Holocaust uniqueness debate

Since the 1980s, there has been a debate on whether the Holocaust was a unique event in history.^[1]

The debate began in West Germany in the 1980s, when some German historians doubted the Holocaust's uniqueness after reviewing the separate history of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.^[1] However, mainstream historians, including Emil Fackenheim, Yehuda Bauer, Deborah Lipstadt and Daniel Goldhagen, disagreed and called these doubts a form of Holocaust trivialization.^[1][2]

In his book To Mend the World, philosopher Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003) wrote that the Holocaust was unique because:^[3][4]

• Most people who carried out the "Final Solution" were "ordinary job holders" and regular citizens
• The "Final Solution" was designed to exterminate every Jew on earth (including non-Jews with Jewish ancestors)
• The Nazis were not trying to achieve any political or economic goals by killing Jews; they simply did not want Jews to exist any more

Fackenheim argued that no other genocide in history has had these characteristics.^[4] The genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan happened in specific geographical areas, he wrote, while the Nazis wanted to kill every Jew on earth.^[4] For these reasons, he concluded that the Holocaust is unique.

Philosopher David Patterson (1922–2005) agreed with Emil Fackenheim's view. He wrote that the Nazis attempted to annihilate not just the European Jews, but also Judaism itself, its customs, and its worldviews, he wrote.^[5] Neither the far left or the far right has acknowledged this, according to Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld in a 2020 article.^[5]

political scientist Dr. Clemens Heni (1970 – ) said that antisemitism motivates many of the people who doubt that the Holocaust was unique. Some of these people have trivialized the Holocaust by exaggerating Germans' suffering from Allied bombing operations (like the Dresden bombing in February 1945).^[6] Some have falsely accused Israeli Jews of "weaponizing" the Holocaust to "extort" from modern Germans.^[6] Heni classified this rhetoric as "soft-core Holocaust denial".^[6]

Heni pointed out that at a Saxon State Parliament (Landtag) session, the far-right National Democratic Party (NDP) in Germany claimed that "the British committed a bombing Holocaust against the Germans in Dresden".^[6] They also described the post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe as an expulsion Holocaust.^[6] Heni criticized German scholars who doubted the Holocaust's uniqueness (including Jörg Friedrich, Martin Walser and sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky) for contributing to these views.^[6]

Heni also thought some "left-wing" academics (like Ward Churchill, Robert Kurz, Noam Chomsky, and John Mearsheimer) had trivialized the Holocaust.^[6] He said these scholars had accused Jews of "controlling America's government to support Israel",^[6] using tropes like "US-Jewish leaders" and "Israel lobby".^[6][7]

Historian Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld (d. 2021) criticized scholars who rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness.^[5] He called their behavior "historical manipulation".^[5] He believed that they had encouraged antisemitism in academia.^[5]

Philosopher Ingo Elbe (1972 – ) wrote that "the battle against Israel is being fought [indirectly] through attacks on German memory culture and its supposed [narrow-mindedness]."^[5] He criticized the idea that focusing on the Holocaust's uniqueness will make others' suffering seem less important.^[5]

German historian Wolfgang Benz (1941 – ) considered the Holocaust "a unique crime in the history of mankind".^[8]

Canadian historian Annette F. Timm considered the Holocaust unique due to the Nazis' "[complete] rejection of any single Jewish person from being assimilated".^[9] This contributed to their decision to kill every Jew they could identify, Timm wrote.^[9]

In a 2019 article, British journalist Christian Davies criticized Polish nationalists, who rejected Holocaust uniqueness over the belief that a "parallel Holocaust against ethnic Poles" had been committed by the Germans.^[10] Davies said that the nationalists saw themselves as having "suffered equally as Jews" and disliked the international attention received by Jews.^[10]

Many of them reportedly spread disinformation on English Wikipedia between the 2000s and 2023.^[11][12] Dozens of Holocaust-related articles were found to have downplayed Polish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers and blamed Jews for their own suffering.^[11][12]

Objections to the Holocaust's uniqueness have historically been associated with Holocaust denial^[13] Such objections are found to be one of the most common themes of Holocaust deniers' propaganda.^[13] For historians not known to have held antisemitic views, they objected to the Holocaust's uniqueness by accusing the concept of being "Eurocentric",^[14] even though Jews are not European.^[15]

The Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a self-declared academic group that has been promoting Holocaust denial since 1978,^[13][16] is noted for rejecting the Holocaust's uniqueness.^[13][16] In several of its papers, the IHR compared the Holocaust to Allied bombings of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.^[13][16] While claiming to be neutral, the IHR promotes the antisemitic trope that "the Holocaust was invented by Jews to further Jewish-Zionist interests".^[13][16]

The IHR also alleges that "Nazi Germany actively supported Zionism" by presenting relevant history without context.^[13][16] IHR's rejection of the Holocaust's uniqueness is shared by figures across the political spectrum. For instance, former London mayor Ken Livingstone (1945 – ), who was a British Labour Party member until 2018, rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness in a similar manner to the IHR,^[17] so did PA's leader^[18] and American Trotskyist activist writer Lenni Brenner (1937 – ) who published a book endorsing the claim.^[19][20]

Richard C. Lukas (1937 – ) is an American scholar rejecting the Holocaust's uniqueness.^[11][21] In his 1986 book The Forgotten Holocaust, Lukas claimed that a "separate Holocaust against ethnic Poles" had happened.^[11][21] Lukas is seen by some historians as a "Holocaust revisionist" as a result.^[11] Lukas alleged that "Jewish historians" were "controlling Holocaust history".^[11][22]

David Engel, a Holocaust historian, wrote a 30-page article in the journal Slavic Review to criticize his claims,^[11][22] pointing out that Lukas invented facts, ignored archival sources and failed to assess secondary sources.^[11][22] Jan Grabowski, a chair professor of history at University of Ottawa, who won several awards for his books about the Holocaust in Poland,^[23] also criticized him:^[11]

Take The Forgotten Holocaust, a 1986 book by the aforementioned Richard C. Lukas that borders on Holocaust distortion. Lukas attempted, without any reference to historical evidence from the Polish, Israeli, or German archives, to broaden the definition of the Holocaust in such a way as to also include the killings of ethnic Poles by the Germans.

[...]

David Engel, one of the most eminent historians of the Holocaust, wrote a thirteen-page scathing critique of the book in the journal Slavic Review [...] demonstrated in detail that Lukas had made sweeping generalizations, invented facts, disregarded archival sources, and displayed a complete lack of familiarity with secondary sources.

Some of those sharing Lukas' rejection of the Holocaust's uniqueness are also found to have caused significant disruptions to English Wikipedia between the 2000s and 2023.^[11][12] They reportedly coordinated to rewrite dozens of Holocaust-related articles to invent Jewish "atrocities" against Poles,^[11][12] downplay Polish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers,^[11][12] exaggerate Jewish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers and blame Jews for their own suffering in the Holocaust.^[11][12] Lukas defended the Wikipedia users involved,^[24] repeating his false claim that "Jewish historians" were "controlling Holocaust history".^[24]

Pierre Guillaume (1940 – 2023), a French ultra-left anarcho-Marxist activist, rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness.^[25] Guillaume argued that the Holocaust was "no different" from any other racially motivated massacres in history, going as far as calling the Holocaust "a distraction from class struggle" that "played into the hands of Zionism and Stalinism".^[25]

Despite being left-wing, Guillaume's views were adopted by the French far right,^[25] many of whom also believed that the Holocaust was "no different" from the alleged Judean massacres of the Canaanites or the Native American genocide.^[26] They believed that Jewish claims of the Holocaust's uniqueness are "excuses for extorting compensations from European countries.^[27]

• Polish Memory Law
• Historical revisionism
• Secondary antisemitism