Peter Kellner: Why this story does matter

If there is anything positive at all to be derived from the debacle surrounding Prince Harry and his Nazi uniform, it has been to help to focus attention on next week's 60th anniversary of the bitter January day in 1945 when the Red Army reached Auschwitz. As anyone who has been there can testify, the task now is to ensure that this anniversary is marked for the right reasons, and that the true meaning of Hitler's death camps is not lost.

If there is anything positive at all to be derived from the debacle surrounding Prince Harry and his Nazi uniform, it has been to help to focus attention on next week's 60th anniversary of the bitter January day in 1945 when the Red Army reached Auschwitz. As anyone who has been there can testify, the task now is to ensure that this anniversary is marked for the right reasons, and that the true meaning of Hitler's death camps is not lost.

I have to say that the nature of that meaning was not obvious to me when, at Harry's age, I first visited a Nazi concentration camp. Touring Europe with two friends, I looked round Dachau, near Munich. The camp was hard to find: there were no signposts and local folk seemed reluctant to direct three young English interlopers towards it. When we finally got there, it was damp and derelict.

My visit to Auschwitz a few weeks ago a guest of the Holocaust Educational Trust was very different. I was braced for horror - and encountered the trappings of a tourist attraction. Road signs pointed the way. The car park was marked with small bays for cars and large bays for coaches. Inside the entrance hall, signs directed us to ticket booths, toilets and a shop.

Of course, it is right that as many people as possible should visit Auschwitz, that their cars and coaches have places to park, that books, maps and photographs are available. Even so, I found the first sight of Hitler's most terrible monument particularly unnerving.

Sixty years after the SS abandoned Auschwitz to the Red Army, the remaining survivors of the camps are few and growing fewer. This month's anniversary comes as the intimacy of living memory starts to yield to the more detached verdict of history. What impact, I started to wonder, will Auschwitz have on visitors 100 or 200 years from now? Will they still regard it as a serious warning, or more like the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds: a passing glimpse of a distant past?

The answers turn on how we, and generations to come, choose to regard the Nazis in general, and Auschwitz in particular. One option is to see them as the products of historical circumstances, concerning Hitler, the SS and six million Jews. In that case, the Holocaust will one day seem as relevant as the battles between Cavaliers and Roundheads are today: historically vital to the evolution of democracy, but not a cause of contemporary moral anguish.

The other option is to view Auschwitz as a gruesome example of the human condition. That message is universal: that when conscience goes to sleep, any group at any time is prone to commit unspeakable acts. This would carry a more enduring warning, but only if we accept that the Holocaust was not just about the Nazis and their victims.

Wisely, the Polish authorities have let Auschwitz speak for itself. The original camp, "Auschwitz I", is a museum quite unlike any other. Your sense of decency is assaulted from the moment you pass through the gate decorated with the ominous, mocking words "arbeit macht frei". It continues as you pass through the rooms piled high with the everyday goods stolen from the inmates, to the blocks were prisoners were tortured and shot, and finally to the building where victims were gassed and cremated.

The museum also shows that Auschwitz I was not at first an extermination camp, or initially intended to contain mainly Jews. Originally a Polish army barracks, it was taken over by the SS in 1940 to house Polish dissidents and force them to work for the nearby complex of IG Farben factories.

For me, however, the impact of this restrained and highly informative museum was less than that of the larger but less museum-like expanse of "Auschwitz II", the industrial-scale extermination camp at Birkenau. This came into operation in 1942, and, unlike Auschwitz I, was intended for Hitler's Final Solution. Today much of it lies in ruins, as the Russians found it, after the retreating Germans had burnt down the wooden blocks and blown up the gas chambers.

Here the informative props of a fine museum are largely missing. You see the rusting railway track, the concrete floors, and the place where new arrivals were sorted into slave labourers and those who would be gassed immediately. Just a few of the buildings survive, and they bear silent witness to degradation that will, one hopes, still have the power to shock for centuries to come.

But shock to what purpose? At the back edge of Birkenau, one of the surviving blocks contains an exhibit that suggests an answer. A wall is full of photographs of victims and their families from happier pre-war days. You see parents in their best clothes, girls with impish grins and boys with new bicycles. These pictures add the vital human dimension to the dry statistics telling how many Jews were put to death, alongside the smaller but still daunting numbers of gays, Gypsies and political prisoners.

There is, though, something missing from this display. It is the equivalent photographs of the pre-war lives of the ordinary people who made Auschwitz function: the clerks, guards, architects and train drivers and their families. They would presumably also show parents in their best clothes, girls with impish grins and boys with new bicycles.

I doubt we shall ever see two such sets of pictures side by side. But to imagine them is to imagine the most important truth that Auschwitz could convey. The warning for future generations is that, unless we cherish our consciences, any of us could become killers and any of us could be killed.

Woody Allen made the point in Hannah and Her Sisters through the character of Frederick. Commenting on the inability of intellectuals to explain the Holocaust, he says: "The reason why they can never answer the question 'how could it possibly happen?' is that it's the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is, 'why doesn't it happen more often?' Of course it does - in subtler forms."

My visit to Auschwitz ended with a moving Jewish memorial service amid the ruins of Birkenau's main incinerator.

I hope that Prince Harry goes one day and shares this experience. But if he does, he should do so privately. Auschwitz is a place for honest emotion and personal reflection, not for worrying how to look in the presence of the media.

I would expect him, like any visitor, to return home feeling, as I did, the force of the sacred injunction, "never again". But never what, never who, never whom? I thought of the relatives I never knew who perished in the camps and felt that they should be regarded not just as Jewish victims of Nazi brutality, but as human victims of human brutality.