The Holocaust is characterized by the fact that apparatus to kill human beings was systematically designed, assembled and utilized on an industrial scale. The precise number of victims will never be known, but estimates place the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis at around 6 million, with the annihilation of other minority groups totalling up to 5 million more lives.
Each of these millions of people was somebody’s son or daughter; an individual with his or her own unique life and personality. Their shared fate is routinely summarized by statistics, but the stories of each person murdered by the Nazi regime because they were considered racially or culturally inferior must never be enveloped within these figures, significant though the numbers are.
As the world came to realize the full scale of the devastation wrought by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, calls for justice abounded. The Nuremberg Trials were endorsed by the United Nations and became the first international war crimes trials, with prosecutors from Britain, America, the Soviet Union and France. Between November 1945 and October 1946, twenty-one Nazis were tried on charges of war crimes, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and conspiracy to commit these crimes. While the Nuremberg Trials set a precedent for trying future war criminals, only a minority of the Nazis involved in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ were ever prosecuted, as many (including Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Mengele) either committed suicide or evaded capture.
As the twenty-first century progresses, the eyewitness generation of the Nazi atrocities is almost gone. Survivors still appear at events that mark national days of Holocaust remembrance, but their numbers are dwindling. Soon only their testimonies will remain.
In spite of survivors’ stories, monuments to the dead, education programmes and physical evidence of the Holocaust, there are still those who deny that millions of innocent people were methodically, purposefully annihilated. As the final generation who were witness and subject to Nazi persecution passes, it becomes ever more crucial that the appalling truth is neither forgotten nor denied.