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Is the Holocaust Unique? |
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 by Jordan Michael Smith, February 12, 2009 |
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Choeung Ek, near Phnom Phen, Cambodia, is the best-known site of the Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge regime killed thousands of civilians from 1975 to 1979. Transformed from a mass gravesite into a public memorial, Choeung Ek houses hundreds of human skulls and is still littered with bone fragments. It also features an English-language sign declaring, among other things, that the Cambodian genocide “was more cruel than the genocidal act committed by the Hitler Fascists [sic].” When she visited Choeung Ek in 2006, my friend was offended by the sign’s minimization of the Holocaust. Six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, she said, while two million Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge. It was no contest.
Avraham Burg would have none of my friend’s thinking. A former speaker of the Knesset and leader of the World Zionist Organization, Burg argues against the uniqueness of the Shoah in The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes. The book was controversial when released in Israel in 2007 as Defeating Hitler--Burg was called a hero by some and an anti-Semite by others. Newly translated and released in the U.S., The Holocaust is Over makes many contentious arguments. But perhaps none is as emotionally charged and confrontational as Burg’s thoughts on the Holocaust.
“The Holocaust is ours, and all other killings in the world are common evils, not holocausts,” he writes. “For us, the Shoah is unique in the history of the world. It is the logical climatic outcome of anti-Semitism. We have never sought to view our Shoah as an event in the historical continuum of others…For the non-Jew, the Shoah is a chapter among chapters, a trauma among the other European traumas. It resides in history alongside Napoleon, Versailles, Lenin, Spain, World War I and the divided Germany after World War II...Life in the shadow of trauma does not allow room for a bigger picture to emerge—that of the universal context of hatred and its origins, of dictatorship and tyranny, of the history of genocide, not just the Jewish genocide.”
Burg’s argument is not quite novel. In 1986, several German historians asserted that the Holocaust was unexceptional; Hitler had merely replicated Stalin’s massacre of 14.5 million kulaks (class enemies). Their arguments scandalized the Germany intelligentsia, who concluded after years of debate that the dangers of forgetting the Holocaust far outweighed those of remembering it as unique.
But Burg’s contentions are noteworthy because of his prominent standing in Israel. Never before has such a high-ranking politician and thinker made these arguments. Burg’s remarks are a sign, or perhaps a harbinger, that the Holocaust’s hallowed place in Jewish life is being questioned.
Part of me instinctively recoils from Berg’s argument, and finds it not just untrue but deeply offensive. The Holocaust is unique, I think. It is not just another of the massacres that have demolished peoples throughout history. To label the Shoah as similar to other genocides seems to deprive it of its power and horror. It seems even to blaspheme the victims, whose tragedy has been documented and lamented in unprecedented numbers of films, books and museums. If the Holocaust is in fact not unique, its distinctive place in Western memory becomes not only superfluous, but downright unwarranted and even unjust. The problem with denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust, I am afraid, is that rationalizes or normalizes the Shoah.
Certainly a good case can be made for the Holocaust’s singularity. For one thing, there was the staggering number of Jews killed. Scholars are unsure about the exact number, but it’s somewhere between five and six million. Six million has been the popular estimate for years—Adolph Eichmann’s trial in Israel in 1962 opened with the Attorney General of Jerusalem dramatically declaring that he was not the sole prosecutor because “with me are six million accusers.” But scholars are actually divided about the sum. The historian Raul Hilberg estimates the number at 5.1 million. Hilberg’s assessment is thought to be on the conservative side, however, with British historian Martin Gilbert going with 5.75 million, and Jacob Leschinsky arguing for 5.95 million. Yad Veshem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, is probably most accurate when it concedes that “there is no precise figure.” In any case, the number is staggering, and between 5-6 million Jews.
Compare the Holocaust’s amount to the genocide in Rwanda, where the number of massacred is estimated at between 750,000 and one million. Or Cambodia, where 1.7 million were slaughtered. 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by Turks from 1915 to 1923, and thousands of Muslims were killed in the Yugoslav Wars. The Holocaust dwarfs all of those.
The problem with this numbers game is that it limits comparisons to only modern genocides. And while “the word is new, the concept is old,” as the philosopher Leo Kuper memorably put it. Genocide dates back at least to the Third Punic War (149-46 BCE), when Romans killed an estimated 150,000 Carthaginians, more than one-third of the population. Since then, dozens of genocides—maybe even hundreds—have taken place. If all of them are included, the Holocaust loses its exceptionalism.
In terms of numbers, the largest number of killed people might be in the indigenous populations in the Americas. Historian David Stannard argues that 100 million died in the “Euro-American genocidal war.” Recent books like 1491 and Respect for the Ancestors affirm that thriving pre-Colombian cultures were wiped out by the arrival of the Europeans.
Stannard’s ideas are widely disputed, however. Genocide, according to the United Nations Convention that bears its name, must include the intent to destroy a people. Most scholars of the subject believe the intentions of Europeans and Americans to be more complicated, with many desiring subjugation, not extermination, of the indigenous populations. Moreover, since few records were kept and many natives perished from diseases, it is impossible to identify the exact number of slaughtered indigenous Americans. If Stannard’s numbers are even partially correct, however, the slaughter of the indigenous Americans would dwarf the Holocaust.
But maybe the Holocaust’s recency is exactly what makes it unique. The Holocaust took place in an era when much of the world thought exterminating entire peoples was barbaric. Unlike the Europeans’ massacres in the Americas, Nazi treatment of Jews aroused fierce condemnation from around the world (though not, of course, intervention), because it was believed to be below the standard of civilized behavior. Germany itself had been a central player in the development of civilization, as leaders in the arts, technology, intellectual developments, and political and social spheres. “[H]istorians have generally been overwhelmed by the spectacle of a nation once thought to be among the most “civilized” destroying one of the most “civilized” of peoples,” as historian Istvan Deak writes.
Other reasons have been provided for the Holocaust’s uniqueness. The modern character of it has been evoked repeatedly since 1945. It was the event when industrialization was first married to barbaric ends, the genocidal equivalent of World War One. Others mention the illogical, fantastical nature of Nazi hatred of the Jews, or the totality of The Final Solution. “This was not a byproduct of war, not casualties as a result of skirmishes or partisan activities, but the end-result of an ideology,” CUNY professor John A. Drobnicki argues. One of the foremost defenders of the uniqueness mantle, Cornell University professor Steven Katz, wrote that “never before has a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman and child belonging to a specific people…Only in the case of Jewry under the Third Reich was such all-inclusive, noncompromising [sic], unmitigated murder intended.”
And yet, I can’t help but think these explanations somewhat arbitrary. Why should victim-number and killing methods be the sole criteria for uniqueness? After all, other genocides also have distinctive characteristics. In the Rwandan genocide, for example, Hutus killed thousands of Tutsis with the full knowledge of the international community at the time. The West had a clear, relatively painless opportunity to prevent thousands of deaths—UNAMIR General Romeo Dallaire said 5500 troops would do the job—and chose not to. Never before had genocide been so brazenly and openly perpetrated. Moreover, the instruments of death in Rwanda were machetes and rifles—even though the murders occurred in the post-industrial era of mass technology. In direct contrast to the Holocaust, the killing methods in Rwanda are unique precisely because of their primitivism. Should Rwanda not be a candidate for uniqueness on this basis?
The problem may lie with the vagueness of the concept of uniqueness. Each genocide is in some ways unique and in other ways not. The question then becomes, as one scholar put it, is the Holocaust uniquely unique? Is it more different than other atrocities? Is it exceptional, the same question journalist Ron Rosenbaum has asked about Hitler’s evil?
Ultimately, I think, deciding on that is impossible. It requires measuring immeasurables. What counts for more: numbers of killed, or method of killing? Do the horrors of the death camps outweigh the efficiency of 100 days in Rwanda? Does Zyklon B offset machetes? Answer these questions is not just distasteful, it is hopeless. Acts of cruelty cannot be quantified and appraised like baseball statistics. An accurate ranking of atrocities is unachievable. And the persistent attempts to claim the uniqueness mantle become a sort of atrocity competition. Some genocides are minimized to accentuate others; some crimes are downplayed while others are emphasized. If the Holocaust is uniquely unique, is it worse than other genocides? I find something more than a little disconcerting about that idea.
Memory is not motionless. In the first decades after World War II, Jews rarely mentioned the Holocaust. Desperate not to appear weak, determined to overcome their helplessness in history’s greatest war, there was a silent pact among Jews to avoid delving into the recent past. But the Eichmann Trial and the 1967 War, especially, changed all that. The Holocaust is now the most memorialized atrocity in history. Surely this is better than forgetting or ignoring it, and that will always be a danger. But fixating on the Shoah’s uniqueness brings dangers of its own for Jews. It can separate us from the rest of humanity, for whom the Holocaust is in a string of genocides that stain the 20th century. It can blind us to the suffering we cause others, in the Holy Land but also elsewhere. And, perhaps worst of all, declaring the Holocaust unique just might not be true.
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NimrodErez
I think the Jewish holocaust IS unique, maybe just for the fact that Hitler's aim was a total destruction of one group of people. I don't think there are many other instances in history that parallel that fact.
But of course to us Jews Shoah is unique because it happened to US, not to THEM.
I also visited Cambodia and saw the sign and was offended, but I forgive the Cambodians because I know that from their perspective nothing could be more horrific than what happened to them. Maybe it's part of the psychology of owning the atrocity.
In addition, you forgot to mention that the Jewish holocaust wiped of over %30 of world jewry at the time.
and at last, I have a high resolution photograph of the sign in Choeung Ek, if anyone cares to read the sign for themselves drop me a line and I'll email you the photo.
NimrodErez
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/12/former_speaker_of_the_israeli_parl...
François Blumenfeld-Kouchner
Ismail
I find this post exceptionally provocative. Whenever the question of the holocaust's uniqueness arises, two things come to mind; first, what is the point of asking this question at all? Put another way, why does it matter whether or not it is unique? Put still another way, what is the use of this question?
As the poster makes clear, the question may as well be unanswerable. Is it worse for death to be mechanized or primitive? Is it worse to be killed by "others" or, like the Cambodians, by your own people? Regarding the intent to wipe out a whole people; would the attempted erasure of a tiny group-say, the Aleuts- be worse than Stalin's murder of millions even though the latter may not have been designed to eliminate an entire people? We have no clear and objective criterion by which to assign uniqueness, except to say that every instance of monstrous human savagery is unique in one way or another.
There are emotional or psychological reasons why we continue to think of the holocaust as unique-numbers, recency, located within the rational, scientific West, et al-but no logical ones (I suggest having a look at the work of Stannard, mentioned by J Smith above, for compelling arguments supporting this view).
But the uniqueness argument has at least one obvious social use, and that is to buttress the legitimacy of Israel (as Peter Novick, no radical Pali-symp, has pointed out, holocaust awareness in the US did track developments in Israel quite closely). We increasingly hear references to the holocaust within the context of defending Israeli policy, as though Hamas' flying pipes have even the faintest relationship to the horrors of Dachau. Meaning is use, and I am sorry that the lessons of the holocaust for humanity are becoming increasingly subsumed under the requirements of defending Israeli policy.
Which brings me to my second point; to the extent that the holocaust is unique, its meaning to humanity at large is diminished. It is precisely the commonalities among the unbelievable acts of viciousness of which we are capable that ought to draw our attention; it is with reference to these that we become educated to our common responsibilities. The more particular and unique the holocaust is regarded, the less its lessons may be extrapolated to humanity at large.
Isaac
whether the Jews are unique.
And it would be as unsurprising to find Ismail incapable of grasping the point of that question as it is to find him incapable of grasping the point of the other.
Every situation is unique. This is a no-brainer. Historical lessons may be drawn only once the similarities and differences of various events are accounted for. So to ask what the point is of viewing a certain event as unique is almost like asking what the point is of studying history.
Some potentially unique points about the Holocaust have been mentioned. Others could have to do with understanding the persistent nature of anti-semitism (why study that, Ismail might wonder) and the extraordinarily methodical way in which Germany went about attempting to implement the endlosung. (Solution to what? The very term "final solution" at the same time suggests both weariness over many very longstanding, previous efforts at correcting the "error" of a Jewish presence and the assumption that only a well-devised and thought-out plan would finally accomplish the aim.)
To not grasp the irony of the use, by one of the most advanced countries, of civilization's most advanced technologies and methodologies to commit, in a totalist fashion, the most primitive of acts is bizarre, and calls into question one's understanding of the significance of history as a field of study in the first place. At the least, it should point out the incredible weakness indicated by one's willingness to view an attachment to progressive movements as a shield against criticism of one's possibly inadequate moral philosophy.
aval31
and to speak about it is sinnless.
Never in the history of human beeing people have been killed due to their grand parents.
Thats all, those who wants to add more, make comment are revisionnist or worse they
do the same job like revisionnist specialy if they are jews.
Rachel Ament
bwf
First, I want to thank the author for raising this important and thought-provoking issue. There's no question that the Holocaust was horrible and is still hugely influentia -- to both Jews and non-Jews.
I think it's important to consider the historical context of anti-Semitism in Europe. The Holocaust was the culmination of a thousand-plus year tradition of European anti-Semitism. I don't claim to be inside Hitler's head, but my belief is that he did not lay grand plans to seize power with the express purpose of annhilating Judaism. (And if you disagree, still consider the following.) Rather, he took advantage of hundreds of years of anti-Semitic sentiments and policies to unify Germany and give it new purpose and direction -- at the obvious expense of those Germans who didn't fit the "Aryan" mold. The Church and various political institutions had required Jews to wear identifying clothing -- commonly hats, but also yellow star badges -- hundreds of years before the Nazis "came up with it." In this sense, then, the Holocaust is unique only in that the Nazis were notably more successful in trying to destroy Judaism than their predecessors.
Another point that always frustrates me about Jewish discussions of the Holocaust is emblemized is the whole notion of 6 million victims. (The author points out that may have been less, but that's not where I'm going.) I've seen numbers that the Nazis destroyed up to 11 million *people* -- civilians; if we count the casualties of war then the number is much, much greater. That is to say, "only" a little over half of Hitlers victims were Jews. Just because they are a varied group -- homosexuals, physically handicapped, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, -- does that mean that their murders were less significant? If anything, the Holocaust is extremely cotidian -- even normal -- as evidence of the human capacity and prediliction for evil.
Pragmatically speaking, this is how I believe the Holocaust can be most valuably viewed -- as frightingly non-unique. It was not just a Jewish event, or a German event, or a 1945 event; it was a human event. Genocide isn't just a crime against Jews, or Tutsis, or Sudanese; it is a crime against humanity.
Which brings me to my last point, concerning the whole not forgetting and prevention business. Tragically, the Holocaust happened. And we must not forget. And we must prevent future Holocausts. But if we're vigilantly on the lookout for a short German man with funny mustache talking about solutions, we've missed the point. If we're vigilantly on the lookout for genocides with roughly 6 or 11 million people, then we've also missed the point. Evil is not just zyklon B or a machete or a death toll in the millions.
Similarly, if we are dedicating our Jewish lives to carrying on for the express purpose of proving to Hitler that "we're still here! You didn't get us all!" then we've also missed the point. If our commitment to Judaism is fueled only by a desire to give Hitler the finger by our existence, then he -- long dead -- has won. To use a sports analogy, we need to play offense, not defense. Instead of "not forgetting," let us remember that evil does not discriminate based on religion, or color, or ethnicity. Instead of preventing the genocide and destruction, let us encourage human interaction and understanding and build relationships that are the antidote to fear, anger, hatred, and suffering. Instead of living to prove wrong, let us live to prove right.
~bwf
Throbert McGee
That is to say, "only" a little over half of Hitlers victims were
Jews. Just because [the other half] are a varied group -- homosexuals, physically
handicapped, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, -- does that
mean that their murders were less significant?
Don't forget the Gypsies. In my understanding, the Nazi persecution and slaughter of Europe's Rom was more or less as comprehensive in both effect and design/intent as the campaign to solve the Jewish question. (That is, the Nazis wished to rid Europe of Jews and Gypsies entirely, whereas despite the huge number of Slavs killed, there was no long-term plan to make Europe "Slavenrein.")
Thus, if there is one historical fact undermining the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Shoah, it would be that the Nazis targetted Gypsies with the same thoroughness.
But in any case, I don't understand the importance of insisting that the Shoah was literally "unique" in the sense of being one-of-a-kind. Isn't it sufficient to say that among all the genocides in recorded history, the Jewish Holocaust is one of a small handful that in their hideous egregiousness stand out from all the other examples?
הגיון
jgerard
The Shoah was unique in its methodology but humans (and peoples) have always used the greatest force and resources at their disposal to try to destroy their enemies. In this sense the Shoah represents an advance in human violence and evil that is nevertheless part of a historical continuum.
Monica Osborne
You write:
"In direct contrast to the Holocaust, the killing methods in Rwanda are unique precisely because of their primitivism. Should Rwanda not be a candidate for uniqueness on this basis?"
I think you are right here. But I also think we need to make a distinction between comparing the suffering of one person (or group of people) to the suffering of another, and comparing one collective tragedy to another. The comparison of individual suffering is something that cannot and should not be done. And I think this is why people bristle at the idea that the Holocaust is unique--because it implies a comparison of suffering, which is transgressive and ultimately benefits no one.
There is, however, something useful in considering the uniqueness of every collective tragedy or atrocity. Yes, the Holocaust is unique in the context of the way it was carried out, the ways in which persecution and extermination of Jews became written into German laws, and the ways in which it changed/shaped our postmodern consciousness. It is important to consider these things, and to do so does not minimize the suffering of the victims of another genocide or atrocity. There are some scholars who say that the Holocaust simply revealed to us--made visible--the darkness that we were already in. It was simply the revelation of what has been happening since the beginning of time. It seems to me that in such a view there is no room for genocide comparisons.
Polaris
I wish I had a handy link to hand, but I don't.
Sven Lindqvist's excellent book "Exterminate All The Brutes" puts this subject into some perspective perhaps.
Unique? I'm not sure, but I think the nazis were somewhere in an advanced stage of a lengthy process which had evolved throughout many years of European imperialism and land-grabbing. Combined with latent European anti-semitism and advanced mechanical capbilities and the outcome was truly astounding and dreadful.
Moses12
It's quite simple really: The Jews are the Chosen People because they individually/collectively embody a fundamental integrity of the Universe:
Moses embodies the intellectual integrity of Freedom. Jesus embodies the emotional integrity of Love, and the Second Coming of Christ (yes, still a Jew) embodies the structural integrity of Power.
The Holocaust was a 'solution' to this fundamental integrity: Destroy the Jews, destroy this fundamental integrity, and the Will of the Reich will have free reign. Unfortunately for Hitler, the Jews survived, and the structural integrity of the Second Coming is assured.
No Holocaust--potential or past--no individual/collective tragedy can compare to this fundamental assault on the integrity of the Universe and thus God's will.
Yes, I know people don't want to hear this. Perhaps especially the Jews. But what you do with this information is up to you. I can only give you the truth. After this, the responsibility is yours.
sausundbraus
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sausundbraus
While I agree with the author that comparative genocide is a distasteful business when it is used to privilege the unimaginable suffering of one group over the unimaginable suffering of another, I believe that understanding the differences
between genocidal crimes, which are all, indeed, unique, can better help us come to terms with the individual "limit cases" that constitute genocidal history.
With this is mind, the "auto-genocide" of Cambodia bears a distinctive stamp, as does the colonial construction of difference that formed the basis of the Rwandan genocide. The Shoah, however, for all of the elements that play into its uniqueness (and doesn't uniqueness itself have something too hygienic about it?), has an absolutely crucial quality in terms of its memorialization, which is, after all, much of what is at stake in the question of uniqueness (that is, how are we to remember it). This element lies in the concerted effort to annihilate the traces of the annihilation.
The double annihilation of the Shoah, to make the annihilation unavailable to memory and for memorialization, creates a moral duty to remember. A knowledge of the Shoah becomes, and I believe I can say this without polemics and without exaggeration, a kind of eternal resistance to the perpetrators of Judeocide, whose crime was itself eternal insofar as it was waged against the memoric future. It is in this particular uniqueness that the attention paid to the Shoah is by no means unfair, is by no means privileging Jewish suffering over and against the suffering of the millions of other victims of genocide. For to forget the Holocaust, to stop paying attention to it, to cease living in the negativity constructed by its criminal uniqueness, would be tantamount to complicity with the uniqueness of the National Socialist’s
crimes.
Kaitlin
I am not Jewish, but the family I am marrying into is, and members of that family were lost in concentration camps. Others survived in hiding. I am Polish, and members of my extended family also perished at the hands of the Nazis. As a result, this genocide is closer to me, personally--and it hurts more than the others--as noted in the post, we tend to think what hurts us is the "worst" or "most important"
BUT--
Having explained the personal connection, I still don't think it matters if the Holocaust is unique or not in terms of numbers, methods, political ideology, causes, race persecuted, etc. All that matters to me is that it is held up as a well-known example of what humans are capable of doing to one another. It may or may not be "worse" than any given genocide throughout history, but it certainly is more well known. It serves as a tool in teaching future generations that humans are capable of horrors beyond the imagination. If it weren't this genocide, but perhaps instead the Rwandan or any other genocide that was held up as the example for all to see, that would serve the very important purpose of preventing genocide just as well.
kellenkaiser
kellenannekaiser.wordpress.com
This subject came up a few years back on the listserve for my Labor Zionist Youth Movement. Someone had started to toss around the word Genocide with little regard for its actual definition, like "What America did in Vietnam- Genocide!" and that dissolved into people saying on one side that all Genocides are equivalent and folks on the other side asserting some sort of special status for the Holocaust. As the author and other commentators stated, playing whose genocide is worst/best is distasteful to the Nth degree but its also useless. Because although there is certainly a through line that allows them all to be defined as "Genocide" each one is its own horror. I feel strongly enough about this to have printed T-shirts for my best friend and I that proclaim "every Genocide is unique," a point I had once assumed to be self-evident. The strangest consequence of this dialogue came in the form of the psuedo-sensitive men who try to use what is written across my chest as a platform for romance. " I really care about genocide also, you want to go out for coffee?"
Ismail
"The strangest consequence of this dialogue came in the form of the psuedo-sensitive men who try to use what is written across my chest as a platform for romance."
Any chance that it's the, um, contours of the shirt itself and not the message displayed thereon that's got them lining up?
Fishman
Ismail, we may disagree on a lot, but that was hilarious!