The word “holocaust” has come to be applied to a wide array of events.  Thus, we may hear of animal rights activists claiming that the slaughter of chickens is a kind of “holocaust”; less controversial are the claims that the treatment of the U.S. government of 19th-century Indians was a “holocaust.”  David E. Stannard uses the term in his title American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.  Stannard argues that there have been many terrible cases of genocide that rival the Holocaust, and that each of them is unique for one reason or another.  Among the other genocides that Stannard mentions are the slaughter of the Armenians (“about 1,000,000”), the deliberately caused famines in the Soviet Union (which killed “more than 14,000,000”), the murder of the Gypsies during the Holocaust (“perhaps 1,500,000 men, women, and children”), the African slave trade (“during the course of which at least 30,000,000—and possibly as many as 40,000,000 to 60,000,000—Africans were killed”), and the extermination of “many American Indian peoples and the near-extermination of others, in numbers that eventually totaled close to 100,000,000” (150-51).[1]  A serious problem with Stannard’s analysis is that the deaths that occurred over an extended period of time and that most occurred as the result of disease.  As Richard White points out in a review of Stannard’s book, “There are two questions here.  What is the connection between disease and the actions of the conquerors and invaders?  And do these actions amount to what we consider genocide, that is, to the deliberate and systematic attempt to eliminate an entire racial or national group?” (34). 

White claims that most recent scholarship has attempted to answer the question of why the disease epidemics after 1492 claimed 90 percent or more of the Indian populations when similar “virgin soil epidemics” in other parts of the world and in different times (the Black Death in Europe, for example) usually claimed 40 to 50 percent of the population.  The answer is that the Indian populations had to deal with more than one serious disease at the same time, and “conquering armies and slave raiders contributed to the astonishing death rates . . . even though the direct casualties they inflicted were only a minor part of the toll” (34).  So while the European invaders brought about a massive number of deaths among the Indians and their actions were certainly cruel, they lacked the sort of intentionality that we usually associate with the Holocaust.

It is helpful to conceive of the Holocaust as a particular case of genocide.  In turn we might characterize genocide as a particular form of mass murder.  Murder itself can be reasonably assumed to be a particular form of killing.  I realize that for some people there is no distinction between different forms of killing, but the overwhelming view of society and our students has been that killing as an act of war does not constitute murder.  Such a view, while not accepted by pacifists, has been the dominant view in Western culture since the “just war” theories of Augustine.[2]  We usually think of murder as the unlawful taking of human life, with an accompanying idea that there are occasions when there is such a thing as the lawful taking of human life.  Although such distinctions may seem obvious, it is often helpful to discuss them with a class at the very beginning.  Young adults, who are in the process of clarifying their own values, often need to work through the logic of some of these positions.  And some students may be developing pacifist theories of their own.  A writing class can offer them a chance to clarify some of their values by defending them to others.  In so doing, they may discover that they do not necessarily hold to some ideas as strongly as they thought they would.  On the other hand, this kind of discussion may help them to realize how different their values are from others, which will have important implications for how they approach serious writing tasks.

In general, though, it is safe to assume that a group of students will probably exhibit the same mix of opinions about differences between murder and killing in war as a more general population.  It is difficult to maintain a full pacifist position, although we do need to respect students who do.  Few students, however, will have arrived at a firm distinction between murder and genocide.  Is there a distinction between individual cases of unlawful killing in war and an atrocity?  Between atrocities and genocide?  I think that the answer is yes, and it is appropriate to discuss these questions with a class in order that we might work toward some sort of group consensus of what genocide is.

What Is Genocide?

As István Deák notes in a review of a series of books on the Holocaust, including Is the Holocaust Unique?  Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, comparative genocide studies is “an almost hopelessly unresolvable subject”:  “there is no agreement on what, precisely, genocide means.  Some writers seem to have a proprietary interest in proving that the Holocaust was the only true act of genocide in history.  Others want to prove the opposite.  Most carefully avoid the subject” (“Memories of Hell” 42).  Deák is using the term “genocide” somewhat more narrowly than I think is necessary—it is not hard to find other examples of genocide itself—but he points to a tactic common to many writers:  how narrow or broad the use of the terms “genocide” or even “holocaust” is very much at issue.  Whether the Holocaust deserves another category is hotly disputed.

Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn in The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies provide a useful summary of the term genocide and its history as a prelude to offering their own definition and typology of the phenomenon.  The term was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944; it forms the basis for the most accepted definition, which is in the United Nations Convention on Genocide from 1946. Article II states that genocide consists of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

A.     Killing members of the group;

B.     Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

C.     Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

D.     Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

E.      Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (quoted in Chalk and Jonassohn 10)

Chalk and Jonassohn point out that such a definition lacks rigor and “is responsible for much of the confusion that plagues scholarly work in the field” (11).  Point B is especially vague.  By this definition it is not necessary that an act of genocide include murder.  Their own definition is shorter, but contains important qualifications:  “Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator” (23).   Under this definition, the victims do not have an organized means of defense; they cannot, by this definition, be the citizens of a country that is at war with another country.  Thus, the populations of London, of various German and Japanese cities during World War II are not victims of genocide, since the intent was not to destroy them as a people, but only to destroy their will and capacity to fight (whether it did so is another issue).  Chalk and Jonassohn are certainly not suggesting that other forms of “mass killing, massacres, riots, and so forth” are not objectionable, but they wish to distinguish them from genocide itself.  By specifying that the victim group is defined by the perpetrator, they avoid such problems as trying to determine the exact make-up of the victims of Stalin’s terror: they can simply be considered to be “enemies of the state,” as Stalin himself defined them.  The Nazis defined Jews according to who their grandparents were, not according to their actual religious practice; according to Nazi ideology, being a Jew was primarily a racial matter, something that can be quite confusing to students as they try to write about this issue.

In addition to a general definition, Chalk and Jonassohn also classify genocide according to its motive:

1.      to eliminate a real or potential threat;

2.      to spread terror among real or potential enemies;

3.      to acquire economic wealth; or

4.      to implement a belief, a theory, or an ideology.  (29)

Using this typology, they provide an historical summary of genocide since ancient times.  They point out that genocide has occurred in all cultures and throughout all recorded history, but the fourth type of genocide has emerged in its distinct form only in the twentieth century.  Examples of this fourth kind of genocide are the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks during World War I and the killing of Jews and Gypsies during the Holocaust, a series of genocides and genocidal massacres carried out by the Stalin’s Soviet Union, repression in communist China, and the killing of city-dwellers by the regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia in the 1970s.  (37-40)

Differences Between Genocide and the Holocaust

An article of faith for many Jews has been that the Holocaust is unique and that the victims were Jews.  We can readily understand why Jews and other commentators might resist a tendency to find similarities between the Holocaust and other genocides: if the Holocaust is simply a particularly terrible case of a phenomenon that has occurred throughout history and in all cultures, it loses some of its significance.  In her study of the attitudes of various countries today toward the Holocaust, Judith Miller argues that this is one of the methods that West Germans have used to distort history, by comparing the Holocaust with other genocides and examples of “man’s inhumanity to man.  The specificity of the Holocaust—in magnitude, in method, and in intention—is buried in comparison” (41). [3]  Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer has written extensively on how the Holocaust fits in with other instances of genocide.  He points out that Lemkin had two definitions of genocide, only one of which involved the killing of the victims.  The first type of genocide, which could be termed “ethnocide,”[4] describes quite well the Nazi treatment of the Poles, Czechs, Serbs, and other Slavs: they were to be enslaved and treated brutally, for they were considered sub-human.  They were often subjected to mass killings, but the purpose of this was to terrorize the rest of the population into submission to the Nazi will.  The Nazis did not plan to physically annihilate the Slavs as a group, for their plans required hundreds of thousands of slave laborers.  The leadership classes were to be killed (the Nazis largely accomplished this goal in Poland during the war), and large portions of the populations might be deported to areas where they would be more manageable (exactly where was debated among various Nazi planners), but these groups were in general in a different class from the Jews (205-08).  

In contrast, another form of genocide, which Bauer refers to as “holocaust,” required the complete physical annihilation of a people “for ideological or pseudo-religious reasons” (“The Holocaust in Contemporary History” 214).  The only people to have been subjected to this kind of genocide have been the Jews.  Nazi ideology was built around spurious concepts of race.[5]  Bauer offers a useful summary:  the so-called Aryan race was superior; German Aryans were the best examples, but northern European stock in general was Aryan.  Even Slavic peoples were Aryans, but the purity of the their race was so much in question that they were quite inferior to German Aryans (“The Holocaust in Contemporary History” 205, especially Note 7).  Jews were also a “race,” according to this view, but although they looked human, in reality they were not.  Similarly, the Jew appeared powerless, but in reality he “controlled most of the world through his control of both capitalism and Russian Bolshevism.”  One was determined to be a Jew not on the basis of one’s religious practice, but on the basis of who one’s grandparents had been.[6]  The only way not to be a Jew was not to have three or four Jewish grandparents.  This is the heart of the phrase “Jews were not killed for anything that they had done, but for who they were.”[7]  Nazi ideology called for the destruction of the Jews as vermin, or as some kind of tumor of disease that infected the “body” of the German people.  But what made the Holocaust into a special form of genocide, writes Bauer, was “its translation of abstract thought into planned, logically implemented total murder” (“The Holocaust in Contemporary History” 202). 

Michael Marrus also emphasizes that, while not all the victims died in death camps, the camps evoke “what are probably the most horrifying aspects of the destruction of European Jewry—the systematic dehumanization of the victims, the assembly-line process of mass murder, and the bureaucratic organization on a continental scale that brought people from every corner of Europe to be killed” (23).  One measure of the Holocaust’s efficiency is provided by Michael Berenbaum:  at Treblinka alone, 150 people were able to kill 900,000 people in 18 months at a cost of $0.0005 per person (cited in Miller 234).  Furthermore, this killing was fully sanctioned by the highest levels of the government; it was not the result of some sort of “excess” or uncontrolled action by local officials.  If local officials did anything wrong, so far as the central Nazi government was concerned, it was that they were not thorough enough or were not killing Jews fast enough. 

In this sense, the killing of the Jews was possibly comparable to the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks beginning in 1894-96 and reaching a climax in 1915, but it was not similar to the terrible treatment that Native Americans received in the 19th century from the U.S. government.[8]  Bauer acknowledges that the killing of the Armenians is the most significant parallel.  The Armenians were killed by shootings but also by being deported under extremely harsh conditions.[9]  Horrible as this treatment was, however, it was not the same as the Holocaust: Armenians living in the large cities were spared, and there was much variation in local practice.  Marrus acknowledges that this lack of completeness may have been the result of the technological capacity of the Turks; they lacked “the modern railway network, machine guns, and gas ovens used by the Nazis,” but they tried very hard to bring about the same result later achieved in Europe.  Their lack of technology may also have “limited the horizon  of what was conceivable in terms of mass murder.”  Yet, Marrus continues, “I have seen no indication . . . that the Turks felt the killing ended prematurely or considered that their plans for the Armenians had failed” (22).   In addition, the Turks and Armenians were engaged in a genuine political struggle about real issues; the Turks were not motivated by such an “all-consuming ideological obsession” as was the Nazis’ hatred of the Jews. 

Another group singled out solely for genetic reasons was the Gypsies in the Holocaust, but even here, the Nazis did not have a plan to annihilate every single one of them.  Bauer emphasizes that in principle, Gypsies who were considered “pure” in Nazi eyes were not killed, provided that they led “a Nazi-approved non-sedentary Gypsy life” (“The Holocaust in Contemporary History” 210).   (In practice, most Gypsies were murdered; Bauer acknowledges that there were great similarities between Gypsies and Jews).  In contrast, the Nazis did plan to annihilate every single Jew that they could find.  At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, a meeting of high-level Nazi officials that coordinated the various agencies within the government during the Final Solution, the emphasis was on the Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union where killing had already begun.  But the minutes also carefully noted the number of Jews in Finland, Ireland, Turkey, and Switzerland.  All of them were targeted for destruction (25).  There are good reasons for making a distinction between the Holocaust and other instances of genocide.  Perhaps the best way to think of the issue is to imagine it as Bauer does:  as a “kind of continuum of evil that would lead from ‘mass murder’ in recent times through ‘genocide’ to ‘holocaust’ (‘shoah’)” (“The Holocaust in Contemporary History” 214). 

To insist that the Holocaust was unique in every respect, though, places it outside of history and works to mystify its character.  This method of viewing the Holocaust has been championed by Elie Wiesel in his many writings on the subject.  Alan Michman and Alan Rosenberg claim that such a view “sees the Shoah as a transcendent event, unconnected to the trajectory of our techno-scientific civilization sprung from the sociocultural matrix of the West; its singularity is such that it exceeds the power of language to express it: the Holocaust is finally ineffable” (7).  Although he argues for the uniqueness of the Holocaust on other grounds, Bauer has argued against this tendency as well, especially in “Against Mystification: The Holocaust as a Historical Phenomenon” in The Holocaust in Historical Perspective.   Bauer writes that solid historical knowledge is required in order to understand the mysticism of certain writers such as Wiesel:  “Without a return to the very hard and arduous task of actually knowing something about the Holocaust, the symbolic descriptions that occupy, quite legitimately, the center of the literary stage in Holocaust literature, become just another escape route for the superficial” (47). By placing the Holocaust in its historical context, we can draw comparisons between it and other genocidal events.  Understanding the differences and similarities between these events is one of the best ways to comprehend how it is possible to think of the Holocaust as unique.

Furthermore, we must see the Holocaust as tied to other people besides Jews.  As Bauer has argued elsewhere: 

If what happens to the Jews is unique, then by definition it doesn’t concern us, beyond our pity and commiseration for the victims.  If the Holocaust is not a universal problem, then why should a public school system in Philadelphia, New York or Timbuktu teach it?  Well, the answer is that there is no uniqueness, not even of a unique event.  Anything that happens once, can happen again: not quite in the same way, perhaps, but in an equivalent form. (quoted in Milchman and Rosenberg 8)

Indeed, the Holocaust is both unique and universal.  Milchman and Rosenberg argue the Holocaust was a powerful decisive event, “a caesura in global history” (10):

In the Shoah, the practice of mass-murder and genocide, which had previously occurred in history, was inextricably linked to the very development of science and modern technology.  One of the crucial distinctions between the death-world created by the Nazis, and orgies of mass-murder before and even after . . . , was the technical efficiency and organization of the Holocaust. . . . Indeed, they were the fruits of the same nexus of technological and scientific productivity that resulted in the atomic bomb, and upon which our late-twentieth-century civilization now rests.  More pertinent, perhaps, is the fact that the direct instruments of death were themselves inserted into a matrix that was the culmination of the West's technological development—transport, record-keeping, surveillance—which made possible the industrialization of mass-death that was a unique characteristic of the Holocaust.  (13-14)

In other words, the precedents for the Holocaust are deeply embedded into the fabric of Western civilization.  The very features that have made Western culture so successful from a material perspective are the qualities that made the Holocaust possible and ultimately created something new, something unprecedented.

Toward a Definition of the Holocaust

It is not necessary to rehearse for students all of the implications of thinking of the Holocaust as unique or for defining the word genocide in all its historical richness.  Nevertheless, some discussion of the distinction between Holocaust and genocide will help students frame their study of it. It will also help them set limits on what the Holocaust is and is not.  Not only does the Holocaust take place during World War II, but it also occurs within the context of other terrible atrocities and extreme actions by the Nazis and even the Allies.  Getting students to make distinctions among these various actions can be crucial to their study of the Holocaust, lest they allow their shock at learning of other events to convince them that the Holocaust was not significantly different.  Take, for example, the fact that Allied bombing probably killed at least 500,000 German civilians—noncombatants—during the war, a number far greater than the total number of American combat deaths, which were about 292,000 (Miller 233).  Does this mean that the U.S. committed crimes against humanity that are comparable to Auschwitz?  Most of us would say no, although some may argue that the bombing was a war crime.  One tactic of Holocaust deniers has been to acknowledge that the Nazis were brutal toward various subjugated people, including Jews, but to deny that there was anything special about the treatment of the Jews.

The Holocaust can be viewed as the worst aspect of a larger system of terror and repression that employed millions in slave labor camps and ruled most of Europe by totalitarian methods.  Christopher Simmons in The Splendid Blond Beast writes a description of the Holocaust and other forms of genocide from the perspective of how Nazi aims conspired with business interests.  The death camps were part of a larger system of concentration camps that included “Buchenwald in central Germany, Dachau near Munich, Mauthausen in Austria, and Sachsenhausen just north of Berlin” (91).  There were 23 main camps that operated as hubs for hundreds of smaller ones.  Auschwitz operated both as a death camp and a labor center, but Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka functioned only as extermination centers.  Forced labor fell into “three overlapping categories: pressed-ganged foreign workers, POWs, and concentration camp inmates.”  The foreign workers were mostly Poles, Ukrainians, French, and Russians, and they worked as virtual slaves; nevertheless, the Labor Ministry was committed to keeping them alive while extracting the maximum amount of work from them.  In the concentration camps run by the SS, millions of Jews and Soviet POWs “were set to work in order to extract some labor from them during the process of destroying them.”  The SS “teetered uneasily between contradictory policies of deriving valuable labor from camp inmates or of simply murdering Jews and other targeted groups as quickly as possible.”  Forced labor for the Jews, though, was basically another method of putting them to death; the procedure “typically required between one and six months” (88).  Most of the Jews killed in camps, though, were not put to work; they were killed within hours, sometimes even minutes, of their arrival.

The widespread use of what amounted to slave labor by the Nazis, combined with their savage policies toward Soviet and Polish POWs, can confuse the question of defining the Holocaust.  The death camps and the concentration camps were all part of the same system.  Toward the end of the war, inmates of the death camps in Poland, most of whom were Jewish, were transported or were marched hundreds of miles back into Germany and confined in the concentration camps where they were discovered by Allied troops in April and early May 1945.  By that point these concentration camps had been transformed into death camps.  Today, Dachau is probably the most well known of these camps.  To the thousands of tourists who visit there each year, the exact status of the camp during most of the war makes little difference.  Yet, though the treatment of many of these prisoners was similar, there were important differences in why these different groups—Soviet POWs, political dissidents, recalcitrant slave laborers, and Jews—were targeted.

During the war, most Americans were aware of the concentration camps, and they also knew that many people were killed in these camps.  Despite press reports that described fairly accurately the scope of the Nazi actions against Jews, most people apparently thought that the Nazis victims numbered in the thousands or hundreds of thousands (this in itself is difficult enough to imagine).  In his account of American reactions to the Nazi concentration camps, Robert H. Abzug describes how even the fervently anti-Nazi filmmakers and publishers during the war “envisioned a terrifying but sadly outdated sense of life under the Hitler regime.”  He cites the example of 1943 book, The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code.  Most of the novellas “recounted sometimes melodramatic confrontations of human decency with Nazi rule,” but few of them show any grasp of what was actually happening in Europe.  Even books about the camps themselves, such as the novel The Seventh Cross (later made into a movie in 1944), or movies of Nazi cruelty, such as Hangmen Also Die (1943), depicted Nazi cruelty and sadism, but it was almost always aimed at political opposition.  The story in Hangmen Also Die told the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command, by Czech partisans.  In retaliation for his death, the SS completely destroyed the town of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, because it was thought that the villagers had helped the assassins.  Cruel as this was, the story displayed a kind of logic.  The action was a reprisal:  “Innocents died, but in events set in motion by heroic defiance to Nazi rule” (15-16).  The murder of millions of Jews did not have this heroic quality, nor did the Nazis act in any sort of rational way to crush political opposition.

On the one hand, a ruthless and brutal totalitarian government crushed any opposition to its rule by exterminating entire classes of people from countries it had conquered—the Polish intelligentsia and officer corps, for example.  This same government also enslaved  millions of citizens from countries it had conquered, crushed any political dissent of its own citizens by murdering them and imprisoning them in camps, and carried out the war crimes of killing prisoners on a massive scale.  All of these are terrible and unforgivable actions, but they stem from a realistic fear: political dissidents are a threat to the government, and the Nazis were at war with the Soviet Union.  These were also the actions that Americans could and did understand during the war itself.      

At the same time and using the same apparatus, this same government murdered millions of Jews because of an ideology that proclaimed them to be non-human.  The Jews were not at war with Germany; they did not even comprise a separate nation.  The threat they posed was dictated purely by ideology.  We may want to claim that the Holocaust refers only to the killing of the Jews.  But it is not that simple:  Soviet POWs were murdered partially out of the same race theories that created Nazi antisemitism.[10]  The other non-Jewish groups were mixed in with Jews in the same camps and died the same way.  Furthermore, as Simpson points out, ordinary Germans may have had a rationale motive for cooperating with the Nazi apparatus that carried out the Final Solution, at least during the first years of the war:  “for millions of ordinary Germans . . . whose active and tacit cooperation was necessary to implement Hitler’s genocidal designs, Allied bombing seemed to be a war crime against Germans that justified harsh retaliation against the supposed enemies in their midst, the Jews” (92).  A good definition of the Holocaust must first of all account for the deaths of the Jews, but it should not ignore the deaths of the millions of others who perished under similar circumstances.  Furthermore, the definition should distinguish between these murders and the acts of a totalitarian state, which used any means at its disposal to wage war and to deal with internal opposition.

Whether the definition should use the term “Holocaust” is also an issue. According to Gerd Korman, the term did not come into use until 1957 to 1959 (260).  And Michael Marrus, citing another source, points out that it originates with the Greek work Holokaustos, from the third century BCE, which meant “the burnt sacrificial offering dedicated exclusively to God” (3).  Korman explains that the common term in the 1940s and 1950s for the destruction of the Jews used the word “catastrophe” or “disaster,” (as in “recent catastrophe,” the “recent Jewish catastrophe,” or “great catastrophe”), which is an accurate translation of the Hebrew word sho’ah or shoah; the Yiddish word is khurbn or churbn (259-60), which itself is derived from the Hebrew word chuban (see Young 85-89).  In its original theological sense, “Holocaust” might seem to imply that the Jewish victims were in some way an offering to God.  It is hard to imagine a God who would require this sort of offering.  In any case, as Marrus notes, “Holocaust” has become the common term and now connotes “an event of theological significance, and perhaps as well an event whose mysteries were not meant to be understood. In addition, [it] may have indicated a preference to focus upon recounting the experience of the martyred victims, rather than the victimizers” (3).  Germans during the war referred to the Holocaust as the “Final Solution to the Jewish question” (die Endlösung der Judenfrage).  As Richard Breitman explains, historians who use this term “implicitly emphasize the experience of the perpetrators, rather than the victims” (19).  In spite of all these considerations, I am using the term Holocaust because it is so widely understood.

In this book I will define the Holocaust as the systematic murder of between five and six million European Jews during the period of 1933-1945 by the Nazi government.  The Holocaust also entailed the murder of several million Soviet prisoners of war and thousands of Gypsies, persons mentally or physically handicapped through a genetic defect, homosexuals, and political and religious dissidents.  Millions of the victims were murdered in gas chambers, but more than half of them perished by being shot or through starvation and neglect. The Jews were killed because they were Jewish—not to resolve some sort of political dispute or any other reason.  In addition, their extermination was complete and systematic: although there were many survivors, there were in principle to be none.

This definition follows closely the definition offered by the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum.  I have tried to offer a mainstream definition of the Holocaust.  Even so, it is hardly possible to define the Holocaust without being controversial—at least in some quarters.  I emphasized that the Jews were the primary, but not the only victims of the Holocaust, and I put their number at between five and six million.  Some historians would claim that the word Holocaust be reserved only for Jewish victims of Nazi terror. In fact the word “holocaust,” with its original meaning of “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire” or “burnt offering,” seems to refer to the religious characteristic of the victims. It is true that a Jehovah’s Witness or even a homosexual could renounce his or her previous behavior and sometimes survive the camps, just as some political dissidents were released from camps like Dachau after being tortured, punished, and supposedly “reformed.”  But since Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mentally and physically handicapped persons, Soviet prisoners-of-war, and homosexuals were placed in the same camps and met the same fate, it is hard to argue that they should be excluded from this term.

In coming to understand that the deaths of the Jews in the Holocaust were qualitatively different from the deaths of say, U.S. soldiers in combat, we start to see the Holocaust as a separate set of events.  We can isolate it too much by creating circumstances in which students do not fully understand what it means to say that the Holocaust occurred in the midst of World War II.  In discussing whether the U.S. government could have done more to alleviate the effects of the Holocaust during the war itself, one of my students burst out that the U.S. government was doing all that it could.  He had just learned the day before the average number of casualties that the U.S. armed forces suffered each day.  Somehow, this fact, which I had not emphasized but had assumed was obvious to us all, was enough to convince him that it was wrong to talk about the U.S. doing anything more.  While there is something to be said for this position, I suspect that he arrived at it out of a kind of shock at realizing the scale on which World War II was being fought.  Although this could have been an example of misplaced patriotism, I could have done more to place the Holocaust in its immediate context of World War II.

Seeing the Holocaust as an exact parallel to other situations passes too quickly over some complex historical questions.  But offering a definition with some understanding of what is at stake in that definition helps us to define better the bounds of our inquiry.  And it also frames the study right from the start in a way that excludes the claims of Holocaust deniers as legitimate historical interpretation.  The claims of the deniers are worthy of study—but only to examine the pernicious rhetoric that they employ to make their case.  Before they approach such literature, students need to have a firm grasp of generally accepted history, so that they have a means of analyzing the logic.  The deniers’ rhetoric is at its strongest when it is being taken in by a student working under a deadline with only a partial acquaintance of generally accepted facts about the Holocaust. 

The “Americanization” of the Holocaust

A definition of the Holocaust can also help an instructor develop a rationale for using the topic in a writing class.  The U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum has published the document “Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust.”  This document, written by William S. Parsons and Samuel Totten, begins by offering three reasons for studying Holocaust history:

democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained, but need to be appreciated, nurtured, and protected;

silence and indifference to the suffering of others, or to the infringement of civil rights in any society, can—however, unintentionally—serve to perpetuate the problems; and

the Holocaust was not an accident in history—it occurred because individuals, organizations, and governments made choices which not only legalized discrimination, but which allowed prejudice, hatred, and ultimately, mass murder to occur.

These reasons are an excellent example of what has come to be called the “Americanization of the Holocaust”: the Holocaust is to be studied to derive from it specific lessons related to American democracy.  That the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum would state this as its purpose is not surprising because “the primary mission of the [museum] is to promote education about the history of the Holocaust and its implications for our lives today” (“Guidelines”).

As Edward T. Linenthal describes in his history of the museum’s founding, this method of viewing the Holocaust originated with Michael Berenbaum about 1980 in the debates that surrounded the establishment of the museum.  Berenbaum was attempting to formulate a workable compromise between a vision of the museum as a national institution and the desires of various ethnic groups, particularly Jews, to have it perceived more narrowly. Linenthal’s book, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum, describes many of the same issues that need to be considered to justify the use of this topic in a writing course.

On May 1, 1978, President Carter announced the formation of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust; six months later on November 1, 1978, with Executive Order 12093, the commission was officially established with Elie Wiesel as the chairman.  By this time, according to Linenthal,

a canonical reading of the Holocaust had already been established in American culture, thanks largely to . . . Wiesel.  For him, the Holocaust could never be understood but, for the sake of humankind, had to be remembered. It was an event that transcended history, almost incapable of being represented except through survivor testimony. . . . The Holocaust was not only a transcendent event, it was unique, not to be compared to any other genocidal situation and its victims were Jews. (4)

As we have seen, there are good reasons for viewing the Holocaust in this way.[11]  But because the museum was to be a national institution, the issues of the membership on the commission and the larger Holocaust Memorial Council as well as a definition of the Holocaust became contentious.  Linenthal describes how a project that was originally intended as “an act of reconciliation” between the Carter presidency and the Jewish community was very difficult to bring about:  “Clearly, those engaged in the project on all sides were stunned, angered, and frustrated by the dilemmas that seemed to erupt in every facet of planning.  They quickly learned that memorials do not solve problems or necessarily heal wounds” (52).

How to include non-Jewish victims in a definition of the Holocaust was one of the more difficult issues.  The President’s commission included a definition of the Holocaust in its Report to the President: President’s Commission on the Holocaust issued on September 27, 1979:  It was the

systematic, bureaucratic extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators as a central act of state during the Second World War. . . . As night descended, millions of other people were swept into this net of death. . . . Never before in human history had genocide been an all-pervasive government policy unaffected by territorial or economic advantage and unchecked by moral constraints.  (quoted in Linenthal 36)

Linenthal describes how the first part of this definition showed Berenbaum’s thinking.  We can see how the third purpose of the museum’s mission might grow out of the use of Nazi Germany as an example of how a government can perpetrate evil as “a central act of state.” Linenthal points out how “the phrase ‘as night descended’ illustrated Wiesel’s desire to emphasize the mystery of the Holocaust, and to encode the uniqueness of the Holocaust into an argument for temporal priority.”  And he criticizes this definition for its lack of historical accuracy:  “Many of the ‘other people’ to be included within the boundaries of Holocaust victims, however—the handicapped, Russian POWs, Polish intelligentsia, for example—were killed before the mass extermination of Jews in killing centers began” (36-37). 

Few people would dispute that there were other victims of the Holocaust besides Jews. At dispute was the issue of how to represent their experience in a national museum and what their representation on the president’s commission should be.  The Polish-American community wanted to be sure their views were adequately represented on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which would have the task of implementing the commission’s recommendations.  More controversial was whether Ukrainian representation on the council would result in appointees who might attempt to whitewash the role that Ukrainians had played in the extermination process (45).[12]  In the end, the president issued Executive Order 12169 on October 26, 1979, which now claimed that the Holocaust was the “systematic and State-sponsored extermination of six million Jews and some five million other peoples by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II” (quoted in Linenthal 41).  By attaching specific numbers to the other victims, Linenthal recounts, “there was now . . . competition over first place in the Holocaust’s body count,” especially in light of the fact that several reputable Holocaust historians, including Gerald Reitlinger and Raul Hilberg, place the total number of Jewish victims “between five and six million” (41).

Out of these debates and discussions, Berenbaum was able to justify including these other victims by asserting that the Holocaust story would “have to be told in a way that would be meaningful to an American audience; it would have to move beyond the boundaries of ethnic memory.”  Jews would still be at the forefront of the story, but it is, he felt, “just as appropriate to talk about the Americanization of the Holocaust as it is to talk about the Israelification of the Holocaust” (quoted in Linenthal 44).  Linenthal describes how Wiesel found such an approach “more threatening, potentially an assault on the very essence of the Holocaust” (45).

As writing teachers, we need to consider these questions if we undertake to use this topic in a class.  It is indeed tempting and perhaps necessary to justify studying the Holocaust by “Americanizing it.”  If we want students to explore this topic so that they can become better citizens, more aware of the role that democracy can play in preventing governments from behaving as the Nazi government did, then it will be necessary to Americanize the story to some extent. The Holocaust museum under Berenbaum’s direction (he became project director in 1987 and then director of the research institute in 1993)[13] has been careful to balance this concern with the problems in factual representation that may arise. 

One critic of this tendency in approaching the Holocaust is Franklin Bialystok, who argues that the decision to adopt the Americanization of the Holocaust “as the paradigm for learning about this event” is “ill founded and unworkable.”  He points to three problems with this paradigm:

The Holocaust is shoe-horned into the context of the American experience, thus both denying the uniqueness of time, place, and motivation, and expanding the boundaries of universality.

The Holocaust is taught so that Americans will become more tolerant and understanding and less disposed to racism and prejudice, thus hoping that students will create a more just society.

The Holocaust is reduced to a mono-causal phenomenon which can be understood, perhaps even “experienced,” thus both simplifying a complex historical process and ascribing comprehension to a situation which even the participants are at pains to describe.  (123)

Let us approach these problems one at a time.

Bialystok acknowledges the legitimacy of the “unique/universal” debate on the Holocaust.  There are many reasons for arguing that the Holocaust was unique, not comparable to other genocidal events, horrible though they may have been. But Bialystok’s point is that such debate falls within the boundaries of the debate.  At the same time, though, the Holocaust has obvious universal implications.  The mass murder of any group of people by any government has similarities with other mass murders.  The Holocaust Museum reflects this idea as follows:

As students gain insight into the many historical, social, religious, political, and economic factors which cumulatively resulted in the Holocaust, they gain a perspective on how history happens, and how a convergence of factors can contribute to the disintegration of civilized values.  Part of one’s responsibility as a citizen in a democracy is to learn to identify the danger signals, and to know when to react.  (“Guidelines”)

Bialystok would probably approve of this goal when it is stated so generally.  What he objects to is “the presumption that the universal implications of the Holocaust can be applied willy-nilly to American history, popular culture, and social discord” (123).  In particular he objects to the conflation of antisemitism and American-style racism.  These are ugly emotions, but they have very different histories.  Nazi antisemitism was a form of racism—Nazi ideology held that Judaism was a racial characteristic—but it developed out of pseudo-scientific notions from around the turn of the century that were used to institute an extremist form of eugenics.  American racism had a different and a longer history. 

Before using the Holocaust in a writing course, we should explore our purposes in doing so.  If we intend to do so as a pretext for studying American racism or if we believe that racism is universally the same, we should perhaps reconsider our choice.  It is important to keep the Holocaust in its context.  If we want to make a connection to American culture, we might better do it by exploring how the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were modeled after the current American race laws.  And much of the theory behind the euthanasia program, the first time in which undesirable persons were killed using poison gas, had earlier been developed by American states in their laws from the 1920s requiring the sterilization of the mentally retarded and handicapped.[14] 

Bialystok’s second point, that “by learning about this event students will create a less racist, more caring, and increasingly tolerant society” (125), attacks a methodology dear to the hearts of many writing teachers.  One principle of radical pedagogy is to insist that students confront deep-seated ideas in American culture and then deal with them, usually in the way the teacher wants them to be dealt with.  For Bialystok, the problem is that teaching about the Holocaust becomes “subsumed within an exploration of American-style democracy and safeguarding its principles in order to prevent a recurrence of the events that led to Auschwitz” (125).  While this is “undeniably a laudable goal,” Bialystok believes that it contains a major flaw:  “How is one to determine whether fifteen-year-olds who learn about the Holocaust change their attitudes about race and tolerance?” (125)  It seems clear that it would be very difficult to prove empirically that students—even freshmen writing students—and society in general have benefited from such a curriculum.  But just because something cannot be easily measured does not mean that we should not attempt to teach it.  A more serious objection is that students take writing courses in order to write “better.”  I would like to think that they will be better writers by becoming more tolerant.  But I think it is more plausible that they may become better writers by wrestling with serious moral questions that truly engage them.  If they become more tolerant citizens in the process, so much the better.  But the primary focus of such a course should be writing ability.

Bialystok’s last objection is related to his first:  the Americanization of the Holocaust can lead teachers and students to see antisemitism as “the European version of racism; racism is the reason for the Holocaust.  According to this mono-causal construct, when racism is unchecked it leads to the crematoria” (126).  Such a view oversimplifies and distorts history.  While Nazi antisemitism has a shorter history and can be seen as racism, the older form of antisemitism in the larger population, not just in Germany but in Poland as well—what used to be called anti-Judaism—made the Final Solution possible.  Michael Marrus expresses the view of many historians when he writes, “antisemitism in Germany may have been a necessary condition for the Holocaust, but it was not a sufficient one.”  The sufficient cause was the special, more virulent form of antisemitism that Hitler developed (18).  Racism is indeed a scourge that has afflicted many aspects of American life.  But the Holocaust is not an appropriate method for leading directly to this topic.  Nevertheless, there are some similarities.  We would be wiser, though, to allow students to make these connections themselves rather than assigning them topics that call upon them to simplify or even distort history.

Another consequence of this desire to make the Holocaust more immediate for students, according to Bialystok, has been to assume that it can be experienced by students “by entering models of camps, ghettoes, gas chambers, and genuine transport wagons.”  In this way students “will recognize the evil of racism in their own society and its current manifestations, and will acquire the tolerance to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust in the United States” (126).  I believe it is naïve and even misleading to have as the goals of one’s course the specific prevention of a re-occurrence of the Holocaust in the United States.  The Holocaust was the result of very specific cultural forces, unlikely to be repeated quite the same way again.  It is far more likely that such an event could occur elsewhere in the world—indeed, one might even argue that it has, albeit on a smaller scale in Cambodia, Bosnia, or Rwanda.[15]  Certainly the possibility of mass murder has become more, rather than less likely since 1945.

The desire to get students to experience the Holocaust directly is somewhat more defensible.  Certainly, it is helpful to involve students emotionally in the topic: this emotion, when controlled, can become one of the most powerful motivations for wanting to write something meaningful.  But the primary purpose in getting students’ emotions aroused should be to develop empathy toward the victims and possibly anger against the perpetrators.  These feelings should not be equated with the feelings that the victims themselves had.

As anyone who has visited the Holocaust museum in Washington can testify, the experience arouses one’s feelings—anger, but especially pity, empathy, and even grief.  Tourists who were happily chatting to members of their families after visiting the other museums on the Mall grow silent in the elevator ride up to the fourth floor, as the video tape that shows the reactions of the first U.S. soldiers to the death camp is played.  As the visitors emerge on the fourth floor and confront the photomural of U.S. soldiers contemplating a charred pile of Holocaust victims, they usually grow completely silent. As they progress through the exhibits describing the development of the Nazi state, in an area that is deliberately a little too dark and a little too crowded to feel comfortable, it is not unusual for some of them to be weeping. As the exhibits continue, past the extraordinary photographs of the inhabitants of the village of Ejszyszki, most of whom are posing at ordinary family events such as weddings or holidays (only 29 of the 4,000 residents survived the shootings on September 25 and 26, 1941), down to the third floor, visitors are increasingly drawn into the world of destruction.  They cross over a walkway on either side of which are hundreds of the victims’ shoes from the Majdanek death camp, castings from the Mauthausen crematorium, a table from Majdanek on which the bodies of victims were placed in order to remove valuables, and a twisted and charred truck frame from Majdanek that had been used to burn the bodies.  Visitors cross over a bridge next to a huge photomural showing the bridge over the trolley track in the Lodz ghetto; they can walk through a boxcar from Warsaw of the type used to transport Jews during the war; and they can stand next to a barracks that has been brought over from Auschwitz.  All of these artifacts have a powerful effect on visitors to the museum.  But they do not really recreate the Holocaust itself.

Nor did the museum designers attempt such a re-creation.  Speaking on a 1993 trip to Auschwitz about what the exhibit would be like, Martin Smith, who was director of the exhibition department for two years, said,

You’re going to walk through bits and pieces of a barracks.  You’re not walking through a Holocaust barracks.  We’re not making any pretense you’re walking through. . . . You get a semblance of shape. . . . Auschwitz is here and the museum is in D.C.  It’s something altogether different.  And we didn’t try to recreate that.  What we tried to do was convey facts using physical evidence as well as copied evidence, which is essentially what books and photographs are. . . . We wanted to try and take back as much of the physicality as we could possibly convey in the pitiful amount of space that’s available for it. (quoted in Linenthal 163)

Sometimes the distinction between experiencing the event very sharply and re-creating it can seem to disappear.  Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-one-half hour documentary Shoah depicts the many survivors telling their story.  As they speak, the film often cuts away to shots of what the death camps look like today: the camera may pan slowly across the memorial stones at Treblinka as the survivor in Israel narrates his experience.  Lanzmann has been criticized for actually re-creating the Holocaust for the survivors, especially when he uses what appear to be aggressive interviewing techniques.  But even if this were true, which I don’t think it is,[16] the most one can say is that we, as viewers of the film, only observe the victim painfully recounting the past; we do not ourselves participate in it.  Indeed, when one listens to the stories of the survivors, to the anguish in their voices and their haunted expressions, it becomes clear that no one can fully comprehend their experience.

Sometimes students are encouraged to engage in activities that simulate prejudice.  For example, students may be told to behave for a few days in prejudicial ways toward classmates of theirs who possess a particular characteristic—blue eyes or blond hair.  The purpose of such activities may be to teach the irrationality of prejudice, but it can also be used to show the psychological changes that occur in groups engaged in prejudiced behavior.[17] On the one hand, as Lucy Dawidowicz, the distinguished Holocaust historian, wrote in her last article, such activities ignore “the particular religious and historical roots that nurture specific prejudices . . .  [without explaining] the distinctive character and history of anti-Semitism” (28).  The Holocaust museum in its “Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust” argues that it is very difficult for survivors and other eyewitnesses to describe their experience; in fact, “they argue the virtual impossibility of trying to simulate accurately what it was like to live on a daily basis with fear, hunger, disease, unfathomable loss, and the unrelenting threat of abject brutality and death.”   For this reason the museum asserts that “simulating experiences from the Holocaust remains pedagogically unsound.”  It is for these reasons that I argue that asking students to re-create in writing the experience of the victims is also pedagogically unsound.  An interesting way to encourage students to learn the details of a particular historical period is to ask them to write a work of creative nonfiction that attempts to illustrate the feelings that an historical character might have.  In the case of the Holocaust, though, such a practice can only lead to an inaccurate and even offensive writing. 

The kind of assignment I refer to here is championed by Sara Leuchter Wilkins in “Witness to the Holocaust: History from a First-Hand Perspective,” where she describes an assignment in which the students write a first-hand account of being a victim from a particular country.  The students must include accurate historical details, but aside from that the writing can take any form—“a fragmented diary, letters, memoirs, or even poems.”  Leuchter reports that that assignment “has a profound impact on my students, forcing them in effect, to exchange their safe and comfortable lives of today with the horrors of the past.  These first-hand accounts are filled with warmth, depth, emotion, and pain, and I know my students will now be able to find the strength to stand up to what they know to be wrong, to challenge hatred and bigotry” (164).  While I admire her goals, I doubt that any of us can really know what our students will be capable of as the result of an assignment like this.

The pitfalls that can arise from Americanizing the Holocaust result from a naïve and unclear purpose in using the topic in the first place.  Such questions are more crucial for writing teachers than they would be for teachers more directly involved in Holocaust Studies.  Students usually sign up for a writing course without being able to know the topics they will be exploring in that course. Teachers must have a particularly clear rationale for using the Holocaust in such a course.  While it is important to respect historical accuracy, our primary concern should be on the student’s writing abilities.  A writing teacher must create an environment in which students can learn a complex and demanding skill.  At the same time, writing courses can have secondary purposes: understanding something complex about the world, developing tolerance, learning to live with opposing points of views, gaining the confidence to assert one’s ideas using academic conventions with other people.  These different purposes need not compete with one another; the goals that I have listed as secondary should contribute to the first.