Is the Holocaust Unique?

Perspectives on Comparative Genocide

Alan S Rosenbaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429974762
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

In essays written specifically for this volume, distinguished contributors assess highly charged and fundamental questions about the Holocaust: Is it unique? How can it be compared with other instances of genocide? What constitutes genocide, and how should the international community respond? On one side of the dispute are those who fear that if the Holocaust is seen as the worst case of genocide ever, its character will diminish the sufferings of other persecuted groups. On the other side are those who argue that unless the Holocaust's uniqueness is established, the inevitable tendency will be to diminish its abiding significance. The editor's introductions provide the contextual considerations for understanding this multidimensional dispute and suggest that there are universal lessons to be learned from studying the Holocaust. The third edition brings this volume up to date and includes new readings on the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, common themes in genocide ideologies, and Iran's reaction to the Holocaust. In a world where genocide persists and the global community continues to struggle with the implications of international crime, prosecution, justice, atonement, reparation, and healing, the issues addressed in this book are as relevant as ever.

1

The Ethics of Uniqueness

JOHN K. ROTH

The debate is blurred by the vagueness of the idea of an episode being unique. Every event is in some ways unique and in other ways not.

Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

Is the Holocaust unique? As this revised edition of Alan S. Rosenbaum’s book indicates, debate about that vexing question has been going on for some time. Nor will it go away any time soon. The reasons for the persistence of this issue include the point that Jonathan Glover underscores in this essay’s epigraph.¹ There is unlikely to be universal agreement about how events are or are not “unique,” and thus closure on the question of the Holocaust’s uniqueness—no matter how extensive the scholarship, to say nothing of what future events might produce—should not be expected. For that reason, it is important to consider Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s observation that the Holocaust uniqueness debate raises “important questions concerning the utility of the uniqueness concept.”² Rosenfeld’s observation appears at the end of his primarily historiographical analysis of the uniqueness debate. He approaches but does not enlarge what I shall call the ethics of uniqueness, the topic on which my reflections here will dwell.

As I understand Holocaust, it was the systematic, state-organized persecution and murder of nearly six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.³ They slaughtered two-thirds of Europe’s Jews and one-third of the world’s Jewish population. In addition, Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies destroyed millions of other defenseless people, including Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Polish citizens, and Soviet prisoners of war, as well as homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other political and religious dissidents within Germany itself.

At least four terms name this immense tragedy, which continues to raise questions concerning why and how it happened. Masters of euphemistic language, the Nazis spoke of die Endlösung, “the Final Solution” of their so-called Jewish question. In the early 1940s, eastern European Jews turned to Jewish scripture and used a Yiddish word, Churb’n, which means “destruction,” or the Hebrew term, Shoah, which means “catastrophe,” to name the disaster confronting their people.

Although Shoah is widely used in Israel and the official remembrance day for the Holocaust is called Yom Hashoah, “Holocaust,” a term that began to achieve prominence in the 1950s, still remains the most common name. It derives from the Septuagint, an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which employs holokaustos for the Hebrew olah. Those biblical words refer to a completely consumed burnt offering. While the destruction perpetrated by Nazi Germany must be named lest it be forgotten, the problematic religious connotations surrounding the term “Holocaust” suggest that no name can do it justice.

Genocide swirls through the Holocaust uniqueness debate. As I understand genocide, it involves state-organized destruction of a people because of what the political scientist R. J. Rummel calls “their indelible group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, language).”⁴ Nazi Germany’s destruction of European Jewry was genocide or nothing could be. But what of the Holocaust’s uniqueness?

Arguments for the Holocaust’s uniqueness do not depend primarily on the number of Jewish victims or the way in which they were killed. Rather, as Steven T. Katz maintains, the uniqueness claim rests on “the fact that never before has a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people. … Only in the case of Jewry under the Third Reich was such all-inclusive, noncompromising, unmitigated murder intended.”⁵

The Nazis intended to destroy all Jews. That aim was neither restricted to specific territory nor based primarily on what Jews had done. Instead, the Nazis’ apocalyptic ideology defined Jews to be so inferior racially, so threatening, that their existence had to be eliminated root and branch. While I find this analysis persuasive, and thus I am a defender of what Glover calls the “distinctive darkness” of the Holocaust, I do not devote my life to study of the Holocaust primarily because of its purported uniqueness. One of a kind or not, the Holocaust remains immensely important, so much so that the reasons for studying it ought not to hinge on something as ambiguous as its uniqueness. Moreover, there is no doubt about it: the uniqueness debate does leave us in ambiguous territory.

Some scholars contend, for example, that Nazi Germany’s targeting of the Sinti and Roma did not differ substantially from the fate intended for the Jews. Others fear that the uniqueness claim banishes other genocides to undeserved second-class status. How those disagreements will continue to unfold remains to be seen, but I believe that the debate ought to be contextualized by ethical considerations more than it has been to date. We need to ask: What is the most important issue at stake in our consideration of the Holocaust and genocide? Surely it cannot simply be uniqueness issues or even exact historical accuracy, crucial though such accuracy is, for historical understanding is scarcely an end in itself. Historical study presupposes values that are not contained in historical study alone. Intentionally or unintentionally, it functions in ways that affect the present and the future. As the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel so often suggests, we remember not only for the dead but perhaps even more for the living. To remember for implies “on behalf of” and “for the sake of.” Such remembering serves goals and perceived goods that go beyond the remembering itself.

Any debate about the Holocaust’s uniqueness or about the relation of the Holocaust to other genocides is worthwhile just to the extent that it never loses sight of the fact that ethical reasons are the most important ones for studying these dark chapters in human history. The historian Yehuda Bauer, a defender of the Holocaust’s uniqueness, offers a proper qualifying reminder along these lines when he writes: “Events happen because they are possible. If they were possible once, they are possible again. In that sense, the Holocaust is not unique, but a warning for the future.”⁶

To elaborate this essay’s key thesis—the most important reasons for studying the Holocaust and genocide are ethical—I want to step back from encountering the uniqueness debate directly and consider instead what education about the Holocaust and genocide involves. Doing so will then help to focus further the ethics of uniqueness.

Charlotte Delbo was not Jewish, but her arrest for resisting the Nazi occupation of her native France made her experience the Holocaust when she was deported to Auschwitz in January 1943. Delbo survived the Nazi onslaught. In 1946, she began to write the trilogy that came to be called Auschwitz and After. Her work’s anguished visual descriptions, profound reflections on memory, and diverse writing styles make it an unrivaled Holocaust testimony. As the trilogy draws to a close, Delbo writes, “I do not know / if you can still / make something of me / If you have the courage to try…. “⁷ She contextualizes those words in two ways that have special significance as we think about the direction of Holocaust and genocide studies—and issues about the ethics of uniqueness—in the twenty-first century. First, Delbo stressed that her experience in Auschwitz and then in the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbrück gave her what she called “useless knowledge,” a concept to which I shall return later in this chapter. Second, just before the lines I have quoted from Auschwitz and After, Delbo remembers Françoise, one of the French women who survived Auschwitz with her. Memory made Françoise mourn. When she thought of the waste and devastation she had experienced and could not forget, the permanently scarring “useless knowledge” it involved, Françoise insisted that the advice one often hears (start over, begin again, put the past behind you) rings hollow as it mocks what cannot be forgotten. “Make one’s life over,” Françoise protested, “what an expression.… “⁸

Françoise was not the only survivor on Delbo’s mind in Auschwitz and After. She had not forgotten Poupette, Marie-Louis, Ida, and many others who were with her in the camps. Nor could Delbo forget how Auschwitz forever divided, besieged, and diminished her own life. Thus, as though she were speaking for her survivor friends, as well as for herself, Delbo wondered “if you can still / make something of me.”

To the best of my knowledge, Delbo did not participate in debates about the Holocaust’s uniqueness. I expect she would have found them quite beside the point. Yet issues about the ethics of uniqueness are not far removed from her reflection, because the uniqueness debate needs to confront a challenge that Delbo poses: What can and cannot be done with the Holocaust? What must and must not be made of that catastrophe? If we have the courage to study, research, and teach about the Holocaust and other genocides, even to try to learn from them, what awareness should that courage embody, what questions must it raise, what pitfalls does it have to avoid?

Toward the end of the annual Claremont course on the Holocaust course that I concluded in January 2000, my students and I studied Delbo’s trilogy. They also wrote papers about that book. The one submitted by an art major named Sarah Yates was distinctive. Inspired by Delbo’s reflection that she has two faces (one ruined, another full of light), Sarah’s “paper” consisted of a handsome oak box, dark-stained and lacquered. The accompanying written text noted that the box could be “something one might set on a coffee table next to a plate of cookies or a vase of tulips.” Like the appearance of Delbo’s post-Holocaust life, it could seem to be normal and even decorative. However, Sarah went on to say, “when opened, the box reveals its other ‘face,’” an interior of memory fragments, which are not “normal,” let alone decorative.

Sure enough, inside Sarah’s “Box of Memories,” as she called her project, there were carefully crafted wooden puzzle pieces. Some fit together; others did not. Each piece was delicately inscribed on both sides. The inscriptions were words not only from Charlotte Delbo but also from Primo Levi, Gerda Weissmann Klein, Dr. Elchanan Elkes, Raul Hilberg, and other Holocaust-related writers we had read. Their words did not fit together easily, any more than the puzzle pieces themselves, but Sarah’s advice was to “dump the pieces out onto your floor or your desk, and then to try making and ‘reading’ different arrangements.” Each time the configuration, the narratives and meanings, would change, and yet they would not be entirely different. The fragments were real. Many things could be done with them, but not anything or everything, at least not if one respected the memories the box contained.

Doing as Sarah instructed, I observed—but not closely enough—that the “Box of Memories” was layered. Deep down, covering what turned out to be a face painted at the bottom of the box, there were levels where the puzzle pieces did fit together in a recognizable way that just matched the box’s interior. Before I knew it, the fragments were out of the box, and I was arranging them to see what the combinations could be. But when the time came to put the pieces back in the box, I discovered that I could not make them fit.

Without replacing the bottom layers as Sarah had originally arranged them, the pieces would not go back into the box in a way that permitted its lid to be closed. Sarah had color-coded the edges of the bottom layers so she could remember how they went together, but even then, she confessed, closing the “Box of Memories” was hard to do. Later, when Sarah shared her “Box of Memories” with her classmates during a period at the end of the semester when the students reported about work they had been doing, a few of the carefully carved memory fragments disappeared. Regretting their loss, Sarah made others—not to replace the irreplaceable but to fill the “Box of Memories” again so that it could not easily be closed.

Experience with Charlotte Delbo’s writing and with Sarah Yates’s artistic reflection on it, I believe, makes two clusters of suggestions about the overall direction of Holocaust and genocide studies in the twenty-first century and, in particular, the ethics of uniqueness. First, just as is true of the magnitude of these events themselves, study and research about the Holocaust and genocide are increasingly overwhelming tasks. They will be no less so in the future, because the aspects we have to study are not “color-coded,” and they do not and will not all fit neatly into boxes of memory, let alone into the departments and compartments of scholarship—including definitions and debates about uniqueness.

It is not just that whole fields of scholarly inquiry scarcely imagined twenty, ten, or even five years ago have emerged and loom large. Where the Holocaust alone is involved one thinks of restitution issues, new archival materials, concerns about women, and renewed controversy about the Vatican and Pope Pius XII, to name just a few. Each genocide will entail its own expanded fields of inquiry as study proceeds. In addition, the issue also involves different ways in which scholarly investigation is carried on. It takes place not just in archives and libraries, not just in the conventional forms of lecturing, writing, and publishing, but also electronically through e-mail networks and the Internet as well as through oral history and the breaking of daily news. Given the magnitude of the events under study, the fact that no one can keep up with all that is going on in Holocaust and genocide studies is fitting, but the realization is disorienting nonetheless and especially as we think of Delbo’s challenge: “I do not know / if you can still / make something of me / If you have the courage to try.…”

Second, because Holocaust and genocide studies will overwhelm us all, it will take some courage to try to direct these studies well in the twenty-first century. With that fact in mind, it is worth asking: How important is it to continue the debate about the Holocaust’s uniqueness? Certainly it is important to defend the Holocaust’s particularity—the same is true of every genocide—so that these disasters are not universalized to the point of abstraction and banality. The ethics of uniqueness requires us never to forget that it is always particular people who are targeted and that they are targeted by specific people and powers. The ethics of uniqueness also requires us to remember that particularity is no guarantee against becoming a victim or a perpetrator, a point that has led Yehuda Bauer to make three additions to the biblical Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a bystander.

With these concerns in mind, I spent some time in my recent Holocaust course asking Sarah Yates and her classmates what they thought about six topics: (1) Why should the Holocaust be studied? (2) How should the Holocaust be investigated or taught? (3) What goals should be emphasized in teaching and learning about the Holocaust? (4) What criteria should be used to judge whether study and teaching about the Holocaust are successful? (5) What question(s) about the Holocaust remain most on your mind as our study draws to a close? (6) How do you think study about and research on the Holocaust might change, or should change, in the future? What do we need to know about the Holocaust that we seem not to know?

I want to share some of the things that my students said. I do so not because they are “experts” in the field, but because they are “thoughtful amateurs” whose intuitions, fallible though they are, contain valuable reminders. The students’ intuitions can do so, I believe, because of the ways in which they avoid the uniqueness debate while still keeping attention focused on the particularity of the Holocaust and genocide.

The question “Why should the Holocaust be studied?” elicited responses that overlapped with “What goals should be emphasized in teaching and learning about the Holocaust?” Wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the First Edition
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Introduction to the Third Edition
• 1 The Ethics of Uniqueness
• 2 Religion and the Uniqueness of the Holocaust
• 3 From the Holocaust: Some Legal and Moral Implications
• 4 The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Dimension
• 5 Responses to the Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust
• 6 The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis
• 7 The Armenian Genocide as Precursor and Prototype of Twentieth-Century Genocide
• 8 The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective
• 9 Stalinist Terror and the Question of Genocide: The Great Famine
• 10 The Holocaust and the Japanese Atrocities
• 11 The Holocaust, Rwanda, and the Category of Genocide
• 12 Hitler, Pol Pot, and Hutu Power: Common Themes in Genocidal Ideologies
• 13 “Global Vision”: Iran’s Holocaust Denial
• 14 The Promise and Limits of Comparison: The Holocaust and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda
• 15 Applying the Lessons of the Holocaust
• 16 The Rise and Fall of Metaphor: German Historians and the Uniqueness of the Holocaust
• 17 Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship
• About the Book and Contributors
• Index