On Holocaust Remembrance Day, pope warns mass extermination could happen again

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis marked Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday by warning that warped ideologies can pave the way to another mass extermination.

Francis spoke off the cuff at the end of his weekly general audience, held in his private library because of coronavirus restrictions, to commemorate the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where Nazis killed more than 1 million Jews and others.

In all, about 6 million European Jews and millions of other people were killed by the Germans and their collaborators.

The Argentine pope insisted on the need to remember, saying it was a sign of humanity and a condition for a peaceful future. But he said remembering “also means to be aware that these things can happen again, starting with ideological proposals that claim to save a people and end up destroying a people and humanity.”

He warned that the Holocaust began that way, opening “this path of death, extermination and brutality.”