THE worst event of the barbarous 20th century was surely the Nazi Holocaust. This involved the state-organised murder of six million Jews, over one million Roma, and mass atrocities towards a further seven million civilians. Its nadir was Auschwitz, the darkest moment of the 20th century, perhaps of world history.

It is now 79 years since the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Its horrors shocked even those battle-hardened veterans of Stalingrad.

The Holocaust evokes for most people the ultimate in inhumanity, hence the outrage and revulsion towards Holocaust distorters and deniers. They insult the memory of survivors and other eyewitnesses who are the spokespersons of those millions without voice, who collectively tell us a story of systematic and ongoing brutality. The Holocaust must be remembered.

The Holocaust demonstrates how genocide was committed as a “normal” routine. Holocaust scholar Hannah Arendt referred to it as the "banality of evil". Secondly, the Holocaust demonstrates how a technologically advanced country used its scientific and industrial innovations for the mass extermination of people. Historian and author Zygmunt Baumann argues that the decisive factor that made the mass murders possible was not only Nazi racial policy per se but modernity itself.

Although the Jews and Roma were the main targets of the genocide, it must be recognised not only as a part of Jewish history but as a crime against all humanity. In essence, as Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi explained, it was an attempt to strip humans of their humanity, their dignity, and their identity; an attempt to demonstrate and justify, through the victims themselves, that they were "subhuman" and to stamp out through overwhelming violence and subterfuge any thoughts of resistance.

The industrial capitalist nature of the Holocaust can be seen from the SS, the army, the industrialists, and the civil servants planning the Holocaust at Wannsee in January 1942; the bureaucratised and efficient train system to transport Jews to the death camps, huge research and development into efficient gas for the ovens, the county’s best engineering firms competing for the contract to build the most efficient crematoria, "healthy" Jews not being exterminated immediately but worked to death as slave labour. This is one of the most frightening bits of the event: the planning and execution of the Holocaust resembled normal industrial activity. As one camp commander of Auschwitz commented, it was "murder by assembly line".

This perspective is relevant today where new crimes occur, including the routine murder of civilians in many parts of the world. Keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive will not by itself stop the rise of fascism in the 21st century but it does make modern-day Nazis’ job harder; they know that the revulsion of most people to the events in Europe in the 1940s makes it more difficult for them to win support.

Remembering the Holocaust and commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day, perhaps particularly in schools, can contribute to marginalising them.

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