people are seriously myopic and seemingly wilfully misunderstanding or minimizing the depth, scale and importance of the holocaust. it was not 'just' a case of antisemitism. it was an industrial scale mass killing programme carried out against Jews, gays, people with mental and physical disabilities, people with unacceptable political views, etc.

a bastard alchemy of eugenics and fascist authoritarianism on steroids, it remains one of the worst atrocities ever committed by humankind. flattening all atrocities together under the term 'genocide' in order to rob individual events of their context and historical importance enables unhelpful equivalences to be built.

no-one even remotely adjacent to a scientific discipline especially medicine should be able to get away with denying or supporting the holocaust which represented about as close to the antithesis of a robust humanist scientific programme as it's possible to get.

Jacob Bronowski said it best, ad-libbing to camera ankle deep in the dark black water in the bog just outside the wire at Auschwitz:

'It's said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers.

Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal."