Page 2508 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 14 November 1989
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happening in Eastern Europe can perhaps be left for another time. Having just briefly discussed that with Mr Humphries, perhaps we might raise it ourselves on Thursday. That is a different topic.
There are a lot of lessons, I think, from the Holocaust which we should remember and which Germany should remember especially if it is to reunite. Firstly, Mr Speaker, as Mrs Grassby said, a madman came to power in Nazi Germany and brought his gang along with him. As a result of a number of factors, he took over what was formerly a shaky democratic government in 1933 and instituted in Europe a reign of terror. Of course, at the same time, there was an equivalent reign of terror going on in the Soviet Union with his ally, briefly, Joseph Stalin. Indeed, the effects of that continued and really were responsible for the erection of the Berlin Wall.
However, to get back to the Nazis, the Germans were considered by the Jewish population to be among the most civilised people in Europe. It was quite shocking to see what one madman and his followers could do to a country. That madman caused the death of over six million Jews in a systematic campaign of extermination.
To the Western Allies' shame, especially Britain and France, the major Western Allies, this lunatic could have been stopped in the Rhineland in 1936; he could have been stopped during the Anschluss; he could have been stopped at Munich when the absolutely gutless Neville Chamberlain and the equally gutless French leader went there and capitulated to Adolf Hitler. After that, war was inevitable.
The Western Allies took until halfway through 1939 to wake up to the fact that he really was a menace, despite the loud protestations of a significant few led by such people as Winston Churchill. I suppose I have got something personal in this, Mr Speaker, because several members of my family on my father's side were killed by the Nazis. Poland was the first country hit by the German onslaught in World War II. Five and a half million Poles, including three million Jews, were exterminated by the Nazis.
Hitler's plans and the Nazis' plans for Eastern Europeans, who were Untermenschen in the Nazi creed, were the enslavement and execution of any intellectuals, any people in the bourgeoisie, anyone with a high school education. The Pol Pot regime has many similarities in terms of what Hitler intended to do to the people of Eastern Europe, Poland, the Soviet Union and other states in Eastern Europe.
As a result of World War II in Europe, some 30 to 35 million people were killed and also a significantly huge number of people in Asia, some 40 million. However, I suppose that is another story. That was another regime. One of the problems during World War II was that, despite
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