Holocaust uniqueness debate

Since the 1980s, there has been a debate on whether the Holocaust was a unique event in history.' 






History

The debate began in West Germany in the 1980s, when some German historians doubted the Holocaust's uniqueness after reviewing the separate history of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. However, mainstream historians, including Emil Fackenheim, Yehuda Bauer, Deborah Lipstadt and Daniel Goldhagen, disagreed and called these doubts a form of Holocaust trivialization.

Support for Holocaust uniqueness

Emil Fackenheim

In his book To Mend the World, philosopher Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003) wrote that the Holocaust was unique because:Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World, (IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).

 Most people who carried out the "Final Solution" were "ordinary job holders" and regular citizens
 The "Final Solution" was designed to exterminate every Jew on earth (including non-Jews with Jewish ancestors)
 The Nazis were not trying to achieve any political or economic goals by killing Jews; they simply did not want Jews to exist any more
Fackenheim argued that no other genocide in history has had these characteristics. The genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan happened in specific geographical areas, he wrote, while the Nazis wanted to kill every Jew on earth. For these reasons, he concluded that the Holocaust is unique.

David Patterson

Philosopher David Patterson (1922–2005) agreed with Emil Fackenheim's view. He wrote that the Nazis attempted to annihilate not just the European Jews, but also Judaism itself, its customs, and its worldviews, he wrote. Neither the far left or the far right has acknowledged this, according to Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld in a 2020 article.

Clemens Heni

political scientist Dr. Clemens Heni (1970 – ) said that antisemitism motivates many of the people who doubt that the Holocaust was unique. Some of these people have trivialized the Holocaust by exaggerating Germans' suffering from Allied bombing operations (like the Dresden bombing in February 1945). Some have falsely accused Israeli Jews of "weaponizing" the Holocaust to "extort" from modern Germans. Heni classified this rhetoric as "soft-core Holocaust denial".

Heni pointed out that at a Saxon State Parliament (Landtag) session, the far-right National Democratic Party (NDP) in Germany claimed that "the British committed a bombing Holocaust against the Germans in Dresden". They also described the post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe as an expulsion Holocaust. Heni criticized German scholars who doubted the Holocaust's uniqueness (including Jörg Friedrich, Martin Walser and sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky) for contributing to these views.

Heni also thought some "left-wing" academics (like Ward Churchill, Robert Kurz, Noam Chomsky, and John Mearsheimer) had trivialized the Holocaust. He said these scholars had accused Jews of "controlling America's government to support Israel", using tropes like "US-Jewish leaders" and "Israel lobby". 






Manfred Gerstenfeld

Historian Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld (d. 2021) criticized scholars who rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness. He called their behavior "historical manipulation". He believed that they had encouraged antisemitism in academia.

Ingo Elbe

Philosopher Ingo Elbe (1972 – ) wrote that "the battle against Israel is being fought [indirectly] through attacks on German memory culture and its supposed [narrow-mindedness]." He criticized the idea that focusing on the Holocaust's uniqueness will make others' suffering seem less important.

Wolfgang Benz

German historian Wolfgang Benz (1941 – ) considered the Holocaust "a unique crime in the history of mankind".

Annette F. Timm

Canadian historian Annette F. Timm considered the Holocaust unique due to the Nazis' "[complete] rejection of any single Jewish person from being assimilated". This contributed to their decision to kill every Jew they could identify, Timm wrote.

Christian Davies

In a 2019 article, British journalist Christian Davies criticized Polish nationalists, who rejected Holocaust uniqueness over the belief that a "parallel Holocaust against ethnic Poles" had been committed by the Germans. Davies said that the nationalists saw themselves as having "suffered equally as Jews" and disliked the international attention received by Jews.

Objection to Holocaust uniqueness
Institute for Historical Review

The Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a self-declared academic group that has been promoting Holocaust denial since 1978, is noted for rejecting the Holocaust's uniqueness. In several of its papers, the IHR compared the Holocaust to Allied bombings of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. While claiming to be neutral, the IHR promotes the antisemitic trope that "the Holocaust was invented by Jews to further Jewish-Zionist interests".


The IHR also alleges that "Nazi Germany actively supported Zionism" by presenting relevant history without context. IHR's rejection of the Holocaust's uniqueness is shared by figures across the political spectrum. For instance, former London mayor Ken Livingstone (1945 – ), who was a British Labour Party member until 2018, rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness in a similar manner to the IHR, so did PA's leader 




  and American Trotskyist activist writer Lenni Brenner (1937 – ) who published a book endorsing the claim. 









Richard C. Lukas


Richard C. Lukas (1937 – ) is an American scholar rejecting the Holocaust's uniqueness.Richard Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986). David Engel, “Poles, Jews, and Historical Objectivity,” Slavic Review, vol. 46, no. 3/4 (1987): pp. 568–80. In his 1986 book The Forgotten Holocaust, Lukas claimed that a "separate Holocaust against ethnic Poles" had happened. Lukas is seen by some historians as a "Holocaust revisionist" as a result. Lukas alleged that "Jewish historians" were "controlling Holocaust history". 

David Engel, a Holocaust historian, wrote a 30-page article in the journal Slavic Review'' to criticize his claims, pointing out that Lukas invented facts, ignored archival sources and failed to assess secondary sources.  Jan Grabowski, a chair professor of history at University of Ottawa, who won several awards for his books about the Holocaust in Poland, also criticized him:

Pierre Guillaume

Pierre Guillaume (1940 – 2023), a French ultra-left anarcho-Marxist activist, rejected the Holocaust's uniqueness. 

  Guillaume argued that the Holocaust was "no different" from any other racially motivated massacres in history, going as far as calling the Holocaust "a distraction from class struggle" that "played into the hands of Zionism and Stalinism".

Despite being left-wing, Guillaume's views were adopted by the French far right, many of whom also believed that the Holocaust was "no different" from the alleged Judean massacres of the Canaanites or the Native American genocide. They believed that Jewish claims of the Holocaust's uniqueness are "excuses for extorting compensations from European countries.

Related pages
 Polish Memory Law
 Historical revisionism
 Secondary antisemitism

Footnotes

References

Category:Antisemitism
Category:The Holocaust
Category:Antisemitism in Germany