A stolen piece of molded metal some 16-foot-long was recovered yesterday by Polish police and five young suspected thieves were arrested. As a result, decent people everywhere have breathed a sigh of relief. For the missing metal carried words of infamy “Arbeit Macht Frei”(“Work Will Set You Free”) that greeted prisoners on their arrival at the notorious Nazi Auschwitz camps where, if people were not immediately gassed in the extermination chambers in the Birkenau section, they were worked to death by the hundreds of thousands in the industrial part of the camp.

Some 1.1 million people were slaughtered at Auschwitz, the majority of them Jews but also Gypsies, Russian prisoners of war, left-wingers and anyone else whom the Nazi regime wished to eliminate. Alone of all the Nazi death camps throughout Europe, Auschwitz has been kept as a memorial, not only to its victims but also to the almost incredible inhumanity of man to man. The Germany that had given the world Bach and Beethoven also gave it, between 1940 and 1945, slaughter on a genuinely unimaginable scale during which six million people perished.

The theft of the horrific gateway plaque with its motto was therefore an offense to all who believe this lesson in barbarity must never be allowed to fade. The Israeli reaction to the crime that it was “an act of war” was over the top — not least because in Gaza a year ago, the Israelis visited upon the Palestinians the same ruthless bombardment which the Nazis used to put down the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Nevertheless the stealing of this archetypical piece of genocidal cynicism was a gross affront to all civilised society.

The tragedy is of course that though the Nazis were destroyed, the bestiality of which they were guilty has not ceased. In Cambodia perhaps as many as 2.2 million were butchered in the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge. At least 1.4 million Russians perished in Stalin’s Siberian Gulag camps. In Rwanda in 1994, up to a million Tutsis and their sympathizers were massacred by Hutus. And even in Europe, the lesson of genocidal hatred has still not been learned. The cold-blooded 1995 Srebrenica extermination of over 8,000 Bosniaks by Serb forces was a chilling modern echo of the Auschwitz evil.

Thus the motif on the Auschwitz gateway is far more than just a grim lesson from history. It is also a reminder that even in supposedly civilized countries, let alone in African tribal societies, the capacity for genocidal violence on a staggering scale still exists. This is in fact a matter of rebuke for everyone.

The international community not only needs to be prepared to act in concert to deal with the threat of intercommunal savagery, but if this does indeed still take place, the perpetrators must be found and made to answer for their crimes. And this does not just mean those who gave the orders. It also includes those who carried them out. As Nazi guards at Auschwitz have discovered, pleading they were just doing what they were told is no defense.