“With humanity still scarred by genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, the international community shares a solemn responsibility to fight those evils.”
– Article 3 of the Stockholm Declaration
Reflecting on the lessons of the Holocaust
The Holocaust is eminently relevant to the present day. A well-informed understanding of the Holocaust, the paradigmatic genocide, can help in comprehending and addressing other genocides, mass atrocities, and human rights violations. The IHRA’s core competencies in education, remembrance and research about the Holocaust can inform and guide educators, scholars and activists responding to emerging mass atrocity crimes today. In turn, Holocaust education, remembrance and research can benefit and learn through continuous dialogue with educators, scholars and activists working on other cases of genocides, offering new perspectives and highlighting areas of similarity and difference.
The IHRA’s Committee on the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity
“We, the IHRA Member Countries, recognize that understanding the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust is essential to the prevention of genocide and mass atrocity crimes. IHRA expertise is relevant to historically informed policymaking and addressing contemporary challenges.”
— Article 13 of the 2020 IHRA Ministerial Declaration
The IHRA established the Committee on the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity to develop and share good practices on how to sensitively reflect and discuss the Holocaust and other cases of genocides without diminishing their respective differences in an educational and research environment.
The Committee has produced pedagogical guidance for educators; a publication comprising an overview of programs provided by 120 organizations worldwide that deal with the Holocaust in comparison to other mass atrocities; and its most recent report, History Never Repeats itself, but Sometimes it Rhymes: comparing the Holocaust to different Atrocities, which explores what we mean by “compare” when we relate the Holocaust to another genocide.
The current Chair of the IHRA’s Committee on the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes against Humanity is Vassiliki Keramida (Greece).
