Third, while survivors are still alive and able to provide information of historical value, there should be more emphasis on in-depth conversations with selected persons rather than the fairly standardised video interviews which have been all too common. The experiences of some victims were too traumatic to be revealed in short conversations with relative strangers. Two survivors whom I came to know well felt able to tell me things only after several years. I discovered recently that one of them had provided information to a museum on condition that it was not to be revealed within the lifetime of his children.

Fourth, as a perverse result of the Cold War and of the desire to appease post-war West Germany, there has never been a legal reckoning for the Holocaust. This surely must be resolved. The miserable, out-of-court settlements reached in the late 1990s by lawyers representing survivors in class action suits in the US were on the basis that the German corporations who had participated in and profited from slave labour under the Nazis would admit no legal responsibility. When I accompanied former slave labourers at Auschwitz to see the then German ambassador in London in the 1990s, the ambassador stressed that "strictly speaking" there had been nothing illegal in their employment. If Europe is to be rebuilt on the basis of respect for the rule of law, this position is intolerable.

Fifth, there have been concerted and growing efforts within the European Union to promote the doctrine of "Double Genocide", namely that the Holocaust should not be considered in isolation but on a par with Soviet misdeeds. The effect of this doctrine in such countries as Hungary and Lithuania has been to place greater emphasis on Soviet than on Nazi crimes. In the Vilnius museum built in the former Nazi and then Soviet police headquarters, only a single room has been belatedly added to record the murders of Lithuanian Jews in the Holocaust—murders in which Lithuanians had been active participants. There is a growing tendency in Central and Eastern Europe to downgrade the Holocaust by comparison with Communist terror.

Sixth, the Cold War emphasis on anti-Soviet analysis has continued to affect the way in which the history of Europe in the 20th century is taught in many universities. Whereas the Holocaust is firmly on the teaching agenda in schools in the UK and elsewhere, the same often does not apply in higher education. St Antony's College, Oxford, was a Cold War creation. It later received considerable funding for its European studies centre from the Volkswagen Foundation with the advice of Hermann Abs, the director of Deutsche Bank mainly responsible for foreign investments at the time the bank financed the construction of the Buna works at Auschwitz. Abs (who died in 1994), as well as leading German historians, would have had us believe he was ignorant of this.

Seventh, this leads to the conclusion that there needs to be considerably better funding of Holocaust history from neutral and Jewish sources rather than from German ones.

Until these issues are resolved, our understanding and memory of the Holocaust will remain in doubt.