Page 2505 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 14 November 1989
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Mrs Grassby: I was alive when they were getting rid of six million people. I was alive, yes.
MR HUMPHRIES: I am sure you were, Minister, but I am sorry that age has not given you any more wisdom.
Mrs Grassby: I do not think it has given much to you either.
MR HUMPHRIES: Minister, you talked about the excesses of madmen that do terrible things to the human race. Those excesses are not finished. There are regimes in this world which have continued that kind of oppression even within my lifetime. Only a few years ago there was a government in Cambodia which, on the scale of human tragedy, was far more excessive and was far more suppressive of the people of that country than anything Adolf Hitler did. Half of the people of Cambodia were killed by that regime - half. Hitler never quite got to those heights, Minister. But let us keep something in perspective. I am happy to acknowledge and to share with you the horror of Nazism but do not for one minute, by your calling across the chamber, hint to anybody that you are prepared to tolerate the excesses of totalitarian communism.
Holocaust
MR BERRY (Minister for Community Services and Health) (5.01): I would like to follow on from what Minister Grassby has said about the terrors of Nazism. I think that the anniversary of the most important and significant event in recent times, if we can relate to that, occurred on 9 November. That was Kristallnacht. It marks an important day of remembrance for Jewish people around the world.
Kristallnacht - night of glass literally, but night of broken glass in reality - was the start of overt actions by the Nazis against the Jews, and I am sure, Mr Stevenson, that that is not rubbish, as I heard you say a little while ago. On 7 November 1938 a young Jew, whose parents were deported from Germany to Poland by the fascists, assassinated a German diplomat in Paris. In so-called spontaneous reprisals, on Kristallnacht in 1938, synagogues, Jewish shops, businesses and homes were attacked and destroyed by mobs including civilians and the military. The Nazis mobilised the might of a modern industrialised society against unarmed and unprepared civilians. They included not just Jews but also trade unionists, gypsies, communists and anybody else who spoke up against the terrible regime.
During World War II tens of millions of people were killed, of which several million were Jews. It was long before Kristallnacht in 1938, however, that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party began their persecution of the Jewish people. As early as 1924, Nazis had introduced anti-Jewish Bills into
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