Month: January 2025

Every year on January 27th, International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed. This resolution was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 1, 2005. The initiators were Israel, Canada, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. Over 90 additional countries were co-authors of the document.

The Holocaust – from the ancient Greek holocaustosis, meaning “whole sacrifice by fire,” “destruction by fire,” “sacrifice through fire.” In modern scientific literature and journalism, it refers to the policy of Nazi Germany, its allies, and collaborators to persecute and systematically exterminate Jews between 1933 and 1945. The foundation of the Holocaust was the Nazi racial theory, the idea of the superiority of the Aryan race over other races deemed “inferior,” and the perception of “global Jewry” as the main enemy of the German nation.

The persecution of Jews in Germany began in 1933, almost immediately after the Nazis came to power. However, systematic mass extermination occurred during World War II (1939-1945): initially through the processes of ghettoization (creating localized, enclosed, isolated settlements) and mass shootings in Central and Eastern Europe, and then, from 1941 to 1945, deportations to death camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Belzec.

The term “Holocaust” was first used by future Nobel Peace Prize laureate writer Elie Wiesel in the early 1960s as a metaphor symbolizing the burning of an entire people in the crematoria of Nazi death camps. In Israel and some other countries, the term “Shoah” is also used, meaning “catastrophe.”

The date of the memorial day was chosen deliberately. On January 27, 1945, the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, was liberated, where, according to various estimates, between 1.5 and 4 million people perished. The exact number of victims in Auschwitz has never been established, as many documents were destroyed, and the Germans did not keep records of victims sent to gas chambers upon arrival. As evidenced by the documents of the Nuremberg Tribunal, 2.8 million people died, 90% of whom were Jews. According to the latest estimates by catastrophe historians, the total number of victims in Auschwitz was about 1.5 million, of which 85% were Jews (1.275 million).

On his first day in office, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC). This means that the economic sanctions and travel restrictions against ICC staff, initially introduced by Trump in 2020, will once again take effect.

After the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the U.S. Senate stated that it views the court’s actions “not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but also to the sovereignty of the United States.”

The U.S. House of Representatives has already begun advancing a bill imposing sanctions on the ICC. However, the bill still needs to pass through the divided Senate. Meanwhile, judges fear that Trump will not wait for Congress to approve the legislation and will instead use an executive order to establish a legal basis for multiple rounds of sanctions.