Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Howard of Lympne Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to say a few words in the gap and to pay tribute to the many excellent speeches that we have heard in this debate, including, particularly, the admirable maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate.

As I have mentioned before, my grandmother was killed in Auschwitz, and I was partly brought up by an aunt who not only survived Auschwitz but, as she told me, survived being put into the gas chamber when that evil and macabre operation was aborted because on that occasion the system malfunctioned, so this subject is very real for me.

Last week, in the debate on the Holocaust memorial, my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for whom I have great respect, said that the Nazis intended to kill 6 million men, women and children. As I told her afterwards, I almost intervened during her speech because she was wrong. The Nazis intended, as my noble friend Lord Massey said, to kill many, many more. One of the most chilling documents of the Holocaust, which I am sure many of your Lordships have seen, is the map that was in front of the participants of the infamous conference at Wannsee in 1942 that planned the details of the final solution. That map showed every country in Europe and the number of Jews that those at the conference estimated that country contained. It showed not only the countries that the Nazis then occupied or planned to occupy, but the neutral countries in Europe and this country.

Those of us who are familiar with the events of the first three weeks of Churchill’s premiership know that an argument raged as to whether terms should be sought from Hitler. An argument raged in the War Cabinet itself for 10 days, and there is no doubt at all that, had it not been for Winston Churchill, such terms would have been sought, and much the same deal would have been done as the deal that Marshal Pétain and the French did at that time. If that had happened, even if by some miracle your Lordships’ House had survived or had been revived in the intervening years, I would be very unlikely to have been here to contribute to this debate today. Therefore, I am at the forefront of those who insist that the Holocaust must be remembered, even if the antisemitism that brought it about was just a matter of history, but, of course, we know that it is not.

A few months ago, I attended the funeral of Adrian Daulby, one of the victims of the Heaton Park attack. It was, as your Lordships would expect, a very moving event. It was an event of a kind that I never expected to attend and that I hope never to attend again, but unless the efforts of our Government and our society are increased and stepped up, I fear that I may.

Not long after 7 October, I was invited to give a talk at a synagogue in central London, and then I was told by the organisers that they had been advised that it would not be safe for that event to take place. Rather meekly, I accepted that advice, and the event was postponed, although it did take place at a later date. Looking back on it, I think I was wrong. I should have insisted that that event went ahead on the original date. It is the duty of government to ensure that its citizens can go about their lawful business in safety. The police have the responsibility of discharging that duty, and, alas, they have not always distinguished themselves in discharging it in recent months. More needs to be done, and I hope that this memorial day, this debate and the debate that is to take place in the other place help to get that message across.

At the annual memorial service that used to take place in Hyde Park and now takes place at other venues, which I have attended for many years, a rather beautiful song is sung. Its title and refrain are the words “Never Again”. It is our duty to ensure that those words are given their full meaning.