Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum designates a theme for each year's programs,[1] and provides materials to help support remembrance efforts.

Senator John Danforth of Missouri chose April 28 and 29, because it was on these dates, in 1945, that American troops liberated the Dachau concentration camp.

Executive Order 12093, November 1, 1978:[5] On April 24, 1979, in anticipation of the Commission's report, the first National Civic Commemoration was held in the Capitol Rotunda, with the address delivered by President Carter: "Although words do pale, yet we must speak.

President Ronald Reagan, making his first public appearance after recovering from an attempted assassination, said: "We remember the suffering and the death of Jews and all those others who were persecuted in World War II.

As we briefly lay aside the problems and the promises confronting our nation today to memorialize the supreme tragedy of more than forty years ago, there is no more appropriate location in which to do this than here in the Capitol Rotunda.

This Rotunda is the symbol of all that the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust tried to eliminate: human rights, individual liberties, the independence of nations living in freedom.

Our holding this ceremony here symbolizes the ultimate triumph of these values, which other democratic nations also cherish, over the unspeakable negation of those principles embodied by the Holocaust.

It was a crime unique in the annals of human history, different not only in the quantity of violence—the sheer numbers killed—but in its manner and purpose as a mass criminal enterprise organized by the state against defenseless civilian populations.

The concept of the annihilation of an entire people, as distinguished from their subjugation, was unprecedented; never before in human history had genocide been an all-pervasive government policy unaffected by territorial or economic advantage and unchecked by moral or religious constraints....

The Holocaust was not simply a throwback to medieval torture or archaic barbarism, but a thoroughly modern expression of bureaucratic organization, industrial management, scientific achievement, and technological sophistication.

The entire apparatus of the German bureaucracy was marshaled in the service of the extermination process.The Department of Defense (DOD) used this definition as the foundation of goals for DRVH programs.

In fact, the Final Solution often took precedence over the war effort—as trains, personnel, and material needed at the front were not allowed to be diverted from death camp assignments.

As part of this witness, these walls show how one of the world's most advanced nations embraced a policy aimed at the annihilation of the Jewish people.

And these walls remind us that the Holocaust was not inevitable; it was allowed to gather strength and force only because of the world's weakness and appeasement in the face of evil.

Yet in places such as Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald, the world saw something new and terrible: the state-sanctioned extermination of a people, carried out with the chilling industrial efficiency of a so-called modern nation.

Also participating were World War II veterans from every state in the Union, who had served in divisions that helped liberate Nazi concentration camps.

[7] In 1984, the long-term efforts of a Navy Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff, to convince the Department of Defense to participate in the national DRVH were successful.

[17] As a result of that meeting, the first shipboard Holocaust Days of Remembrance Ceremony was conducted on board USS Puget Sound (AD-38), the Sixth Fleet Flagship, during a port visit to Málaga, Spain.

It also included materials that could be used in remembrance and educational programs and ceremonies, divided into eight sections: (1) The Liberators; (2) The Horror; (3) The Process of Annihilation; (4) Bystanders and Collaborators; (5) The Response; (6) Resistance and Rescue; (7) The Shadow; (8) America Remembers.

The cover of the DOD Guide featured a photograph of the sculpture, Liberation, depicting an American soldier carrying a Holocaust victim.

The Guide includes this description of the "cover illustration: Dedicated on May 30, 1985, the fifteen foot, two-ton bronze sculpture, Liberation, is the creation of the late Nathan Rapoport, the Polish-born artist who died on June 4, 1987.

His artistic goal was to embody in bronze a daring vision: in the face of sorrow and tragedies, he asserted that hope can triumph despite atrocity.