The New Worker
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 29th January 2016
ON 27TH JANUARY 1945 the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp in the Third Reich and last Wednesday we remembered the millions of victims of Nazi genocide in solemn ceremonies in London and across the country. Holocaust Memorial Day takes place on 27th January each year to remember the six million Jews and the millions of other innocent civilians who were murdered in Nazi death camps during the Second World War.
The genocidal policies of Nazi Germany and their Japanese allies during their brief period of ascendancy show what the future would have been had they won and there can be no doubt that a world run by Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito would have set back civilisation hundreds of years.
As these events pass from living memory some fascists claim that the holocaust never happened. They dismiss survivors’ statements as lies and juggle statistics to “prove” that the gas chambers didn’t exist. What they can’t explain is why none of the Nazi war-criminals claimed this as a defence at Nuremberg or by Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the holocaust, at his own trial in Tel Aviv in 1961.
Most bourgeois academics, on the other hand, tend to portray Nazism as an aberration of capitalism rather than the instrument of the industrialists, bankers and landowners within the German ruling class who wanted another global conflict and were prepared to commit any crime in order to win it.
The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is a time for reflection for all working people. It is a time to honour the dead. It is a time to remember the unspeakable crimes of the Axis powers in the Second World War that began in 1939 and only ended in 1945 with the total defeat of the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire. It is a time to recall the sacrifice of millions of people, and in particular the 27 million Soviet workers and peasants, who died in the fight to defeat Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire.
The Jews the Nazis had marked down for extermination along with the Roma and Soviet prisoners and all the others butchered or worked to death in Nazi concentration camps must never be forgotten. Not least because of what is happening in Ukraine today.
In February 2014 fascist militias overthrew the elected Ukrainian government in favour of a new regime led by reactionary nationalist politicians and neo-Nazi thugs. Some are in the pay of Anglo-American imperialism, others willing tools of Franco-German imperialism.
Some are open admirers of Adolf Hitler and the Ukrainian collaborators who served the Nazis during the German occupation. Others simply favour open bourgeois dictatorship. All are committed to destroying workers’ rights. The neo-Nazi militias, who ultimately prop up the Kiev regime, have driven all the socialist movements underground in a wave of terror that led to Crimea seceding and joining the Russian federation and forcing the people of eastern Ukraine to take up the gun to fend off the fascist menace.
The Communist Party of Ukraine, which held 32 parliamentary seats, has been banned. It is now a criminal offence to promote Marxism or communism or to display any symbols associated with the communist movement. At the same time all Ukrainians are now required to show respect to the “Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists” (OUN) and other fascists who played an active part in murdering tens of thousands of Jews and Poles during the Nazi occupation.
As we remember the dead we must also vow to ensure that these atrocities never happen again. We must stand by the anti-fascist resistance in Ukraine and Novorossiya and fight racism and fascism in Britain and wherever it appears throughout the world.