Bulgaria joined most countries in the world in marking January 27 2012, International Holocaust Day, which commemorates the World War 2 genocide of six million Jews in a Europe under the thrall of the Nazi regime.
 
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day was established by a UN resolution on November 1 2005, to mark the day when the largest Nazi death camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. 

More than six million Jews were murdered during World War 2, many in death camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Mauthausen and Dachau.
 
To mark the day, a debate was held at the Jewish Cultural Centre in Sofia on "hatred today – unlearnt lessons of the Holocaust".
 
In Berlin, Norbert Lammert, the president of the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s parliament, called on Germans to actively stand up against all forms of right-wing extremism.
 
At a Holocaust memorial event, European Parliament President Martin Schulz spoke of the specific responsibility that he felt as a German.

Noting that he was born after World War 2, Schulz said, "But as a German representative I feel that I have a very specific responsibility, because what happened, and what was decided at the so-called Wannsee Conference was decided in the name of the German people, and I am a representative of the German people.
 
"The German people of today are not guilty but responsible," Schulz said.

"Responsible to keep the memory and to never forget that what happened happened in the name of our nation. For me this means that whoever today is representing the German nation has one first duty: to take into account our responsibility to the Jews in the world today.
 
"And therefore, for every German, wherever he is acting, and especially when he has the honour and the privilege of being the president of a multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-religious assembly of representatives for 500 million Europeans, he must never forget that this is an enormous privilege for a German, taking into account the responsibility of our country to chair today such an assembly," Schulz said.
 
"Therefore, I speak about myself: my first political goal, my first duty as a German representative is to express here in front of you - and I think I'm speaking on behalf of all German members of the European parliament, and of our national parliaments - never more.

"Whatever is happening in the world today; anti-Semitism, action against the existence of the Jewish community, of the state of Israel or whatever, we are the first ones who have to defend our Jewish friends," Schulz said.
 
Turkey's observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day began with a broadcast of a French documentary on the Holocaust on state run television, the Voice of America reported.
 
Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann's Shoah was shown late Thursday, on the eve of the observance.
 
Lanzmann says the broadcast marked the first time a predominantly Muslim country has shown his 1985 biographical film of the Holocaust era.
 
The nine-hour film was aired to help build understanding between Muslims and Jews and combating denials that the Holocaust occurred, the report said.
 
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day was to be marked in Serbia on January 27, with the central ceremony led by Serbian president Boris Tadić.
 
European Jewish Congress (EJC) president Moshe Kantor called on Europe "to recognise evil and prevent its re-emergence."
 
"If we don’t remember it, and don’t study it, and don’t learn about it, we cannot learn from it; we can never be confident we can recognise it and stop its emergence in time," Kantor said.