What is Holocaust Memorial Day?

HOPE not hate by Nick Lowles | Tuesday, 27 January 2009

Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) is an international day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust and other genocides - Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda to name but a few. It commemorates the victims and honours the survivors of the Nazi genocide as well as more recent genocides in an effort to ensure that these unimaginable horrors are neither forgotten nor indeed repeated either in Europe or elsewhere in the world ever again.

Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) is an international day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust and other genocides - Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda to name but a few. It commemorates the victims and honours the survivors of the Nazi genocide as well as more recent genocides in an effort to ensure that these unimaginable horrors are neither forgotten nor indeed repeated either in Europe or elsewhere in the world ever again.

These various acts of commemoration have as their goal to motivate individuals to take a stand against prejudice, discrimination and racism, in short to stand up against hatred, and in doing so, to ensure that the oft spoken refrain "Never Again" retains its resonance and moreover, its promise.

HMD is commemorated each year on the 27 January, the anniversary of the date of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Hundreds of events take place to mark HMD each year and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust invites individuals to take part in any of these of indeed to organise your own. "Anyone can organise an activity to commemorate HMD. Individual symbolic acts, like lighting a candle or observing a silence also signify your commitment to remember the past and create a better future," observes its website. If you wish to stand up against hatred and division get involved.

BNP and Holocaust Denial

During the late 1990s Griffin edited his own anti-Semitic publication entitled The Rune in which he denied the Holocaust proclaiming that:

It was during this period that Griffin revealed he had done his own update of the famous Holocaust denial pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? "You've come across Did Six Million Really Die? It was a shattering book, it was a superb booklet or magazine," told an undercover reporter. "I've done an update of that, which is not only all the material which has come out since, it is also a much more modern style."

Griffin is also the author of Who Are the Mindbenders? an anti-Semitic tract which accuses the Jews of controlling the media "providing us with an endless diet of pro-multicultural, pro-homosexual, anti-British trash." The pamphlet drew upon a long lineage of anti-Semitic propaganda dating back to the old Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Griffin has never repudiated these views. In an interview with the Mail on Sunday in April 2006 Griffin stated: "It's well known that the chimney's from the gas chambers at Auschwitz are fake, built after the war ended." Griffin also told the interviewer that prussic acid could "never have been used at Treblinka concentration camp - but it makes good Shoah business, doesn't it?" Shoah is the Hebrew for Holocaust.

At one time Griffin also kept two pigs on his farm, one called "Anne" the other called "Frank" consciously mocking Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl whose diaries, written whilst in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, have since become a world famous account of the horrors of the Holocaust. This constitutes humour for Griffin.

Asked if he still denies the Holocaust Griffin said recently that he does not and that he believes in it because European Union law tells him he must. This is hardly a convincing denial of his anti-Semitic past. Indeed it says more about Griffin's fear of prosecution under Holocaust denial laws, then under discussion in the European Parliament, than it does about his belief in historical fact.

The BNP itself used to produce a newspaper called Holocaust News, which constantly denied the existence of the Holocaust and referred to it as the "holohoax". Richard Edmonds, the former BNP national organiser, helped distribute and has recently been promoted to the BNP Advisory Council by Griffin himself.

Many of Griffin's senior officials are also Holocaust Deniers and as anti-Semitic as Griffin.

• Mark Collett (pictured) the BNP publicity officer told a television documentary maker: "There's not a European country the Jews haven't been thrown out of. When it happens that many times, it's not just persecution. There's no smoke without fire." For good measure he added: "Hitler will live forever; and maybe I will."
• David Hannam, the BNP deputy treasurer has served a prison sentence for distributing anti-Semitic propaganda, which claimed Jews were in Britain "unlawfully."
• Lee Barnes, the BNP legal officer, regularly hurls anti-Semitic abuse from his website including his belief that the Jews rule Hollywood. His articles on the subject were plagarised from the viciously anti-Semitic Jew Watch website.
• Ken Booth, the BNP North East organiser wrote to the Northern Echo in 2007 to complain about the Holocaust Education Trust's acclaimed programme of taking school children on educational visits to Auschwitz claiming that it was "racist" because it omitted other forms of politically motivated genocide. Booth said the BNP did not deny the Holocaust but then turned his statement on its head by claiming that the party refused to believe either the "official figures" or recognise the "authenticity" of the buildings at Auschwitz claiming the death camp was a moneymaking venture comparable to "Disneyland".

Griffin is also linked to Holocaust Deniers across the globe.

(left) David Duke (second left) with Nick Griffin and his family
(right) David Duke in Ku Klux Klan costume in London in the 1960's

• Griffin remains close to former Ku Klux Klan boss David Duke, who wrote of the Holocaust in his autobiography My Awakening:
  The official keepers of the Holocaust wage an international campaign to silence the disturbing questions. Most people never even hear the revisionist position because Jewish forces dominate the media and block mainstream access to material that questions Holocaust orthodoxy.

  The BNP called My Awakening "brilliant".

• Jean Marie Le Pen. Griffin has close ties with the leader of the French Front National who has been found guilt in a French court of deliberately minimising the significance of the Holocaust by referring to it as a "detail of history." Griffin invited Le Pen to help kick start the BNP's 2004 European election campaign.
• Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands. Griffin's BNP has strong links to the German NPD, whose leading members have a long history of involvement with Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic activism. One of them is Horst Mahler, who has been involved in perpetuating Holocaust denial in the Middle East.
• Petra Edelmannová. Griffin's latest international friend is the chairwoman of the National Party (Národní strana, NS) who in 2006 led protests against a memorial to Romani victims of wartime internment camps in Lety, South Bohemia where 326 people perished and from where over 500 of its inmates were deported to Auschwitz. Edelmannová claims it was "a collection camp, not a concentration camp" and that those who died did so because, "people do not observe good hygiene and then spread infectious diseases, it is in fact their fault."
Nick Griffin and David Irving

Nick Griffin has had a mixed relationship with David Irving, the British historian who was referred to by Mr Justice Gray as "an active Holocaust denier" an "anti-Semitic", and a "racist" who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism." In 1991 Griffin organised security for an Irving meeting where the surprise speaker was Holocaust denier Fred Leutcher, an American engineer who claimed to have "scientifically" proven that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

However, more recently, the pair clashed. In the 1990s Iriving changed his stance slightly and admitted that some Jews may have died under the Nazi regime. This enraged Griffin, who wrote:

"True Revisionists will not be fooled by this new twist to the sorry tale of the Hoax of the Twentieth Century… Back in the 1960s the Jews quietly shifted the alleged sites of the mass gassings from the no longer believable German camps such as Dachau and Belsen to the sites in Communist Poland such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. Now that the very idea of Zyklon-B extermination has been exposed as unscientific nonsense, they are once and again re-writing bogus history, playing down gas chambers and talking instead of "hundreds of hitherto unknown sites in the East where more than a million Jews were exterminated by shooting."'

When Irving was imprisoned in Austria, however, the BNP forgave and forgot, rallying to his support outside the Austrian Embassy where an array of BNP supporters stood shoulder to shoulder with other known Holocaust Denier including Lady Michelle Renouf.


Richard Edmonds (right) with Lady Michelle Renouf
Picture David Hoffman

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