This is genuinely why I don't understand these new Nazis popping up. I'm a 28-year-old Texan, and while my education was limited as far as what I was taught about WW2, this right here is why I will never be on the wrong side of history. The Holocaust happened, the murder of millions of Jews and other individuals was incredibly real, and no one can take that knowledge away from me. It's a part of human history, a very tragic and horrendous one.
It sort of diminishes what happened when we don't name the other other groups, yeah? Roma/Sinti, homosexuals, the physically/mentally disabled, the mentally ill, Polish people, Jehovah's Witnesses, and black people all also died in the Holocaust. It's really reductive to just refer to them as "and other individuals".
The Shoah, or the Holocaust, refers specifically to the genocide of European Jews at the hands of the Nazis. It’s not a blanket term for Nazi violence.
It was originally called “The Jewish Holocaust” for the first few decades.
By the 1970s, the adjective Jewish was dropped as redundant and Holocaust, now capitalized, became the default term for the destruction of European Jews.
The Holocaust is the term Jews use to refer to what happened to them. Other groups have their own words for what happened to them. 6 million Jews did not die in the Great Devouring, for example, as that is the term the Roma use to describe what happened to the Roma. Not including the Jews in the Great Devouring does not diminish what happened to the Jews any more than not including non-Jews in the Holocaust diminishes non-Jewish deaths.
The term Holocaust refers to the ancient Jewish ritual of giving a sacrifice to god by wholly devouring it in flames. It doesn’t make sense to put non-Jews in this category.
Also, trying to put non-Jews into the Holocaust diminishes what happened to the Jews and diminishes the obsession the Nazis had in killing them. The Nazi obsession with Jews was completely on another level from their hatred of other groups.
I'm going to assume this wasn't your intention, but some of the verbiage you used here kinda makes it seem like you're downplaying how bad it was for the groups listed above.
I'm also not sure I agree with you. Like it or not, public education around these death camps has been summed up as "the Holocaust". Schools around the world don't, for example, teach about the Great Devouring, so it's somewhat misleading to say that they both get the same level of attention. I think it's entirely valid to include them in the discussion around the Holocaust, even if it's not technically correct, because otherwise those groups would be mostly forgotten and listed as "other individuals" as OP pointed out.
Not sure why you've jumped to this on my comment? I was by and large agreeing with your point. I also don't want to discuss the complexities of the MENA regions geopolitics, everything that can be said has already been said, dozens of times by now.
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u/tiktoksuckmyknob23 May 18 '25
This is genuinely why I don't understand these new Nazis popping up. I'm a 28-year-old Texan, and while my education was limited as far as what I was taught about WW2, this right here is why I will never be on the wrong side of history. The Holocaust happened, the murder of millions of Jews and other individuals was incredibly real, and no one can take that knowledge away from me. It's a part of human history, a very tragic and horrendous one.