'Many of you younger people are obsessed by the Holocaust'

Gitta Sereny, the author, began yesterday's talk on "Architects of the Holocaust" with an old debating trick: she used her introduction to reject the terms of the discussion.

Gitta Sereny, the author, began yesterday's talk on "Architects of the Holocaust" with an old debating trick: she used her introduction to reject the terms of the discussion.

"I'm not at all trying to be negative," began Ms Sereny, who has written The German Trauma and Into that Darkness and is an authority on "the repentant Nazi" Albert Speer, an intimate of Hitler's. "But I will start by explaining my objection to the term Holocaust being applied to the genocide of the Jews."

The author has been struggling for several decades, to prevent the word holocaust becoming synonymous with this genocide. "What it does is actually diminish other instances deserving of that term," she said. "It has become 'The' Holocaust. There are recent genocides in Kosovo, Cambodia, Rwanda and now in the Sudan that are equally deserving of that term. It seems to me that we in the West are making a value judgement between the dead and the dead. I worry that not only the people of my generation, who grew up under the Nazis in the 1940s, but many of you younger people are obsessed by ... this one event."

Ms Sereny's discussion with David Cesarani, professor of modern history at the Royal Holloway London and author of Eichmann and Justice Delayed and Richard Evans, author of The Coming of the Third Reich and professor of modern history at Cambridge University, otherwise focused entirely on the Nazi genocide of the Jews. But, given Ms Sereny's introduction, it was impossible for them not to look for some explanation of modern events in these interpretations of the past.

Professor Cesarani said: "There was a deeply ideological core to the Nazi regime, but it was not entirely shared by everyone within it. Whatever Hitler was saying it was being interpreted in different ways by the inner circle and then passed down the line and interpreted in even more different ways, until you've got a situation that is nearly anarchy."

Professor Evans added: "The danger of phrases like 'industrial mass murder' and 'the banality of evil' is they make it all seem very cold-blooded. But Adolf Eichmann [an architect of the 'Final Solution'] became quite an ideologue. You can see a visceral hatred of Communism and Jews."

All the panelists agreed that it was dangerous to write off Hitler or his commandants as madmen, bureaucrats or jokes as to do so would be to ignore the subtle characteristics, both personal and political, that can lead to the genocide of a race.

What emerged most powerfully from the discussion, however, was what Professor Cesarani called "the economics of genocide". "It has thrown into focus the extent of the redistribution of wealth that happened all over Europe." Given the state of the German economy at the time it is understandable that people were opting into the economy of genocide "out of sheer desperation".