‘The Holocaust’

The very name ‘the Holocaust’, which acquired its specific application to the extermination of the Jews only in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it came to be adopted (initially by Jewish writers) in preference to the accurately descriptive term ‘genocide’, has been taken to imply an almost sacred uniqueness of terrible events exemplifying absolute evil, a specifically Jewish fate standing in effect outside the normal historical process – ‘a mysterious event, an upside-down miracle, so to speak, an event of religious significance in the sense that it is not man-made as that term is normally understood’.

The ‘mystification’ and religious–cultural eschatology which has come for some writers to be incorporated in the term ‘the Holocaust’ has not made the task of Jewish historians an easy one in a subject understandably and justifiably ‘charged with passion and moral judgement’. Given the highly emotive nature of the problem, non-Jewish historians face arguably even greater difficulties in attempting to find the language sensitive and appropriate to the horror of Auschwitz. The sensitivity of the problem is such that over-heated reaction and counter-reaction easily spring from a misplaced or misunderstood word or sentence.

The perspective of non-Jewish historians is, however, inevitably different from that of Jewish historians. And if we are to ‘learn’ from the Holocaust, then – with all recognition of its ‘historical’ uniqueness in the sense that close parallels have not so far existed – it seems essential to accept that parallels could potentially occur in the future, and among peoples other than Germans and Jews. The wider problem alters in essence, therefore, from an attempt to ‘explain’ the Holocaust specifically through Jewish history or even German–Jewish relations, to the pathology of the modern state and an attempt to understand the thin veneer of ‘civilization’ in advanced industrial societies.

—Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 109‑110.