UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 2 (UPI) -- The United Nations has designated Jan. 27 as Holocaust Remembrance Day for the millions of Jewish and other victims of Nazi genocide in World War II.
The resolution, initiated by Israel, passed unanimously in the General Assembly Tuesday with 104 member countries as co-sponsors.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the international day of commemoration "an important reminder of the universal lessons of the Holocaust, a unique evil which cannot simply be consigned to the past and forgotten," said his spokesman.
The resolution comes 60 years after the Holocaust, when one third of the Jewish population of Europe, and hundreds of thousands of people of other ethnic origins, religions, political backgrounds and sexual orientations were exterminated in Nazi death camps.
It follows last Thursday's controversial comments by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in which he said Israel should be "wiped off the map."
Jan. 27 was already officially recognized as a day of remembrance for Holocaust victims in the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy, because it marks the day in 1945 when an advancing Soviet army liberated the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland.
