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Holocaust uniqueness debate

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Since the 1980s, there has been a continuous debate on whether the Holocaust[1][2] was a unique event in history.[3]

History

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The debate is said to have started in West Germany in the 1980s, when some German historians doubted the Holocaust's uniqueness after reviewing the separate history of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.[3] However, many historians, including but not limited to Emil Fackenheim, Yehuda Bauer, Deborah Lipstadt and Daniel Goldhagen, disagreed with those who doubted the Holocaust's uniqueness,[3] arguing that their doubts are a form of Holocaust trivialization.[3][4]

Academic views

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Support for Holocaust uniqueness

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Emil Fackenheim

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In his book To Mend the World, Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim gave the following reasons for why he believed the Holocaust to be unique:[5][6]

  • Anyone seen by Nazi officials as having "Jewish blood" was assigned to be killed
  • The Holocaust was not seen by Nazi officials as a means to an end, but an end itself
  • The Final Solution was made by Nazi officials to kill every Jewish person they could identify, regardless of the person's religion or ideology
  • Holocaust perpetrators involved a sizeable proportion of ordinary citizens, who participated in the systematic genocide of Jews as part of their jobs

David Patterson

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David Patterson, another Jewish philosopher, agreed with Emil Fackenheim's view by adding that the Nazis did not only seek the annihilation of the Jews but also Judaism, Jewish custom and the way that God, the world and humanity is understood by the Jews,[7] a fact that is not acknowledged by those on the far left or the far right.[7]

Clemens Heni

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Jewish political scientist Dr. Clemens Heni believed that many of those who doubted the uniqueness of the Holocaust were motivated by antisemitism.[8][9] Among those found to have rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness, some of them trivialized the Holocaust by exaggerating Germans' suffering from Allied bombing operations (e.g. Dresden bombing in February 1945) and falsely accusing Israeli Jews of "weaponizing" the Holocaust to "extort" from modern Germans.[8] Dr. Heni classified such rhetoric as "soft-core Holocaust denial"[8] – a synonym for Holocaust distortion.[1][2]

Germans scholars who rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness include Jörg Friedrich, Martin Walser and sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky,[8] whose ideas contributed to false claims made by the far-right National Democratic Party parliamentarians at a Saxon State Parliament (Landtag) session that "the British committed a bombing Holocaust against the Germans in Dresden".[8]

The post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe was also phrased by them as an expulsion Holocaust,[8] some of whom are left-wing academics, such as Ward Churchill, Robert Kurz, Noam Chomsky and John Mearsheimer.[8] Dr. Heni added that the said academics also had a history of accusing Jews of "controlling America's government to support Israel"[8] – with tropes like "US-Jewish leaders" and "Israel lobby".[8][10]

Manfred Gerstenfeld

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Historian Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld (d. 2021) criticized scholars who rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness,[7] calling their behavior "historical manipulation".[7] He believed that they had encouraged antisemitism in academia.[7]

Ingo Elbe

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Philosopher Ingo Elbe observed that anti-Zionism partly presented itself as "attacks on German memory culture".[7] Elbe said that it was founded on the "post-colonial concept of memory",[7] which falsely assumes that an emphasis on the Holocaust's uniqueness would create "indifference to others' suffering".[7]

Wolfgang Benz

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German historian Wolfgang Benz (1941 – ) considered the Holocaust "a unique crime in the history of mankind".[11]

Annette F. Timm

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Canadian historian Annette F. Timm considered the Holocaust unique due to the Nazis' "categorical rejection of any single Jewish person from being assimilated",[12] which partly contributed to their decision to kill every Jew they could identify.[12]

Objection to Holocaust uniqueness

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Further information: Holocaust denial

Objections to the Holocaust's uniqueness have historically been associated with Holocaust denial.[13] Such objections are found to be one of the most common themes of Holocaust deniers' propaganda.[13] For historians not known to have held antisemitic views, they objected to the Holocaust's uniqueness by accusing the concept of being "Eurocentric",[14] even though Jews are not European.[15]

Institute for Historical Review

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The Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a self-declared academic group that has been promoting Holocaust denial since 1978,[13][16] is noted for rejecting the Holocaust's uniqueness.[16] In several of its papers, the IHR compared the Holocaust to Allied bombings of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.[13][16] While claiming to be neutral, the IHR promotes the antisemitic trope that "the Holocaust was invented by Jews to further Jewish-Zionist interests".[13][16]

Ken Livingstone after speaking in the BBC Radio 4 Any Questions? programme at the Nexus Methodist Church, Bath, on 15 January 2016. This photograph is taken in the basement for coffee after the programme.

The IHR also alleges that "Nazi Germany actively supported Zionism" by presenting relevant history without context.[13][16] IHR's rejection of the Holocaust's uniqueness is shared by figures across the political spectrum. For instance, former London mayor Ken Livingstone (1945 – ), who was a British Labour Party member until 2018, rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness in a similar manner to the IHR,[17] so did PA's leader[18] and American Trotskyist activist writer Lenni Brenner (1937 – ) who published a book endorsing the claim.[19][20]

Richard C. Lukas

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Photo of author and historian, Richard C. Lukas.

Richard C. Lukas (1937 – ) is an American scholar rejecting the Holocaust's uniqueness.[21][22] In his 1986 book The Forgotten Holocaust, Lukas claimed that a "separate Holocaust against ethnic Poles" had happened under Nazi occupation.[21][22]

Lukas also tried to expand the definition of the Holocaust to include every other group targeted by the Nazi Germans,[21][22] arguing that "Jewish historians" were "controlling Holocaust history".[21][9] David Engel, a historian specialized in the Holocaust, wrote a 30-page article in the journal Slavic Review to criticize his claims,[22][23] pointing out that Lukas invented facts, ignored archival sources and failed to assess secondary sources.[22][23]

Pierre Guillaume

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Pierre Guillaume (1940 – 2023), a French ultra-left anarcho-Marxist activist, rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness.[24] Guillaume argued that the Holocaust was no different from any other racially motivated massacres in history, going as far as calling the Holocaust as "a distraction from class struggle" that "played into the hands of Zionism and Stalinism".[24]

Guillaume's views were adopted by the French far right,[24] many of whom also believed that the Holocaust was no different from the alleged Judean massacres of the Canaanites or the Native American genocide.[25] They believed that Jewish claims of the Holocaust's uniqueness are "excuses for extorting compensations from European countries.[26]

David Duke

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White supremacist David Duke in the Saxony region of Germany, summer 2002.
Further information: Ku Klux Klan and Racism in the United States

David Duke (1950 – ), leader of the White supremacist group Ku Klux Klan (KKK) between 1974 and 1980, also rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness.[27] On December 11 – 13, 2006, Duke attended a Holocaust-denying conference in Iran upon invitation from Iran's regime.[27] In expressing his rejection of the Holocaust's uniqueness, Duke accused "Zionists [of] weaponizing the Holocaust to deny the rights of the Palestinians".[27] He went on to argue that "[T]he Holocaust [...] is the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder."[27][2] He was one of the 70 participants of the conference.[27]

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References

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1
    • "Holocaust Denial and Distortion on Social Media". World Jewish Congress (WJC). Retrieved February 8, 2025.
    • "Holocaust denial / distortion". American Jewish Committee (AJC). Retrieved February 8, 2025.
    • "Holocaust Denial and Distortion". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Retrieved February 8, 2025.
    • "What you need to know about UNESCO's teachers guide and lesson activities to counter Holocaust denial and distortion". UNESCO. January 23, 2025. Retrieved February 8, 2025.
    • UNESCO; Nathalie Rücker (January 27, 2025). "Countering Holocaust Denial and Distortion: A Guide for Teachers" (PDF). Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). Retrieved February 8, 2025.
    • "Holocaust distortion more dangerous than outright denial, warns departing IHRA chief". The Times of Israel. January 29, 2025. Retrieved February 8, 2025.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion". International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Retrieved October 17, 2024. Distortion of the Holocaust refers, inter alia, to:
    • Intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany
    • Gross minimization of the number of the victims of the Holocaust in contradiction to reliable sources
    • Attempts to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide
    • Statements that cast the Holocaust as a positive historical event. Those statements are not Holocaust denial but are closely connected to it as a radical form of antisemitism. They may suggest that the Holocaust did not go far enough in accomplishing its goal of "the Final Solution of the Jewish Question"
    • Attempts to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3
  4. ↑ Gerstenfeld, Manfred (April 9, 2008). "Holocaust Trivialization". Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA). Retrieved February 28, 2025. [Holocaust trivialization is a] tool for some ideologically [...] motivated activists to metaphorically compare phenomena they oppose to the industrial-scale destruction of the Jews [. ...] exaggerate the evil nature of a phenomenon they condemn.
  5. ↑ Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World, (IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).
  6. ↑ "The Holocaust: What Makes the Holocaust Unique?". Jewish Virtual Library (JVL). Retrieved February 28, 2025.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 Gerstenfeld, Manfred (July 13, 2020). "The Attacks on the Uniqueness of the Holocaust". Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA). Retrieved March 1, 2025.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 Heni, Clemens (November 2, 2008). "Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah". Jewish Political Studies Review. Retrieved February 8, 2025.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 "Working Definition Of Antisemitism". World Jewish Congress. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
    IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism :
  10. ↑
  11. ↑ Benz, Wolfgang (1999). The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide (1st ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. p. 152. ISBN 0-231-11215-7.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Timm, Annette F. (2022). Graziosi, Andrea; Sysyn, Frank E. (eds.). Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-2280-0951-1.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5
  14. ↑
  15. ↑
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 "Institute for Historical Review (IHR)". Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Retrieved February 6, 2025.
  17. ↑ "Ken Livingstone repeats claim about Nazi-Zionist collaboration". The Guardian. March 30, 2017. Retrieved February 6, 2025.
  18. ↑
  19. ↑
  20. ↑
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 21.3 Richard Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986). David Engel, “Poles, Jews, and Historical Objectivity,” Slavic Review, vol. 46, no. 3/4 (1987): pp. 568–80.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4 Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (February 9, 2023). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. Retrieved October 24, 2024.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Engel, David (1991). "David Engel Replies to Richard C. Lukas". Slavic Review. 50 (3): 742–747. doi:10.1017/S0037677900115955. Retrieved February 28, 2025. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2
  25. ↑ "Dans le mensuel "Globe" les propos antisémites de M. Claude Autant-Lara député européen". Le Monde. September 8, 1989. Retrieved December 26, 2024.
  26. ↑ Levy, Richard S.; Donahue, William Collins; Madigan, Kevin; Morse, Jonathan; Shevitz, Amy Hill; Stillman, Norman A.; Bell, Dean Phillip (2005). "Bardèche, Maurice (1909–1998)". Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution [2 volumes]. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 9781851094394. Retrieved December 26, 2024.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 27.2 27.3 27.4 "Iranian leader says Israel will be 'wiped out'". NBC News. December 11, 2006. Retrieved February 27, 2025.
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