Human beings might never rid themselves entirely of prejudice, being of itself a distortion of our own nature, but Bulgin touches on something fundamental: never to take for granted that our common humanity can only be preserved by us all challenging the very tolerance of hatred, as well as facing down the hatred itself. But it, it's important to be really specific about what we mean when we use the word Holocaust, and what the problems are that arrive with that as well. After the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939, they began segregating Jews in ghettos, usually in the most run-down area of a city. More importantly, he correctly emphasises that evil can, under particular circumstances, look very much like any one of us. The British soldiers upon arrival found almost 60,000 prisoners so it's severely overcrowded, and typhus was running rampant throughout the camp.

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And significantly they don't just target Jewish-owned businesses, they also target Jewish-owned homes, so for the first time really Jewish people living in Germany and Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia feel that their most precious havens are under threat. And I think that seems like a simple thing to do, but somehow sometimes with black and white images, people wearing different kinds of clothes, and different types of places, doing different type of things, it’s somehow all too easy to push them into a different dimension, to say their world is not my world, and of course it is. Historian James Bulgin, who created the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum, investigates a story left unexplored for over 80 years. And you know, the first time I went to see it, I thought well, I've seen a lot of these things before, you know, I don't enjoy it but I feel like prepared, and it shocked me. The confirmation of the covert plan (Operation ‘Reinhard’) to ‘liquidate’ the 2 million Jews under Nazi control in occupied Poland was approved.James created the Holocaust galleries at the Imperial War Museum; now he examines a chapter of the Holocaust that has been left largely unexplored for more than 80 years.

Holocaust Memorial Day with three new BBC to mark Holocaust Memorial Day with three new

Almost 700 million people were under occupation during the Second World War, but their experiences varied widely depending on where they were and who they were.From the mid-1930s until the end of the Second World War, the Nazi regime carried out a campaign of sustained antisemitic persecution that developed into a coordinated programme of massmurder. Now these Einsatzgruppen answer to Heinrich Himmler head of the SS, and they're supposed to be a security unit protecting the advancing German line. So we tried really hard to find different ways of doing that; we spoke to archives across the world to find varying images that just capture- each image just captures a flicker of a moment in time. S. and the Holocaust (3x120), a film by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, is available on BBC iPlayer from Monday 9 January and TXs on BBC Four at 10pm.

How the Holocaust Began | Imperial War Museums

I think it's really almost dangerous actually to suggest that there is any such thing as a sort of, you know, a prototypical, you know, pre-war Jewish life; of course, of course there isn't. I think one of the things that teachers really struggle with in difficult and complicated histories is the use of emotive language, particularly mindful of the fact that they're working with young people, they're working with people who, you know, may be experiencing a lot of things going on. And it's something that really kind of crystallized for us as we were working on the text for the galleries particularly. And yet somebody's chosen to freeze this moment in time and to capture this moment, and this man has made this choice. And so of course just by seeing somebody at their actual height, at eye level, doesn't somehow kind of put them back in the world in a kind of a 3D sense, but it at least asks you to sort of think about the fact that they were once every bit as human as you or I are.

As the Allies advance, soldiers uncover mass graves and liberate German concentration camps, revealing the sheer scale and horror of the Holocaust. That's something that we try and be quite clear with our students about, and our visitors about as well. We do later on in the galleries, and what happened is they were all deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and none of them, none of them survived.