It's worth keeping in mind that anti-semitism was virulent across most of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The authorities in France, for instance, unhesitatingly handed over their Jews to the Nazis, though they were under no real pressure to do so. ("Occupied" France was in fact occupied by less than 3,000 German troops for most of the time.) This widespread hatred was an easy thing for the Nazis to exploit, and they had no difficulty getting the German business community on board either. Companies such as I G Farben and Bayer were complicit in the crimes, taking advantage of the ready supply of slave labour and human guinea pigs, and helping to design ever more efficient killing and cremation systems etc. And American investors in Nazi Germany, such as IBM and the Rothschilds, could not have been unaware of the intense and systematic persecution of German and Austrian Jews in the 1930s.

The only reason anti-semitism was less evident in the UK (but still a strong undercurrent ebbing through the so-called Establishment) was that Britain had killed or driven out most of its Jews in medieval persecutions centuries earlier.

Wolfgang, I have no problem with Auschwitz being emblematic of the Holocaust, and indeed of all genocides (thus I would like to see 27 January observed as something wider, such as Genocide Awareness Day) but the numbers game can be misleading. Deaths at Auschwitz are almost universally put at 1.1 to 1.5 million, with most latter-day historians now tending towards the lower estimate. Deaths at Treblinka were 700,000-850,000, but that was achieved in a single year, not five years like Auschwitz. Think what the story might have been if Treblinka had not been destroyed by an uprising of prisoners in August 1943.

When I said Holocaust Memorial Day was a recent innovation, I meant to add that Jews have of course been commemorating the Shoah for 50 years or more. (It started to be known as the Holocaust only around 1960 and the Eichmann trial.) Yom HaShoah is observed on 27 of Nissan (which usually falls in March or April I think). I can't remember the significance of the specific date, but I think it might relate to the Warsaw uprising, which would be as appropriate an event as any to relate it to.