Holocaust Memorial Day 2019 date: When is Holocaust Memorial Day – what date?

Every year, thousands of people remember the past and take action to create a safer future and tackle ongoing prejudice and hatred. Six million Jewish people were tragically killed during the Holocaust. But genocides have occurred since in Cambodia, Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda. 

When is Holocaust Memorial Day? 

Holocaust Memorial Day, the day of remembrance, takes place every year on January 27.

This marks the anniversary of when the largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated. 

After the Holocaust, genocide was recognised as a crime and the international has been battling every since to ensure this level of evil would never be allowed to happen again. 

What happened during the Holocaust? 

After the Nazis rose to power in Germany in 1933, they used propaganda to prevent German Jewish people having human and civil rights. 

The Holocaust, which is also known as The Shoah in Hebrew, was an attempt by the Nazis to to kill all Jewish people in Europe. 

In 1941, this became a plan known as The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. 

Jewish people were killed by firing squads at death squads called Einsatzgruppen started to take hold in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. 

The first extermination camp, Chelmno in Poland, was then created and lead to the Nazis murdering on a huge scale between 1941 and 1945.

By the end of the Holocaust, six million Jewish men, women and children were killed in ghettos, mass-shootings, in concentration camps and extermination camps.

The Genocide in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 also shocked the world, after the leader of the radical communist political party Khmer Rouge gained power following years of guerrilla warfare.

About two million people died from execution, disease, exhaustion and starvation. 

In Rwanda, about one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in 100 days in 1994. 

During the civil war in 1995, Bosnian Serb troops and paramilitaries marched into the town of Srebrenica and murdered 8,000 Muslim men and boys over the age of 12. 

A civil war also began in 2003 in Dafur, west Sudan, between the sedentary black African farmers and the lighter-skinned nomadic Arab population. 

The civil war resulted in the recorded deaths of about 400,000 people, although this figure could actually be higher, as up to 2.6 million people are still displaced and living in refugee camps in Darfur and Chad.

source: express.co.uk