... to me the need to *humiliate* in order to *dehumanize* is the relevant connection. I certainly don't dispute that Holocaust victims suffered more, and worse, for longer. But my point was that the impulse to dehumanize an entire people, individually and collectively, in order to victimize them is itself something the Holocaust taught us to recognize properly and forced us to confront. The OED dates the origin of the term "genocide" to Raphael Lemkin's essay from the WWII era. The first international recognition and prohibition of genocide came a few years later.

It's not that genocide had never occurred before -- it's that the specifics of what Germany did forced us to think harder about it. And the lessons we learn from history teach us plenty about the impulses behind dehumanization as it manifests itself today and in the future.