The Holocaust: a unique phenomenon – like every genocide

It is often stated (e.g. in Yehuda Bauer’s Rethinking the Holocaust) that the Holocaust was a unique phenomenon since Jews were murdered just because they were Jews. Let us not forget, however, that Jews have been murdered also in Israel during half a century, exactly because they were Jews. And in 1945-46 Germans were killed by the millions just because they were Germans. In 1914-16 a million of Armenians were exterminated in Turkey because they were Armenians. In 1972 more than 100,000 Bahutu were murdered in Burundi because they were Bahutu. The very last Tasmanian died in 1877 after her people had suffered a ruthless extermination campaign. The British invaders did indeed perform the task thoroughly; not a single Tasmanian was left alive.

The German National Socialists did not attain anything near such a perfection. If we compare the number of Jews in the various countries as reported in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference with the number of deported Jews as noted in the book Dimension des Völkermords, we find among other things the following: Deported from Bulgaria 24 percent, from Italy 15 percent, from Romania 12 percent from Denmark eight percent and from Finland none. Actually not a single Finnish or Danish Jew is known to have been murdered during World War II. And the AMCHA of Jerusalem reported in 1997 that there were still about 900,000 Holocaust survivors living in that year. (Considering the likely mortality of the survivors in 1945-97, we must account with about three million of them in 1945.)

Apparently it was not enough to be a Jew in order to be exterminated in Hitler’s Germany. In the Encyclopedia Judaica I have found a total of 533 biographies of Jews born before 1910 who in 1939/40 were living on (eventually) German controlled area. Out of these, 24 percent emigrated while World War II was going on. Only 28 percent were murdered or deported to some type of camp. The remaining 48 percent escaped deprivation of liberty – but suffered of cause hardly in other ways. These unmolested Jews were often obliged to live in ghettos, they got reduced rations, they lost their civil rights and sometimes also their property.They also lost their right to freedom of movement and in some countries were even deprived of schools and cultural opportunities. Many died because of these hardships. (The Jews in Finland, however, enjoyed exactly the same rights as all other inhabitants of the country throughout the War.)

Certainly the Holocaust was unique in its way. For instance, it was surronded by an extreme degree of secrecy. Singular in its way was also the Bahutu genocide with its multitude of murderers. The millionfold extermination perpetrated by the Red Khmers in Cambodia in 1977-80 certainly has no equal either. Ever since the time of King Hiskia (about 700 B.C.), whose henchmen exterminated the Hamites and the last surviving Amalekites (First Book of the Chronicles 4:41-43), there has been a number of unique genocides throughout human history. The most recent of them have not been kept secret at all, but have been perpetrable nontheless. The activity is likely to go on, especially since the perpetrators can now excuse themselves with “after all, the Holocaust was worse”.