Eighty years after the Holocaust's end, world leaders and survivors gather to remember the atrocities. Various commemorations, including Holocaust Remembrance Day, are observing significant liberation anniversaries. Despite the importance of remembrance, the understanding of the Holocaust appears to be waning. The article outlines vital lessons, emphasizing conditions that lead to such crimes, like the failures of states and democratic erosion, as seen in Weimar Germany. It notes how authoritarianism can arise from democratic processes, the requirement of mass apathy, elite complicity, and international inaction to culminate in genocide.
First, crimes like the Holocaust require a series of conditions. They often happen in failed states. The inability of Germany's Weimar Republic to secure liberal democratic values and civil discourse provided fertile ground for Nazism's rise.
Once in government, it turned toward authoritarianism, undermining national institutions, the media, the civil service, the intellectual classes, and the law so the state would mirror its ideology and its goals.
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