THE Holocaust, the attempted genocide of Jews and Sinti and the associated murder of other "sub-humans" with its 12 million victims was the most brutal act of the 20th century.

Even the battle-hardened Russian troops who liberated Auschwitz were shocked at what they found – medical experiments, mass murder, starvation, slave labour, gas chambers, crematoria, disease, horror. The Holocaust evokes for most people the ultimate in inhumanity, with its legacy of the writings and memory of survivors and other eye witnesses, the spokespersons for those millions without voice. They tell us a story of systematic and ongoing brutality.

However, it was not just the scale and savagery of the slaughter, but rather the thoroughly capitalist nature of the Holocaust both in its planning and implementation that makes the Holocaust such an event. One Auschwitz officer even described the camp as "murder by assembly line", as the most advanced industrial methods of a vast military economy were put to genocide.

The planning of the Holocaust at Wannsee in January 1942, the train system, the research and development into efficient gas for the ovens, the country’s best engineering firms competing for the contract to build the most efficient crematoria, the fact that "healthy" Jews were not exterminated immediately but, particularly in times of labour shortage, were worked to death as slave labour, resembled normal industrial capitalist activity, as modern industrial efficiency merged with the Nazi racist antisemitic world outlook.

Often, the genocide could appear irrational or illogical as industrial managers using slave labour complained of how wasteful it was to constantly have to train up new labour as the system ensured that Jewish slave labour did not live too long.

Also, on occasion the transport of Jews could seem to go counter to the war effort; on D-Day itself, June 6,1944, the Allied invasion of France, a main concern of German High Command was the transport of a few hundred Greek Jews to Auschwitz. Yet, as defeats occurred on all fronts and it became clear that the war was going to be lost, the one thing holding the Nazi cadre together was the belief that as they went down they would take millions of Jews with them.

Finally, we should never forget those who tried to resist: the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, those who destroyed a crematorium at Auschwitz and countless other heroism, including the three million Germans who passed through the concentration prisons for aspects of opposition to Nazism.

In the light of harsh refugee policy across Europe, we need to remember that in the 1930s virtually every country put up immigration controls and although Britain did take some child refugees, hundreds of Jewish asylum seeking adults who arrived here were sent back to the Nazis because they did not have the correct papers.

The insistence on papers by European governments and our Nationality and Borders Act is chillingly reminiscent. As neo-fascists gain electoral success in some parts of Europe we need to remember the main lesson of Holocaust remembrance – Never Again.

Henry Maitles is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of the West of Scotland. Holocaust remembrance events are taking place throughout this week.