David Slucki | Holocaust's effects still felt with Nazi ideology still prevalent

But, for survivors and their descendants, and indeed the wider world, the Holocaust did not end with the arrival of the Red Army, and its effects are still felt as the Holocaust continues to be misremembered and politicised.

This year we've already had a few reminders that the Holocaust is still very much with us, whether it be the NSW Premier having dressed up as a Nazi at his 21st birthday, or a white supremacist leader giving a Nazi salute outside court, or a gathering of neo-Nazis in an area with a substantial Jewish population.

A majority of Australian Jews are descended from survivors of the Holocaust and they are understandably sensitive about the vulnerability that comes with being Jewish, even in a society in which you are, on the surface, accepted as equals.

After all, many Jews in Europe felt thoroughly German, or French, or Czech, or Polish. And yet the speed at which their neighbours turned against them came as a major shock.

As a result, Jewish schools and institutions are today heavily fortified, reflecting a generational anxiety that the next Holocaust might just be around the corner.

It's not only for Jews, that this should matter.

When we study the history of the Nazi regime, we learn quickly that although Jews were the primary target of Nazi racial ideology and the most significant group of victims, the Nazis' anti-Semitism was part of a larger eugenicist worldview that targeted a range of groups and that was shared far beyond the borders of Germany.

The Nazis targeted many groups of people including; Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ people, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, socialists, and Soviet prisoners of war. The breadth of victim groups is often overlooked.

This fact should give us some pause for thought. Just as the Nazis targeted a wide range of groups in Europe, so too does the rhetoric of the Nazis' modern-day heirs threatens all marginalised groups in Australia and around the world.

This modern-day expression of Nazi ideology is not only anti-Semitic; it is Islamophobic, racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist, just as it was in the 1930s and 1940s.

We need to be ever-vigilant about Nazism, anti-Semitism and the far-right, and education is crucial in combating the insidious persistence of Nazi ideas, but it's not a silver bullet.

When we study the Holocaust, we need to understand its broader implications.

We should study it alongside other histories of mass violence and oppression, especially those in our own backyard.

We should find the links between the Holocaust and other instances of state-sanctioned violence to help us to see the warning signs.

Without seeing the context for the Holocaust -including the history of racism, genocide, and colonisation throughout the modern world - we blind ourselves to its impact and legacy on the world.

Studying the Holocaust is only a partial antidote to combatting the rhetoric of modern-day Nazis.

We need to read the memoirs of survivors, the diaries of victims; watch the films and documentaries; and visit the museums to combat the persistence of Nazi ideas in our world.

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But the Holocaust should also be seen as part of the continuum of mass violence across the world today.

As a society, we must take a multi-pronged approach to stamp this out. Education is a first step. As a scholar of the Holocaust, it is easy for me to take for granted that the Holocaust is a historical catastrophe that we ought to study; that in doing so, we can better understand the society in which we live and can rethink our behaviour with that knowledge.

For most people, this is not self-evident, nor should we expect it to be. Without learning about the past in a way that makes sense in the present day, it is all too easy for people to see something like the Holocaust as too remote, too unbelievable to think that its legacy still lives with us today.

We need to learn the truth of the past in order to shape the future. When we learn about how people behaved in history and the circumstances that shaped their behaviour, we are better prepared to face the world each day.