Lord Tugendhat (Con)

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of my noble friend Lord Pickles. It is impossible to carry the words of this amendment into effect. Of course the Nazis initiated the Holocaust and were responsible for organising it, but its administration involved many hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. The rounding-up of the Jews, their confinement to holding camps and transportation from their countries of origin to the camps in the east all involved the participation of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. Certainly, the French, Polish and Dutch police were involved, but so too were ordinary citizens carrying out their jobs. One of the most important aspects of the Holocaust, which one must understand, is that it involved ordinary people—ordinary Frenchmen, Lithuanians and Poles—participating in the extermination of their fellow citizens. Crimes by people against their own nationals became one of the most outstanding features of the Holocaust. Therefore, it is very important to convey in this memorial the fact that, if you have a Government who have no limits on their powers and what they can do and who are pursuing evil policy, that evil will contaminate and involve many others. It cannot be confined to a small group of initiators, so although I sympathise with the spirit underlying this amendment, the words that it uses would be damaging and would disguise one of the most important aspects of the Holocaust.