Why the Holocaust is Actually Unique

If we want "never again" to be more than a platitude, we must understand what made the Holocaust truly unique.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Poland. Photo credit Colin C. Murphy.

This post is by Contributor Alexander von Sternberg. An audio version, read by Alex himself, is available for free on his History Impossible Podcast.

Contributor Timothy Wood also has a new piece out in Queer Majority: “Getting Bi: The Evolution of Sexual Thinking.”

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Having spent the better part of five years studying and reporting on the stranger corners of the Third Reich, the Holocaust has featured prominently in the 50 plus hours of History Impossible podcasts I’ve made on the subject. The fact is, one can’t discuss the Third Reich without discussing the Holocaust, both for historical and moral reasons. And it is this moral dimension that necessitates an examination of why it’s so morally imperative to discuss the Holocaust, above and beyond other chapters of history, in terms that delve deeper than platitudes like “never again.” Drilling down requires us to ask a very simple but complex question: is the Holocaust unique as an event in human history? The answer is a resounding yes — but not for the reasons most people tend to think.

The question of “what makes the Holocaust unique?” is one that frequently surfaces in books, academic journals, and classroom discussions. I took a course on the Holocaust in college, where we discussed this very question at length, even reading a book that I still own titled Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (1996). The American historian David E. Stannard’s contribution to the book, an essay titled “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship”, explores the idea that the Holocaust, amid the mosaic of suffering that defines the human experience, is not a unique event. Stannard argues that “the purported means-of-extermination distinction between the deaths of Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe and the deaths of indigenous peoples in their European-invaded homelands is nonsense.” In service of establishing some sense of parity between the Holocaust and other historical atrocities, he asserts that “there is no such evidence” of disease playing the most significant role in the decimation of indigenous Americans after European contact. Despite the fact that “such evidence” not only exists in abundance, but is not even in dispute, Stannard sacrifices historical truth on the altar of political bias¹ and makes the claim anyway.

Others posit that the Holocaust is not special except in how it’s discussed and used politically. This view is most often held by those who believe that the pro-Israel lobby (or, in more extreme cases, the Jews as a whole) have a vested interest in keeping the story of the Holocaust alive. To name names, paleoconservative or paleocon-adjacent writers like Pat Buchanan, Joe Sabran, and Paul Findley, who have ideological axes to grind against the state of Israel. Across the aisle, rabidly anti-Zionist leftists have come pretty close to walking in lock-goose-step with their paleocon counterparts, such as the anti-Israel writers Max Blumenthal and Norman Finkelstein, showing that hostile obsessions with Jews or their state is a bipartisan phenomenon. 

While it’s a bit crass to say that the Holocaust has “good PR”, it’s undeniably true that it does. This PR comes from the aforementioned “never again” ethos, which, despite being rote and arguably unserious (considering the multitude of genocides that have occurred in the 80 years since Hitler), has enabled a tremendous amount of knowledge and insight into the Holocaust. This has been aided, of course, by the Nazis’ perplexingly extensive documentation of their own crimes. While the destructiveness certainly could be seen as “unique” in terms of its efficacy, there are no shortage of memorials all over the world commemorating the victims of genocide, which throws more than a little cold water on any simplistic assertions of the Holocaust’s “true” uniqueness as an event.

This begs the question: given how depressingly common genocide has been in human history, what exactly makes the Holocaust special? 

The Holocaust is unique in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious to the casual observer, as most of the usual arguments rest on claims which are disproved by historical counterpoints. For example, some might point to the sheer scale of the Holocaust, with the 11 to 17 million people massacred by the Nazis (including six million Jews), mostly in shooting pits and gas chambers. However, the Soviet Union’s infamous Holodomor in 1932 Ukraine produced comparable death tolls of up to 7 million. Stalin’s Great Purge may have resulted in over a million killed. Pol Pot wiped out 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians. Caesar destroyed one million Gauls, and Genghis Khan wiped out 11 percent of the world’s population, mostly with blades and arrows. In terms of scale, the Holocaust is sadly not in a league of its own.

So what then? The intention of the destruction of a race of people? Not quite. Putting aside the fact that half of the Holocaust’s victims were not Jewish (e.g. Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, Russian POWs, Polish civilians, Catholic dissidents, etc.), history is replete with examples of the intent of complete destruction. In the 18th century Dzungar genocide, the Manchu Qing dynasty waged a campaign of complete annihilation against one of the Mongol peoples of the Asian steppe. With an estimated “success” rate of 80 percent of Dzungars killed, historian Michael Clarke explains that the Qianlong Emperor’s extermination edict resulted in “the complete destruction of not only the Dzungar state but of the Dzungars as a people.” Complete destruction was the intent, just as it was during the Holocaust. Within the Nazi puppet state of Croatia in 1941-1945, a parallel Holocaust had the aim of killing one third of all Serbs for the crime of being Serbs within Croatia’s new borders. Even in the Old Testament, divinely-ordained genocides occur left and right, such as the Israelites’ campaign against the Canaanites in the Book of Joshua. Again: destruction was and has always been the point.

Perhaps the mechanization of the killing process? The Nazi’s methods were certainly unique for their time. An industrialized killing apparatus and system of death factories hasn’t been replicated in quite a similar way since. The Nazi’s brutal methods were also a perversely effective way of preventing burnout on the part of the executioners. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992) movingly recounts stories of German troops simply being unable to participate, at least initially, in the mass slaughter of Jews in the early months of Operation Barbarossa. Shooting literally over a million men, women, and children into pits was, as the Nazi high-ups noticed, psychologically unsustainable, hence the introduction of the death camps. This also incentivized the use of the Nazis’ rotating slave labor force, where prisoners, usually Jews, dug their own graves, herded fellow victims into gas chambers, and so forth. Another one of the Holocaust’s most distinctive aspects is how well-documented it was. But these observations are primarily about the technology of the era, and differentiating the means of mass murder is too superficial a metric to illustrate what puts the Holocaust in a class by itself.

When we step back from all of these common arguments and look at the broader picture, a disturbing realization at last illuminates the Holocaust’s true uniqueness. What makes the Holocaust unique is the inextricable link it has with the ideology that spawned it, because there could be no Nazi Germany without the Holocaust.

This might seem counter-intuitive, especially since for the most of the Third Reich’s 12-year existence there was no official program that called for the extermination of Germany’s Jews, much less Europe’s or the world’s (a favored talking point of revisionists). Even after the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942, there was no specific document saying “Kill all the Jews now.” However, the minutes taken at the Wannsee Conference do provide clear evidence of the decision to deport Jews to the east for annihilation as well as the involvement of different government departments in implementing this plan.

Similarly, in Heinrich Himmler’s Posen speeches in 1943, he is recorded as having said, “It is one of those things which is easy to say. ‘The Jewish race is to be exterminated,’ says every party member. 'That’s clear, it’s part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we’ll do it.’” But while these examples show the Third Reich’s intent to mass-murder the Jewish population, they don’t prove the claim that there could be no Nazi Germany without the Holocaust. To do that, we need to step back from the Holocaust as policy, and examine the ideology that allowed for it in the first place.

Nazi Germany, as strange as it might seem, had many different expressions of its core philosophy. Not every citizen in good standing was a Nazi, and not everyone who supported the Nazis necessarily held a murderous hatred of the Jews. The famous Afro-German Hans Massaquoi, for example, recalled that during his time working in a wartime German factory, his colleagues had all voted for Hitler in the early 1930s because of his party’s pro-working class rhetoric. Nazi ideology, however — the foundation of any intelligible concept of Nazi Germany — could not have existed without a hatred of the Jews, both in theory and practice. We can see this demonstrated by the different strains of bigoted thinking found within the Nazi Party itself.

As I’ve documented in History Impossible’s ongoing “Muslim Nazis” series, there were many examples of what can best be called Islamophilia within the higher echelons of the Nazi hierarchy. Heinrich Himmler spoke in glowing terms about Islam and kept a Quran by his bedside. SS Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger once said that, had Islam taken a greater hold in Europe, “We would really have a Germanic culture and not a Jewish one.” And Adolf Hitler himself, in one of his Table Talks, contrasted a Christianity and Islam when he referred to “Catholicism’s Jewish filth and priestly twaddle” and Islam as being “a religion of men.” These opinions, it should be noted, were not motivated by a true understanding of Islam, but born out of a reactionary hatred of Judeo-Christian culture and values. 

Similarly, Nazi ideologists like Alfred Rosenberg and the aforementioned Heinrich Himmler took a distinct interest in Eastern esotericism, and many of their views regarding “Aryans” came from a distinct form of Hindu mythology practiced by Indian Brahmins of a certain racist disposition (and espoused by Western fanatics like Savitri Devi). This was where the Nazis’ intensely hierarchical views on race and blood essentially came from in an ideological sense, but it shows the same pattern. Even in their efforts to position themselves — the so-called “Aryans” — at the top of the racial hierarchical, they were always sure to place the Jews at the bottom or even outside of it, denoting a certain alien or inhuman quality to them.

The Nazis’ self-conception was fundamentally defined by their irrational degradation of the Jewish people, and could not have existed as anything recognizably Nazi without it. Anti-Semitism, as even cursory students of the history of the Third Reich will recognize, suffused everything about National Socialism, from the rhetoric used in their propaganda, to education reforms, to the laws used to devalue and justify the persecutions that took place. Anti-Semitism was everywhere, and in almost every meaningful way, it defined the role of the state. We must therefore ask: after investing so much political, philosophical, and moral energy into demonizing an entire group of people in such absolute terms, what is the logical endpoint, if not complete destruction?

This notion has its skeptics. There are those who hang their hats on the fact that the Nazis didn’t have a documented plan to murder every Jew in sight, but this does not address the fact that the Nazis overtly and loudly regarded Jews as both untermenschen and the world’s supervillains in need of stopping. Skeptics might point to Heinrich Himmler’s later attempts to release one million captive Jews in 1944 when it became clear the Nazis were losing the war, but this has nothing to do with what the Nazis wanted to accomplish if they could accomplish anything unhindered. Mass slaughter, as the Nazis saw it, was the best way to accomplish their goals, that is, a world completely Judenfrei. This is why it became their method, rather than shipping European Jews to Madagascar or ignoring the complaints of their Arab allies like Hajj Amin al-Husseini and shoving them into Palestine.

These inherent contradictions show that the desire to kill the Jews was much deeper and more systemic, as seen in the rhetoric used by the Nazi leadership regarding Jews. While propaganda doesn’t singularly cause behavior, it can indicate what people intend to do. And Hitler and his devoted followers never missed an opportunity to refer to the Jews as the kind of organism whose only purpose is to be snuffed out. No one who ever likened the Jewish people to a “bacillus” as much as Hitler did could be content leaving the Jews alone.

There are also the ground-level facts to consider. One can’t make the argument that extermination was a wartime necessity when the option of deportation was still on the table, considering that the massive exterminations by the Einsatzgruppen — the Nazis’ mobile death squads that took part in Operation Barbarossa — predated the Final Solution proposed at Wannsee. The reason that focusing on this question is so important is that it shows the necessary mentality associated with mass extermination was always in place within the minds of those Nazis whose authority mattered most. Even if it was never on paper, it was ever-present. This mindset shows that the Nazi state was one whose ideological foundations were built upon genocidal hatred and nothing else. Indeed, anti-Semitism was the lone thread that wove together all of the facets and factions within Nazism.

This is what is meant by “there could be no Third Reich without the Holocaust.” The Holocaust — or something like it — was always, at some level, an inevitability with people like Adolf Hitler and his immediate underlings. It was always in the back of their minds, and it’s naïve to think otherwise, given all we know. Thus, the state, which was tethered so inexorably to its leader and his demented ideas, was built upon such a notion, with the ultranationalist rhetoric serving as the perfect justification. This is why the Holocaust is unique. Understanding these dynamics can help us not only acknowledge the horrors of what happened in Europe eight decades ago and thwart historical revisionism, but to learn the lessons of history so that “never again” becomes more than a mere platitude.

See also: “Time and the Laundering of History”

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1. In Stannard’s case, bias of a decolonial/leftist bent.