Moreover, the German Federal Republic remained defiant in its refusal to accept the right of wartime slave labourers to back pay or compensation. When Germany finally offered insultingly small amounts of money to them as a "goodwill" gesture in the late 1990s, it was on condition that they sign away all their legal rights. When I accompanied Auschwitz survivors Rudi Kennedy and Roman Halter to the German embassy in London during the slave labour compensation negotiations, the then ambassador told us that "strictly speaking" there had been nothing illegal in the unspeakable conditions at the I.G. Farben works at Auschwitz which Kennedy had just described to him. To this day, German companies and banks as well as German governments persist in variations of this intolerable argument and refuse to accept legal liability to compensate the inmates of the ghettoes and concentration camps for their toil and suffering. The legal rights of former members of the SS and their families are far better protected.

Germany even resorted in 1989 to the legal fiction that the Second World War had not yet ended in a peace treaty as a device to protect the interests of Holocaust-mired German corporations. For it had been agreed in the London Debt Settlement of  February 27, 1953, that claims against them would await such a peace treaty. The West German negotiators were led in the negotiations held in London in 1952 by Hermann Abs, the Deutsche Bank director who had escaped prosecution for war crimes only because the United States brought the Nuremberg trials to a close.

In view of the failure of legal processes to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust and their minions to account, and in view of the non-admission of legal responsibility for compensation by the slave-driving German corporations and by the German government, the court of history becomes vital. A determination to preserve memory and publish unadulterated truth is all that is left for us now that the surviving perpetrators and their victims are so elderly.

Yet here too the position is far more gloomy than most people realise. Certainly, there are museums, memorials, a Holocaust Remembrance Day on the official calendar in Britain, and even a Foreign & Commonwealth Office Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues. Certainly, a 28-nation Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education was created in Stockholm in 2000. Certainly, also in 2000, David Irving lost his libel action against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, who had accused him of Holocaust denial.

These welcome developments conceal concerted, albeit more subtle, assaults on Holocaust truth. Some of the most persistent have emanated from prominent German historians, from corporations with dubious wartime records to defend, and from successive German governments.

Germany has spared almost no expense in a prolonged campaign of cultural diplomacy. Its aim has been to demonstrate that it has come to terms with its Nazi past while, at the same time, promoting a relatively sympathetic view of that terrible period. Among the most common themes are that pre-World War II Germany was not especially anti-Semitic, that ordinary Germans were as much victims as aggressors, that relatively few of them knew about the Holocaust, that the destruction of European Jewry was not intended but happened as part of a process of wartime brutalisation, and that the Holocaust was not unique but is just one example of man's inhumanity to man. A further common argument is that German scholars — unlike Jewish historians — are able to analyse the Nazi record in a dispassionate, "scientific" manner.