Communities Secretary Aileen Campbell says much of what we remember this week is not the actions of leaders and troops, but actions done by "humdrum men".

We remain committed to educating young people about the Holocaust as part of the curriculum for excellence, she says.

We want a world that is open-minded, peaceful, loving and kind she states.

The minister praises Daniel Johnson for addressing challenges felt within his party.

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Tory MSP Adam Tomkins says many members have said it has been a privilege to speak in this debate, but it is a particular privilege to follow that speech from Daniel Johnson, which was "courageous, brave and right".

Mr Tomkins says hatred is such a venal emotion that it can cause perfectly ordinary people to commit vast extraordinary crimes on an industrial state.

"We must have the courage as Mr Johnson has shown to call out hatred wherever we see it."

The Tory MSP says one day he will take his children to Auschwitz, explaining his children are Jewish.

He says the resolution people feel walking through places like Auschwitz is "never again".

Labour MSP Daniel Johnson says: "The Labour Party is supposed to be the party of equality, of social justice and of human rights. But in recent months and years, we have failed and in particular we have failed the Jewish people.

"Following these events I made it a personal point to reach out to discuss, to listen, to the Jewish community in Edinburgh. I feel I had to take direct, personal steps and I have been struck by the pain, the hurt and the fear our actions and our inactions have caused.

"Our failure to deal with complaints. Our readmission of members guilty of anti-Semitism. Our reluctance to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

"In my 25 years of being a member of the Labour party, there are things the party has done that I've disagreed with. There are things the party have done that have made me angry. But these events and these conversations that I have held are the first time in all those years I have ever felt ashamed to be a Labour party member."

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The stories of child survivors of the Holocaust could be used to help improve the lives of refugees in the UK, researchers at Aberystwyth University have said.

About 10,000 mainly Jewish children escaped from the Nazis in the 1930s thanks to the Kindertransport scheme.

A study will look at how their experiences went on to affect them in their adult lives.

Dr Andrea Hammel said it could help children fleeing conflict today.

Image source, Getty Images

• What was the Kindertransport?
• When Kindertransport arrived in Wales
• Kindertransport refugee retraces journey
• Read more here

Image source, PA Media

Five per cent of UK adults do not believe the Holocaust took place and one in 12 believes its scale has been exaggerated, a survey found last year.

The poll, external of more than 2,000 people was carried out by Opinion Matters for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT).

In the survey, 45% of those polled said they did not know how many people were killed in the Holocaust, while one in five (19%) believed fewer than two million Jews were murdered.

The actual figure was six million.

Read more.

Lib Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton begins: "Monsters are real." They may wear business suits or uniforms but they walk among us, he adds.

The Holocaust was only made possible by the capitulation of thousands of people, and of decent people averting their eyes he says.

Mr Cole-Hamilton says this period of history is beginning to move out of living memory but we must continue to pass on the story, because already one in 20 people in Britain do not believe it happened and one in eight think it has been exaggerated.

"Hate still blooms against the Jewish people," he warns. He adds: "We must do everything we can to stamp it out."

Image source, AFP

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has apologised on behalf of his country's government for its failure to protect Jews during World War Two.

Mr Rutte said that while some Dutch officials resisted during the Nazi occupation, too many simply did as they were told.

It was the first such apology to be offered by a Dutch prime minister.

About 102,000 of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust came from the Netherlands.

Green MSP Ross Greer says: "The Holocaust was a singular evil, an act of calculated barbarity to which few, if any, others can compare."

Mr Greer says two in every three Jews in Europe were murdered, alongside Slavic people, Roma, disabled people, LGBT people, prisoners of war, Communists and other political or religious opponents of the Nazis.

More Jews were killed than there are people in Scotland today, he says.

The Green MSP says the same underlying hatred that led to the Holocaust continues to fester in European society.

In the last few years the voices of hatred have grown louder and have gained more legitimacy, he says.

We have to actively be anti-racist and anti-fascist, Mr Greer adds.

Image source, bbc

Scotland's last Holocaust survivor has recalled the horror of Auschwitz as the 75th anniversary of the death camp's liberation is marked.

Judith Rosenberg was 22 when she was put on a cramped train with her Jewish family in the spring of 1944.

Together they were transported from Gyor in their native Hungary to Poland where they were immediately split up.

Ms Rosenberg, now 97, recalled: "I could not even say cheerio to my father."

• How Auschwitz became centre of Nazi Holocaust
• 'I survived two concentration camps'
• The families who weren't meant to live
• Holocaust row seethes as leaders gather in Israel
• Read more here

Labour MSP Pauline McNeill says it is painful to read and hear about this period of human history but it is also important to reflect on it.

"How it could have happened at all is the imperative question for anyone who is interested in ensuring it could never happen again."

We must educate every child of the facts and have robust policies to tackle hate crime and racism, she argues.

The message of Holocaust Memorial Day cannot be allowed to fade, Ms McNeill says.

She goes on to highlight the role the UK played in accepting Jewish children as refugees, including Alf Dubs who himself has gone on to promote the rights of child refugees.

"Britain and Scotland must play a positive role in today's refugee crisis. We should live up to our responsibilities and create a humane society to do our part to make the world a better place."

Image source, Getty Images

On 27 January 1945, Soviet troops cautiously entered Auschwitz.

Primo Levi - one of the most famous survivors - was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the liberators arrived.

The men cast "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive", he would later write.

"They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by... the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist."

"We saw emaciated, tortured, impoverished people,"soldier Ivan Martynushkin said of liberating the death camp, external. "We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell."

In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. Almost one million were Jews.

Those deported to the camp complex were gassed, starved, worked to death and even killed in medical experiments. The vast majority were murdered in the complex of gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.

Six million Jewish people died in the Holocaust - the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe's Jewish population. Auschwitz was at the centre of that genocide.

• 'I survived two concentration camps'
• The families who weren't meant to live
• Holocaust row seethes as leaders gather in Israel
• Read more here

Tory MSP Ruth Davidson says she defies anyone to have watched the news last night and not be moved by the coverage of hundreds of survivors marking Holocaust Memorial Day, possibly for the last time.

Ms Davidson says: "It seems to me that seldom has there been a year in my lifetime when the lessons of the Holocaust have felt this fresh, this prescient and this urgent."

She says: "The rise in hate crime, the politics of identity, culture wars and out and out anti-Semitism we see throughout the world reminds us that progress is not irreversible and things don't just get better."

"Injustice and prejudice must be fought, gains are hard won and ground will never be held if complacency and indifference are allowed to take hold."

The former Scottish Conservative leader says we have to take responsibility for the protection of our fellow citizens.

She says tackling the forces of evil, indifference and prejudice is a load we have left to the survivors of Auschwitz for too long, to the Holocaust Education Trust for too long, too other people for too long.

"It is time for us, for all of us, to step forward and lift the load with them."

Communities Secretary Aileen Campbell says testimonies that went around the world yesterday from Holocaust survivors remind us of what should not be forgotten and "informs a better future for everyone".

She highlights while Jewish people were the most persecuted group, gay people, Gypsy and Roma people and disabled people were also targeted.

Jewish people were vilified, othered, stigmatised and blamed for social ills as part of a deliberate build up to extermination, the minister says.

The context and systematic racism which led to the Holocaust must not be forgotten either, Ms Campbell says.

The Holocaust did not spell the end of suffering and the lessons of the past were not globally heeded, she says, pointing to genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia which have taken place since.

Perpetrators "were not born to hate" but were drawn into it, and we must remain vigilant in calling out racism and hatred when we see it, the minister says.

Image source, AFP

Survivors and international leaders have honoured the victims of the Holocaust, with memorial events and services held all over the world.

This year, Holocaust Memorial Day coincided with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, in what was then-Nazi-occupied Poland.

Set up in 1940, Auschwitz was initially intended to house Polish political prisoners - but it eventually became the largest of the Nazis' extermination camps, where Adolf Hitler's plan to kill all Jewish people - the "Final Solution" - was put in to practice.

About 1.1 million people were murdered at the vast, horrifying complex.

Most of the victims were Jews. In addition, more than 70,000 were Poles, 21,000 were Roma, and 15,000 were Soviet prisoners of war, as well as several thousand others.

The camp was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945.

Click here for some of the memorial events that took place throughout the day.

Image source, Reuters

Image source, Getty Images

The Scottish government leads a debate marking Scottish Holocaust Memorial Day 2020 – 75th Anniversary.

Commemorations were held around the world on Monday to mark the end of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews and millions of others were murdered, and to honour survivors of subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.