Mr. Speaker, last week the world paused to remember the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
About 1.5 million people were murdered at Auschwitz. Those deemed too weak to work were sent immediately to the gas chambers. Those whose energy could be profitably extracted were used as forced labour and died of disease, starvation or exhaustion, or were gassed in their turn once they had been used up.
In terms of raw numbers, Auschwitz was the largest cog in the Nazi machinery of industrialized death which consumed over six million Jews and several million others who were deemed by the Nazi pseudo-science to be inferior or by the Nazi bureaucracy to be undesirable or merely disposable.
Auschwitz serves therefore as proof that true evil is not mere wickedness and is not simply the opposite of good. True evil is found wherever human beings are regarded as mere objects to be used as needed for the attainment of some outside goal.
Let the memory of Auschwitz therefore stand forever as a permanent reminder--