The Holocaust (from the Greek holókauston from holos "completely" and kaustos "burnt"), also known as Ha-Shoah (Hebrew: ×"שו×گ×"), Churben (Yiddish: חור×'×ں), is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.
Other groups were persecuted and killed by the regime, including the Roma, Soviet POWs, disabled people, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roman Catholic Poles, and political prisoners. Many scholars do not include these groups in the definition of the Holocaust, defining it as the genocide of the Jews, or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll is estimated at between 9 and 11 million.
The persecution and genocide were accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Roma were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of miles by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal nation."
Etymology and use of the term
The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holókauston, meaning a "completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)" sacrificial offering to a god. Since the late 19th century, it has been used primarily to refer to disasters or catastrophes.
The biblical word Shoa (שו×گ×") (also spelled Shoah and Sho'ah), meaning "calamity," became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s. Shoa is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the original meaning of "holocaust."
Although the word "holocaust" has been widely used since the 17th century to refer to the violent death of a large number of people, since the 1950s its use has been increasingly restricted; it is now mainly used to describe the Nazi Holocaust, and is usually spelled with a capital H. The word was adopted as a translation of "Shoah," which appeared for the first time in 1940 in Jerusalem in a booklet called Sho'at Yehudei Polin (The Holocaust of the Jews of Poland). "Holocaust" was first used in English in the spring of 1942, when the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) stated that the Holocaust was a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people. By the 1950s, the term had come to refer to the genocide of the European Jews.
The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is widely used as an alternative to the Holocaust.
The word "Holocaust" is also used in a wider sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include the killing of around half a million Roma and Sinti, the deaths of several million soviet prisoners of war, along with slave laborers, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and political opponents. The use of the word in this wider sense is objected to by many Jewish organizations, particularly those established to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust. Jewish organizations say that the word in its current sense was originally coined to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.
Even more hotly disputed is the extension of the word to describe events that have no connection with World War II. It is used by Armenians to describe the Armenian genocide of World War I. The terms "Rwandan Holocaust" and "Cambodian Holocaust" are used to refer to the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia respectively, and "African Holocaust" is used to describe the slave trade and the colonization of Africa, also known as the Maafa.
Michael Berenbaum writes that Germany became a "genocidal nation." Every arm of the country's sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders; the universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the ovens; detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag company's punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was carefully catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was "in the eyes of the perpetrators … Germany's greatest achievement."
Saul Friedländer writes that: "Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews." He writes that some Christian churches declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point.
Friedländer argues that this makes the Holocaust distinctive because anti-Jewish policies were able to unfold without the interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies, such as industry, small businesses, churches, and other vested interests and lobby groups.
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