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Your link goes to a long wikipedia page on the life on Simon Wiesenthal. Would you please clarify where in that long article is the claim that the estimate of non-Jews killed in the Holocaust was invented without backing of evidence?
I’m kids sympathetic to the point of AngoAmerican Imperial propaganda having more of an impact on the post war era than anything the Nazis ever did. It became a way to legitimize the rule of the Anglophone order and the right of the UN as an allied government to effectively control international affairs. It gave NATO the right to invade other countries in the name of protecting the world from communism and authoritarian regimes and anyone else we didn’t like. For the most part, we’re fairly decent as far as empires go, but at the same time, the narrative of us as the people who Stopped a Genocide and Defeated Evil Incarnate gives legitimacy to the effort that would be hard to create without the story.
It’s actually kinda funny to me to listen as both the Pro-Israeli and Pro-Palestinian factions try to weaponize the holocaust narrative to win the arguments about the war in Gaza. To the Pro-Israeli side, “Never Again” means that the Jews of Israel must be allowed to use force as much as they want to defeat the genocidal Hamas. To the Pro-Palestinian side, “Never Again” means that bombing Gaza is just like the Auswitz. It’s like using that narrative gets you the stamp of approval to do whatever is necessary to defeat your enemy. Heck even Putin tried to justify taking Ukraine by invoking the need to “denazify” Ukraine of Azov.
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IIRC, at least one browser (Brave) refuses to obey the "highlight this passage on the page" section of URLs due to privacy concerns.
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The link for me had the relevant passage highlighted. Maybe because I'm on Android?
I'm on desktop (Opera browser), and it goes straight to the highlighted section for me as well.
That said, Bauer is one of those insisting that the Holocaust can only refer to Jews murdered by the Nazis, so the pushback against the "other undesirables killed in the Holocaust" feels a little unseemly, particularly insisting that only those killed in the known camps count (why not include massive numbers of Poles and Romanians killed in town, but not the camps?)
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Didn't the Nazis kill plenty of Poles, Roma and Slavs, or are we now defining Holocaust to only include dead Jews? Seems like a lot of word games are being played here.
This passage, by itself, does not actually necessarily imply that the real figure is lower, just that this one was selected arbitrarily.
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"Holocaust" implies deliberate killings in the gas chambers, or deliberate worked-to-death-with-short-rations in the concentration camps. This applies uncontroversially to the Jews and the Roma (of whom only about 300,000 were holocausted).
My understanding (I am not an expert) is that several million non-Jewish Poles died due to war-related famine, but without the requisite intent on the part of the Nazis to be included in the Holocaust. If you count Nazi deaths as generously as anti-communists count communist deaths, the 11 million civilians killed by Nazis is roughly correct.
"War-related famine" was not exactly incidental; it was a matter of German policy.
Generally "the Holocaust" is used by historians to refer only to the murder of Jews. Some people say you should lump in other groups murdered by the Germans but I think it is fairly coherent to exclude them because as you have noted a. the Germans pursued Jews with a unique sort of intent and b. the methods and organization with which they murdered Jews was in large part distinct.
Yes, there were plenty of instances where the Germans rounded up groups of Poles, or Russians, or Serbs, or Italians, and shot them to death. But it was not done on the scale or with the deliberate forethought of the initial phases of the Holocaust where something on the order of ~2.3-2.5 million Jews were killed in mass executions.
Yes, there were other nationalities and classes who went to the gas chambers, particularly ethnic Poles and particularly at Auschwitz. But at nowhere near the numbers that Jews did; and a number of the extermination camps pretty much exclusively killed Jews.
The caveat to all of this is that the Holocaust was not going to be unique if the Germans had won. It was merely to be the first in a grand series of genocides to depopulate Eastern Europe for German settlement. As it stands if you tally the dead in history's genocides, coming in at numbers 2 and 3 on the list is the German murder of Soviet POWs and the German murder of ethnic Poles.
Wikipedia agrees with you but I was (in the UK in the 1990s) taught in school that the Holocaust included gypsies and homosexuals.
The Germans avoid this question by calling the memorials in Berlin the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism without using the word "Holocaust". (The latter is a recent renaming - when I went there circa 2013 the English-language signage still called it the Memorial to the Murdered Gypsies of Europe)
Wikipedia's "Holocaust" article first specifies that it limits the term only to European Jews, then mentions "non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of these", linking to their "Holocaust victims" article that includes a dozen categories. I don't think all the wiki editors are 100% on the same page here...
The shocking things about the Holocaust vs the mass civilian death tolls common in war were the deliberateness of it (dead prisoners were the goal, not just negligence) and the industrialization of it (literally "holokaustos"=="whole burnt offering", referring to the crematoria). Neither characteristic was restricted to just the Jewish victims, even if the proportionate effect on Jewish victims was an order of magnitude or more greater. The genocide of other "untermenschen" was also intentional, and though it was much less industrialized, there were still over 100,000 non-Jews murdered at Auschwitz, not just a handful of exceptions. Seems to me like they should count too.
I suppose it was also astonishing that the Holocaust included a country trying to kill its own citizens, rather than just being uncaring about others', and that characteristic wouldn't apply to any Polish or Soviet victims of the Nazis, but that includes the majority of the (predominantly Polish) Jewish people murdered too; the self-destructiveness of the Holocaust was important but not central.
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Thank you for finding the relevant passage.
It's a good question, which WWII civilian deaths get (or should get) counted towards Holocaust. It wouldn't count, say, a Polish man who got hit by a jeep driven a German soldier on a typical patrol route. It wouldn't count if that same Polish man got shot by that same German soldier on that same patrol route. But would it count if, instead of the patrol route, this German soldier was rounding up Polish men in the neighborhood to be transported to a concentration camp, and shot this particular Polish man who was trying to escape the sweep? Or would it only count if that concentration camp's primary purpose was extermination, and not forced labor or internment (like US internment camps for Japanese-Americans)?
Does it only count if it was done by, or on behalf of, Germans?
(I don't know, I haven't thought about it before. I do know that my family tree got substantially pruned by both the Nazis and the Soviets.)
Is the presence of a "concentration camp" per se really the deciding factor? I heard an account recently of the Nazis conquering a Slavic village and, as a standard part of their war plan, immediately rounding up and killing everyone present, men, women, and children. Is this excluded because it was less industrialized and more like standard savage ancient warfare? Is the village itself considered a very short-lived, improvised concentration camp? It seems like a distinct phenomenon from the long-term "corpse factories" we know as "concentration camps", but I think I'd be slightly more surprised to hear it excluded from the Holocaust than included.
Excellent point, and I should have thought of that because I know that in Kyiv the Jews were rounded up to Baby Yar, which is just a ravine conveniently deep for disposing the bodies.
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Weren't a relatively large chunk of victims in the Holocaust, especially early in the war, basically rounded up and shot? The death camps were, IIRC, a fairly late addition, and even then many of the deaths were from forced labor and disease.
Which isn't to say that the death camps didn't exist, just that "The Holocaust" is a much broader event than just gas chambers. And also isn't to suggest that deaths from bullets or starvation are somehow more morally excusable.
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