TODAY thousands of events will take place worldwide to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 75 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp complex by the Red Army.
The murder of six million Jews, millions of Soviet prisoners of war, hundreds of thousands of Roma and many gay and disabled people by the nazi regime and its collaborators is far from history’s only example of genocide, but the calculated and systematic approach to a project aimed at exterminating entire races was unique. It justifies global commemoration of this as the most horrendous crime committed by any government in history.
Fighting Holocaust denial means maintaining an accurate historical memory. The concerted effort to rewrite the history of the second world war to portray our wartime ally the Soviet Union as jointly complicit with nazi Germany in starting the conflict is dishonest and dangerous.
WILL PODMORE admires an account of the liberation of Berlin that overthrows the conventional US army-inspired account
CJ ATKINS commemorates one of the most dramatic moments in working-class history
In a speech to the 12th Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, SEVIM DAGDELEN warns of a growing historical revisionism to whitewash Germany and Japan’s role in WWII as part of a return to a cold war strategy from the West — but multipolarity will win out
As the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia rebuilds support through anti-cuts campaigns, the government seeks to silence it before October’s parliamentary elections through liberal totalitarianism, reports JOHN CALLOW


