key ideological driver of the Holocaust was antisemitism there is a danger of antisemitism today being trivialised by an argument that labels everything anti-Israel or anti-Zionist as being antisemitic. If everyone is antisemitic, no one is antisemitic. It lets the Holocaust deniers and distorters, those who claim that the Holocaust was not so terrible, off the hook.
Keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive will not by itself stop the rise of fascism in the 21st Century but it does make today’s Nazis’ job harder; remembering the Holocaust and commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day, perhaps particularly in schools, can contribute to marginalising them.
(Henry Maitles is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of the West of Scotland)