WHEN I was young I was obsessed with history and television, so the epic ITV series The World At War was right up my proverbial street.

I watched every episode of this chronicle of the Second World War, but one in particular changed my childish view of the world, the one entitled “Genocide”.

I had known vaguely about the Nazi persecution of the Jews, having, for example, read parts of Anne Frank’s diary, but I didn’t actually know what the word genocide meant until I saw that programme. The sober account of the Holocaust and survivors’ stories made an indelible impression on me.

More than a decade later, I was confronted by something that could have come straight out of that programme, but in rather unexpected circumstances.

I was a very junior reporter on a local newspaper. A man I’d been talking to about a charity event came in the office and handed me a packet of photographs, saying: “I think these will interest you.” Though I’d never seen them before I knew immediately what they were.

I remember thinking how very clear the black-and-white images were – of piles of bodies, barely alive walking skeletons with only rags to cover their bones and stunned British soldiers wandering through the horror. My visitor had been one of those first soldiers to reach the Belsen concentration camp in 1945 and recorded his experiences.

To my horror, I discovered the ex-serviceman had mistakenly assumed a comment he’d heard in our office about a young man who was dabbling in right-wing politics referred to me, so showed me the pictures to illustrate the consequences of fascism.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Auschwitz to report on a visit by Yorkshire students. Unlike Belsen, where the dead and dying were victims of starvation and disease, Auschwitz was, among other things, a huge death camp where it is estimated more than a million people perished in gas chambers.

But in my mind I couldn’t really connect their fate with the neat, red-brick buildings of Auschwitz I, the ghostly ruins of Birkenau or even the piles of shoes, spectacles and heaps of human hair.

I haven’t done even now; perhaps I never will.

That lack of connection made more pressing for me a question posed by the rabbi who pioneered these visits – why come to Auschwitz?

After all, time has moved on, the Germans have embraced peace and the Nazis didn’t have a monopoly on mass murder; think of the millions who died due to Stalin and Mao or modern massacres in Africa or the Balkans.

One reason the rabbi gave for why we should visit Auschwitz was that some people deny the Holocaust ever happened. In their world view, Auschwitz was a legitimate factory complex with an attached corrective facility, and the stuff about death camps was made up later in a vast conspiracy to justify the war against Hitler and the creation of the state of Israel. Some years ago, I reported on a man who brought a successful court case against the police for raiding his home. I had never heard of him, but learned he had once been prominent in British far-right circles.

After the case someone asked him if he was a Holocaust denier. While he didn’t entirely accept the phrase he made it clear he had issues with accounts of the slaughter of Europe’s Jews.

I mentioned my ex-soldier with his photos from Belsen, saying he wasn’t a part of any conspiracy but an ordinary person who recorded what he witnessed.

The other man smiled at my naivety and politely suggested the photographed bodies were those of German victims of Allied bombing, deliberately brought to the site, adding: “I know a bit about history.”

Well so did I, and my mind fairly boggled at the practicalities of shifting all those bodies across a war zone, and making bombing victims, even ones on wartime rations, look like the emaciated corpses of Belsen.

There was clearly little point in further debate. It’s also possible there wasn’t, from an individual point of view, all that much point in me going to Auschwitz.

But was there a point to the hundreds of Yorkshire teenagers journeying across Europe to experience the legacy of the Holocaust? I hope and believe there was, if we really want to create a future free from such crimes.