Lest we should ever forget....

A career soldier before the outbreak of World War II. His first experience of conflict was as part of the British Expeditionary Force defending the beachheads at Dunkirk in May 1940 in the face of overwhelming German superiority during the evacuation of the beaches at Dunkirk.

He saw service in North Africa and was at El Alamein in 1942 where the ground shook so much that it felt like a rippling earthquake so fierce was the bombardment from the Allied tanks targeting Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s German Africa Corps. It was hell on earth, or so he thought.

Then on to Sicily in 1943 and to the weeks of blood curdling battles around Monte Casino - 130 kilometres (81 miles) southeast of Rome - in the early part of 1944. The Benedictine abbey atop of Monte Cassino was fiercely defended as the Axis forces strived to stop the Allied forces breaking through to Rome. Soldiers' lives were measured in days rather than weeks.

As I write this I am looking at my father's distinctive Desert Rats 8th Army shoulder badges to prove that part of his life at least. But then a blank.

Richard Harold Minton-Taylor never talked about the real horror. He faced it in April 1945 buried in a forest clearing outside the town of Celle in what is now modem day Lower Saxony in northern Germany.

He had arrived at Bergen-Belsen during the dying days of World War II. My father was part of the 8th army corps that helped liberate the concentration camp. What he must have seen and had to comprehend as a battle hardened lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) is hard to take in.

A year ago I visited, with my wife and some friends, the beautiful medieval city of Krakow in south west Poland. We spent an afternoon taking a side tour, some 60 kms west of the city, to a place that is now infamous. Like Bergen-Belsen the first approach to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex is deceptively calming. Woods and sleepy towns and villages are dotted around the countryside near the town of Oswiecim.

Arriving in Auschwitz, with its grand Polish officers corps buildings and the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (work will set you free) adorned above the ornate iron entrance, it’s difficult to imagine what’s the other side of the gate.

We learn that relatives could even buy a death certificate and the ashes of their loved ones who had been incinerated in the ovens. Every ‘inmate’ was documented with their arrival date, occupation and date of death. Their pictures adorn the corridors of the offices attached to the camp. The average life expectancy appears to be all of three months.

The buildings house a wealth of warped detail. The 'logistics office' with a map of railway lines from all over Europe centred on Auschwitz. It took three weeks by train from Greece. Many were dead on arrival. It’s all very poignant. But it’s the glass showcases full of women’s hair, suitcases with their return addresses and children’s shoes that really sticks in the throat. I am desperately trying to picture the scene that my father saw at Bergen-Belsen - their faces, their emaciated bodies and the smell of the dead and the dying.

Thence to the Birkenau camp barely two kms away over a railway bridge with a maze of lines below. The image you see as you turn into Birkenau is the all too familiar high brick wall and iron gate entrance astride a railway track seen in the film Schindler's List. But it is the size and the scale of the place that hits you most. This was mass murder on an industrial scale. The rail tracks and the width of the platforms inside the camp make London King's Cross station look like some kind of toy railway.

During our two-hour tour no-one speaks except in hush tones. Even the crows perched on the watch towers around the camp seem to know that this is some godforsaken place. They don’t caw. Just the sound of the wind. Even in late April it’s biting cold.

What has this got to do with PR? A lot my friends.

The racist rhetoric of some of the so-called public relations professionals acting for far right parties in Europe, and I’m afraid to say a few of our ‘special relationship’ friends across the big pond, has me worried.

I’m 68, and shortly to be 69, and I am beginning to wonder what my father fought for on the beaches of Dunkirk, El Alamein and Monte Cassino over 70 years ago.

Those who think it’s OK to use provocative language against people of other faiths, immigrants and refugees - from lands less fortunate than our own - would do well to read Michael Smith’s book “Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews”.

Major Francis Edward Foley CMG was a British Secret Intelligence Service officer who was seconded to the British embassy in Berlin 1919. In the 1930s his undercover persona in the German capital was as a passport control officer. In reality he was the MI6 head of station at the embassy.

The book describes Foley’s life in Berlin and the everyday language he heard in the course of his work in the late 1930s against Jews, gypsies, the LGBT community and anyone else the German government took a dislike to. Foley describes vividly how the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler’s government was ramped up to fervour pitch with devastating consequences.

Foley bent the rules to help thousands of Jewish families escape from Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht – the Night of the Broken Glass - in November 1938 before the outbreak of World War II the following year.

Despite having no diplomatic immunity and being liable to arrest at any time, he went into the concentration camps to get Jews out, he hid them in his home and helped them to get forged passports. One Jewish aid worker estimated that he saved ‘tens of thousands’ of people from the Holocaust.

The present language used against Muslims by the present day US government has signs of the tone of voice used by Nazi Party in the early 1930s. Strange too that the ante immigrant rhetoric in the US comes out of the mouth of someone who himself is of paternal German ancestry and maternal Scottish ancestry!