Names of the Holocaust
Encyclopedia
Names of the Holocaust vary based on context. "The Holocaust
" is the name commonly applied since the mid 1970s to the killing of six million Jews by Nazi Germany
during World War II
. The term is also used more broadly to include the Nazis' systematic murder of millions of people in other groups, including ethnic Poles
, the Romani
, Soviet civilians
, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities
, gay men, and political and religious opponents
, which would bring the total number of Holocaust victims
to between 11 million and 17 million people. In Judaism, Shoah (שואה), meaning "calamity" in Hebrew
, became the standard term for the 20th century Holocaust (see Yom HaShoah
).
word holokauston
, meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering", or "a burnt sacrifice offered to a god". In Greek and Roman pagan
rites, gods of the earth and underworld
received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full. The word "holocaust" was later adopted in Greek translations of the Torah to refer to the olah
, standard communal and individual sacrificial burnt offerings that Jews were required to make in the times of the Beit HaMikdash (Temple in Jerusalem). In its Latin
form, holocaustum, the term was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jews by the chroniclers Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes
in England in the 1190s.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary
, the word holocaust has been used in English since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people, but the earliest attested such usage dates from 1671, but it became common in the 19th century. In 1833 the journalist Leitch Ritchie
, describing the wars of the medieval French monarch Louis VII
, wrote that he "once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church", a massacre by fire of the inhabitants of Vitry-le-François
in 1142.
In the early twentieth century, Winston Churchill
and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide
of World War I. The Armenian Genocide is referenced in the title of a 1922 poem "The Holocaust" (published as a booklet) and the 1923 book "The Smyrna Holocaust" deals with arson and massacre of Armenians. Before the Second World War
, the possibility of another war was referred to as "another holocaust" (that is, a repeat of the First World War). With reference to the events of the war, writers in English from 1945 used the term in relation to events such as the fire-bombing of Dresden
or Hiroshima
, or the effects of a nuclear war, although from the 1950s onwards, it was increasingly used in English to refer to the Nazi genocide of the European Jews (or Judeocide).
By the late 1950s, documents translated from Hebrew sometimes used the word "Holocaust" to translate "Shoah", as the Judeocide. This use can be found as early as May 23, 1943, in The New York Times, on page E6, in an article by Julian Meltzer, referring to feelings in Palestine about Jewish immigration of refugees from "the Nazi holocaust." By the late 1960s, the term was starting to be used in this sense without qualification. Nora Levin's 1968 book The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945 explains the meaning in its subtitle, but uses the unmoderated phrase "The Holocaust". An article called “Moral Trauma and the Holocaust” was published in the New York Times on February 12, 1968. However, it was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the generally accepted conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified and with a capital letter, a usage that also spread to other languages for the same period. The 1978 television miniseries titled "Holocaust
" and starring Meryl Streep
is often cited as the principal contributor to establishing the current usage in the wider culture.
The Hebrew word Shoah is preferred by some people due to the supposed theologically and historically unacceptable nature of the word "holocaust". The American historian Walter Laqueur
(whose parents died in the Shoah) has argued that the term Holocaust is a "singularly inappropriate" term for the genocide of the Jews as it implies a "burnt offering" to God. Laqueur wrote, "It was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim". The British historian Geoff Eley
wrote in a 1982 essay entitled "Holocaust History" that he thought the term Holocaust implies "a certain mystification, an insistence on the uniquely Jewish character of the experience".
The term became increasingly widespread as a synonym for "genocide
" in the last decades of the 20th century to refer to mass murders in the form "X holocaust" (e.g. "Rwandan holocaust"). Examples are Rwanda
, the Ukraine under Stalin
, and the actions of the Khmer Rouge
in Cambodia
.
In order to suggest comparison with Nazi murders other historical events have also been labeled "Holocausts", for example the oppression of lower caste groups in India ("Sudra Holocaust") or the slave trade ("African Holocaust
"). Such usages are often heavily disputed. Even more contested is the use of the word in the older sense of "immolation" to refer to Allied World War II bombings, since this is sometimes adopted to imply equivalence between the Allied and the Nazi war record.
during the Nazi rule
, the term "Holocaust" is sometimes used in a wider sense to describe other genocide
s of the Nazi and other regimes.
The Columbia Encyclopedia
defines "Holocaust" as "name given to the period of persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany". The Compact Oxford English Dictionary
and Microsoft Encarta give similar definitions. The Encyclopædia Britannica
defines "Holocaust" as "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women and children, and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II", although the article goes on to say, "The Nazis also singled out the Roma (Gypsies). They were the only other group that the Nazis systematically killed in gas chambers alongside the Jews."
Scholars are divided on whether the term Holocaust should be applied to all victims of Nazi mass murder, with some using it synonymously with Shoah or "Final Solution of the Jewish Question
", and others including the killing of Romani peoples (Roma and Sinti
), Poles
, the deaths of Soviet prisoners of war, Slavs, homosexual men, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and political opponents.
Yehuda Bauer
contends that the Holocaust should include only Jews because it was the intent of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews, while the other groups were not to be totally annihilated.
Inclusion of non-Jewish victims of the Nazis in the Holocaust is objected to by many persons including Elie Wiesel
, and by organizations such as Yad Vashem
established to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. They say that the word was originally meant to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such totality and specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.
Michael Burleigh
and Wolfgang Wippermann maintain that although all Jews were victims, the Holocaust transcended the confines of the Jewish community – other people shared the tragic fate of victimhood. László Teleki
applies the term "Holocaust" to both the murder of Jews
and Romani peoples by the Nazis. In The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia use the term to include Jews, Gypsies and the disabled. Dennis Reinhartz has claimed that Gypsies were the main victims of genocide in Croatia and Serbia during the Second World War, and has called this "the Balkan Holocaust 1941-1945".
: Endlösung der Judenfrage) was the Nazis' own term, coined by Adolf Eichmann
as a euphemism
. Before the word "Holocaust" became normative this phrase was also used by writers in English. For example, in William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, the genocide is described as "The Final Solution" (in quotation marks; the word "Holocaust" is not mentioned). In both English and German, "Final Solution" has been widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust". Whereas the term "Holocaust" is now often used to include all casualties of the Nazi death camps and murder squads, the "Final Solution" refers exclusively to the genocide of Jews. For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term Völkermord ("genocide"), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah.
(and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages
), became the standard Hebrew term for the 20th century Holocaust as early as the early 1940s. In recent literature it is specifically prefixed with Ha ("The" in Hebrew) when referring to Nazi mass-murders, for the same reason that "holocaust" becomes "The Holocaust". It may be spelled Ha-Shoah or HaShoah, as in Yom HaShoah
, the annual Jewish "Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day".
Shoah had earlier been used in the context of the Nazis as a translation of "catastrophe". For example, in 1934, when Chaim Weizmann
told the Zionist Action Committee that Hitler's rise to power was an "unvorhergesehene Katastrophe, etwa ein neuer Weltkrieg" ("an unforeseen catastrophe, comparable to another world war
"), the Hebrew press translated Katastrophe as Shoah. In the spring of 1942, the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) used Shoah in a book published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland to describe the extermination of Europe's Jews, calling it a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people. The word Shoah was chosen in Israel
to describe the Holocaust, the term institutionalized by the Knesset
on April 12, 1951, when it established Yom Ha-Shoah Ve Mered Ha-Getaot
, the national day of remembrance. In the 1950s, Yad Vashem
, the Israel "Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority" was routinely translating this into English as "the Disaster". At that time, holocaust was often used to mean the conflagration of much of humanity in a nuclear war. Since then, Yad Vashem has changed its practice; the word "Holocaust", usually now capitalized, has come to refer principally to the genocide of the European Jews. The Israeli historian Saul Friedländer
wrote in 1987 of "the growing centrality of the Shoah for Jewish communities in the Diaspora and that "The Shoah is almost becoming a symbol of identification, for better or for worse, whether because of the weakening of the bond of religion or because of the lesser salience of Zionism and Israel as an identification element". The British historian Richard J. Evans
wrote in 1989 that the term Holocaust was unsuitable, and should not be used.
of the Second Temple
), is also used. The Yiddish
term is khurbn eyrope . Max Kaufmann's early (1947) history of the genocide in Latvia was called Churbn Lettland, that is, The Destruction of the Jews of Latvia. Published later, Raul Hilberg
's most important work was The Destruction of the European Jews.
to describe attempts by the Nazis to exterminate most of the Roma peoples of Europe
. The phenomenon has been little studied.
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
" is the name commonly applied since the mid 1970s to the killing of six million Jews by Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. The term is also used more broadly to include the Nazis' systematic murder of millions of people in other groups, including ethnic Poles
Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles
In addition to about 2.9 million Polish Jews , about 2.8 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished during the course of the war...
, the Romani
Porajmos
The Porajmos was the attempt made by Nazi Germany, the Independent State of Croatia, Horthy's Hungary and their allies to exterminate the Romani people of Europe during World War II...
, Soviet civilians
Generalplan Ost
Generalplan Ost was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing to be undertaken in the Eastern European territories occupied by Germany during World War II...
, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities
Action T4
Action T4 was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany's eugenics-based "euthanasia" program during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination"...
, gay men, and political and religious opponents
Holocaust victims
While the term Holocaust victims generally refers to Jews, the Nazis also persecuted and often killed millions of members of other groups they considered inferior , undesirable or dangerous....
, which would bring the total number of Holocaust victims
Holocaust victims
While the term Holocaust victims generally refers to Jews, the Nazis also persecuted and often killed millions of members of other groups they considered inferior , undesirable or dangerous....
to between 11 million and 17 million people. In Judaism, Shoah (שואה), meaning "calamity" in Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
, became the standard term for the 20th century Holocaust (see Yom HaShoah
Yom HaShoah
Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah , known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews and five million others who perished in the...
).
The Holocaust
The word "holocaust" originally derived from the GreekGreek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
word holokauston
Holocaust (sacrifice)
A holocaust is a religious animal sacrifice that is completely consumed by fire. The word derives from the Ancient Greek holocaustos , which is used solely for one of the major forms of sacrifice....
, meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering", or "a burnt sacrifice offered to a god". In Greek and Roman pagan
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
rites, gods of the earth and underworld
Underworld
The Underworld is a region which is thought to be under the surface of the earth in some religions and in mythologies. It could be a place where the souls of the recently departed go, and in some traditions it is identified with Hell or the realm of death...
received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full. The word "holocaust" was later adopted in Greek translations of the Torah to refer to the olah
Oláh
Oláh is a Hungarian surname that means Vlach . It may refer to:*György Oláh , Nobel Prize winning Hungarian and American chemist*Ibolya Oláh , a Hungarian singer*Katalin Oláh, a Hungarian orienteering competitor...
, standard communal and individual sacrificial burnt offerings that Jews were required to make in the times of the Beit HaMikdash (Temple in Jerusalem). In its Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
form, holocaustum, the term was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jews by the chroniclers Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes
Richard of Devizes
Richard of Devizes , English chronicler, was a monk of St Swithin's house at Winchester.His birthplace is probably indicated by his surname, Devizes in Wiltshire, but of his life we know nothing. He is credited by Bale with the composition of the Annales de Wintonia, which are edited by Henry...
in England in the 1190s.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
, the word holocaust has been used in English since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people, but the earliest attested such usage dates from 1671, but it became common in the 19th century. In 1833 the journalist Leitch Ritchie
Leitch Ritchie
Leitch Ritchie was a Scottish novelist and journalist. He was born at Greenock and worked as a clerk in Glasgow, but about 1820 adopted literature as his profession....
, describing the wars of the medieval French monarch Louis VII
Louis VII of France
Louis VII was King of France, the son and successor of Louis VI . He ruled from 1137 until his death. He was a member of the House of Capet. His reign was dominated by feudal struggles , and saw the beginning of the long rivalry between France and England...
, wrote that he "once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church", a massacre by fire of the inhabitants of Vitry-le-François
Vitry-le-François
Vitry-le-François is a commune in the Marne department in north-eastern France. It is located on the Marne River and is the western terminus of the Marne-Rhine Canal.- History :In 1142, Louis VII invaded Champagne and seized Vitry-le-François...
in 1142.
In the early twentieth century, Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime—refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I...
of World War I. The Armenian Genocide is referenced in the title of a 1922 poem "The Holocaust" (published as a booklet) and the 1923 book "The Smyrna Holocaust" deals with arson and massacre of Armenians. Before the Second World War
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, the possibility of another war was referred to as "another holocaust" (that is, a repeat of the First World War). With reference to the events of the war, writers in English from 1945 used the term in relation to events such as the fire-bombing of Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
or Hiroshima
Hiroshima
is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. It became best known as the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on it at 8:15 A.M...
, or the effects of a nuclear war, although from the 1950s onwards, it was increasingly used in English to refer to the Nazi genocide of the European Jews (or Judeocide).
By the late 1950s, documents translated from Hebrew sometimes used the word "Holocaust" to translate "Shoah", as the Judeocide. This use can be found as early as May 23, 1943, in The New York Times, on page E6, in an article by Julian Meltzer, referring to feelings in Palestine about Jewish immigration of refugees from "the Nazi holocaust." By the late 1960s, the term was starting to be used in this sense without qualification. Nora Levin's 1968 book The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945 explains the meaning in its subtitle, but uses the unmoderated phrase "The Holocaust". An article called “Moral Trauma and the Holocaust” was published in the New York Times on February 12, 1968. However, it was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the generally accepted conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified and with a capital letter, a usage that also spread to other languages for the same period. The 1978 television miniseries titled "Holocaust
Holocaust (miniseries)
Holocaust was a television miniseries broadcast in four parts in 1978 on the NBC television network. The series tells the story of the Holocaust from the perspective of the Weiss family of German Jews and that of a rising member of the SS, who gradually becomes a merciless war criminal...
" and starring Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television and film.Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's The Playboy of Seville, before her screen debut in the television movie The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with...
is often cited as the principal contributor to establishing the current usage in the wider culture.
The Hebrew word Shoah is preferred by some people due to the supposed theologically and historically unacceptable nature of the word "holocaust". The American historian Walter Laqueur
Walter Laqueur
Walter Zeev Laqueur is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Breslau, Germany , to a Jewish family. In 1938, Laqueur left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, became victims of the Holocaust...
(whose parents died in the Shoah) has argued that the term Holocaust is a "singularly inappropriate" term for the genocide of the Jews as it implies a "burnt offering" to God. Laqueur wrote, "It was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim". The British historian Geoff Eley
Geoff Eley
Geoff Eley is a British-born historian of Germany. He received his D.Phil from the University of Sussex in 1974, and has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor since 1979...
wrote in a 1982 essay entitled "Holocaust History" that he thought the term Holocaust implies "a certain mystification, an insistence on the uniquely Jewish character of the experience".
The term became increasingly widespread as a synonym for "genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
" in the last decades of the 20th century to refer to mass murders in the form "X holocaust" (e.g. "Rwandan holocaust"). Examples are Rwanda
Rwandan Genocide
The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people in the small East African nation of Rwanda. Over the course of approximately 100 days through mid-July, over 500,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate...
, the Ukraine under Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, and the actions of the Khmer Rouge
Khmer Rouge
The Khmer Rouge literally translated as Red Cambodians was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who were the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan...
in Cambodia
Cambodia
Cambodia , officially known as the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia...
.
In order to suggest comparison with Nazi murders other historical events have also been labeled "Holocausts", for example the oppression of lower caste groups in India ("Sudra Holocaust") or the slave trade ("African Holocaust
Maafa
The Maafa refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the African diaspora, through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation...
"). Such usages are often heavily disputed. Even more contested is the use of the word in the older sense of "immolation" to refer to Allied World War II bombings, since this is sometimes adopted to imply equivalence between the Allied and the Nazi war record.
Use of the term for non-Jewish victims of the Nazis
While the terms "Shoah" and "Final Solution" always refer to the fate of the JewsJews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
during the Nazi rule
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
, the term "Holocaust" is sometimes used in a wider sense to describe other genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
s of the Nazi and other regimes.
The Columbia Encyclopedia
Columbia Encyclopedia
The Columbia Encyclopedia is a one-volume encyclopedia produced by Columbia University Press and sold by the Gale Group. First published in 1935, and continuing its important relationship with Columbia University, the encyclopedia underwent major revisions in 1950 and 1963; the current edition is...
defines "Holocaust" as "name given to the period of persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany". The Compact Oxford English Dictionary
Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English is a one-volume dictionary published by Oxford University Press. It is intended for a family or upper secondary school readership...
and Microsoft Encarta give similar definitions. The Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
defines "Holocaust" as "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women and children, and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II", although the article goes on to say, "The Nazis also singled out the Roma (Gypsies). They were the only other group that the Nazis systematically killed in gas chambers alongside the Jews."
Scholars are divided on whether the term Holocaust should be applied to all victims of Nazi mass murder, with some using it synonymously with Shoah or "Final Solution of the Jewish Question
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
", and others including the killing of Romani peoples (Roma and Sinti
Sinti
Sinti or Sinta or Sinte is the name of a Romani or Gypsy population in Europe. Traditionally nomadic, today only a small percentage of the group remains unsettled...
), Poles
Poles
thumb|right|180px|The state flag of [[Poland]] as used by Polish government and diplomatic authoritiesThe Polish people, or Poles , are a nation indigenous to Poland. They are united by the Polish language, which belongs to the historical Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages of Central Europe...
, the deaths of Soviet prisoners of war, Slavs, homosexual men, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and political opponents.
Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
contends that the Holocaust should include only Jews because it was the intent of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews, while the other groups were not to be totally annihilated.
Inclusion of non-Jewish victims of the Nazis in the Holocaust is objected to by many persons including Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel
Sir Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE; born September 30, 1928) is a Hungarian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and...
, and by organizations such as Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....
established to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. They say that the word was originally meant to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such totality and specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.
Michael Burleigh
Michael Burleigh
Michael Burleigh is a British author and historian.In 1977 he was awarded a first class honours degree in Medieval and Modern History from University College London, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer prizes...
and Wolfgang Wippermann maintain that although all Jews were victims, the Holocaust transcended the confines of the Jewish community – other people shared the tragic fate of victimhood. László Teleki
László Teleki
Count László Teleki IV de Szék was a Hungarian writer and statesman. He is remembered as the author of the drama Kegyencz ....
applies the term "Holocaust" to both the murder of Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
and Romani peoples by the Nazis. In The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia use the term to include Jews, Gypsies and the disabled. Dennis Reinhartz has claimed that Gypsies were the main victims of genocide in Croatia and Serbia during the Second World War, and has called this "the Balkan Holocaust 1941-1945".
Final Solution
The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (GermanGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
: Endlösung der Judenfrage) was the Nazis' own term, coined by Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
as a euphemism
Euphemism
A euphemism is the substitution of a mild, inoffensive, relatively uncontroversial phrase for another more frank expression that might offend or otherwise suggest something unpleasant to the audience...
. Before the word "Holocaust" became normative this phrase was also used by writers in English. For example, in William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a 1960 non-fiction book by William L. Shirer chronicling the general history of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945...
, the genocide is described as "The Final Solution" (in quotation marks; the word "Holocaust" is not mentioned). In both English and German, "Final Solution" has been widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust". Whereas the term "Holocaust" is now often used to include all casualties of the Nazi death camps and murder squads, the "Final Solution" refers exclusively to the genocide of Jews. For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term Völkermord ("genocide"), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah.
Shoah
The biblical word Shoah (שואה), also spelled Shoa and Sho'ah, meaning "calamity" in HebrewHebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
(and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
), became the standard Hebrew term for the 20th century Holocaust as early as the early 1940s. In recent literature it is specifically prefixed with Ha ("The" in Hebrew) when referring to Nazi mass-murders, for the same reason that "holocaust" becomes "The Holocaust". It may be spelled Ha-Shoah or HaShoah, as in Yom HaShoah
Yom HaShoah
Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah , known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews and five million others who perished in the...
, the annual Jewish "Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day".
Shoah had earlier been used in the context of the Nazis as a translation of "catastrophe". For example, in 1934, when Chaim Weizmann
Chaim Weizmann
Chaim Azriel Weizmann, , was a Zionist leader, President of the Zionist Organization, and the first President of the State of Israel. He was elected on 1 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952....
told the Zionist Action Committee that Hitler's rise to power was an "unvorhergesehene Katastrophe, etwa ein neuer Weltkrieg" ("an unforeseen catastrophe, comparable to another world war
World war
A world war is a war affecting the majority of the world's most powerful and populous nations. World wars span multiple countries on multiple continents, with battles fought in multiple theaters....
"), the Hebrew press translated Katastrophe as Shoah. In the spring of 1942, the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) used Shoah in a book published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland to describe the extermination of Europe's Jews, calling it a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people. The word Shoah was chosen in Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
to describe the Holocaust, the term institutionalized by the Knesset
Knesset
The Knesset is the unicameral legislature of Israel, located in Givat Ram, Jerusalem.-Role in Israeli Government :The legislative branch of the Israeli government, the Knesset passes all laws, elects the President and Prime Minister , approves the cabinet, and supervises the work of the government...
on April 12, 1951, when it established Yom Ha-Shoah Ve Mered Ha-Getaot
Yom HaShoah
Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah , known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews and five million others who perished in the...
, the national day of remembrance. In the 1950s, Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....
, the Israel "Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority" was routinely translating this into English as "the Disaster". At that time, holocaust was often used to mean the conflagration of much of humanity in a nuclear war. Since then, Yad Vashem has changed its practice; the word "Holocaust", usually now capitalized, has come to refer principally to the genocide of the European Jews. The Israeli historian Saul Friedländer
Saul Friedländer
Saul Friedländer is an award-winning Israeli historian and currently a professor of history at UCLA.-Biography:...
wrote in 1987 of "the growing centrality of the Shoah for Jewish communities in the Diaspora and that "The Shoah is almost becoming a symbol of identification, for better or for worse, whether because of the weakening of the bond of religion or because of the lesser salience of Zionism and Israel as an identification element". The British historian Richard J. Evans
Richard J. Evans
Richard John Evans is a British academic and historian, prominently known for his history of Germany.-Life:Evans was born in London, of Welsh parentage, and is now Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and President of Wolfson College...
wrote in 1989 that the term Holocaust was unsuitable, and should not be used.
Churbn and destruction
Churban Europa, meaning "European Destruction" in Hebrew (as opposed to simply Churban, the destructionSiege of Jerusalem (70)
The Siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 AD was the decisive event of the First Jewish-Roman War. The Roman army, led by the future Emperor Titus, with Tiberius Julius Alexander as his second-in-command, besieged and conquered the city of Jerusalem, which had been occupied by its Jewish defenders in...
of the Second Temple
Second Temple
The Jewish Second Temple was an important shrine which stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem between 516 BCE and 70 CE. It replaced the First Temple which was destroyed in 586 BCE, when the Jewish nation was exiled to Babylon...
), is also used. The Yiddish
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
term is khurbn eyrope . Max Kaufmann's early (1947) history of the genocide in Latvia was called Churbn Lettland, that is, The Destruction of the Jews of Latvia. Published later, Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
's most important work was The Destruction of the European Jews.
Porajmos
The Porajmos (also Porrajmos) literally "Devouring", or Samudaripen ("Mass killing") is a term adopted by the Roma historian Ian HancockIan Hancock
Ian Hancock is a linguist, Romani scholar, and political advocate. He was born and raised in England, and is one of the main contributors in the field of Romani studies....
to describe attempts by the Nazis to exterminate most of the Roma peoples of Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. The phenomenon has been little studied.