How many people were directly killed in the Holocaust?

[Colibri]

@MaxTheVool

Like so many words and phrases, it has different meanings in different contexts. And that can lead to confusion. Such is language.

On the origin of the term, Wiki says that the Hebrew word Shoah was used first to describe the extermination of the Jews. In the 1950s the Greek word holocaust began to be used as a translation of Shoah to refer to this event. So originally “The Holocaust” specifically referred to the extermination of the Jews. It wasn’t until later that the term began to be extended to extermination programs for the Roma, and then to all deliberately killed by the Nazis in WWII.

So given the origin of the term, it’s entirely reasonable to just include the Jews when speaking of victims of “The Holocaust.” Of course, the expanded definitions are OK when the meaning is made clear, but IMO the default meaning of “The Holocaust” is the extermination program against the Jews.

[drad_dog]

Didn’t the final solution necessarily involve the fate of Jews as a first principle, so there would not have been a holocaust as we know it if it weren’t for the “jewish question”? It’s not that more or many were killed, but that they were the principal target, around which other genocides were organized.

[drad_dog]

@MaxTheVool

I reject your entire premise.
(1) The Holocaust is a (horrifyingly) unique event. There aren’t enough other genocides of similar scale for us to be able to say “well, see, in these other 5 holocaust-like events, we discuss things THIS way, but in the Holocaust, we don’t… why is that?”.

(2) Non-Jewish victims of the holocaust are discussed all the time. If, with no other context, you said to me something like “hey, how many people died in the holocaust” I would say “6 million or so Jews, and a few million other people”. They’re discussed so often that even the issue of whether or not they’re discussed is an issue that is discussed a lot.

(3) There are plenty of contexts in which it doesn’t make sense to discuss non-Jews. Ie, “why were so many Jews so passionate about the founding of the state of Israel? Well, remember, they had just witnessed the Holocaust, in which 6 million of them were murdered…” or “why do I take anti-semitism so seriously? Because it wasn’t that long ago that anti-semitism in a western nation led to the Holocaust and the murder of 6 million Jews”. In both of those contexts, mentioning that non-Jews were also murdered would be odd.

(4) The fact that Jews are so prominent and influential in the USA certainly means that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust are discussed more frequently and more prominently than maybe they otherwise would be. But there’s nothing sinister about that. There’s a big difference between “David Cohen lost aunts and uncles in the holocaust, so he donates money in his will to organizations which focus on holocaust remembrance from a Jewish perspective” vs “David Cohen lost aunts and uncles in the holocaust, so he uses his political clout to quash any attempt to publicly mourn non-Jewish holocaust victims”.

(5) As others have said, there are at least two major differences between Jewish and non-Jewish holocaust victims:
(a) pure numbers. Far more Jews were killed than any other single group. The percentage of Jews from some nations that survived the holocaust is fractional.
(b) the ethnic and hereditary arbitrariness of it. Hitler tried to kill political undesireables, like union organizers? Well, lots of dictatorships have done similar things. It’s murdery, but it’s sadly fairly common in human history. Hitler tried to kill all the homosexuals? Well, that’s very evil, but “homosexual” is not a cultural/ethnic group. If Hitler had actually killed 100% of Jews in Europe, there would be no Jews there today (barring immigration). If he’d killed 100% of homosexuals alive in 1940, there would still be homosexuals there today. Trying to literally exterminate Jews was trying to end the existence of an entire people/culture in a way that does not apply to his other victim-groups. (The Roma being a partial exception…)

I think that it was racial logic that was being applied no matter what the group was, certainly homosexuals. If they killed their political adversaries then racialism was probably in there in the official “reason,” too but as an excuse.

[md2000]

As a fascinating side note to the discussion - IIRC in the movie “Sophie’s Choice” she is a wife in a Polish Catholic family, sent to the camps because her husband was an intellectual, no Jewish connection at all. The movie received massive publicity, rave reviews, yet I don’t recall any discussion one way or another that the victim in the was not Jewish. It was a non-issue.