It is a privilege to rise to speak for my party on the important occasion of our annual commemoration of the Holocaust. I am grateful to Paul O’Kane for leading the debate, which has been characterised and punctuated by thoughtful and moving contributions, not least from Jackson Carlaw and Michael Marra.

As we have heard and will hear again this afternoon, the Nazis engaged in the most horrific and barbaric acts. There was the mechanised slaughter of 9 million people, 6 million of them Jews—a genocide that killed two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Entire communities, huge segments of entire races and, indeed, anyone who the Nazis declared to be either deviant or defective were rounded up and shipped to camps such as Auschwitz and Belsen to be murdered.

As we have heard in speeches such as that of Ivan McKee, today is also an important opportunity to remember the victims of other genocides around the world—in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur—all of whom were tyrannised, oppressed and tormented simply because of who they are.

Monsters are real. They might wear business suits or military uniforms, but we see the evidence of their works in the bleaker chapters of human history, and today we mark the darkest chapter of all. The horrors of the Holocaust are a grim and tragic reminder of what can happen when we fail to recognise and challenge those monsters, and when we turn a blind eye to them. Horrific acts of this kind are enabled by the passivity of those with the power and the agency to act and to stop them, but who choose not to.

Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz, warns us against that when he tells us:

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

The haunting memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, standing as it does at the heart of Berlin, symbolises the particular horror that can occur when those in power become corrupted and when domination trumps any sense of service to one’s fellow human being. There is no limit to how bleak things can become.

We should acknowledge that the Nazi regime was made possible only by the blind capitulation of thousands of otherwise normal people. The Nazis were successful at mass murder because they desensitised it, normalised it and buried it under the drudgery of bureaucracy. They inured every level of government and the military to atrocity using endless layers of bureaucracy that reduced millions of precious lives to the lines of a ledger book.

As we have heard many times today, the theme of this Holocaust memorial day is “Fragility of Freedom”. The word “fragility” rings scarily true just now. We have seen democratic institutions tested the world over. Some of them are facing tests still now. Authoritarianism is on the rise, and war has returned to continental Europe.

If we look even at modern-day Germany, we will be alarmed and heartened in equal measure. The rise of Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right nationalist party in Germany since the Nazi era, is deeply concerning. However, just last weekend, and in recent days, tens of thousands of Germans have taken to the streets to protest right-wing extremism, following reports that senior AFD members were present at a meeting at which the mass deportation of millions of not just immigrants but anyone who they did not deem to be properly German was discussed. That was a chilling echo of the past.

We in the Liberal Democrats and members across the chamber stand with those who took to the streets in defiance of that extremism. We must never be complacent. We must always remember the consequences of that complacency.

I have previously told the story of when I spent some time in hospital, and a man in the bed opposite volunteered his belief that the Holocaust was a hoax. In the argument that followed, he revealed that the basis of his position was rooted in the videos that he had seen on YouTube. Challenging antisemitism and Holocaust denial falls to each of us, wherever we find it, as does educating our children and young people about the horrific reality of the genocides that have taken place across our world.

The fact that today we are living among many of the communities that the Holocaust sought to extinguish, and that we stand united across the chamber in our remembrance of those awful events and in our opposition to the twisted ideologies of which they were born, is evidence that the Nazis failed. That sort of darkness will always fail, but only if we stand unflinchingly together, united, and resolute against it.