Shoah 101: International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Heydrich convened a conference on January 20, 1942, when 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials met at a palatial villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” That was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. It is said that at some still undetermined time in 1941, Adolf Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder, although his name does not appear on any relevant documents.

The 15 participants at the infamous Wannsee Conference were:

Representing the agencies of the state were:

The goal of the conference was to disclose to the participants that Adolf Hitler himself had tasked Heydrich and the RSHA with coordinating the operation. It was not to deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken but to discuss the implementation of a policy decision that had already been made at the highest level of the Nazi regime.

It was Soviet troops under the command of Vasily Petrenko who liberated Auschwitz, where they found more than 7,000 remaining prisoners, mostly ill and dying. Petrenko was subsequently promoted to the rank of general and died in 2003 at the age of 91. When he was honored at a Jewish event in London on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, he told me how proud he was that his actions are remembered and that he hoped the Holocaust would never be forgotten.

“Today on January 27, we remember all the victims of the Holocaust, including those in the Auschwitz concentration camp, which I liberated,” he said in Russian. “In this country [England], everybody remembers the Holocaust and this memorial day is a good example for my country too. Best wishes to the Jewish community!”

Auschwitz-Birkenau serves as the paradigm for all the camps. According to statistics by the German Ministry of Justice, about 1,200 camps and sub-camps were run in countries occupied by Nazi Germany, while the Jewish Virtual Library estimates that the number of Nazi camps was closer to 15,000 in all occupied Europe.

The sub-camps were locations where, for instance, underground tunnels were dug like the factory for the V1 and V2 rockets. Jewish slave laborers were used until they were too weak and died. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist, was in charge. After World War II, he was arrested as a war criminal but instead of sitting on the benches at the Nuremberg trials, he was shipped to the US where he was later honored as a pioneer of American space rockets. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975 two years before he died at the age of 65.