Learn about the Holocaust

The Shoah, or Holocaust, was initiated by members of the Nationalist Socialist Party (Nazi) which seized power in Germany in 1933. The Nazis believed in the concept of racial superiority, holding that the people of Northern European descent – particularly the Germanic peoples – were better than other races. While many experienced suffering, torture and death, the Nazis held a particular disdain for the Jewish people, counting them “unworthy of life.”

Of the nine million Jews who resided in Europe in the early 1930s, approximately six million – roughly two-thirds – were systematically dehumanised and murdered by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Estimates are given that as many as a million of this number were children. A network of over 40,000 facilities across the German occupied European territories was used to execute the plan of the regime.

The persecution and ultimate genocide followed a carefully designed strategy. All peoples were required to register through a census program. Various laws were passed to exclude the Jews from the rights of regular society. Many of these were enumerated in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and were enacted in Germany prior to the outbreak of World War II.

Initially Jews were denied admission to schools and universities, were fired from their jobs, and were made to surrender property, businesses and personal items. The sale of food and clothing to Jews was prohibited or restricted. Civil ceremonies were denied to the Jews. Law suits and imprisonment haunted those who used to be considered law-abiding, influential citizens.

This was not tribal conflict or domination. Nor was it simply a base animal instinct to conquer. Rather, this was the intellectualisation and normalisation, in an advanced modern European society, of the debasement of an entire people and their mechanised mass extermination, based on an imagined and distorted reality held by the Nazis.

The economic ills of Germany, following their defeat in the First World War, lead to the rise of Hilter's 'National Socialism'. He allied his distorted reality with an underlying antisemitism, prevalent in the previous decades in middle Europe, effectively making the Jews the Scapegoat for Germany's ills.
Until that point Jews had lived in Germany for several centuries and were a significant part of its economy and cultural life. Indeed it was not uncommon for Jews to receive the Iron Cross fighting for Germany in the First World War.

Concentration camps were established everywhere that Germany conquered and occupied a territory. Gas chambers and crematoria were built to implement the German 'final solution'. As the German war effort demanded increasing manpower, those who were fitter were kept back from the Gas Chambers to be used as Slave Labour. The camps subjected the inmates to horrific labour and torture and forced these individuals to live in inhumane conditions. Many of the people died of exhaustion, malnutrition or disease in these camps. In notorious experiments German drug companies tested their products on camp prisoners.

When Germany would occupy a new region, specialised military units were brought in to perform mass executions of the Jewish population and others who opposed the political aspirations of Hitler. In the final months of the war, German SS guards moved inmates by train or marches to prevent the Allied Forces from setting large numbers of prisoners free. These “death marches” continued until May 7, 1945 when Germany surrendered to the Allies.

No existing word could adequately describe that event. It was left to a new word, the “Holocaust”, to mark this in the annals of mankind.

Today we are still witness to new Genocides. Atrocities are enacted where people annihilate their hitherto friends and neighbours. The purposes are centred on the struggle for power by a leading elite over their adversaries. Their ambitions are limited to a country or tribal region. Their mechanisms use a fighting command structure, or the brainwashing of a vulnerable army of children.

The Holocaust certainly may be compared and contrasted to other events in history; indeed doing so helps us understand events better. But comparing and contrasting is a very different exercise from superficially equating things. Moreover, when events have no real common denominator – as anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge and intellectual honesty will attest – equating, and even comparing and contrasting is iniquitous, and generally constitutes purposeful manipulation. Doing this to the Holocaust, arguably one of the most significant and horrific events of modern history, dishonors the victims, and trivializes the events themselves.

Language has power. The words we choose to use carry weight, and are meaningful. If we choose to label every event a Genocide or equate every event with the Holocaust, then we detract from the real meaning of those words and reduce their ability to represent true horror. Subsequently, when faced with a real incident of genocidal murder people will be reluctant to cry out. If everything is genocide, nothing is genocide.