The lessons of the holocaust are as pertinent as ever

The date is now marked as International Holocaust Memorial Day.

The commemoration is of vital importance.

The annihilation of the Jews by Germans took place in what was then one of the most advanced societies in human history, with solid foundations set in centuries of learning and culture.

If anything illustrates the precariousness of civilised values it is the way in which Nazism swept through a society as ordered as Germany.

The lesson of the holocaust has lost no significance at all in the decades since it happened.

While there has been nothing exactly like it, the sudden genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was a shocking reminder that human nature has not improved since the 1940s. Indeed Rwanda was in a way worse, in that it happened in little more than three months, was mostly carried out with machetes, and resulted in most of the country’s Tutsi population being slaughtered.

The sudden massacre of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 was a reminder that Europe could again lapse into barbarism.

But this year the potential for human savagery has been apparent again, with the continuing rise of Isis. The brutal Muslim extremist group is so widely feared and loathed that it resulted in the rare unification of the United Nations Security Council against it.

It is almost hard to believe that such atrocities could be happening at the same time as stunning technological advances.

The Nazi holocaust is still the supremely wicked event of the modern age.

By keeping alive the memory of what happened from generation to generation, it helps make it more likely that it will remain a uniquely horrific phase in history.