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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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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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