Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)

My Lords, I should start by explaining why I am speaking at all on this subject. The reason is a personal one. My grandfather, the previous Lord Russell of Liverpool, fought in and survived the First World War. He was obviously a very brave man: he won the Military Cross not once, not twice, but three times. He had a Military Cross with two bars, which made him a fairly formidable individual. He subsequently became a lawyer, and he joined the Judge Advocate-General’s office of the Army. Between 1946 and 1951, he and his team were responsible for preparing and overseeing the war crimes trials throughout that period in the British occupied zone of Germany. As noble Lords may imagine, what he and his team saw, read and experienced was pretty searing. They visited the camps, talked to the survivors and interviewed the perpetrators. That must have been a pretty unpleasant experience. The experience was strong enough that, in 1952, only seven years after the cessation of hostilities, my grandfather, who was still in the Judge Advocate-General’s department—he was the deputy by then—became increasingly disturbed to hear that a generation of young Germans going through schools was starting to emerge who were already beginning Holocaust denial. The rumour was that this was propaganda put out by the Americans, that they had exaggerated the situation and were trying to keep Germany under control. My grandfather was sufficiently worried about this that he decided, because he had all the material which his team had collected, that somebody needed to go on the record and write a factual account of what happened—the beginnings of proper Holocaust education, if you like. He wrote the book and, as he was still an employee of the Army, he sent it to the authorities, because he needed to get permission to publish it. He was not given permission. The reason given at that time —the early 1950s—was that, with the Marshall plan’s money coming in and the early stirrings of the European Coal and Steel Community, which ultimately became the European Union, there was a feeling that one should not rake over the painful coals of the recent past too much and that it was important to try to move on. My grandfather disagreed with that, so he resigned. I hope he thanked the Army for that, because it resulted in such a huge amount of publicity that his book immediately became a bestseller. It is called The Scourge of the Swastika, and I am ashamed to say it is still in print. It is a factual, educational account of part of what happened during the Holocaust. That is a personal reason for why I am speaking on this amendment, which is to do with the educational part of the national Holocaust memorial. We are on Report. I am conscious that, like me, my noble friend Lord Colville of Culross, as a fellow Deputy Speaker, finds one of the less enjoyable parts of the privilege of being a Deputy Speaker to be sitting on the Woolsack listening to Second Reading speeches—so I do not intend to indulge in that. Indeed, I hope this group will not take very long, because the point I will try to make to your Lordships is about the difference between what was originally hoped and envisaged for what the learning centre would be and would be capable of delivering, and the increasingly likely reality if we proceed in the way that it is currently put together.