Tomorrow marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army.
Among the events being held to mark this is a reading at the former Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands of the names of the 102,000 Dutch Jews, Sinti and Roma murdered by the Nazis.
My Dutch is very limited, but hearing how young many of these people were when they were gassed - if they managed to survive the horrendous journey - brings it home in a new way. The footage we have is of the teenagers and younger adults who survived - not the children and older people who were murdered on arrival at places like Auschwitz.
The more one reads about the Holocaust, the more horrific it becomes.
The Wannsee Conference wasn't where the decision was taken to try to kill all 11 million Jews then living in Europe. It was a high-level planning meeting to determine how to put into effect a decision already made.
People came up with plans for all this, printed forms, typed reports, designed structures. This was the calculated and considered destruction of an entire ethnic group.
Yet it was just part of a wider plan that would also have, if completed, reduced Slavs into a semi-literate slave people and created a vast Nazi empire across Europe through puppet rulers or direct annexation.
The Nazi regime were the biggest criminals this world has ever known. Anyone who claims otherwise is at best wrong and at worst a bigot.
