I'd like to keep this one about Auschwitz and related matters if you wouldn't mind.

Thanks.

It's twenty-six years now, since I visited Auschwitz. Like another poster here, it was the glass display-box with the childrens' shoes that finally made me start to cry. Even now, just remembering it, I feel the tears near again.

Although there have been other genocides before and since – Rwanda comes to mind as an example where the so-called civilized world stood by and just let it happen – the Shoah is unparalleled by the sheer cold-blooded, bureaucratic, systematic brutality with which it was carried out.

I've lived in Germany for over twenty years now. Apart from the lunatic fringe on the right, it does generally remain as a sad defining component of the modern German psyche. There are still issues arising from it being worked through here – as will probably be the case for every generation. Hard questions, some of them, like the boundary between ideas like guilt (which is, for modern Germans, most of whom weren't even alive or only children then, inappropriate) and responsibility (which remains), which have to be continually renewed. As the question as to how much the Shoah, as the work of mad Nazi anti-Semitism, is the expression of a deeper, murky current in "Western," (in some sense) "Christian" culture also remains.
The present pope reinstituted the prayer for the conversion of the Jews in the Roman Catholic Good Friday liturgy in 2008 – and made it compulsory: "That our God and Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Savior of all men…", which had been dropped after Vatican II. Not a particularly hopeful sign.

It was a supposedly civilised Europe that committed this crime.

It's appropriate that this piece comes to the fore again in light of the Ryan Commissions report – the fact there are even any comparisons speak volumes for what has come to light in such explicit terms.