Holocaust Memorial Day 2012

Debate between Mike Gapes and Lord Barwell

Thursday 19th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hancock. On 27 January—the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—the UK will, for the 12th time, celebrate Holocaust memorial day. I am very grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate, which has become something of an annual tradition in Parliament in recent years. I am also grateful to all Members who have attended today.

With your indulgence, Mr Hancock, I shall start with an explanation. When I originally requested this debate, I was a lowly Back Bencher. Subsequently, I was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark). I checked with the Backbench Business Committee whether that was a problem, and it said no. However, the Government have chosen a Minister from my Department to respond to the debate, so there is a technical issue. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) and to my Secretary of State, who have both agreed that, because the subject is wholly apolitical, there is no issue with me initiating the debate. I wanted to put that on the record from the start.

As all hon. Members will know, the holocaust was the systematic state-sponsored murder on an industrial scale of approximately 6 million of Europe’s pre-war Jewish population of 9 million by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. One million of those murdered were children. Of course, there were many other victims of the Nazi regime. In addition to those killed on the battlefield or by the bombing of civilian areas, millions of prisoners of war and civilians were brought to Germany to act as slave labour, and Romani were also killed.

There has been a great deal of historical debate about whether the holocaust is unique. Genocides have occurred before and, regrettably, they have occurred since. However, it seems that the holocaust is unique in the sense that it involved a modern industrial state turning all the energies of its bureaucracy towards the extermination of a single group of people, and it is entirely right that we commemorate that and learn the appropriate lessons.

In opening the debate, my job is briefly to set out the facts of what happened. Nazi ideology was based on a pseudoscientific racism that saw Jews as a race that was in mortal combat with the Aryan race for world domination. However long their families had lived in Germany, as far as the Nazis were concerned, Jews were aliens who could never be part of the community. The persecution of Jewish people began as soon as Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933. That year, a series of laws were passed that excluded Jews from key areas of public life, the civil service, medicine and agriculture. In 1935, the Nuremberg laws were passed, making it illegal for a Jew to marry or have sex with an Aryan, and stripping Jews of German citizenship. Violence against Jewish people and against Jewish property escalated, with Kristallnacht on 9 and 10 November 1938 being the most infamous example.

At that point, the Nazis’ plan was to deport forcibly all Jews from Germany and to try to convince the Governments of the United Kingdom and France to accept deported Jews to their colonies. However, it was the outbreak of the second world war that led to the holocaust, both because it put a much larger proportion of Europe’s Jewish population at the Nazis’ mercy and because it gave cover to the ultimate fulfilment of their racist ideology.

Western Poland—annexed-occupied by Germany in September 1939—contained about 2 million Jewish people before the war. Initially, they were forcibly relocated to ghettos. Conditions were appalling: for example, 30% of Warsaw’s population was forced to live in just 2.4% of the city. The ghettos were deliberately located in cities that were also railway junctions, so that, in Heydrich’s chilling words, “future measures can be accomplished more easily”.

The invasion of Russia in 1941 escalated the atrocities even further. The invading army was followed by four SS Einsatzgruppen, which were essentially extermination squads. At his trial at Nuremberg, the commander of Einsatzgruppe D, Otto Ohlendorf, described their work:

“The Einsatz unit would enter a village or town and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of ‘resettlement.’ They were requested to hand over their valuables and shortly before execution to surrender their outer clothing. They were transported to the place of execution…immediately. In this way it was attempted to keep the span of time from the moment in which the victims knew what was about to happen…until the time of their actual execution as short as possible. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, by firing squads in a military manner and the corpses thrown into the ditch. I never permitted the shooting by individuals, but ordered that several of the men should shoot at the same time to avoid direct personal responsibility.”

It is estimated that more than 700,000 Jewish people were killed in that way.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. He has referred to what happened when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Is he aware that there are many people who, at the end of world war two, fled the Soviet Union and got false identities in other countries? Is it not important that we continue to make sure that those people, wherever they are and however old they are, pay for the crimes they carried out?

[Gavin Barwell]

That point is extremely helpful, because the end of that quote states:

“to avoid direct personal responsibility.”

One of the responses to what happened must be to ensure that everyone, wherever possible, is made to take responsibility for what they did.

On 20 January 1942, Heydrich convened a meeting to discuss

“the final solution of the Jewish question”.

At that meeting, figures were given for each country, including the United Kingdom, countries under German occupation, neutral countries and belligerents that Germany had not yet conquered. The Jewish population of Europe was to be deported to the east and either used as slave labour in concentration camps—the Germans had a phrase for that that translates as “destruction through work”—or killed in the gas chambers of new extermination camps. It is estimated that 1 million died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 870,000 at Treblinka, 600,000 at Belzec, 360,000 at Majdanek, 320,000 at Chelmno and 250,000 at Sobibor.

I want briefly to touch on the emotional reactions of those who liberated the various camps, both the concentration camps and the extermination camps. For time reasons, I shall quote just three people. First, I shall quote America’s legendary broadcaster, Ed Murrow, who was with the US Third Army when it liberated the concentration camp of Buchenwald. He said:

“I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words”.

A. R. Horwell was a German Jew serving as a doctor in the British Army who wrote to his wife following the liberation of Bergen-Belsen about how he was deeply moved to be part of a group

“where there is no sign of discrimination, and where the Jewish padres were the most honoured guests. It made me realise it again: it was worthwhile to be in this war, it is an honour and distinction to wear this uniform...I must restrain myself, for fear to become too emotional. I can’t help it, darling; it is a great thing to be back here after all these years—after all these immense sufferings inflicted upon us and our people, to be here with the victorious army...I am very happy tonight and sad at the same time. Happy, because I have survived, one of the few to see this day, and sad, because I am one of the few—so few”.