Names of the Holocaust vary based on context. The Holocaust is the name commonly applied in English since the mid-1940s to the systematic extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II.
The term is sometimes used in a broader sense to include the Nazi Party's systematic murder of millions of people in other groups they considered (), which besides the Jews included Slavs (including Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Serbs, and Czechs, the former having allegedly infected the latter), and also the Romani people, Balts (especially Lithuanians), people with disabilities, gay men, and political and religious opponents.
In Hebrew, Shoah (), meaning , , became the standard term for the Holocaust.
Names The Holocaust The word holocaust originally derived from the Koine Greek word meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering," or "a burnt sacrifice offered to a god." In Hellenistic religion, gods of the earth and underworld received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full. The word holocaust was later adopted in Greek translations of the Torah to refer to the olah, standard communal and individual sacrificial burnt offerings that Jews were required"(Amos 5:22-25. Cf. Jer. 7:22, 'When I freed your fathers from land of Egypt, I did not speak with them nor commanded them burnt offering or sacrifice'; see also I Sam. 15:22-23; Isa. 1:11-13; Hos. 6:6; Mic. 6:6-8.) .. Jewish tradition understood these utterances to be directed not against sacrifices as such, but against the substitution of ritual for morality." ibidem. (Plaut); Leviticus, Part I, Laws of Sacrifice, Introduction, p.752. to make in the times of the Temple in Jerusalem. In its Latin form, , the term was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jewish people by the chroniclers Roger of HowdenSimon Schama, A History of Britain, episode 3, 'Dynasty'; BBC DVD, 2000 and Richard of Devizes in England in the 1190s.
The earliest use of the word holocaust to denote a massacre recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1833 when the journalist Leitch Ritchie, describing the wars of Louis VII of France, wrote figuratively that he "once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church" where they had gone to seek refuge when the town of Vitry-le-François was burned by Louis' troops in 1142. The English poet John Milton had used the word as a poetic description of the self-immolation of a phoenix in his 1671 poem Samson Agonistes.The Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, 2nd ed. Oxford 1989, vol. VII p. 315 sect c.'complete destruction, esp. of a large number of persons; a great slaughter or massacre' citing examples from 1883 onwards.
In the late 19th century, holocaust was used in 1895 by the newspaper The New York Times to describe the Ottoman massacre of Armenian Christians. In the early twentieth century, possibly the first to use the term was journalist Melville Chater in 1925, to describe the burning and sacking of Smyrna in 1922 in the context of the Greek genocide.M. Chater, "History's Greatest Trek", National Geographic, 1925, 533-583. In Panayiotis Diamadis, "Aegean Eucalypts", MODERN GREEK STUDIES, Vol. 13, 2005, published by the Modern Greek Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand, p. 88 Winston Churchill (in 1929) and other contemporary writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian genocide of World War I. The Armenian Genocide is referenced in the title of a 1922 poem "The Holocaust" (published as a booklet) and the 1923 book "The Smyrna Holocaust" deals with arson and massacre of Greeks and Armenians.Petrie J., "The secular word Holocaust: scholarly myths, history, and 20th century meanings", Journal of Genocide Research, Volume 2, Number 1, 1 March 2000, pp. 31-63(33) Before the Second World War, the possibility of another war was referred to as "another holocaust" (that is, a repeat of the First World War). With reference to the events of the war, writers in English from 1945 used the term in relation to events such as the fire-bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima, or the effects of a nuclear war, although from the 1950s onwards, it was increasingly used in English to refer to the Nazi genocide of the European Jews (or Judeocide).
By the late 1950s, documents translated from Hebrew sometimes used the word Holocaust to translate Shoah as the Nazi Judeocide. This use can be found as early as 23 May 1943 in The New York Times, on page E6, in an article by Julian Meltzer, referring to feelings in the British mandate of Palestine about Jewish immigration of refugees from "the Nazi holocaust."
One significant early use was in a 1958 recollection by Leslie Hardman, the first Jewish British Army Chaplain to enter Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, where he ministered to survivors and supervised the burial of about 20,000 victims,
By the late 1960s, the term was starting to be used in this sense without qualification. Nora Levin's 1968 book The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945 explains the meaning in its subtitle, but uses the unmoderated phrase "The Holocaust". An article called "Moral Trauma and the Holocaust" was published in the New York Times on February 12, 1968. However, it was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the generally accepted conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified and with a capital letter, a usage that also spread to other languages for the same period.Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France, Jewish Quarterly Review, Volume 96, Number 2, Spring 2006, pp. 304-306 The 1978 television miniseries titled "Holocaust" and starring Meryl Streep is often cited as the principal contributor to establishing the current usage in the wider culture.Garaudy, Roger, "The Mythical Foundations of Israeli Policy", Studies Forum International, London 1997, p.133 "Holocaust" was selected as the Association for the German Language's Word of the Year in 1979, reflecting increased public consciousness of the term.
The term became increasingly widespread as a synonym for "genocide" in the last decades of the 20th century to refer to mass murders in the form "X holocaust" (e.g. "Rwandan holocaust").
Objections to the usage of "Holocaust" for Nazi extermination of Jews Some people find the use of for the WWII-period Nazi extermination of Jews unacceptable, on account of the theological and historical nature of the word . The American historian Walter Laqueur (whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust) has argued that the term "Holocaust" is a "singularly inappropriate" term for the genocide of the Jews as it implies a "burnt offering" to God. Laqueur wrote, "It was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim". The British historian Geoff Eley wrote in a 1982 essay entitled "Holocaust History" that he thought the term Holocaust implies "a certain mystification, an insistence on the uniquely Jewish character of the experience". The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote in 1989 that the term Holocaust was unsuitable, and should not be used.
Use of the term for non-Jewish victims of the Nazis While the terms Shoah and Final Solution always refer to the fate of the Jews during the Nazi rule, the term Holocaust is sometimes used in a wider sense to describe other genocides of the Nazi and other regimes.
The Columbia Encyclopedia defines "Holocaust" as the "name given to the period of persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany". The Compact Oxford English Dictionary"The Holocaust", Compact Oxford English Dictionary: "(the Holocaust) the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime in World War II." and Microsoft Encarta"Holocaust" , Encarta: "Holocaust, the almost complete destruction of Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II (1939–1945). The leadership of Germany's Nazi Party ordered the extermination of 5.6 million to 5.9 million Jews (see National Socialism). Jews often refer to the Holocaust as Shoah (from the Hebrew word for "catastrophe" or "total destruction")." give similar definitions. The Encyclopædia Britannica defines "Holocaust" as "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women and children, and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II","Holocaust," Encyclopædia Britannica, 2009: "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women and children, and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Nazis called this "the final solution to the Jewish question ..." although the article goes on to say, "The Nazis also singled out the Roma (Gypsies). They were the only other group that the Nazis systematically killed in gas chambers alongside the Jews."
Scholars are divided on whether the term Holocaust should be applied to all victims of Nazi mass murder, with some using it synonymously with Shoah or "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", and others including the killing of Romani people, imprisonment and execution of homosexual men, execution of the disabled, execution of the Poles, the execution of Soviet prisoners of war, murder of political opponents, and the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses.*Weissman, Gary. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Attempts to Experience the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, 2004, , p. 94: "Kren illustrates his point with his reference to the . 'Should the (strikingly unreported) systematic mass starvation of Soviet prisoners of war be included in the Holocaust?' he asks. Many scholars would answer no, maintaining that 'the Holocaust' should refer strictly to those events involving the systematic killing of the Jews'." "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion", Yad Vashem: "The Holocaust, as presented in this resource center, is defined as the sum total of all anti-Jewish actions carried out by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945: from stripping the German Jews of their legal and economic status in the 1930s, to segregating and starving Jews in the various occupied countries, to the murder of close to six million Jews in Europe. The Holocaust is part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and murder of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazis." Niewyk, Donald L. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans in World War II. Not everyone finds this a fully satisfactory definition. The Nazis also killed millions of people belonging to other groups: Gypsies, the physically and mentally handicapped, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, political prisoners, religious dissenters, and homosexuals." Paulsson, Steve. "A View of the Holocaust", BBC: "The Holocaust was the Nazis' assault on the Jews between 1933 and 1945. It culminated in what the Nazis called the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe', in which six million Jews were murdered. The Jews were not the only victims of Nazism. It is estimated that as many as 15 million civilians were killed by this murderous and racist regime, including millions of Slavs and 'asiatics', 200,000 Gypsies and members of various other groups. Thousands of people, including Germans of African descent, were forcibly sterilised."