Holocaust Memorial Day

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I apologise to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) for missing the first minute of her speech. I was trying to get a transcript of the hearing yesterday at the Select Committee on the Holocaust Memorial Bill, when four of the witnesses were Joanna Millan, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Dr Martin Stern and Dr Lydia Tischler, each of whom is a holocaust survivor.

Some in the House will also have been present at the holocaust memorial commemoration when the holocaust candles were lit—five of them were lit; I was asked to stand in for someone who had had a transport difficulty; I did the one for those who had suffered at Darfur.

We have been given a good introduction to this debate with the moving speech we have just heard. I hope it will be possible to put on wider record the experience of the four people I have cited, who came as witnesses to the Committee having been produced by Baroness Ruth Deech, who herself talked about how her family had been destroyed in the Nazi holocaust.

We have rightly been reminded that our hands are not clean. It would have been possible for the state of Israel to have been created in the 1930s, and possibly 6 million people would have thus survived. Three quarters of the Jews in Europe died.

I have said in the past how much I welcomed the emphasis that the Holocaust Commission has put on education, which has been followed up by words from the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. I have said that I had had a vague idea that perhaps 10 of my grandfather’s extended family had died, but we now know that the real figure is more than 110 and possibly more than 120. That kind of education matters. I do not claim to have had the family experience that the right hon. Member for Barking has had, but I think that more of us will know and understand more if we have a personal connection of some kind.

I have spoken in the past about my first cousin once removed, George Woodwark, who was one of the Westminster medical students who thought they were going to help people suffering from malnutrition in the Netherlands, but were diverted to Bergen-Belsen, where they helped to save the lives of two thirds of those who were still breathing at the time of liberation.

On another occasion, we should have a further debate about the controversial proposals for a memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, but I do not want to disturb this debate by going into too much detail about that now. What I will say is that if people get the chance, they should go to the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum and, if possible, read a copy of the book “The Holocaust” produced two years ago by James Bulgin, which describes how things grew.

I will quote a paragraph from the book about Adolf Hitler:

“Hitler’s early years of adulthood were spent pursuing an unsuccessful career as an artist in Vienna. Service in the First World War changed his life, however, giving his aimless existence a new sense of purpose and direction. Radicalised by the shock of defeat, he became convinced that Jews had conspired to ensure Germany’s downfall. These ideas were first introduced to him by soldiers he was convalescing with after being injured during the war. After the war, he was sent to spy on a Nazi meeting, but became enraptured by the message of the movement—by 1921, he had become the leader of the Nazi Party. In 1923 Hitler led an ill-fated attempt to overthrow the government which became known as the Munich Putsch. He planned to take control of the Bavarian state government and then march on Berlin. The uprising was quickly suppressed and Hitler was arrested. He was sentenced to five years in prison for treason, but was released after just eight months.”

That was a decade before Hitler took his National Socialist party—the Nazi party—from doing pretty badly in the last elections in the 1920s to doing reasonably well in the proportional representation elections in 1933. The people who thought they had control of Germany thought they would make him Chancellor as a way of controlling him; they were wrong.

In any education associated with the holocaust—or whatever name people choose to call it, because “the holocaust” is a relatively recent name for the horrors, the terrors and the intended annihilation of a whole people—we need to understand that people can come up in the way that Adolf Hitler did. They may have gone to a meeting, found a small group, turned it into a more powerful one, recruited a private army and started marching around with the aim of taking control. If that sounds familiar from recent events in other countries, so be it.

We have to beware of private militias. We have to give the state a monopoly on resisting the potential of violence, so that it can resist by force those who are behaving dangerously badly. We have to ensure that message is not known just in this country, but in other countries as well.

When I first stood for election, there were about 40 countries around the world that had reasonably democratic political systems, in which people who lost elections accepted the fact they had lost. That number increased to about 80 or 90, while the number of countries in the world rose from about 190 to 210. We are now, I think, going backwards. More people may have a better standard of life, but I do not think they have a better standard of democracy.

The flexibility of people who are willing to use elections as a way of accepting defeat, not a way of guaranteeing victory, matters. We have to have a way of controlling, and if necessary confronting with force, those who would use force to subvert our country or any country, or would try to launch a genocidal attack on a whole group of people defined by their race or religion—or, for those who are Jewish, the overlap of the two.

When there was the attack on 7 October in Israel, on Israelis, someone wrote to me saying, “Why do they keep picking on us?” There are 16 million Jews around the world, but the number would probably be three times higher if it had not been for the holocaust. We have a responsibility to get better education about the holocaust going. We ought to ensure that people do not just get the chance to see an exhibition, but that in virtually all parts of their life, whether geography, history, current affairs or international relations, they understand how people rose to take control of their countries. People should be able take part in something that is different and an alternative.

I understand that I will not always get my way—within my own party, within Parliament, and within the country. I might not always be re-elected. It is important that we learn the lesson that democracy is about trying to achieve a good purpose but being willing to be defeated and to try again, without taking to the streets with guns or going into exile. Even more importantly, we have to ensure that people do not find themselves dead because of other people’s prejudices and very cruel behaviours.