Europeans urged to keep Holocaust memory alive on Auschwitz anniversary

by Deborah Cole, Agence France-Presse
January 27, 2004

...Holocaust Memorial Day was introduced in 1996 by then-president Roman Herzog. The day of remembrance is not a public holiday but it observed by schools, community organizations and church groups.

To mark the day of remembrance, the German Jewish Community History council, the Berlin legislature and JewishGen, a genealogy Web site, honored six non-Jewish Germans who had worked to preserve Jewish history and culture in German towns, which nearly vanished in the Holocaust.

An estimated six million European Jews were murdered during the Nazis' genocide campaign between 1941 and 1945, one million of them at the massive Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

Some 600,000 Jews lievd in Germany before Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, but their numbers had fallen to just 15,000 by 1950.

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