ON SATURDAY January 27 1945 — 76 years ago tomorrow — the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, was liberated by the Soviet army.

There were 27 main concentration camps set up by the Nazi regime and in them over 1.6 million people were incarcerated and many exterminated. The inmates comprised those who didn’t conform to the Nazi concept of humanity: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, socialists, trade unionists and those with disabilities. The nazi programme of mass killing of ‘undesirables’ was the world’s most comprehensive and devastating attempt to establish an elite race of supermen and women.

Only belatedly, decades after the war’s end, did the former West German state erect any monuments at all to the victims of fascism. Up until 1995 there was no official research into the history of the concentration camps. This was hardly surprising, as many former Nazis were soon reoccupying their former posts in West Germany even before the flames of war had been extinguished.