The UN General Assembly designated January 27- the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau – as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this annual day of commemoration, every member state of the UN has an obligation to honor the victims of the Nazi era and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.
The calculated killing of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of others as Nazi Germany spread across Europe, remains a potent catalyst for debate sixty-eight years after the end of the Second World War.
As a day of remembrance, January 27 is tied to the arrival in 1945 of Soviet troops at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where trainloads of men, women and children had been gassed to death over the course of the war.
Eighteen governments have legislated January 27 as an annual Holocaust Memorial Day.
