As Jews, many of whom lost family members in the Holocaust, we owe it to the memory of those who were murdered to ensure that the terrible events of the 1940s are never repeated.

We regard it as our moral and religious duty to warn that the suppression of civil liberties, and the exclusion from society of groups regarded as unhealthy or unclean, or otherwise undesirable, bear very strong parallels to the events of the 1930s that eventually paved the way for the Holocaust to happen.

It must be recognised that the Nazi regime initially excluded Jews from German society by claiming that such measures were necessary on grounds of a ‘public-health emergency,’ in order to prevent the spread of infectious disease. Anti-Covid policies which excluded the unvaccinated from society, and denied many more their basic right to make a living, to travel, even to hospital treatment and to food, were asserted on the very same grounds.

We are further committed to upholding the principles of the Nuremberg Code, drawn up in 1947 following the Nuremberg Trials of German doctors who had conducted inhumane experiments on the inmates of concentration camps. The Nuremberg Code established the principle of informed consent for all medical experiments, and thus quite clearly outlaws the compulsory wearing of medical devices such as face masks, and intrusive tests that constitute a bodily assault, as well as coerced vaccination in the form of vaccine passports and mandates. These are all experiments. None of them had been demonstrated as ‘safe and effective’ before they were imposed on the public on the grounds of an ‘emergency’. Furthermore, in 2005 the United Nations (UNESCO) Declaration on Bio-Ethics and Human Rights extended the principle of informed consent to all medical treatments, not just experimental ones.

Despite the apparent restoration of some rights, governments are still seeking to downgrade human rights by asserting the concept of ‘communitarianism,’ which sets an arbitrary assessment of the ‘common good’ of society above the hitherto inalienable rights of individuals. Yet either the individual is sovereign, or the individual must be subordinate to the community - both situations cannot exist simultaneously.

Communitarianism does not materially differ from the principles of National Socialism in Germany, which subjugated the rights of citizens to the collective will of the state. For example, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which excluded Jews from citizenship, introduced a ‘citizenship certificate,’ requiring the compliance of all citizens to the diktats of the Nazi regime. Governments which today seek to impose the principles of communitarianism on their citizens must be viewed in the same moral light.

A precedent has now been set. The public has been conditioned through a campaign of fear. Covid policies or similar measures can be reintroduced at any time on almost any grounds the government deems sufficient. We assert that this cannot be permitted: that it is just such a campaign of fear – combined with the silencing of dissent – that creates the conditions in which totalitarian regimes are likely to take hold.

Those of us who do attempt to speak out against censorship and discrimination, and who dare to compare recent events to the history of Germany in the 1930s, are often accused of ‘Holocaust denial’, yet this is a direct inversion of the truth. Those of us who warn of the potential consequences of discrimination and subordination do so precisely to honour the memory of those who were murdered in Holocaust; those who seek to silence us are the true Holocaust deniers, as they seek to deny us the right to learn from history – from our history.

The principal phrase of officially sanctioned Holocaust remembrance is ‘Never Again’. To quote Vera Sharav, human-rights campaigner and child survivor of the Holocaust, ‘Never Again is Now.’ Now is the time to show that we have learnt the lessons of history, and to ensure that the creation and subjugation of ‘undesireable’ classes does not take place, lest we repeat the horrors which followed the demonisation of Jews in Nazi Germany.

Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. If we cannot warn of the lessons of the Holocaust, and of the events that preceded it, then every single victim of the Holocaust will have died in vain.