The Holocaust, the effort to destroy the Jewish people by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, marked one of humanity’s greatest failures. It forced difficult new discussions around the world about our obligations to one another and about the rights and duties of citizenship. The broad ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Charter took shape with the nightmares of all-consuming war and genocide still fresh in the global consciousness. The urgent need to prevent such atrocities in the future required both the creation of new international institutions and a bold vision of our shared humanity to be inculcated in the hearts and minds of the world’s peoples. The concrete horrors and inhumanity of the Holocaust marked the antithesis of the Global Citizenship that the world needed to cultivate for the future.
