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The Holocaust Debate
The debate about the uniqueness of the attempts by the Nazis and their alliances to
eradicate the European Jewry has been around for many years. Mass atrocities, war crimes,
crimes against humanity, genocides, and Holocaust are some of the popular phrases that are
frequently mentioned at the hearts of these discussions (Katz 3). Many historians, depending on
their racial inclination, have advanced endless arguments in literature as to which historical mass
killing recorded was the worst ever. By far, most of them seems to agree that Hitlers final
solution to the Jewish problem in Germany stands out as the worst animosity against humanity
ever document, perhaps because of the full attention it received internationally (Katz 3). It is
worth recalling, though, that there are several other genocides whose perpetration bears close
semblance to infamous Holocaust and should not just be relegated to the list of just other war
crimes.
It should be noted that before Hitlers final solution,' the Jewish community, as a result
of their self-proclaimed religious domination had attracted several enemies including Christians
and Romans- who though not a religious group, were willing to play them against one other their
selfish supremacy ambitions (Gellately 54). The Jews who primarily practiced Judaism were
persecuted utterly by their Christian counterparts for their religious beliefs and forced to flee to
other regions including Europe. This scenario is not far from the massacre of the Armenian
Christians by the Turks in medieval Ottoman Empire between the years 1905 and 1916

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(Gellately 21). The Muslim Turks slaughtered Christians and the Greeks with an intention of
emptying the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Empire of its Christian population.
The events that constituted the Holocaust are directly associated with the German Nazis
and Hitlers collaborators. Adolf Hitler was determined to rid Germany and its colonies of the
Jewish inferior race. According to Katz, anyone who bore allegiance to the doctrine of the
sanctity of life as decreed in the Jewish and Christian monotheism had to be purged. According
to Hitler, they were the reason for their defeat in the First World War, and by far the economic
recession that followed (Katz 7). Much as Christians were given a second chance at life by
denouncing their faith, Jews whom he considered incurable carriers to the inferior blood,' had
no such provisions. From this angle, the Nazis anti-Semitism was, therefore, racist and not faith
based as widely assumed (Gellately). A quality that makes the Holocaust in many ways similar to
the Native-American killings by the European colonialist. The new U.S. government through its
policy of Manifest Destiny continued to kill, maim and torture the Red Indians because of their
race that was considered savage and inferior (Gellately 26).
Joseph Stalin, ruler of the Soviet Union during this era, was a very aggressive man who
bullied, terrorized and even killed his own people who dared oppose him (Gellately). Unlike the
charismatic Hitler, who often exploited his subjects emotions by offering the Jews and the
incapacitated as scapegoats, Stalin was authoritative, arrogant and even instigated the onslaught
of his subjects (an estimated five million) with a mere intention of purging those who threatened
his power (Gellately). Though these genocides were not aimed at a particular cultural group, it
resembled the Holocaust in many fashions. The casualties number is estimated to be almost the
same as those murdered in the infamous Jewish Holocaust. Besides, Stalin, like Hitler, gassed,

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bombed and even forced his opponents into death matches across deserts, just to make
statements (Katz).
While the Nazis attempt to rid German-Aryans of the inferior Jewish blood is the most
documented and even marked a watershed in the international criminal justice (Gellately), there
are several isolated cases of mass atrocities that are similar and ever far more dire than the
Jewish persecution. For instance, the genocidal killings of the Tutsi community in Rwanda, the
mass killings in Darfur Sudan, Cambodia, Bosnia and Yugoslavia and massacre of the pygmies
of Congo are just some of the worst annihilation of groups of people ever witnessed, and yet are
never given much historical highlight like the Holocaust.

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Works Cited
Gellately, Robert. The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. Cambridge
[u.a.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006. Print.
Katz, Steven T. The Holocaust in Historical Context: The holocaust and mass death before the
modern age. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, USA, 1994.