By the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp #2 Holocaust deniers and twisters of the truth

In spite of the numerous eyewitness accounts to the horrendous events that took place during the Holocaust, many today still deny its very existence.

The loss of six million Jewish people in the Holocaust confirms that when anti-Semitism festers, the ultimate result can be catastrophic.
We should be aware what happened after 1918 and how there grew a hatred against certain groups of people, starting with Jews, then Roma, continued by the prosecution of Jehovah's Witnesses and all that  contradicted the way the government foresaw the best community to live in. All refuters or protestors had to be silenced, and because non of the onlookers dared to react it became quite easy to continue to deport people.

Today, as global anti-Semitism rises, we must go beyond solemn moments of remembrance and speak out against anti-Semitism (hatred toward the Jewish people and Israel) and anti-refugees as well as any hatred against other people or religious groups. After World War I many thought it would never again, but just a few years later in 1939 a new and even more horrible war was at the doorstep of Europe that was going to fall in pieces.

When Europe got to hear what Nazi Germans did to Jews, nobody wanted to believe it, at first.

Regarded as exaggeration and Polish war propaganda, a lot of the reports sent to different news agencies and governments were simply not believed

Despite “strong demands” by the Polish and Jewish resistance for Britain or the US to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz and other death camps,

 “the military’s attitude was: ‘We’ve got to concentrate on military targets, not on civilian things’,” 

said Davies, an authority on Polish history.

“One of the targets that the (British) military did bomb was a synthetic fuel factory near Auschwitz”

 in 1943-44, he added.

Although British warplanes flew over the death camp itself, incredibly, no orders were given to bomb it.

Professor Dariusz Stola, an expert on the history of Polish Jews, echoes this assessment.

“Military leaders didn’t like civilian politicians meddling in their business,”

he said.

For Allied military leaders, bombing Auschwitz, or its supply lines

 “was looking like a humanitarian operation and they didn’t want it,” 

said the former head of the Warsaw-based Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of all Nazi Germany’s death and concentration camps and the one where most people were killed. And it is the only one to have been preserved as it was when it was abandoned by the Germans fleeing the advancing Red Army.

Operated by the Nazis from 1940 until 1945, Auschwitz was part of a vast and brutal network of death and concentration camps across Europe set up as part of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” of genocide against an estimated 10 million European Jews.
Once Europe’s Jewish heartland, Poland saw 90 percent of its 3.3 million pre-war Jewish citizens killed under Nazi German occupation between 1939 and 1945.

Even after the liberation of the first camp by Russians, other camps had to be seen by Americans, to have more people to come to the  realization that the unseen horror could really have been something which had to overcome thousands of people.

We must never forget those who suffered during the Holocaust. For the sake of the Jewish People and all people everywhere, we must never forget what happened so that it will never happen again.

We should listen to the voices of the survivors of those inhuman detention camps and should see what is going on at the moment in Europe and the United States. Everywhere around us we can see politicians who want to be very popular and who do not mind twisting the truth or even to tell lies to enlarge their popularity.

Again people shall have to choose if they are going to stand by and be silent or if this time they shall react in time!

+

Preceding

By the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp #1 Finding a solution to a created problem

++

Find more about this terrible political and human offence: Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question):

1. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
2. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
3. Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
4. Is it really true that Anti-Semitism will never be tolerated? 
5. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking

By the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp #1 Finding a solution to a created problem

In a series of articles we can look back at an industrialized killing machine that took the lives of nearly 6,000 people a day. 75 years ago for those who were still (somewhat) alive on the 27th of January 1945, there was a liberation from the horror camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, but not from the atrocities they had to witness and the horror which would haunt them for the rest of their life.

Of the estimated 1.3 million people — at minimum — who were deported to the concentration, labour and extermination camp Auschwitz, between 1940 and 1945, at least 1.1 million were murdered, through mass exterminations, starvation, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.
Gross of the survivors still suffer the effects of the trauma they experienced during the Holocaust.

How the Nazi Killing Machines Developed

In the part of Europe which could not keep up to the agreements mad in Versailles after World War I fertile soil was created for economical and political unrest. Ideal to undermine the government was speaking along ideas the majority of the people had, giving certain people the fault or cause of all the misery.

Creating a scapegoat, the popular political figures had to make sure they could win more votes and as such knew they had to get away with the "problem" they had showed to the people. Best was also to create a pure people, done away with all what did not fit the picture of a good Arian soul.
Speeches creating hatred against one group of people, at first, took care lots of Germans started to believe that those who lived in big houses and had lots of shops, were the bad guys who had to be eliminated and their places given to the real Germanic race.

It took not many years before the lies about the Jews were accepted as a real truth to be handled. So people turned against the Jewish inhabitants and wanted them away. The Nazi government forced the Jews from their homes and herded them into railway cattle cars.

Initially, however, the Germans used killing groups called Einsatzgruppen (task forces) to round up and massacre entire Jewish communities.

Rivka Yosselevska, who testified at the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961, was one of a few who survived the Nazi massacre of 500 Zagrodzki ghetto Jews (near Pinsk in Belarus) in August 1942. Yosselevska lost her daughter, mother, father, and sister, as well as other relatives in the slaughter. She said her daughter had asked her when they we were lined up in the ghetto,

 “Mother, why did you make me wear the Shabbat dress; we are being taken to be shot.”

At the mass grave, she asked,

 “Mother, why are we waiting? Let us run!”

Yosselevska said,

 “Some of the young people tried to run, but they were caught immediately, and they were shot right there. It was difficult to hold on to the children. ... The suffering of the children was difficult; we all trudged along to come nearer to the place and to come nearer to the end of the torture of the children.”

Although Yosselevska was shot in the head, she lived. For three days, she lay among the dead. The farmer who found her, hid and fed her. He also helped her to join a group of Jews hiding in the forest where she managed to survive until the Soviet army arrived in 1944.

Eventually, the Nazis decided that shooting as a method of mass killing was too expensive and inefficient. It required killing to be done one bullet at a time. And it demoralized the troops.

The Wannsee Conference Decides the Final Solution

In 1942, Nazi Party officials met near Berlin at the Wannsee Conference to discuss the “Final Solution” for the destruction of European Jewry. There they coordinated the deportation of Europe’s Jews to extermination camps that were already operating or were under construction in German-occupied Poland.

As many as 11 million Jews were to be transported to these killing centres, including residents of countries not then under Nazi control, such as Ireland, Sweden, Turkey, and Great Britain.

They decided that the mass transportation of these populations would be accomplished by train.

The SS and the police coordinated with local auxiliaries or collaborators in occupied territories to round up the victims and transport them to the death centres. In charge of all this was SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, who was later to meet his demise at the end of a rope in an Israeli prison.

To disguise their intentions, Nazi authorities referred to these deportations as “resettlements” to labour camps in the “East.” In reality, they were killing centres for mass murder.

+

Find more about this terrible political and human offence: Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question):

1. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
2. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
3. Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
4. Is it really true that Anti-Semitism will never be tolerated? 
5. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking

 

January 27 - 70 years ago Not an end yet to genocide

Photo of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, taken by a United States Army Air Force plane, August 25, 1944. Crematoria II and III are visible. For reference as to the date of the photo and what it shows, see The Case for Auschwitz by Robert Jan van Pelt, 2002, Indiana University Press, ISBN 0253340160, page 175. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today seventy years ago soldiers could not believe their eyes. They found the last extermination camp of the Germans still functioning.

Serbian 1990 War camp

On January 27, 1945, the Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and  found 7,000 survivors. Another 50,000 inmates had been marched out several days earlier by the camp’s staff in order to prevent them from falling into Allied hands. Most of them perished before the war ended. Auschwitz, where over one million people – most of them Jews, but also several non-Jewish Poles, political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, disabled persons and Jehovah’s Witnesses  — were killed, has become a symbol for the Holocaust and for evil as such, and rightly so. But people thought at that time and some even now that this could never again happen. Like they said "Never again" at the end of World War I in the last few years we have seen very similar extinguish camps and Serbia was the most horrible place after World War II where the international community did not take action straight away though they did clearly knew what was happening there.

Luckily for humankind not yet any genocide took place in the form or magnitude as the German extermination camps. We luckily never saw any more such torture and horror coming over one specific race or group of people.
The Caucasian race and Germans and extreme right people should shame themselves and sink deep into the ground that their ancestors could bring such a terrible fear over one group of people. For the Jewish people, it is the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, a cemetery without graves and still many families are not sure where their ancestors found their death and are put into the ground.

HKP survivor Pearl Good
points to Plagge’s name on
the Wall of the Righteous at Yad Vashem

Though the present generation can not be culpable for what their ancestors did, plus we must know that not all Germans did agree with this situation or did become such monsters. The thousands and thousands which were cramped together in huge place, too small for the amount of people, had to face dehumanization as part of the camp system, but they also could find friendships which went beyond all human expectations. There were remarkable acts of solidarity and humanity by camp inmates. Among them were non-Jews, who at risk to their own lives, sought to ease the pain, to give aid and to rescue Jews. They proved that even within the brutality and the murder, people could choose not to remain indifferent. There were even stories of German soldiers , even SS officers who like Maj Karl Plagge, Wehrmacht officer, engineer and Nazi Party member who used his position as a staff officer in the Heer (Army) to employ and protect some 1,240 Jews.  {Good 2005, p. 154.}

On 27 January of 2015 many international leaders shall come together in the afternoon, going along the fortified walls, barbed wire, platforms, barracks, gallows, gas chambers and cremation ovens of the largest of the concentration camp complexes created by the Nazi German regime, which show the conditions within which the Nazi genocide took place in the former concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest in the Third Reich.
The Nazi policy of spoliation, degradation and extermination of the Jews was rooted in a racist and anti-Semitic ideology propagated by the Third Reich.

According to historical investigations, 1.5 million people, among them a great number of Jews, were systematically starved, tortured and murdered in this camp, the symbol of humanity's cruelty to its fellow human beings in the 20th century. 

A few of those who saw the liberating soldiers coming closer to the camps where at that time still not sure what was going to happen with them and for sure could not count on it they would survive it. It is known that also many died  in a few weeks time after coming out in the world of the living again, when they became ill of the food they ate after their liberation.

Having been many times between life and death those survivors would continuously have to live with a huge nightmare and many still find themselves today crawling on the barrack floor or through the mud, because they no longer could walk. Many of them also  remember how they just kept thinking, I must survive, I must survive.

What we commemorate today should be printed in the minds of many generations to come. We may not be at ease thinking that what was unprecedented in human history, this mass killing motivated by the perverse, race-based ideology of the Nazis, who sought to track down and kill every last Jew and any others they considered to be inferior, would not happen again.

Humankind may have come united to overcome the Nazi menace but everywhere we see the (Neo-)Nazi spook turning up again.  Today, we see many similarities with the period coming up to the 1940ies. The economical but also political crisis's and pressure form all sides against immigrants. Not much yet seems to have changed for the minorities which everywhere often face bigotry.  We can not ignore that sectarian tensions and other forms of intolerance are on the rise. Since two years in Belgium and France we have seen a growing amount of anti-Semitic attacks. In several countries in the West it happens that Jews are being killed solely because they are Jews.

Those who belong to Christianity should make it very clear that all people, believers, non-believers and other-believers are all created in the image God. They should react against those who torture or kill others because of different beliefs. they also should demand from their governments and from those countries where there is inequality that the rights of humans shall be respected.

Vulnerable communities around the world continue to bury their dead while living in fear of further violence.

The mission of the United Nations was shaped by the tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust.  We want to see that their commitment to protect the vulnerable, promote fundamental human rights and uphold the freedom, dignity and worth of every person shall be worked out fully.

It is good to see that for the past decade, the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme has mobilized students and educators around the world to help them achieve these goals. 

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his message on the occasion of the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust:

"The violence and bias we see every day are stark reminders of the distance still to travel in upholding human rights, preventing genocide and defending our common humanity.

We must redouble our efforts to eradicate the deep roots of hatred and intolerance.  People everywhere must unite to stop the cycles of discord and build a world of inclusion and mutual respect.”

From the ashes of the murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps arose the words “Never Again” – spoken as shorthand for our collective responsibility to act in the face of genocide.

Janice Kamenir-Reznik who like many Jews who grew up in the 1950s, internalized a deep sense of responsibility to safeguard the memory of the Shoah – so that the world would understand anti-Semitism’s dangers and prevent Jewish persecution in the future.
He says:

Yet, when I heard about atrocities in faraway places like Cambodia and Rwanda, the notion that I could do something – that I should do something – never materialized in my head. My mindset shifted because of one man, Rabbi Harold Schulweis – with whom I co-founded Jewish World Watch. As he changed my perspective, Rabbi Schulweis dramatically changed my life – and saved thousands of others.

How many of our generation had not heard "Plus jamais" or "Never Again". this they said already after the first World War and repeated it as if they saw the summit after the second World War.

We must confess that our industrialised world did not manage to avoid the horrors of the Holocaust to be followed by genocide after genocide, atrocity after atrocity – from Cambodia to Rwanda, from Darfur to Congo. Since 1945, 46 genocides have claimed the lives of tens of millions.

In 2004, at 80-years-old, Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis founded an organization – a movement – that has become one of America’s largest and loudest anti-genocide groups. In the decade since that Rosh Hashanah, Jewish World Watch has been at the forefront of advocacy efforts that helped to bring about pressure to end the genocide in Darfur, drive the most lethal militias out of Congo, and create broad awareness among governments and global corporations about the threat of emerging genocides around the world.

Regarded as the most influential synagogue leader of his generation led the Conservative Valley Beth Shalom (VBS) in Encino for nearly 45 years, introducing significant innovations in synagogue life while also insisting upon connecting the Jewish world with the larger community worldwide through foundations, outreach organizations and, his most successful program, developed late in his life, Jewish World Watch.

Rabbi Ed Feinstein, his friend and successor as senior rabbi at VBS said about Harold Schulweis who died in December at his home after a long struggle with heart disease, that he

"was  a public intellectual who redefined what it is to be a Jew, an author and passionate orator who met injustices and suffering with action,”

In 2004, Schulweis delivered a sermon at VBS on the Jewish high holidays calling for a Jewish response to genocide. He challenged the congregation:

“We took an oath, “Never again!” Was this vow to protect only Jews from the curse of genocide? God forbid that our children and grandchildren ask of us, ‘Where was the synagogue during Rwanda, when genocide took place and eight hundred thousand people were slaughtered in one hundred days?’”

Schulweis’ concern for genocide around the world, led him to reach out to the large Armenian population in his San Fernando Valley neighbourhood after his 2004 sermon at VBS on the Jewish high holidays calling for a Jewish response to genocide.
He had challenged the congregation to take an oath, “Never again!”and not only to protect Jews from the curse of genocide.

In 2005, the rabbi officiated with Archbishop Hovnan Derderian of the Armenian Church of North America at the first joint commemoration of the Jewish and Armenian Holocausts. He joined band members of the rock band, System of a Down, all of them children of survivors of the Armenian Holocaust, in an educational program affirming the common responsibilities of Jewish and Armenian youth to remember their collective experiences of genocide, and to act to prevent its re-occurrence.

The Jewish World Watch and the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (JFR) (originally called the Institute for Righteous Acts) provides monthly financial support to some 500 aged and needy non Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Foundation preserves the legacy of the rescuers through its national Holocaust teacher education program.

Such education programs and us remembering what happened in the 1930-1940ies but also using those awful memories to warn those living today that we always should be at the look out to avoid such disasters coming over humankind.

Janice Kamenir-Reznik, Esq., President and Co-Founder of Jewish World Watch – a multi-faith coalition representing hundreds of thousands in the fight against genocide and mass atrocities, says:

We live during a time in grave need of Rabbi Schulweis’ message. From Congo and Sudan, from Iraq to Syria, from Burma to the Central African Republic, we are called to take the words “Never Again” and turn them into action. In his memory, let us continue to breathe life into the best of our Jewish values to create a better world.

=

• Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945) (UNESCO/NHK)
• Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945) (UNESCO/NHK) 

 =

 Find also to read:

1. Holocaust Survivor Eva Kor Explains How to Stay Hopeful During Tough Times
   The fact that I have overcome so much adversity in my life helps me to have hope during tough times. I believe if I could survive Auschwitz, if I could survive crawling on the barrack floor between life and death, I could probably survive anything. Basically that is the way we gain confidence in our ability. When we overcome one difficulty and one hardship, we can build on that when any other hardship comes along in life. I also like the fact that people who hear me speak can tune in and feel inspired. They see that I could do it, and they realize they can overcome whatever they are trying to overcome too. That is helpful to realize, that maybe each of us can help others overcome by sharing our stories.
2. Turning ‘never again’ into action: the legacy of Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis
3. Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, ‘Rabbi of Rabbis’ and world-renowned Jewish leader, dies at 89
4. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
5. Zwarte bladzijde 70 jaar bevrijding – Herdenking Auschwitz
6. 2012 mensenrechten rapport – 2012 Human Rights report
7. Vredesweek 2012 en Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
8. De Vredesweek vraagt Internationale Gemeenschap Verantwoordelijkheid te nemen
9. Malaysia requires sole use of God's title for Muslims

++

Related articles

• Yad Vashem to Give Keynote at UN for Holocaust Remembrance Day (israelnationalnews.com)
  Chairman of Yad Vashem Avner Shalev will deliver the keynote address at the United Nations event marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The event at the UN General Assembly will take place with the participation of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Israel's President Reuven Rivlin, survivors and liberators.
• Bittersweet Freedom (adl.org)
  Peo­ple rarely con­sider what hap­pened to the anti-Semitism that was at the root of the Holo­caust once the war ended. There is some­times an assump­tion that anti-Semitism ended with the war or that it was greatly dimin­ished. In fact, this is never the case when geno­cide occurs. The hatred and prej­u­dice still exist, but their man­i­fes­ta­tion is not always bla­tantly obvi­ous.  In the case of the Holo­caust, the world felt a col­lec­tive sense of shame in fac­ing the images of sur­vivors, which was a strong inhibit­ing force against the bla­tant expres­sion of anti-Semitism. Today, decades later and with new gen­er­a­tions ris­ing, the ero­sion of that sense of shame has become a key fac­tor in the surge of anti-Semitism. That’s why edu­ca­tion is more impor­tant now than ever.
  After lib­er­a­tion, the sur­vivors of Auschwitz were free to walk out of the camp, and were essen­tially on their own to make their way back to their com­mu­ni­ties and learn if their for­mer homes and val­ued pos­ses­sions were still there.  Many of the young women who sur­vived the camp trav­elled together in small groups, some­times for long dis­tances. Sleep­ing in barns, sheds or out­side in the woods, they were fre­quent vic­tims of vio­lent sex­ual assaults from maraud­ing sol­diers, attacks from which some did not sur­vive. They were tar­geted for two rea­sons – because they were women and because they were Jewish.
  The lib­er­a­tion of Auschwitz is clearly a crit­i­cally impor­tant event in the his­tory of the Holo­caust and one that should hold an impor­tant place in our col­lec­tive mem­o­ries.  But we also need to be mind­ful that anti-Semitism did not mag­i­cally dis­ap­pear with the lib­er­a­tion of the camps or the sign­ing of the peace treaties.  Today, anti-Semitism has reached to all-time highs across Europe and our mem­o­ries need to be tem­pered with a renewed vig­i­lance to con­tinue to fight anti-Semitism and all forms of prej­u­dice, from sub­tle stereo­types and Holo­caust “jokes” to vio­lent hate crimes against peo­ple per­pe­trated
• Auschwitz's lessons for Japan (japantimes.co.jp)
  We also need to learn from the process of post-World War II reconciliation in Europe that eventually led to creation of the European Union. In East Asia, historical issues still cause schisms between Japan, on the one hand, and China and South Korea, on the other.
  To overcome this situation, education plays an important role. The government should not shy away from teaching children the reality of Japan’s modern wars and letting them consider what lessons they should learn.
  About a quarter of some 6 million Holocaust victims were killed in Auschwitz, located in what is now Oswiecim, Poland. Ninety percent of them were Jews. Other victims included Poles, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses and other people of various nationalities.
  
• Auschwitz survivor: Returning to camp about 'revenge' (usatoday.com)
  Men and boys were placed in one line, while women and girls were led to another when they arrived at the camp in Oświęcim, Poland. Ganz was just 15 at the time.
  "I asked a German soldier why we were being separated and he said, 'You've had a long journey. You need to take a shower,'" Ganz, now 86, recalls. "That's when the selection began."
  
• Ed Miliband on 'moment' he discovered horror of grandfather's murder in Nazi camp (dailymail.co.uk)
  
  Ed Miliband only discovered his grandfather died in a Nazi concentration camp six months ago, he revealed this morning.
  The Labour leader said today's Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations were 'really emotional' for him and other Jewish families affected by the genocide.
  He said his family had not talked much about the Holocaust growing up and had only discovered the truth about his grandfather after visiting Israel last year.
• Auschwitz survivors gather to mark 70th anniv. of liberation (panarmenian.net)
  About 300 Auschwitz survivors have gathered at the site of the former Nazi death camp to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation, BBC News reports. The commemoration will be held at the site in southern Poland where 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were killed between 1940 and 1945. It is expected to be the last major anniversary event that survivors are able to attend in numbers.
  
• News story: British Embassy commemorates the International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Thessaloniki, Greece (gov.uk)
  Joined by the President of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki David Saltiel, the British Ambassador John Kittmer laid a wreath on behalf of the members and observers of IHRA at a ceremony that took place at the Holocaust Memorial. Earlier on the day, representatives of the diplomatic corps in Greece received a tour at the Jewish Museum and historic sites in Thessaloniki, such as the ‘Monastiriotes’ Synagogue, the Baron Hirsch neighbourhood near the Railroad Station, where the city’s Jews were deported from to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, and the University, the site of the old Jewish Cemetery.
  Addressing an evening event that took place at Makedonia Palace Hotel, the British Ambassador said:
  

  Each year this day people around the world commemorate a brutal crime unique in human history. We recall and mourn innocent victims who were murdered in Nazi death camps. On this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I would like to stress the meaning of our obligation: Never to forget.’

• Auschwitz liberation anniversary raises difficult questions for local residents [Photo report] (ibtimes.co.uk)
  The anniversary raises painful questions for residents of Oswiecim, the town in Poland where Nazi occupiers created one of the most relentless extermination machines in history.
  How could their parents go about their daily business when such inhumanity was taking place just the other side of a barbed wire fence? How much did they know of what was going on?
  "Of course people knew what was going on," said Bogumila, who lived through the occupation as a child. The mass extermination of prisoners and the incineration of thousands of bodies, she said, were no secret.
  
• Hundreds set to mark Holocaust Memorial Day (dorsetecho.co.uk)
  A Service to mark Holocaust Memorial Day will take place in Weymouth today.
  Holocaust Memorial Day is the annual day of remembrance for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and Tibet.
  
• Video: Aerial video of Auschwitz-Birkenau (bbc.co.uk)
  Drone video shows the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp as it is today - 70 years after it was liberated by Soviet troops. The camp in Poland is now maintained as a World Heritage Site and is visited by thousands of tourists and survivors every year.
  Auschwitz was the largest camp established by the Germans during World War II. More than a million people - the vast majority of them Jews - died there between 1940, when it was built, and 1945, when it was liberated by the Soviet army.