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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32001 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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My only real question with the Holocaust is why did it go from an over-arching term for Nazi genocide killing 11 million to a Jewish specific genocide term covering 6 million. All my childhood I remember hearing 11 million, 11 million.

I second this. I recall as a kid that the term Holocaust was thrown around to mean everyone killed in Nazi camps. A bit more than half of which were Jews.

It seems like something switched and now it is only referring to the Jews killed and not the other 5 million plus non-Jews killed.

I don't think you fully understand, the "5 million plus non-Jews killed in the Holocaust" was a propaganda hoax created by Jewish Holocaust influencers in order to manipulate gentile feelings towards the Holocaust.

Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims – 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.

“I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in an interview Tuesday. “He said, ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’”

Bauer and other historians who knew Wiesenthal said the Nazi hunter told them that he chose the 5 million number carefully: He wanted a number large enough to attract the attention of non-Jews who might not otherwise care about Jewish suffering, but not larger than the actual number of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 6 million.

It caught on: President Jimmy Carter, issuing the executive order that would establish the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, referred to the “11 million victims of the Holocaust.”

People don't understand how easy it is for whole-cloth lies to be embraced as truth by masses of people, or as the world's most famous anti-Semite put it in Mein Kampf:

All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true within itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

It's perfectly possible that Holocaust influencers invented the 5 million for their own reasons. However, they would have had no good reason to invent it. As johnfabian has pointed out elsewhere, about 3 million Soviet POWs, most non-Jewish, died in German captivity. The Nazis also killed something like 2 million non-Jewish Poles. Put that together and you already have 5 million without even needing to count German communists, gays, disabled people, Roma, and so on. Some might argue that those Soviet POW and non-Jewish Pole deaths are just what happens in wartime, but that would not explain why Soviet POWs died in German captivity at more than 10 times the rate of Western Allies POWs in German captivity, or why the Germans killed Polish civilians at a vastly higher rate than they killed, for example, French civilians. Pretty clearly the Poles and Soviets died in such huge numbers in part because of Nazi Germany's racial attitudes.

However, they would have had no good reason to invent it.

They did have a good reason to invent it, and the reason is described in the article. Wiesenthal wanted to psychologically manipulate gentiles into caring about Jewish suffering. That is the motive which was identified for the creation of the lie, it's not a mystery.

My point is that they did not need to invent it, they could have just used actual figures about Polish and Soviet deaths, that is at least assuming that those figures were known at the time.

If you include civilians/combatants who died in the war as Holocaust victims you would end up with more than 5 million in any case. The 5 million number was not based on the logic you are proposing, it was just a lie intended to manipulate people. It had no scholarly basis whatsoever.

Late 20s, not Western but very online:

I've always heard the 6 million figure bandied about, but even then that was clearly a reference to the Jews alone, and I've heard larger figured for the total number of people killed in the Holocaust, but not nearly as frequently.

Of course, they never taught us about the Holocaust in India, and a large number of Indians hold neutral to mildly positive opinions about Hitler thanks to him fighting against the Brits. The ones who share the visceral hatred are largely drawn from the very Westernized, though even then it's hardly the biggest concern.

I'm curious how old you are, and where you grew up. Because in the vernacular it has been a Jewish- specific term covering 6 million for a long, long time, in my experience. It was only relatively more recently that the term has sometimes been used more expansively. See discussion here.

Late 30s, Northeastern USA.

That's very surprising. I'm mid 30s, northeastern US, and I've always heard 6 million over and over and Jewish-specific.

The figure of 5 million non-Jewish Holocaust victims was invented from whole cloth:

Five million is frequently cited as the number of non-Jews killed by the Nazis. The figure is inaccurate and was apparently an invention of famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, he began to refer to “eleven million victims” of the Holocaust, six million Jews and five million non-Jews in the 1970s. Wiesenthal later admitted making up the figure to promote interest in the Holocaust among non-Jews. Lipstadt, says “he chose five million because it was almost, but not quite, as large as six million.”

The number of non-Jewish civilians murdered for racial or ideological reasons in concentration camps, historian Yehuda Bauer estimates, was no more than half a million.

I used to get annoyed at people ignoring the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust until discovering that these were only a tenth as many as I thought they were.

The "Holocaust" does not exclusively refer to Jews killed in concentration/extermination camps though. Roughly a similar number of Jews (~2.5 million) died in mass executions as were gassed to death. While it is true a relatively small number of non-Jews died within the camp system, if you wiped out the Holocaust from existence history's largest genocide would then be the German murder of Soviet POWs (roughly 3.3-3.5 million victims), and if you wiped out that it would be the German genocide of ethnic Poles (2-2.5 million victims)... either that or the genocide against non-Jewish Russians (which is difficult to get an exact bearing on in terms of numbers).

I've mentioned this before but Timothy Snyder provides a simple breakdown: when it comes to the mass murder of civilians in 20th century Europe, there are three prominent cases of roughly equal size: the Nazi murder of Jews, the Nazi murder of Slavs, and the Soviet murder of their own citizens. Whether or not you think the term "The Holocaust" should include both of the first two categories is a matter of debate. For the most part I think they are separate phenomenon and it is more useful for the term "Holocaust" to refer to exclusively Jewish victims.

I was always under the impression that the term "Holocaust" referred to everyone who was killed in Nazi concentration camps, and the term "Shoah" specifically referred to Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps.

It's popularly used IME to refer to the overall campaign of extermination against the Jews in Nazi Germany. Some were killed in concentration camps and death camps by gassing, others by mass executions, and others by starvation or over-work. I haven't heard of it used to refer to the Roma who were killed as well, or to Slavic POWs who also died in large numbers, though were never sent to death camps.

My impression is that generally "the Holocaust" refers to the Nazi mass murder of Jews in general, with "Shoah" just being a Jewish term for the same.

When historians refer to the extermination camps exclusively they speak of "the Final Solution"; the period of mass executions prior to the establishment of the extermination camps I see frequently referred to as "the Holocaust/Shoah by bullets."

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