Danny Cohen, head of BBC television, has announced a series of programmes, including a feature-length drama starring Martin Freeman, to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January.

The event, commemorated annually around the world as Holocaust Memorial Day, will be given a high profile on BBC1 and BBC2 and will include a discussion, documentaries and the screening of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's acclaimed 10-hour documentary from 1985. Cohen's decision to give the event such prominence comes amid growing concern about a rise in antisemitism across Europe.

In The Eichmann Show, Freeman, star of Sherlock and The Hobbit, will play TV producer Milton Fruchtman, who worked on the televising of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Nazi "final solution", the plan to exterminate Europe's Jews.

Eichmann's capture in Buenos Aires and transport to Israel made global headlines in 1960, but it was a year before he was brought to trial before the Jerusalem district court in the auditorium of a newly built cultural centre. The broadcast of these legal proceedings, known at the time as the "trial of the century", went out to 37 countries and ran for four months. It exposed the wider world to the horrors of the death camps and allowed testimony from survivors to be heard live. Often described as the first global TV event, the trial was watched by 80% of the German population for at least an hour a week, and there were repeated reports of viewers fainting.

Screened on BBC2, The Eichmann Show will also star Golden Globe-winner Anthony LaPaglia, the Australian actor familiar from the US television series Without a Trace, who will play the TV director Leo Hurwitz. The Eichmann Show will be accompanied by five short films on BBC2's Learning Zone, aimed at providing a different perspective on the trial that will link to the school curriculum. It will also repeat Children of the Holocaust, an animation based on eyewitness accounts put together for a young audience.

The programmes will centre on coverage of the memorial eve, nt itself, which is organised by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. British survivors of the Holocaust will gather in central London for an event to be themed around the phrase "keep the memory alive". They will be joined by leading political and religious figures for a ceremony taking place in tandem with one held at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland.

"We are delighted that the BBC will be ensuring Holocaust Memorial Day is marked by the widest possible audience," said Olivia Marks-Woldman, chief executive of the Memorial Day Trust. "On 27 January we honour the survivors of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides and challenge ourselves to learn important lessons from their experiences in order to create a safer, better future."

On the same day BBC1 will broadcast A Story of Remembrance, in which three women will recount the effect of the Holocaust on their lives and families. Auschwitz survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon will describe her postwar struggle to talk about her suffering; acclaimed children's author Judith Kerr, who wrote The Tiger That Came to Tea and Mog the Forgetful Cat, will recall her childhood escape from Nazi Germany; and Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner is to travel to the former home of her Jewish ancestors to learn about their fate.

BBC1 will also broadcast Big Questions, a special one-hour debate examining issues raised by the anniversary. BBC2 is to screen Touched by Auschwitz, a 90-minute documentary by acclaimed film-maker Laurence Rees. Shot in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Chicago, London, Bavaria and Krakow, it is billed as "a compelling portrait of the problems, challenges and triumphs that six individuals have experienced since the war as a result of their time in the camp".

Also scheduled for BBC2 is Freddie Knoller's War, a film telling the story of a Jewish survivor who is now 93. As a teenager, he fled his comfortable family home in Vienna after Kristallnacht in 1938. He escaped to Belgium, then to Paris, then on to the south of France where he joined the French resistance before being betrayed by a girlfriend and transported to Auschwitz. His parents, who had told their son they were too old to flee, were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.

On the Sunday before 27 January a live service of remembrance will be broadcast on Radio 4.