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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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