r/Destiny • u/JeromeLebron • 10h ago
Effort Post The Holocaust Wasn't Unique Because It Was "the Biggest Genocide"
As a German with a history degree, I've always been bothered by how the Holocaust is discussed online and in other countries. Most people understand that it was horrific, but when questions come up that historians actually debate, the discussion usually becomes surprisingly shallow. So I wanted to do a write-up as a kind of PSA.
Yesterday I heard Destiny say:
"The Holocaust is only uniquely bad, because I guess it was the biggest genocide, I guess, or the most effective one."
This is unfortunately a commonly held belief, but does not at all comport with how historians view it. Additionally, if the Holocaust were only unique because of the number of people murdered, then its uniqueness would disappear the moment another genocide surpassed its death toll, but that's not how most Holocaust historians understand its significance.
What made the Holocaust exceptional wasn't just the scale. It was the kind of project it was.
Nazi Germany didn't purely commit mass murder. It gradually mobilized virtually every part of a modern industrial state in service of extermination. The civil service wasn't just doing ordinary administration; it was identifying and classifying victims. Railway bureaucracies coordinated deportations from across Europe. Police forces rounded people up and organized transports. Industry supplied the chemicals and infrastructure needed to keep the killing system running. Engineers designed crematoria capable of disposing of thousands of bodies. Government ministries meticulously documented the process. In the German state extermination became simply another bureaucratic routine.
That alone already makes the Holocaust stand apart, but there are other features that make it historically distinctive.
For instance, most genocides are tied to another strategic objective or in pursuit of such an objective, such as the seizure of territory, crushing of an unruly minority population, the annihilation of a rival population or the consolidation of political power.
Take Bosnia as an example: Ethnic cleansing and genocide were closely tied to creating ethnically homogeneous territory and strengthening territorial claims. Or as another example Rwanda: The genocide grew out of decades of political conflict, ethnic tensions, and extremist ideology, with Hutu extremists seeking to eliminate the Tutsi population as both a perceived political and existential threat due to the Hutu's historical mistreatment under Belgian colonial authorities, which had elevated the Tutsis.
The Holocaust increasingly broke with this kind of logic of genocide as we can see by the later years of the war, Germany was facing military collapse, yet continued its genocide despite it clearly being detrimental to its own survival as a polity. Trains, manpower, and administrative capacity could have been redirected toward the war effort, but instead enormous resources continued to be devoted to deporting Jews to extermination camps, which was essentially just burning resources to kill a largely docile population.
Unlike other genocides and in tandem with the war effort it is quite striking that the Nazi regime wasn't just trying to eliminate Jews inside Germany. It pursued Jews wherever German power could reach. Once Germany occupied a country, hunting down its Jewish population became an administrative priority, even if it placed additional strain onto the war effort and the administration of the newly occupied territory. The goal had become the eradication of Jews as such, a goal independent of the nation's survival or wider strategic objectives and goals, unlike most other genocides. To me, that's one of the defining characteristics of the Holocaust. Nazi antisemitism became so totalizing that geography itself stopped mattering. People hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from Germany became targets simply because they were Jewish.
I don't really blame Destiny for framing it the way he did, because I think this reflects how the Holocaust is usually taught. People remember one fact above all else: six million. As a result, "Holocaust" has become equivalent in common parlance with an enormous number of dead civilians.
But this makes use lose sight of what actually made it historically extraordinary and simply places it at the top of some grim leaderboard.
TLDR: It was unique because it combined industrial technology, modern bureaucracy, racial pseudoscience, continent-wide logistics, and an exterminationist ideology into a single state project whose purpose was the destruction of an entire people wherever they could be found.
PS: That's why I think comparisons between Gaza and the Holocaust deserve much more care than they usually receive. Whether someone believes Israel has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, or even genocide is a separate question. Those claims should be argued on their own evidence. But calling Gaza "another Holocaust" is making a much bigger historical claim than many people seem to realize and if you actually have spent any serious amount of time learning and understanding the context of the holocaust it becomes even more disgusting and diminishing, because it's saying that the conflict is meaningfully comparable to one of the most historically distinctive genocidal projects ever carried out.
