Remember, they didn’t pay attention to Hitler, either

January 26, 2012- Jan. 27, the date in 1945 that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz- Birkenau, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the UN in 2005.

The day’s official tagline, “Remembrance and Beyond,” denotes its dual significance. First is the obligation of the world body and its member states to remember and memorialize the six million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide and, in those countries where it took place, to recall the particular circumstances. Second, venturing “beyond” remembrance, the UN explicitly rejects denial that the Holocaust took place, and mandates educational programs aimed at insuring that nothing like it ever happens again.

This second theme faces a severe challenge in our time.

While the world was shocked, in the later stages of World War II, to learn of the destruction of European Jewry, Hitler had never made any secret of his plan to carry it out. From the outset of his political career, Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I, the worldwide economic depression, and any other ills – real or imagined – alleged to plague the German people. As early as 1922, he promised his followers, “If I am ever really in power, the destruction of the Jews will be my first and most important job.”

Even as he harped on the need to destroy the Jews, Hitler cleverly insisted that it was world Jewry that was conspiring against the German people. Nazi rhetoric portrayed Jews as an aggressive cancer whose elimination was necessary to guarantee the health of the German nation. In a speech before the Reichstag in 1939, Hitler asserted that it was “international finance Jewry” that wanted to “plunge the peoples into a world war,” and the result –entirely defensive – would be “annihilation” of the Jews.

Fast forward to 2012. There is one head of state who openly defies the intent behind the UN’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day by denying the Holocaust and at the same time promising to reenact it against the one Jewish state in the world. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has repeatedly called the Holocaust “a myth” and urged the formation of an international inquiry to “expose” it. He also calls Israel a “fake regime” that “must be wiped off the map.” And this head of state who calls for the destruction of a fellow UN member state is regularly allowed to address the very UN General Assembly, in New York, that on Jan. 27 will solemnly pledge to prevent any repetition of the Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad, like Hitler, announces in advance his intention to kill Jews, and portrays this as a defensive reaction to an economic attack on his country by world Jewry (for which he uses the term “Zionists”). But in one important sense Iran is a step ahead of Nazi Germany. While the latter had to conquer Europe country by country and laboriously ferret out the Jews and send them to their deaths, Iran – as demonstrated in a recent report by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency – is well on its way to securing nuclear weapons and the missile capability to launch them against Israel, home to another 6 million Jews. Some say that this danger is wildly exaggerated, since Iran would never begin a nuclear war that would lead to its own devastation by Israeli retaliation. Yet it is worth recalling that Nazi Germany transferred sorely needed men and resources from the front lines in order to speed up the killing of Jews. Ideologically driven regimes may act even against their own national interests to pursue diabolical ideals.

Too many world leaders today, like their predecessors in the 1930s, interpret calls to kill Jews as empty rhetoric. But the clear message of International Holocaust Remembrance Day is that state-sponsored anti-Semitism must be taken seriously – especially if the state will soon be ready to deploy a nuclear weapon to carry it out. 

Irv Kempner is a member of the American Jewish Committee Boston board of directors.