The Holocaust still matters because the conditions that produced it have not been removed from the world. Antisemitism continues; the political movements that produced the regime have heirs who acknowledge the inheritance and others who deny it; the technical and bureaucratic capacities the regime drew on are now widely distributed among states that have shown themselves willing to use them; and the public memory of the events on which the post-war international order was built is fading at the rate of around five per cent per decade as the survivor generation dies. The case for sustained Holocaust education and remembrance, eighty years after the events, rests on these continuing realities rather than on the particular events themselves.
What has not changed
Antisemitism is the most-documented continuity. The 2014 Anti-Defamation League global survey found that around 26 per cent of the world’s adult population, when asked, expressed agreement with significant elements of antisemitic propositions. The figure has not substantially shifted in the surveys conducted since. Antisemitic incidents in the major Western democracies have risen sharply in the years since 2018; in the United Kingdom, the Community Security Trust recorded the highest number of antisemitic incidents in its history in 2024. The pattern is not confined to a single political tradition; antisemitism in 2026 is documented on the far right, on parts of the far left, in some Islamist movements, and as background noise in much wider populations who do not regard themselves as antisemitic but who hold beliefs the surveys count as such.
The political movements that produced the regime have heirs. Far-right parties with documented links to the inter-war fascist movements have entered government coalitions in several European countries since 2018; their public language is often more careful than that of their forebears but their policy positions on minority populations, on press freedom, on the courts and on the international human-rights framework have been shaped by the older tradition. The Holocaust-denying or Holocaust-minimising tendencies that have been part of these movements since the 1950s remain part of them in 2026.
The technical capacities for state violence at industrial scale have proliferated since 1945. The post-Holocaust international order was built on the conviction that the conditions for industrial mass murder must not be allowed to recur; the conditions have nevertheless recurred, on smaller but real scales, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and elsewhere. The post-war legal and institutional architecture (the Genocide Convention, the United Nations human rights framework, the European Convention, the International Criminal Court) has had real if incomplete success in constraining state behaviour but has not produced the world the framework’s authors had hoped to produce.
The case for sustained education
The case for sustained Holocaust education is not the case that knowing about the Holocaust will prevent its recurrence. The historiography of the post-war period does not support that confident proposition; substantial knowledge of the Holocaust has coexisted with subsequent atrocities. The case is rather that the Holocaust remains the most thoroughly documented case study of how a modern state can become the instrument of mass killing, that the documented record of how the killing was decided and carried out has informed every subsequent body of work on state violence, on bystander behaviour, on perpetrator psychology, on the role of bureaucracy in atrocity, and on the conditions under which ordinary people become killers. The case for keeping the Holocaust at the centre of public education is the case that the analytical resources it provides for understanding political violence are not available, at the same depth or with the same documentation, from any other historical case.
The case for sustained remembrance is somewhat different. It is the case that the murdered are owed acknowledgment by the political and social orders that succeeded the regimes that murdered them, and that the survivors and their descendants have a documented interest in the continuing presence of the events in public memory. The case is not contingent on whether remembrance prevents recurrence; the obligation is owed regardless.
What is being lost
The survivor generation is now substantially gone. The youngest survivors of Auschwitz, born in 1944 to mothers who survived pregnancy in the camp, are in 2026 in their early eighties. The oldest survivors, those born in the 1920s and 1930s who can remember the pre-war Jewish communities and the persecution years as adults, are in their late nineties or older. The number of survivors who can give first-hand testimony in person has fallen from around 150,000 worldwide in 2010 to under 50,000 in 2025. The further fall over the next decade will be steep.
The institutional response to the loss of the survivor generation has been substantial. The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, the Yad Vashem testimony collection, the USHMM oral history programme, the Beth Shalom Forever Project and the Anne Frank House testimony collection together hold over 100,000 hours of recorded survivor testimony. The recordings will continue to be available indefinitely. The question they raise is whether recorded testimony, however extensive, will function in the same way as the live presence of a survivor in a room with a class of schoolchildren. The teachers and educators who have used both forms have substantial reservations; the recorded testimony does work that the live presence does not (it can be paused, replayed, used in structured curriculum), but it is unlikely to do all the work the live presence has done.
What follows
The case the pages in this section make is that the Holocaust will continue to require sustained public attention beyond the lifetime of those who experienced it, and that the conditions for that attention have to be built deliberately. The pages address the components of that work: the museums and memorials that hold the public physical infrastructure of remembrance; the educational programmes that keep the subject in school curricula; the testimony archives that preserve the witness; the post-war legal and reparations frameworks that constituted the formal reckoning with the crimes; the contemporary patterns of antisemitism and historical distortion that the Holocaust education work has had to learn to address; and the wider question of how the next generation will encounter the events when no living person remembers them.
See also
- Perpetrator Psychology
- Anne Frank
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre
- Holocaust Memorial Day
- The Next Generation of Holocaust Education
- The Living Memory Problem
Sources
- Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001
- Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Penguin, 2005 (chapter on Holocaust memory)
- Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History, Brandeis University Press, 1987 (revised 2017)
- Anti-Defamation League, ADL Global 100: An Index of Antisemitism, 2014 and subsequent updates, https://global100.adl.org
- Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report, annual, https://cst.org.uk
- Michael Gray, Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
- USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, https://sfi.usc.edu
- Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, Cornell University Press, 2006