This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on 27 January 1945. German football has been marking that event for more than 20 years, using matchdays around 27 January to remember the people who were persecuted, deported and murdered by National Socialists.

Over a million people were killed at Auschwitz – a symbolic location for the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The date of the liberation is also the symbolic start of the end of the Holocaust, allowing persecuted people to survive not just symbolically but in reality.

There are very few survivors of those events still alive to tell their tales, but the 80th anniversary is a special opportunity for us to listen to their stories and pass them on.

Surviving Auschwitz meant much more than simply emerging with your life. It meant the loss of your home, the difficult search for relatives and friends, and mourning all those you had lost. It often meant a decades-long undignified struggle for recognition and financial damages. It meant overcoming trauma and creating a new life for yourself after your old one was destroyed beyond repair, finding a new home, starting over for yourself and the next generations.

Watch: Mirjam's story of surviving the Holocaust

Appreciation for life after

Now, 80 years on, we would like to remember and also honour all the new things that the survivors made possible and created. Families were founded, communities were rebuilt, and last but not least, the State of Israel was created as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people. Today, only around 200,000 of those who survived the Holocaust are still alive around the world, half of them in Israel. They not only leave behind their memories, but as living people they have also helped to shape our present and our future.

Mainz fans sharing an important message of together for Remembrance and Diversity. - IMAGO/Jan Huebner

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This also included keeping the memory alive. Survivors in particular have campaigned for a memorial to be built on the site at Auschwitz. Current memorials around the world are largely thanks to the many years of work by survivors and their relatives, even in the face of resistance.

An active culture of remembrance arrived in German football at the turn of the millennium. Today, remembrance work is carried out in a variety of ways by clubs and associations, by fans and fan projects, also with the support of the !NieWieder initiative.

Leipzig and Leverkusen players standing in support of Remembrance day. - DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga

Never again means forever

We realise that active remembrance does not just mean remembering the victims, looking back and reflecting. It also requires a constant confrontation with antisemitism and racism in today’s society. It requires daily commitment to our democracy and a society free from hate speech and oppression. And it means showing solidarity with Jews, even and especially when this requires courage and taking a stand. This is all the more urgent in view of the increasing antisemitic incidents around the world since the terrorist attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023.

Freiburg fans sharing an important banner: "No Forgiveness No Forgetting" - Alex Grimm/Getty Images

German football is aware of its resonance and the associated responsibility and, after 80 years, is all the more determined to pass on the message of the survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp of ‘Never again!’

Never again means now and forever.