British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called it a "crime that has no name.” He was referring to the Nazis' deliberate and systematic extermination of as many as six million European Jews. A name was soon found: genocide, literally the killing of a people or nation.

On April 21, Holocaust Remembrance Day, also known as Yom Hashoah, the world remembers those that suffered, those that fought, and those that died as a result what the Nazis called the “final solution to the Jewish Question.”

What happened?

Years before he came into power in Germany, Adolf Hitler signaled his intentions for Europe’s Jews in his autobiography Mein Kampf, published in 1925. In the book he warned of his intention to drive them from Germany’s political, intellectual and cultural life. When he became ruler in early 1933, the execution and exodus of German’s half million Jews began almost immediately.

Jews were first singled out, then deprived of property and status, and eventually subjected to deportation and horrific violence. Jewish citizens in dozens of Nazi occupied countries were targeted. Nazi soldiers rounded up and shot nearly two million Jews before concentration camps like Auschwitz became the preferred method of extermination. The result was the genocide of six million European Jews, including entire generations of families.

The Genocidal State

What made the Holocaust in Germany particularly frightening was the manner in which every arm of the country’s system of government was somehow involved in the killing process:

• Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish;
• The Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders;
• The Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property;
• German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders;
• The universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics;
• Government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps;
• German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners;
• Companies bid for the contracts to build the crematoria;
• Detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag company’s punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings.

The victims

Nazi German’s laws and policies asserted the superiority of the “Aryan race” and targeted Jews since they were considered as the most “inferior races” of all on a hierarchy that included Jews at the bottom and the Germanic peoples (seens as the “master race”) as the top.

Though the Jewish people received the brunt of Hitler’s evil, other groups labeled “inferior” were also targeted.

• Slavs: Altogether, more than 1.5 million civilians were killed.
• Ethnic Poles: As many as two million died in the Nazi campaigns.
• Ethnic Serbs: In the Balkans, 581,000 Yugoslavs, mostly Serbs, were killed by the Nazis and their allies.
• Soviet POWs: Up to 5.7 million died in German custody.
• Romani people: Up to 1.5 million were killed.
• Disabled and mentally ill: Approximately a quarter million fell victim to a program that required the killing of physically or mentally disabled citizens to maintain the genetic purity of the German population.
• Homosexuals: As many as 15,000 were assassinated as homosexuals were regarded as defilers of German blood.
• Jehovah’s witnesses: Roughly 12,000 were imprisoned and 5,000 were killed for not renouncing their faith and submitting to the state’s authority.

The Genocide Convention

During the Second World War, mankind witnessed the most heinous of crimes-the Holocaust. After the war, the nations of the world came together and drafted the genocide convention as a howl of anguish and an effort to prevent and punish future acts of genocide.

The International Convention on Genocide, which declared genocide to be a crime under international law, was approved unanimously by the UN General Assembly on December 9, 1948. The United States was the first nation to sign the treaty.

Although the Genocide Convention was meant as a pledge to ensure the horrors of the Holocaust would never be repeated, the world community has consistently failed to prevent the occurrence of genocide in places like Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and northern Iraq. Why has the promise of "never again" proven so difficult to honor?

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Many consider the Holocaust completely detached from our present reality but it’s only been a few decades since the horrors occurred.

Sol Lipson, 87, a survivor from Radom, Poland who lost his mother and two siblings in the concentration camps, feels there is much to learn from the tragic events.

“I want the young generation to know that this happened in one of the most cultured countries in the world – Germany… I was young and what I saw with my own eyes, I never imagined this could happen.”

When asked what lessons we can learn from the Holocaust, Sol says, “If we don’t remember that this happened only 70 years ago, we risk it happening again… It’s happening in Darfur. They are killing people and everyone is quiet. We thought it was never going to happen again. But we see now it is in another part of the world.”

Are you interested in commemorating the millions that lost their lives and vowing to ensure that such an atrocity will never happen again?

• Visit the Holocaust Museum. Don’t worry. You can do it from home!
• Look at the history of genocide in photos at "Never Again, Again, Again..."
• Ask a Jewish friend to share how his/her family has commemorated the day in the past.