Dictionary Definition
holocaust
Noun
1 an act of great destruction and loss of
life
2 the Nazi program of exterminating Jews under
Hitler [syn: final
solution]
User Contributed Dictionary
see Holocaust
English
Etymology
Greek ὅλος italbrac holos or italbrac hol “whole” + καύστος italbrac kaustos “burnt” < καίειν italbrac kaiein “to burn”. The term traditionally referred to animal sacrifice where the whole animal was burned as an offering. This was only done in exceptional circumstances. Normally only the bones, fat and skin were burned on the altar; the animal’s edible parts were distributed to worshippers to prepare festive dinners.Noun
- A sacrifice to a god that is completely burned to ashes. The following usages are derived:
- The annihilation or near-annihilation of a group of animals or people, whether by natural or deliberate agency (eg “nuclear holocaust”)
- The state-sponsored mass murder of an ethnic group. In particular (and often with an initial capital) the “Final Solution”, a euphemism used by the Nazis to describe the mass killing of Jews and others either in camps equipped with industrial gassing and crematorium equipment or by more conventional means.
Usage notes
- Use of the word holocaust to depict Jewish suffering under the Nazis dates back to 1942, according to the OED. By the 1970s, The Holocaust was often synonymous with the Jewish exterminations. This use of the term as a synonym for the Jewish exterminations has been criticised because it appears to imply that there was a voluntary religious purpose behind the Nazi actions, which was not the case whether from the perspective of the Nazis or from that of the victims. Hence, some people prefer the term shoa, which means destruction.
- The word continues with its other uses. For example, part of the action of a BBC radio drama by James Follett in 1981 takes place in “Holocaust City”, which by inference was named because the inhabitants were the only survivors of a global nuclear war. A current website, Iraqi holocaust, deals with the atrocities of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Translations
sacrifice to a god
- Finnish: polttouhri
- Polish: całopalenie
- Spanish: holocausto
annihilation of a group of animals or people
- Finnish: joukkotuho
state-sponsored mass murder of an ethnic group
- Finnish: kansanmurha
See also
References
- Paternoster, Lewis M. and Frager-Stone, Ruth. Three Dimensions of Vocabulary Growth. Second Edition. Amsco School Publications: USA. 1998.
Extensive Definition
The Holocaust (from the Greek (): holos,
"completely" and kaustos, "burnt"), also known as (Hebrew:
), Churben (Yiddish:
), is the term generally used to describe the genocide of
approximately six million European Jews during World War
II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned
and executed by the National Socialist
German Workers’ Party (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf
Hitler.
Other groups were persecuted and killed by the
regime, including the Roma; Soviets,
particularly
prisoners of war; Communists;
ethnic Poles; other Slavic
people; the disabled;
gay men; and political and religious dissidents. Many scholars
do not include these groups in the definition of the Holocaust,
defining it as the genocide of the Jews, or what the Nazis called
the "Final Solution
of the Jewish Question." Taking into account all the victims of
Nazi persecution, the death toll rises considerably: estimates
generally place the total number of victims at nine to 11
million.
The persecution and genocide were accomplished in
stages. Legislation to
remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the
outbreak of World War II. Concentration
camps were established in which inmates were used as slave
labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich
conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called
Einsatzgruppen
murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and
Roma were crammed into
ghettos before being transported hundreds of miles by freight
train to extermination
camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them
were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was
involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country
into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state."
Etymology and use of the term
The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holókauston, meaning a "completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)" sacrificial offering to a god. Its Latin form (holocaustum) was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jews by the chroniclers Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes in the 1190s. Since the late 19th century, it has been used primarily to refer to disasters or catastrophes.The biblical word Shoah (שואה) (also spelled
Sho'ah and Shoa), meaning "calamity," became the standard Hebrew
term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s. Shoah is preferred by
many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically
offensive nature of the original meaning of "holocaust."
Definition
The word "holocaust" has been used since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people. For example, Winston Churchill and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide of World War I. Since the 1950s its use has been increasingly restricted, and it is now mainly used to describe the Nazi Holocaust, spelled with a capital H."Holocaust" was adopted as a translation of
"Shoah" — a Hebrew word connoting catastrophe, calamity,
disaster and destruction 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. By the 1950s,
its translation, "Holocaust," popularized by Yad Vashem,
had come routinely to refer to the genocide of the European 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.
The word "holocaust" is also used in a wider
sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include
the killing of around half a million Roma and
Sinti, the
deaths of several million Soviet prisoners
of war, along with slave laborers, gay men, Jehovah's
Witnesses, the disabled, and political opponents. The use of
the word in this wider sense is objected to by many Jewish
organizations, particularly those established to commemorate the
Jewish Holocaust. Jewish organizations say that the word in its
current sense was originally coined to describe the extermination
of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a
scale, and of such 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.
Even more hotly disputed is the extension of the
word to describe events that have no connection with World War II.
The terms "Rwandan Holocaust"
and "Cambodian
Holocaust" are used to refer to the Rwanda
genocide of 1994 and the mass killings by the Khmer Rouge
regime in Cambodia respectively, and "African Holocaust" is used to
describe the slave trade and the colonization of Africa, also known
as the Maafa.
Distinctive features
Compliance of Germany's institutions
Michael Berenbaum writes that Germany became a "genocidal state."Saul
Friedländer writes that: "Not one social group, not one
religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional
association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its
solidarity with the Jews." He writes that some Christian churches
declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the
flock, but even then only up to a point.
Friedländer argues that this makes the Holocaust
distinctive because anti-Jewish policies were able to unfold
without the interference of countervailing forces of the kind
normally found in advanced societies, such as industry, small
businesses, churches, and other vested interests and lobby
groups.}}
The slaughter was systematically conducted in
virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied
territory in what are now 35 separate European countries. It
was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than
seven million Jews in 1939. About five million Jews were killed
there, including three million in occupied Poland, and over one
million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the
Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece. The Wannsee
Protocol makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out
their "final solution of the Jewish question" in England and
Ireland.
Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was
to be exterminated without exception. In other genocides, people
were able to escape death by converting to another religion or in
some other way assimilating. This option was not available to the
Jews of occupied Europe. All persons of recent Jewish ancestry were
to be exterminated in lands controlled by Germany.
Medical experiments
see Nazi human experimentationAnother distinctive feature was the extensive use
of human subjects in medical experiments. German physicians carried
out such experiments at Auschwitz,
Dachau,
Buchenwald,
Ravensbrück,
Sachsenhausen
and Natzweiler
concentration camps.
The most notorious of these physicians was Dr.
Josef
Mengele, who worked in Auschwitz. His experiments included
placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them,
freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting
chemicals into children's eyes, and various amputations and other
brutal surgeries. The full extent of his work will never be known
because the truckload of records he sent to Dr. Otmar
von Verschuer at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by von Verschuer. Subjects who
survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and
dissected after the experiments.
He seemed particularly keen on working with
Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would
personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel
Mengele." Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who
looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:
In 1935, Hitler introduced the Nuremberg
Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and
deprived them of all civil rights. In his speech introducing the
laws, Hitler said that if the "Jewish problem" cannot be solved by
these laws, it "must then be handed over by law to the
National-Socialist Party for a final solution (Endlösung)." The
expression "Endlösung" became the standard Nazi euphemism for the
extermination of the Jews. In January 1939, he said in a public
speech: "If international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe
should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another
world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the
earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation
(vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe."
The question of the treatment of the Jews became
an urgent one for the Nazis after September 1939, when they
occupied the western half of Poland, home to
about two million Jews. Heinrich
Himmler's right-hand man, Reinhard
Heydrich, recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in
ghettos in major cities,
where they would be put to work for the German war industry. The
ghettos would be in cities located on railway junctions, so that,
in Heydrich's words, "future measures can be accomplished more
easily." During his interrogation in 1961, Adolf
Eichmann testified that the expression "future measures" was
understood to mean "physical extermination."}}
Germany invaded Poland on September 1,
1939, leading
Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and France
to declare war. Hans Frank, a
German lawyer, was appointed Governor-General in October.
In September, Himmler appointed Reinhard
Heydrich head of the Reich Security Head
Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA), a body overseeing
the work of the SS, the
Security
Police (SD), and the Gestapo in occupied
Poland and charged with carrying out the policy towards the Jews
described in Heydrich's report. (This body should not be confused
with the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt or Race and Resettlement Main
Office, RuSHA, which was involved in carrying out the deportation
of Jews.) First organised murders of Jews by German forces occurred
during Operation
Tannenberg and through Selbstschutz
units. Later the Jews were herded into ghettos, mostly in the
General
Government area of central Poland, where they were put to work
under the Reich Labor Office headed by Fritz Saukel. Here many
thousands were killed in various ways, and many more died of
disease, starvation, and exhaustion, but there was still no program
of systematic killing. There is no doubt, however, that the Nazis
saw forced labor as a form of extermination. The expression
Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work") was
frequently used.
When the Germans occupied Norway, the
Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in 1940, and
Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, anti-Semitic measures were also
introduced into these countries, although the pace and severity
varied greatly from country to country according to local political
circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life
and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical
deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. The Vichy regime
in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French
Jews. Germany's allies Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and
Bulgaria were pressured to introduce anti-Jewish measures, but for
the most part they did not comply until compelled to do so. The
German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively
persecuting Jews on its own initiative.
During 1940 and 1941, the murder of large numbers
of Jews in German occupied Poland continued, and the deportation of
Jews from Germany, Austria and the "Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia" (today's Czech
Republic) to General Gouvernment was undertaken. Eichmann was
assigned the task of removing all Jews from these territories,
although the deportation of Jews from Germany, particularly
Berlin, was
not officially completed until 1943. (Many Berlin Jews were able to
survive in hiding—it is an irony of the Holocaust that Berlin was
one of the few places where this was possible.) By December 1939,
3.5 million Jews were crowded into the General Government
area.
The Governor-General, Hans Frank,
noted that this many people could not be simply shot. "We shall
have to take steps, however, designed in some way to eliminate
them." It was this dilemma which led the SS to experiment with
large-scale killings using poison gas. This method had already been
used during Hitler's campaign of euthanasia in Germany (known as
"T4"). SS Obersturmführer Christian
Wirth seems to have been the inventor of the gas
chamber.
Although it was clear by 1941 that the SS
hierarchy led by Himmler and Heydrich was determined to embark on a
policy of killing all the Jews under German control, there were
important centers of opposition to this policy within the Nazi
regime. The grounds for the opposition were mainly economic, not
humanitarian. Hermann
Göring, who had overall control of the German war industry, and
the German army's Economics Department, representing the armaments
industry, argued that the enormous Jewish labor force assembled in
the General Government area (more than a million able-bodied
workers) was an asset too valuable to waste while Germany was
preparing to invade the Soviet Union.
During this period there were a few conflicts
between the Army and the SS over policy in Poland. Ultimately,
neither Göring nor the army leadership was willing or able to
challenge Himmler's authority, particularly since Himmler made it
clear he had Hitler's support.
Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)
-
- Further information: Extermination through labour, List of Nazi German concentration camps, Nazi concentration camps, Nazi concentration camp badges.
- ''The major concentration and extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Chełmno, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Grini, Jasenovac, Klooga, Majdanek, Maly Trostinets, Mauthausen-Gusen, Ravensbrück, Treblinka.
- Camp badges: Black triangle, Pink triangle, Purple triangle, Yellow badge.
These early prisons—usually basements and
storehouses—were eventually consolidated into full-blown, centrally
run camps outside the cities. By 1942, six large extermination
camps had been established in Nazi-occupied Poland. It is estimated
that the Germans established 15,000 camps in the occupied
countries, many of them in Poland.
New camps were focused on areas with large
Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma and Sinti
populations, including inside Germany. The transportation of
prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using
rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their
destination.
Extermination through labour, a means whereby camp inmates
would literally be worked to death—or frequently worked until they
could no longer perform work tasks, followed by their selection for
extermination—was invoked as a further systematic extermination
policy. Furthermore, while not designed as a method for systematic
extermination, many camp prisoners died because of harsh overall
conditions or from executions carried out on a whim after being
allowed to live for days or months.
Upon admission, some camps tattooed prisoners
with a prisoner ID. Those fit for work were dispatched for 12 to 14
hour shifts. Before and after, there were roll calls that could
sometimes last for hours, with prisoners regularly dying of
exposure.
Ghettos (1940–1945)
-
- Further information: Emanuel Ringelblum, Judenrat, Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944, Oyneg Shabbos
- Main ghettos: Cluj Ghetto, Kraków Ghetto, Łachwa Ghetto, Łódź Ghetto, Lwów Ghetto, Theresienstadt Ghetto, Warsaw Ghetto, Wilna Ghetto
In these territories, there were fewer restraints
on the mass killing of Jews than there were in countries like
France or the Netherlands, where there was a long tradition of
tolerance and the rule of law, or even Poland where, despite a
strong tradition of antisemitism, there was considerable resistance
to Nazi persecution of Polish Jews. In the Baltic states, Belarus,
and Ukraine, native antisemitism was reinforced by hatred of
Communist rule, which many people associated with the Jews.
Thousands of people in these countries actively collaborated with
the Nazis. Ukrainians and Latvians joined SS auxiliary forces in
large numbers and did much of the dirty work in Nazi extermination
camps. Raul Hilberg
writes that these were ordinary citizens, not hoodlums or thugs;
the great majority were university-educated professionals. They
used their skills to become efficient killers, according to
Michael
Berenbaum.
According to Ohlendorf at his
trial, "the Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear
of the troops by killing the Jews, gypsies, Communist
functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would
endanger the security." In practice, their victims were nearly all
defenseless Jewish civilians (not a single Einsatzgruppe member was
killed in action during these operations). By December 1941, the
four Einsatzgruppen listed above had killed, respectively, 125,000,
45,000, 75,000, and 55,000 people—a total of 300,000 people—mainly
by shooting or with hand grenades at mass killing sites outside the
major towns.
The
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of one
survivor of the Einsatzgruppen in Piryatin, Ukraine, when they
killed 1,600 Jews on April 6, 1942, the second day
of Passover:
Synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words
annihilation, bloodbath, blue ruin, breakup, burnt offering,
butchery, carnage, clawing, collection, conflagration, consumption, cruciation, crucifixion, damnation, decimation, depredation, desolation, despoilment, despoliation, destruction, devastation, disintegration, disorganization,
disruption, dissolution, drink offering,
elimination,
eradication, ex voto
offering, extermination, extinction, final solution,
fire, genocide, havoc, heave offering, hecatomb, hell, hell upon earth, horror, human sacrifice, immolation, incense, infanticide, inferno, laceration, lancination, libation, mactation, martyrdom, mass destruction,
mass murder, massacre,
nightmare, oblation, offering, offertory, passion, peace offering,
perdition, persecution, piacular
offering, pogrom,
purgatory, race
extermination, race-murder, rack, ravage, ruin, ruination, sacramental
offering, sacrifice,
saturnalia of blood, scapegoat, self-immolation,
self-sacrifice, shambles, slaughter, spoliation, suttee, sutteeism, thank offering,
torment, torture, undoing, vandalism, votive offering,
waste, whole offering,
wholesale murder, wrack,
wrack and ruin, wreck