Holocaust Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The capitalized term Holocaust emerged in the 1950s and, over the next two decades, gradually replaced the German term Endlösung (final solution) for the macro killing project of European Jews by Nazi Germany. Holocaust originally possessed a sacrificial meaning as a burnt offering and, because of its misleading sacred connotation, became frequently substituted by the Jewish concept of Shoah, referring to the Nazi extermination of Jews. Some authors have used the expression holocaust in reference to other mass-killing events, such as genocidal policies against Native Americans in the United States (nineteenth century), Tutsis in Rwanda (1994), and Muslims in Bosnia (1992–1995).

The genocidal project of the extermination of European Jews received scarce attention by political scientists in the United States and other Western countries after World War II (1939-1945). With the exceptions of Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the overwhelming American and international scholarship on the Holocaust was and still is conducted by historians. This scholarly deficit of the political science profession regarding one of the major planned-killing events in human history can extend to the coverage of the other killing regimes in the twentieth century.

The historical understanding of the Nazi killing project underwent substantial changes with the shift from the perpetrators’ language of Endlösung to the victim and survivor centered symbolic concepts of Holocaust and Shoah. Both terms refer to experiences of calamity and catastrophe and have a long conceptual prehistory. The current alternating and capitalized use of these symbolic expressions indicate the primacy of the Jews as a target population for destruction, though other victim populations were included in the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany, such as Sinti and Roma (the so-called Gypsies), mentally and physically disabled people, homosexuals, Russian prisoners of war, Polish intellectuals and priests, war-wounded people, and political opponents. The inclusion of non-Jews in the killing record of Nazi Germany has affected the discussion about the claim of uniqueness connected with a specifically Jewish Holocaust. The estimated 6 million Jewish victims are part of an overall estimated 21 million victim population.

The claim that the Jewish Holocaust was a unique historical phenomenon of selecting one people and its culture for destruction became a unifying feature of the historical literature. As a broader cultural and political discussion in the 1960s and early 1970s, it gained almost universal acceptance. Yet, with the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (1975–1979) and the growing knowledge of the 1.7 million victims of their killing fields, the mass murderous wars in the disintegrating Yugoslavia of the early 1990s, and the death toll of 800,000 Tutsis in the politically organized cleansing rampage in Rwanda in 1994, this claim has been revisited by scholars who had originally established it. The intellectual historian Norman Cohn expressed the general ideas behind killing projects like the Holocaust best when he spoke in his 1975 work, Europe’s Inner Demons, of “the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnation of evil.”

Controversies

In 1984, scholars debated the question as to whether the Holocaust was an intentional mass killing project designed and ordered by Adolf Hitler himself, or the result of contingent circumstances and opportunities offering themselves during the course of World War II. The division lay between the intentionalists, on one hand, who believed in an original design and, occasionally, also a written Führerbefehl (order) from Hitler himself, and the functionalists, on the other hand, who considered it more probable that the extermination policies became enacted as functions of the development of the war. The opposing lines have since become blurred by authors who combine intentional and functional arguments in their research. Agreement, however, has been reached that the search for an original Führerbefehl is an ideological red herring.

The claim of the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a killing event has not only been challenged by the killing record of regimes such as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1975–1979; 1.7 million deaths) and the Rwandan massacre of Tutsis (1994; 800,000 deaths), but also by the massive death tolls resulting from Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s Gulag camps (1924–1953; 30 million or more deaths); mass executions in Ukraine (1932–1933; 7 million deaths); and Chinese premier Mao Zedong’s revolutionary campaigns (1966–1976; 30 million or more deaths). Comparative studies of mass killings in the twentieth century and history in general have tremendously expanded knowledge about ideologically motivated and politically legitimated killing regimes.

Bibliography:

Bauer,Yehuda. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Browning, Christopher. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. 2 vols. New York: HarperCollins, 1997–2006.
Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3 vols. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985.
Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven:Yale University Press, 2007.
Valentino, Benjamin A. Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

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