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The Holocaust and Genocide

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The Historiography of the Holocaust

Abstract

How does the Holocaust relate to genocide as a concept and an event? This question has caused considerable controversy because scholarly discourse and identity politics cannot be separated neatly. While the term ‘genocide’ was coined during the Second World War and enshrined in international law in 1948, the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy did not become an object of consciousness until almost two decades later. Ever since, those highlighting a distinctive experience for European Jewry have sought to separate it from that of other victims of the Nazis as well as other cases of ethnic and racial extermination.1 Sometimes this endeavour takes on sectarian overtones. When President Carter established the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial in 1979 and referred to ‘eleven million innocent victims exterminated’ — a figure that included five million non-Jewish Nazi victims — the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer accused him of attempting to ‘de-Judaize’ the Holocaust. Indignant survivor groups led by Elie Wiesel campaigned successfully to ensure that the permanent exhibition made only passing reference to ‘other [non-Jewish] victims’.Z Bauer went so far as to condemn tendencies to ‘submerge the specific Jewish tragedy in the general sea of suffering caused by the many atrocities committed by the Nazi regime’ as part of a ‘worldwide phenomenon connected with dangers of anti-Semitism’.3

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Notes

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  1. Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

    Dan Stone

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© 2004 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Moses, A.D. (2004). The Holocaust and Genocide. In: Stone, D. (eds) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524507_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524507_25

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