What Was the Holocaust?

Is the Holocaust definable? Is it desirable to define it? After all, definitions are abstractions from reality and are useful only insofar as they help us to better understand the world around us. Any historiographical definition is designed to help us understand the event or events being defined. Because life is infinitely more complex than any definition, definitions, by definition, can never be fully adequate to the events they are supposed to define. We can but hope that they approximate descriptions of reality. Inevitably, our definitions are selective—they deal with parts of a phenomenon. That makes it even more important for our definitions to be as precise as possible in defining at least those parts of the phenomenon that they claim to define. And if experience shows that the definition does not fit reality, then the definition has to be changed, not the other way around. In order to define the Holocaust, it must be compared to other events if it is, as I have just argued, a human event. It is only by comparison that we can answer the question of whether it is unprecedented and has features not found in similar events.

The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a refugee Polish-Jewish lawyer in the United States, in late 1942 or early 1943. Lemkin’s definition is contradictory. On the one hand, he defines genocide as the “destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.… Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”¹ (It seems that he intends to say “the groups as such,” not necessarily all the individuals in them.) Yet in the preface of the same book he says that “the practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups…is called by the author ‘genocide.’ ” The destruction of the essential foundations of national life includes, according to Lemkin, the destruction of the national economic structure, its religious institutions, its moral fiber, its education system, and, always, selective mass killings of parts of the targeted population. What he describes are two distinct alternatives: one, a radical and murderous denationalization accompanied by mass murder, which destroys the group as an entity but leaves many or most of the individuals composing it alive; the other, murder of every single individual of the targeted group. It may perhaps be argued that partial mass annihilation leads to total extermination. But this is not what Lemkin says, though such a possibility certainly cannot be discounted.

The discussion here is not just academic. Lemkin’s definitions were adopted, in large part, by the United Nations. In the Genocide Convention, approved on December 9, 1948, genocide is defined as “any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical or religious group, as such.” Again, both meanings are included, and the phrase “in whole or in part” indicates that what is meant is not the development of partial destruction into total murder but two variations that do not necessarily follow one upon the other. […]

The conclusion to draw is that one ought to differentiate between the intent to destroy a group in a context of selective mass murder and the intent to annihilate every person of that group. To make this as simple as possible, I would suggest retaining the term genocide for “partial” murder and the term Holocaust for total destruction. I will argue that Holocaust can be used in two ways: to describe what happened to the Jews at Nazi hands and to describe what might happen to others if the Holocaust of the Jewish people becomes a precedent for similar actions. Whichever way Holocaust is used, it and genocide are clearly connected; they belong to the same species of human action, and the differences between them remain to be seen, beyond the obvious one of partial versus total destruction.

The next point to consider is crucial: which groups to describe when we talk about genocide. Lemkin talked only about national or ethnic groups, and he would probably have agreed to extend his category to include so-called racial groups. The U.N. convention adds religious groups. A number of scholars have added political groups as well. Neither of these last two additions makes much sense. People persecuted because of their religious beliefs can, in principle if not always in practice, go over to the persecutors’ religious faith and save themselves. The persecution of the Jews in the Middle Ages is an excellent example: accepting baptism usually—not always—meant rescue. During the Nazi regime, Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted in Germany because they refused to recognize the supreme authority of the state and objected to being recruited into the army. But those few members of the group who yielded and joined the army or who acknowledged the Nazi state as having authority over them were no longer persecuted, and if they were in concentration camps, they were usually released.

The same applies to political persecutees. Even in Soviet Russia, joining the Communist Party was often—not always—a way of avoiding stigmatization as “bourgeois.” Alexandra Kollontai, a member of the Russian aristocracy, became a leading Bolshevik and served as Soviet ambassador to Sweden. Most of the leading Bolsheviks were originally “bourgeois” intellectuals and sometimes former aristocrats. In Nazi Germany, millions of Communists became loyal Nazis.

For both religious and political groups, membership is a matter of choice—again, in principle, if not always in practice. One can change one’s religion or one’s political color. One cannot change one’s ethnicity or nationality or “race”—only the persecutor can do that, as the Germans did when they “Germanized” Polish adults and children. Without such action, there is absolutely no way out for the member of a targeted ethnic or national group: that person is a Pole, or a Rom (“Gypsy”), or a Jew, or a Serb. Hence my conclusion that the term genocide should be used only for attacks on the groups specified by Lemkin.

Genocide, then, is the planned attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, or racial group using measures like those outlined by Lemkin and the U.N. convention, measures that accompany the selective mass murder of members of the targeted group. Holocaust is a radicalization of genocide: a planned attempt to physically annihilate every single member of a targeted ethnic, national, or racial group.