‘The case against ‘Holocaust Comparers’

Vice Presidential candidate, Tim Walz, said that we should not teach the Holocaust as being a unique genocide, but instead we should use it to help students identify “clear patterns” with other genocides like the Armenian, Rwandan, Cambodian, Bosnian, and Darfur genocides. It is clear, because Walz conflates the Holocaust with all other genocides, he has much to learn about the Holocaust.

Genocides are nothing new. They have menaced mankind ever since Cain murdered Abel. That single act of fratricide managed to eliminate one quarter of the Earth’s population with one stroke. Whether you believe the Biblical account literally or figuratively or not at all is irrelevant; what is relevant is the story it tells.

Walz criticized the fact that we teach the Holocaust as a unique event, a one-of-a-kind aberration in the historic annals of mankind, when he stated, “The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time.” His assertion draws a false equivalency between various genocides and the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Paradoxically, all genocides were the same and at the same time unique. They were the same because a genocide is a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. They are unique because all the populations targeted for annihilation were different. But what differentiates the Holocaust from all the other genocides begins with the fact that it was based solely upon their religion, not national origin as in the cases of Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Darfur.

Walz and like-minded thinkers pitch their tent among the folks who I label as ‘Holocaust Comparers’. They are individuals who have yet to grasp the uniqueness of the genocide against the Jews. They see no difference between Hitler’s implementation of his final solution against the Jewish people and historical and modern-day genocides. But there are differences.

The perpetrators of the Holocaust were not a horde of sword wielding barbaric fanatics gleefully lopping off the heads of their enemy, or religious zealots who wanted to save all of mankind by converting everyone to adhere to their religious beliefs. Quite the contrary, the perpetrators of the Holocaust were the most cultured people of Europe, German intellectuals who methodically planned, devised and executed fiendish and diabolical methods of industrialized murder of the Jewish people. By employing their acclaimed German engineering skills, they innovated and perfected assembly-line murder that resulted in the extermination of one-third of European Jewry.

So, by comparing other genocides to the Holocaust, Walz and like-minded individuals, deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust and diminish the enormity of the crimes against the Jewish people. Make no mistake, the Holocaust was unique for several reasons, which I will spell out in the following paragraphs.

Since our ancestors stood up on two feet and uttered a complete sentence, we have told stories. We tell stories because they enlighten us about who we are. Real or imagined, they give insights into what people have done, and more importantly, what people are capable of doing. We share stories, narratives, fables, and legends about our heroes, but we also tell tales about our villains. Consequently, we found it necessary to enact laws to protect us from our baser instincts. But as Nazi Germany has demonstrated, in their infamous Nuremberg Laws, enacted in 1935, laws can divide rather than unite, segregate rather than integrate, destroy rather than build. Nazi Germany, and her all too willing European accomplices, not only wanted to murder Jews, but they also wanted to erase their history, eliminate their religion, expunge their sacred books, and relegate the Jewish people to the ‘dustbin of history’. Nazi Germany’s war against the Jewish people was not a war against a country; it was a war against the Jewish civilization. It was a genocidal war the Germans euphemistically called The Final Solution and what we call today, The Holocaust.

The following paragraphs further flesh out the particulars that make the Holocaust unique.

No other group was slated for extermination based solely on ancestry.

According to the draconian regulations spelled out in the Nuremberg Laws being a Jew is not only based on religious beliefs, but on lineage as well. The Germans designated anyone who had Jewish grandparents a Jew. They even deemed Jews who proclaimed themselves as atheists or agnostics, still being Jewish. They even labeled converts out of Judaism, as Jews. How ironic that there were Catholic priests and nuns, as well as Protestant pastors, who fell within their definition, thus the monsters of the Third Reich unceremoniously dispatched them to death as well. For the Germans, there was no way of Jews escaping their blood.

No other group was targeted for extinction no matter where they lived.

In other genocides if the targeted people managed to flee the border to a neighboring country, they might very well have achieved haven, for the authorities did not pursue them across borders. The Jews were not so fortunate. The long shadow of death followed them into every country the Nazis conquered. And even if a Jew managed to outrun the hobnail booted Nazis hunting them, they had no homeland to which they could escape to seek refuge. The world shut their doors, locked their gates and turned their backs on them. Even the Statue of Liberty, with her torch burning brightly, did not light a path of safe harbor for the besieged Jews.

No other group was targeted for the destruction of its history and culture.

Jewish homes, stores, synagogues, books, and art were burned in the streets and its music silenced in the squares. The Nazis destroyed anything that had a hint of Jewishness in their effort to deny that Jewish culture and history ever existed.

No other group was the denied the fact that crimes were committed against it.

During other genocides, the murderers boasted about the atrocities they committed, as evidenced by the recent celebrations of Hamas, Hezbollah, and antisemites, in the wake of the Oct 7 atrocities. Not so the Nazis. The Nazis tried to hide their genocidal plans and crimes from the world. They referred to their concentration camps as work camps and gas chambers as showers. Even when the war was all but lost, the Nazis operated their gas chambers overtime to liquidate all the Jews in their concentration camps. As the final attempt of the SS to conceal their heinous crimes, they stoked their ovens white-hot, to more efficiently incinerate Jewish bodies, as Nazis and their supporting cast of antisemites gleefully watched Jewish ashes darken the sky as they rose heavenward from crematorium smokestacks.

Yes, there were and are other genocides in other countries and they are all crimes against humanity. The Talmud endorses that view by teaching, “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world.” But tragically the world turned its eyes away from that unique form of genocide, whose purpose intended to eliminate any trace of a people, their history, and their religion. It was the diabolical design of the Final Solution that spawned the Holocaust, the worst crime in human history against a particular people. That is why, contrary to what Walz believes, the civilized world recognized its uniqueness, and coined a special term for it, The Holocaust.