In some cases, only little research and witness accounts are available or accessible for teachers and, furthermore, information is often politicized. The question then rises if comparing the Holocaust to other genocides provides worthwhile learning opportunities for our students. This section summarises a number of important reasons why it can be valuable to offer such a comparative approach, points out some challenges, and concludes with some reasons or agendas that should not lie behind a comparative approach.
Why relate or compare the Holocaust to other genocides, crimes against humanity and mass atrocities? The Holocaust is often considered to have given rise to our conceptualisation of the term "genocide", which was coined during the Second World War, in large measure as a response to the crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators.
So the Holocaust may constitute a starting point and the foundation for studying genocide. In comparing the Holocaust to other genocides and crimes against humanity it should be possible to sharpen understandings not only of similarities between events but also of key differences. In so doing, it may be an opportunity to better understand the particular historical significance of the Holocaust, and how study of the Holocaust might contribute to our understanding of other genocidal events.
By the same token, learning about other genocides may contribute to deeper understandings about the Holocaust. In comparing the Holocaust to other genocides and crimes against humanity it may be possible to identify common patterns and processes in the development of genocidal situations. Through the understanding of a genocidal process and in identifying stages and warning signs in this process, a contribution can hopefully be made to prevent future genocides.
Students should appreciate the significance of the Holocaust in the development of international law, tribunals and attempts by the international community to respond to genocide in the modern world. To compare the Holocaust to other genocides may be a means to alert young people to the potential danger for other genocides and crimes against humanity to evolve today.
This may strengthen an awareness of their own roles and responsibilities in the global community. To compare the Holocaust to other genocides may help to overcome the lack of recognition of other genocides.
Knowledge of the Holocaust may also be helpful in considering how to come to terms with the past in other societies after genocide, how communities can respond to genocide, and how survivors can attempt to live with their experiences.
The national history of a given country can be the reason for relating the Holocaust to another genocide: for example, because a genocide plays an important role in the national memory. It is also important to note that there are many challenges in such a comparative approach. Care should be taken to avoid a number of pitfalls: 1. The comparing of two distinct historical events will be difficult without careful historical contextualisation, and so requires good understanding of both historical events.
The differences between historical events are as important and significant as their similarities and care must be taken not to equate, diminish, or trivialise either the Holocaust or the genocides to which the Holocaust is compared. It is important to be alert to the difference between comparing genocides, which is possible and legitimate, and comparing the suffering of individual victims or victim groups, which is not.
Care must be taken not to create hierarchies of suffering or allow the value of a comparative study to be diminished by political or social agendas or competing memories. It is important to be aware of the rationale behind comparing the Holocaust to other genocides. This being said, there are certain reasons or strategies for comparing the Holocaust to other genocides that are not fruitful and that definitely should be avoided.
Some of these are: 1. The link to other genocides is made to hide certain aspects of one's national history, such as collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The Holocaust is seen as a means of political power in contemporary politics and the link to the Holocaust is made out of political considerations.
The link to other genocides is made to diminish or trivialise the Holocaust. Key terms: Relating the terms "Holocaust", "genocide", "crimes against humanity" and "war crimes". Although these terms are often mentioned in the same context and, indeed, can be related, they each have very distinct and specific meanings.
Three of these terms — crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes — refer to legal categories as well as to concepts in the scholarly field. It is important to note that the legal categories are very strictly defined. For greater clarity of thinking and understanding, it is important that educators help their students to understand the different meanings of each of these terms. Crimes against humanity are widespread or systematic attacks on the civilian population, irrespective of whether the people are nationals or non-nationals and irrespective of whether the attacks are committed in time of war or in time of peace.
The attacks can for instance constitute murder, extermination, forced displacement, slavery, rape, torture and other inhumane acts. Crimes against humanity are essentially about the violation of common human rights and values. It is also the umbrella category under which "war crimes" and "genocide" both fall in international law.
War crimes are criminal acts committed during armed conflicts and the term refers to grave breaches of the rules of warfare.
These rules are set down in a number of international agreements, first and foremost the Geneva Conventions. These rules of warfare are intended to protect civilians, women, children, prisoners of war and sick or wounded military personal during armed conflicts. Acts such as torture, destruction of property, and the killing of civilians or hostages can be defined as war crimes, as can the wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, or any devastation not justified by military necessity. War crimes are committed as part of a larger political or military campaign.
Genocide refers to the coordinated and planned destruction of a group of people as that "group" is defined by the perpetrators. While genocide is almost always accompanied by mass killing, this crime is an attempt to destroy the group, not necessarily to murder every member of that group.
Some call genocide "the crime of crimes". Others label genocide as the ultimate crime against humanity because the aim of genocide is to eradicate a part of humanity. In this, acts constitute genocide if they are committed "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such". Whereas this is the legally applicable definition of genocide, the term genocide predates the Convention and few scholars are wholly satisfied with this definition, partly because of the practical difficulties in proving "intent".
Scholars have for decades presented and debated a series of alternative definitions of what constitutes "genocide", often wanting to expand the list of groups contained in the UN definition. For some examples of alternative definitions, please see the accompanying document Defining genocide.
However, during the Nuremberg trials in the immediate post-war period, perpetrators were not indicted for the crime of genocide but instead for aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other offences the reason being that the crime of genocide was not introduced into international law until the UN Genocide Convention of The Holocaust is often called the paradigmatic genocide.
In a number of ways, the Holocaust functions as a benchmark for other genocides. Some reasons for this are:. How do these terms relate to each other? In international law, crimes against humanity can be seen as an umbrella category of international crimes.
The whole basis of Nazi anti-Semitism was an ideology which they derived from the Middle Ages, and on which they superimposed a new concept, that of a racial hierarchy. They wanted to create a new world in which the world would be divided by races. We know that there are no races in existence. We all come from Africa, originally. Some of us who have spent time in northern climates, our pigmentation has changed, but we all originally come from the same place.
But this illusion of races they developed into an idea that they were part of the Nordic peoples of the Aryan race. They should be on top, and everyone then in a kind of hierarchical arrangement below that. This was going to be true not just of Germany, Central Europe, or Europe, but of the whole world. And in that kind of a concept, you see, the Jews were the Satan. They translated medieval philosophy or medieval concepts into these racist terms. The Jews had been introduced to society by some Satanic influence: this is a quote from Hitler.
And so, this ideology is totally non-pragmatic, purely fantastic, purely a fantasy. And so, for instance, they murdered their own armament workers, Jews, when they needed arms. They murdered Jews working on roads, military roads, which they have to build. And then they were surprised that they didn't have any workers, because they killed them.
So, this is a totally non-pragmatic ideology. These are elements that do not exist in other genocides. But it's not unique, because it's a precedent. Toward the end of the war, as German defeat seemed imminent, opportunism and the drive for self-preservation again rose to the fore: some leaders, officials, and private citizens helped individual Jews mainly in the hope of garnering protection against charges of prior collaboration with the German enemy. Generally, the course of the war proved critical in shaping the choices of individuals at all levels of German and European societies: whether people thought Germany would win—and dominate Europe for the indefinite future—or lose—a possibility that grew after the defeat of German forces at Stalingrad in February Let us look more fully at some of these explanations already alluded to earlier in the discussion.
Certainly fear for the consequences—if not physical harm than sanctions of some other kind—rose to the fore in various situations and at certain times—say, in the early months of Nazi rule characterized by terror to eliminate political opposition and during the war and occupation, especially in eastern Europe directly ruled by the Germans.
Focusing too much on fear, however, obscures and oversimplifies the more complicated dynamic behind the choices ordinary people made with regard to the persecution, then killing of Jews.
Overemphasizing fear belies the range of complicit behaviors discussed above. Doing so also ignores the political reality that even within Nazi Germany, leaders were sensitive to public opinion. This was true of ordinary people who may have had little or only superficial relations with individual Jews and of the traditional elites with more influence—Church, university, military, and business leaders.
From the beginning of Nazi rule and the fateful years leading up to them, these leaders failed to speak out against hateful speech, violence, and after , legal measures that progressively stripped German Jews of their rights.
For example, mindful of popular opinion, German authorities did not harm or punish the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men when the women publicly protested the pending deportation of their loved ones in Berlin on February 27, That protests in these two cases aimed at specific actions or policies and not the regime itself was significant.
Even when it came to participation in the mass shooting of Jews and others Roma, Communist leaders in German-occupied eastern European territories beginning in summer , the German police and sometimes soldiers who were involved had a choice.
In his book Ordinary Men , Christopher Browning analyzes the factors that turned most men of one police battalion into first-time, then hardened killers.
A similar dynamic may have been at play for the less studied eastern European collaborators who participated in the German-led shootings; only a few opted out of the face-to-face killing of men, women, and children to serve as guards or in other capacities. Gain came in many forms and dimensions. The systematic plunder of Jewish assets in Germany and German-occupied Europe by agents of the Nazi regime has been well documented. It included businesses bought at less than fair market or reduced competition because of the liquidation of Jewish-owned businesses.
In Nazi Germany the property taken from the Jews following their deportation was distributed through public auctions, the proceeds of which accrued to state finance offices. In eastern Europe, many Jews entrusted household belongings to neighbors or friends prior to their forced move into Nazi-established ghettos.
Goods could then be sold off little by little in exchange for food. This strategy became a matter of life-and-death for Jews, but the temptations for their helpers were great. The war demoralized people who were decent and honest all their lives, and now without any scruples they appropriated for themselves Jewish property.
In the majority of cases, almost 95 percent, they did not return either possessions or goods, excusing themselves that this was done by the Germans through theft, etc. The Germans also expressly used the lure of gain to win the cooperation of locals in the persecution and murder of Jews.
In Lithuania, locals who participated in mass shootings got the first cut of property, usually housing, then auctioned off household belongings to the wider population, in this way spreading complicity.
However, it is not in order to assure us that we can count on her in time of need.
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