Holocaust Memorial Bill

Debate between Baroness Deech and Lord Herbert of South Downs

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

My Lords, some years ago I visited the Dachau concentration camp just outside Munich. It made a huge impression on me, as did visiting the memorial and learning centres in Jerusalem and in Berlin. One thing particularly struck me, perhaps because it touched me personally. In Dachau there was a display of the different badges prisoners in the concentration camp were required to wear. One of those badges was a pink triangle, which was reserved for the prisoners who were detained there because they were homosexual. Some 50,000 people are estimated to have been given severe life sentences by the Nazis, and some 15,000 to 20,000 were sent to concentration camps for being homosexual. Most of them died or were killed. Some were subject to horrific experiments, including castration.

I think it would be the effect of the noble Lord’s amendment that the learning centre should not provide information or education about that part of the atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Sometimes the word Holocaust has been used to include those atrocities. I understand, of course, the force of his argument and the purpose of his amendment—his wish to reserve the education centre and its focus for the appalling crime of attempted genocide perpetrated against Jewish people. If homosexuals, who were also targeted by the Nazi regime, are to be excluded from this learning centre, we should acknowledge that and be conscious of it. Perhaps alternative educational provision can be made. If they should be included—the atrocities were committed against a smaller number of people but were by the same regime with the same sort of motive—then I am not sure the amendment allows for that and should itself be amended at a later stage, should this House accept it tonight.

I do not in any way seek to belittle the crime of attempted genocide against the Jewish people—of course not. Nor do I think we should ignore or belittle what was done to people by the same Nazi regime simply because they were gay.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

I think the discussion so far indicates just how ambiguous the point of this learning centre is. Still no one knows exactly what it is going to teach and what will be in it. I heard the presentation from Martin Winstone. I recall from that that he did not know what lesson was to be learned and that the centre was not going to combat antisemitism.

Over the last few years, I have asked many questions about which genocides will be included. I have had various answers from Ministers and former Ministers, including the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, and different answers to Written Questions. Sometimes we are told it is the Rohingya or Kosovo. Other times we are told it is all the people who were victims of the Nazis. This indicates to me no clarity about what is going on. Most of the other Holocaust memorials around the world address a question that is very painful for this Government and Parliament. The British Government closed the doors of Palestine in the 1930s, and even after the war. I always think of how many more people may have been saved—maybe millions—if Britain had abandoned the mandate and allowed Israel to be created in 1938 rather than 1948. This country bears that responsibility, as it did after the war, when it still would not let people into what was evolving into Israel.

These are difficult questions, but they have to be addressed. The late Lord Sacks said that today’s antisemitism had morphed into anti-Israelism. We cannot escape that question. If we want to combat today’s antisemitism, there has to be some learning somewhere about the biblical, historical and practical need for the nation of Israel, and why it came about. That lack is what is driving much of the hatred on the streets today.

The reason why this amendment is good, but maybe does not even go far enough, is this. The Jewish genocide, unlike all the others that have been mentioned, is rooted in more than 2,000 years of antisemitism—not 1,000, but more than 2,000, and some take it back 5,000 years. The other genocides were the results of tribal hatred, religion, sexual distaste and so on. The other victims, on the whole, were minorities; of all the genocides that have been mentioned, the people were minorities within states, without their own self-determination and means of self-defence. This has nothing to do with democracy, which is why the choice of Victoria Tower Gardens is not a good one. Genocide usually happens because one is a minority within a majority state, unable to exercise self-defence—and the need for self-defence needs to be explained in this learning centre, if it is to teach anything.

We also have to stop putting all this in the past. The learning centre suffers from the deficiency that it will tell people what happened in the war, and about the Nazis. Full stop. Unfortunately some of that is continuing. The learned lawyer Anthony Julius gave a speech a week or two ago in which he said that for thousands of years antisemitism had been a default position almost across the world. My generation were lucky in that this receded for the last 80 years or so, but it has come back, I am afraid to say. We cannot just talk about antisemitism in the past—“It was all Germany, it all happened a long time ago, and now we’re in a democracy and it’s all fine”. That is not the case. It is an ongoing matter.

One has to combat antisemitism with today’s weapons of explanation, which have to encompass what the survivors did after the war. That is a difficult issue for people to confront, because what the learning centre is apparently going to teach, if anything, is very odd—the British reaction to the Holocaust during the war. Did people know about it? Did they not know about it? There will be the Kindertransport, and maybe even the failure to prosecute Nazi war criminals who arrived here after the war. But what one learns from that I really do not know.

I fear that the learning centre will continue the business of globalising the Holocaust, making it a vague word that can be applied to any kind of slaughter that one does not approve of. We need to combat the terrible racism that is appearing in professionals, artists, the media and the universities today. We cannot just treat the Holocaust as another murder in the past, not to be remembered on its own. It is a continuing story.

It has been assumed too readily that learning the facts of the Holocaust inures against antisemitism. Today proves that it does not. I am afraid the learning centre will politicise and de-Judaise the treatment of Jews. We see this at national Holocaust remembrance ceremonies every year: an hour or two of self-congratulation and feeling much better. We need to overhaul Holocaust education and teach that the Holocaust did not succeed. The distinguishing feature of the Jewish community over the ages is survival against all the odds, not just death and victimhood. At every Passover celebration, the people around the table say, “In every generation they rose up to destroy us, but God delivered us from their hands”. That is a lesson that needs to be repeated today.

The learning centre as it stands is not good enough. “Never again” means concentrating on the Jewish genocide and antisemitism, and remembering the need for a safe and strong Israel—the world’s only haven for the persecuted and the survivors of the Holocaust—almost regardless of its faults. Hence the vital nature of this amendment, to secure at the very least a decent rationale for the learning centre.