On January 20, 1942, 15 leading officials of the NS administration met in a stately villa on Wannsee for a "meeting followed by breakfast".

Anyone who reads the documents and the minutes of the meeting in passing today could, given the language and terminology, think that it was about goods whose distribution had to be optimized in the then German Reich, including the occupied countries and territories.

But it was about people.

It was about millions of Jewish women, men and children who, according to National Socialist ideology, were not considered full human beings and whose right to life was denied.

Their persecution was already in full swing in 1942.

Now the remaining legal and administrative steps for the "final solution of the Jewish question" should be clarified.

It was about the optimal preparation and execution of the genocide of the European Jews - a "bureaucratically organized state crime", as the historians Norbert Kampe and Peter Klein called it.

The goal was the murder of eleven million Jews in around 30 countries.

The day before the meeting, the Federal Foreign Office submitted "wishes and ideas" about the planned genocide.

It can be assumed that the participants were quite satisfied at the end of the meeting, because all areas - how can the administrative effort for the deportations be kept as low as possible?

How do we secure the necessary workforce for the German economy?

– were taken into account.

The officials of the Nazi regime would probably have been offended if someone had called their work “bird shit” at the time.

That only happened decades later through Alexander Gauland from the AfD.

It is significant that nowadays a politician from a party represented in the Bundestag aims to win the approval of his supporters with such a completely inappropriate and unacceptable trivialization of the Nazi era and its crimes.

With the growing distance in time to National Socialism, there seems to be a reluctance in society to continue to deal with this part of German history.

Surveys show how little knowledge many schoolchildren have about the Shoah.

The accusation that we Jews want to further stir up feelings of guilt with the commemoration in order to take advantage of it can be read in many letters to the Central Council of Jews and comments on social media.

While the scientific processing of the Nazi crimes has progressed steadily thanks to archives that are now accessible, we among the population are recording regression.

So-called secondary anti-Semitism, in which Jews are accused of abusing their victim status, was something we had previously pushed back – that was my impression.

Why is it important to commemorate historical events like the Wannsee Conference?

Certainly not because the Jewish community wants to take advantage of it.

Rather, we enjoy the privilege, to put it cynically, of still being attacked so severely that Jewish institutions have to be guarded.

Nor do we wish to sideline other victims in history.

The recent development in research and culture to focus more closely on the crimes of the colonial era is to be welcomed.

The fact that some scientists use this to generate competition between the victim groups is inappropriate and dangerous.

In doing so, they are playing – certainly unintentionally – into the hands of those people who are giving secondary anti-Semitism a boost.

Passing on knowledge about the Shoah to future generations and thus also commemorating the dead is a religious imperative for Jews.

For our society, for Germany, it is the greatest possible motivation to stand up for democracy and the protection of human dignity.

The Wannsee Conference is an example of what people are capable of: systematically bringing about the deaths of millions of people with cold precision.

"It happened, and consequently it can happen again," said Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi.

We and future generations must be prepared for this.

That's why we need commemoration days like January 27 and November 9, where the focus is on remembering the Shoah.

That's why we need more Holocaust education in schools.

Former Federal President Joachim Gauck once said: "There is no German identity without Auschwitz." That must be our social consensus.

And must remain so.