By Henry Maitles

ON this day in 1945 the Russian army arrived at Auschwitz. What they found there shocked these battle-hardened troops – medical experiments, mass murder, starvation, slave labour, gas chambers, disease, horror. In the Holocaust, the Nazis in Germany and their allies systematically killed six million Jews, 500,000 Roma and five million other "sub humans" in an orchestrated campaign of racism, slavery and genocide. It can be tempting 77 years on to want to forget what happened. That is understandable but wrong.

First, the Holocaust evokes for most people the ultimate in inhumanity, and is indeed, as a BBC series called it, "a warning from history". The Nazis were the barbaric product of the economic and political crisis in Germany between the wars and the Holocaust was a product of their racist world outlook, which argued that the Jews were the cause of Germany’s ills. Keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive will not by itself stop the rise of racism and fascism, but the revulsion of most people to the events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s makes it much harder for modern-day fascists and racist polices to win support.

Secondly, the programme of genocide was developed in stages, each with its own unique barbarities. However, it was not just the scale and savagery of the slaughter – there had been state-sponsored mass murder and genocide before the Holocaust – but also the thoroughly industrial and technological nature of the planning and implementation, that makes the Holocaust such an event. One Auschwitz commandant described the camp as "murder by assembly line", as the most advanced industrial methods of a vast military economy were put to the mass murder of civilians. The modernist, industrial capitalist nature of the Holocaust can be seen by the SS, the army, the industrialists and the civil servants calmly planning the Holocaust at Wannsee in January 1942, through the bureaucratised and efficient train system, to huge research and development into efficient gas for the ovens. The country’s best engineering firms competed for the contracts to build the most efficient crematoria and "healthy" Jews were not exterminated immediately but, particularly in times of labour shortage, were worked to death. This is one of the most frightening lessons for us: the planning and execution of the Holocaust resembled normal industrial activity.

Thirdly, the Holocaust reminds us of the importance of human rights. When the racists talk about repatriation of black people, it smacks to many as being the Nazis' "resettlement" policy, the first step on the road to Auschwitz. Indeed, when Government here seeks to create a hostile environment towards refugees and asylum seekers by the Nationality and Borders Bill, we need to remember the immigration controls towards fleeing Jews in the 1930s. Britain did take some child refugees, but hundreds of Jews were sent back from Britain to Germany because they didn’t have the correct paperwork. Exactly the same reasoning as hostility to the boat people.

This is why the Holocaust has to be remembered. "Never again" has to be made a reality.

Henry Maitles is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of the West of Scotland