Overnight video - Holocaust Remembrance - Day 27 January

Victims of the Holocaust deserve our remembrance.(TheAustralian).ON November 1, 2005, the UN general assembly resolved that each year January 27 would be designated Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date was significant. It was on this day in 1945 that the largest concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by Soviet forces.With 104 states co-sponsoring the resolution, including Australia, the UN's action was widely acclaimed. It may have taken 60 years to get there, but the message was clear.
The international community is determined to ensure the most horrific episode in the history of mankind is neither forgotten nor repeated.So today on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2012 we gather to commemorate the six million Jews who perished and millions of others who lost their lives including Polish and Romani civilians, homosexuals, people with disabilities, political and religious leaders and Soviet and other prisoners of war, at the hands of the brutal Nazi war machine.

Make no mistake: these people were not casualties of war but the victims of an evil, ideological crusade, a crusade designed to systematically eliminate the Jewish people and achieve what Yehuda Bauer has called "a global-racial hierarchy with the Nordic peoples of the Aryan race on top".
In this sense the Holocaust was unique in scale and scope.

With its origins in the anti-semitic Volkisch movement and morphing into the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht and ultimately the Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution, the Nazi campaign knew no bounds. Every one of the 11 million Jews in Europe including those in states that were neutral or at war with Germany were marked for destruction. It didn't matter if you were one of the more than three million Jews in Poland or one of only 200 in Albania, you were on (Holocaust architect) Adolf Eichmann's list.
In the end more than 90 per cent of Polish Jews were killed, 75 per cent of those in Germany and more than 50 per cent in Hungary, Romania and Belgium. These numbers include up to 1.5 million children, some of whom were exposed to the most horrific medical experiments. To think the German people were unaware of these calamities misses a fundamental point.
Millions of Germans were involved in this effort. From the bureaucrats to the bankers, from the teachers to the train drivers and of course the many German corporations that provided the means for exterminating millions of people, these civilians, like the soldiers in uniform, were not simply following orders. They were accomplices.
That is why, now more than 70 years on, we the descendants of Holocaust victims need to ensure the perpetrators of these horrible crimes see justice, however late. There is no defence for what took place.
That is why we must also do all we can to educate today's younger generation about the horrors of the Holocaust, for if we don't the tragedies of the past are doomed to be repeated.
Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia and Bosnia were not isolated acts of violence, but were genocides too, orchestrated and committed on a grand scale for which the lessons of the Holocaust proved no deterrent. It is against acts like these that the international community must redouble its efforts to prevent in the future.
So too, must the international community stand up to dangerous leaders like Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he threatens to wipe Israel off the map. The day after Iran has a nuclear weapon will be too late for action, for Iran will have at its disposal the technology to destroy in five minutes what the Germans took five years to nearly achieve.

Equally, we must actively confront those who seek to deny the Holocaust ever took place. It is historical revisionism of the worst kind. From Iran's hosting of an international conference on the subject in 2006, to a spattering of pseudo academics in France, Britain and the US who seek to give credibility to their claims, the attempts to deny the facts of the Holocaust are neither benign acts born of ignorance nor simple mischief making. Rather it is something far more sinister and far more deliberate.

In 1945 when a shocked general Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, first saw the horrors of the camps he knew a time would come when those at home would say "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda". He made it his duty then and there to bring journalists and legislators to the site to bear witness, assembling the evidence to prove what in fact occurred.

Eisenhower did his part to ensure "there is no room for cynical doubt" and we must do ours, by ensuring those who peddle falsehoods about the Holocaust are exposed at every turn.
This is our challenge. To constantly remind the peoples of the world that among the good there is also evil.

Communities that can produce the minds of Hegel and Mozart and the hearts of Schindler and Bonhoeffer can also produce the twisted and perverted thinking of Eichmann and Mengele, Himmler and Hitler.

When Soviet troops walked into Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945, one of the darkest chapters in the history of mankind may have ended. But it is now up to us to remind the world the book will never be closed.
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson from nearly 200 years ago, eternal vigilance is the price of our freedom. This is our task, this is our responsibility.

Josh Frydenberg is the member for Kooyong and the keynote speaker at Melbourne's Jewish Holocaust Centre Memorial Day event.Read the full story here.