by Ray Cook

Created on: February 19, 2008   Last Updated: March 15, 2010

As the Holocaust generation ages and the number of survivors dwindles, slowly but inevitably, we are losing first hand witnesses and victims of the Nazi genocide.

There are many reasons why it would be a sad and even dangerous for future generations to forget the Holocaust. Firstly, this remains the greatest crime in human history; not because of the numbers killed, crimes do not just rely on statistics to evaluate their enormity, but because of who committed the crimes, the methods used, the motivation and the fact that the reasons the Nazis and their supporters used for killing Jews still exist today in a new form of anti-Semitism, namely Islamic Jew-hatred which shows many of the characteristics of Nazi Jew-hatred but, as yet, without the power to achieve its stated aims.

Let us look at who perpetrated the crime. The Nazis came to power by stealth and political manipulation. They eliminated their political opponents and immediately began a series of measures against their own citizens who happened to be Jewish which led ultimately to the deaths of 6 million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill and political opponents, especially Communists. All this happened in one of the most advanced, cultured and sophisticated countries in the world: Germany. Yet beneath the veneer of civilization lurked an age-old hatred of the supposed Christ-killers, the ancient scapegoat for all the world's ills: the Jew. And thus a country like Germany could spawn a medieval blood-lust based on ignorance, prejudice and lies. So let us not forget that if Germany with all its art, culture, science and modernity could lapse into a medieval mindset, then this can happen anywhere in the world, and it has only recently reoccurred albeit on a much smaller scale, in Bosnia where Christian Serbs murdered without mercy thousands of Muslims whilst the world looked on helplessly. Once again Europe was mired by a tribal, atavistic hatred based on centuries old prejudices which came to the surface to destroy communities and turn neighbors into murderers, neighbors who had lived in peace for decades.

Secondly the methods employed by the Nazis are without parallel in history. The Nazis took advantage of the vulnerability of Europe's Jews, exposed by Nazi conquests and corrupt puppet regimes willing to do the bidding of their Nazi mentors. There was created across almost the whole of Europe West of the Urals a network of ghettos, death camps and labor camps connected

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