Before or since?* Looking through a book called Is the Holocaust Unique: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (some light bedtime reading), which discusses the uniqueness of the Holocaust. I know we’ve a lot of history buffs here who’d have some thoughts on the subject matter.
It compares events like the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Armenian genocide, Rwanda, Stalinism, Imperial Japanese war crimes among others. But can the Holocaust really be compared to any other events in history or is it unique? If it’s not, what’s the closest humanity has come to what went on in the camps?
*Chose Auschwitz as a representative of the process as a whole of what happened to European Jewry in WWII, Auschwitz as the event not the place if you like.
ETA: Hell, pressed enter before I’d written the title. Can a mod assist?
No one ever has, or thought to have, an industrial complex for killing individuals in the millions. It wasn’t easy, and was unknown territory, but true dedication and the mechanical engineering of the most modern industrial society on earth and the perfect storm/culmination of millennia-old social engineering came up with it.
Nowadays you’d try to get them althogether and just nuke em.
He didn’t ask what was equivalent, only the the closest. Something is always going to be “the closest” even if it isn’t particularly close. But I suspect the Killing Fields in Cambodia was pretty close-- about 2M people killed. Or the Cultural Revolution in China.
The Yugoslavian break-up wasn’t on the same scale, but similar atrocities were committed. Then you have Rwanda…
Some of Mao’s excesses were pretty damn severe. The Cultural Revolution, that sort of thing.
The immense slaughter of Native Americans and Native Australians may have killed more people, overall, but over the course of centuries, and in thousands of small offenses, with occasional “Trail of Tears” atrocities in the midst. There was never any single concentrated spasm of extermination that comes anywhere close to the Nazi extreme.
As a percentage of the whole population of the regions involved, the Khmer Rouge actually killed a much larger share than the Nazis, in the same span of time.
The blackly odd thing is that true extermination is a rather difficult thing to achieve. War atrocities get committed, radical regimes execute real or perceived opposition, massacres, persecution- but people rarely kill outside of the heat of vengeance against real or imagined crimes, and then killing gets weary. The stomach to coldly set out to kill every last man, woman and child of a group is rare. The Holocaust got around this by making the process a matter of bureaucracy, reducing the dead millions to an abstraction. The killing itself became an indirect process, stripped of any personal interaction: Guards herded the doomed into the gas chambers but didn’t kill them themselves; someone who never saw the victims released the gas; prisoner work details hauled the corpses to the incinerators. Even Stalin’s death machine, perhaps equal in sheer numbers, places second because while it demanded a steady flow of sacrifices, it didn’t afaik set out to make an entire group extinct. The genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda seem like half-hearted pogroms by comparison
Roughly 1/2 of the Holocaust was industrialized loading job lots of victims onto trains and feeding them into gas chambers and then ovens. East of the overrun Soviet border and the Baltic, the Nazis kept to the same process as they’d used when they initially invaded Poland: mobile killing squads. A great deal of the killing was farmed out to local Ukranians and Latvians.
So there have been equivalents of the industrial version, especially the Gulad with similar railroad timetables and quotas of round-ups in targeted districts, and the Soviets even crunched the numbers more precisely than did the Nazis in regards to how much labor they could get out of so many people on so few calories until they’d require another trainload. And there were equivalents of enlisting local ethnic groups to kill off the undesirable group, such as Rwanda with a few radio stations and whatever sharp farm tools were handy. But there hasn’t been the same combination of both methods.
The Mongol depredations of what is now Iraq during the 1258-1260 period, have to be right up there. Then there’s their pacification of China, the sacks of Herat, Nishapur, etc…
Rummel, FWIW, puts their total at around 30 million. (Go to Line 535 of the linked .gif) Quite the feat when populations were quite a bit less then than now.
There’s the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, which has killed approximately 300,000 people since 2003 and is still going on. It’s the closest to us in the temporal sense.
I took a tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau about a year ago when I did some work in Poland. The Auschwitz camp itself was not particularly remarkable as an old military barracks turned into a prison camp. The Birkenau camp, however, made Auschwitz look like a Club Med. If you’ve never seen it, it’s basically a huge, flat, treeless expanse of wooden barracks arranged in blocks as far as the eye can see and surrounded by razor wire and goon towers. A rail spur enters through a main gate where prisoners are offloaded and “processed”.
Thousands of rampaging Rwandans with machetes or screaming Mongol hoards are certainly barbaric. But to me there is just something more terrifying and horrific about a modern civilized nation’s accountants and engineers meticulously building a complex, multinational supply chain infrastructure that serves no purpose besides gathering people to exterminate in the most efficient way possible.
I suppose the American slave trade is the only thing I can think of that compares in scale and bureaucratic indifference.
I think that the slave trade and the slaughter of native Americans come close. There wasn’t the same level of technology available, so those efforts weren’t as efficient.
German companies actually bid on contracts to build the gas chambers and ovens for burning bodies. Engineers actually worked things out. Then their was the whole misinformation campaign to hide it all.
They had accountants who could tell with accuracy, how many had been killed each day.
I dont think any other genocide went to this much trouble.
