20th January 1942

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Today is UK Holocaust Memorial Day. On the day of January Twentieth, 1942, the death warrant for six million people was signed in Berlin on the shores of Großer Wannsee: just fifteen pages of typescript; outlining in cold, businesslike terms the intended fate of the Jewish race in Europe: the Besprechungsprotokoll (Minutes) of a meeting held between senior Nazis, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, the principle actor and chief architect of the horror that followed in the wake of that meeting: The Holocaust, culminating in the six million deaths warranted that day.

Long before this formalising document was stamped Geheime Reichssache (Secret Reich Business) and filed away, the intent was there and known throughout Germany and the rest of Europe:

'...only a voluntarily deaf and blind man could have any doubts about the fate reserved for the Jews in a German Europe: we had read Feuchtwanger's Oppermanns, smuggled secretly in from France, and a British White Book, which arrived from Palestine and described the "Nazi Atrocities"; we had only believed half of it, but that was enough.'

Primo Levi

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