What makes holocaust unique

The Nazis sought to remold their own country, Europe and essentially the world, in accordance to pseudo-scientific racial principals. They sought to make Germany a racially pure superpower although at the time this term was not yet in use , totally independent and beholden to no one, a utopian society for members of their "master race. War was the primary means of gaining land and the Nazis were not at all concerned with the price the inhabitants of those lands would have to pay to ensure the sustenance of Germans.

According to Nazi thought, the principle of human equality originated in Jewish thought, was taken over by Christianity, and from there had penetrated and polluted modernity.

The Jews were deemed the primary racial carriers of this idea and thus both an ideological and physical enemy; according to Nazi ideology solving the so-called "Jewish problem" was central to its entire enterprise. It wasn't just the physical Jew who was considered a danger by the Nazis.

This drive gave the anti-Jewish Nazi enterprise — the Holocaust — a unique, apocalyptic dimension: in terms of geographical breadth, of resolute implementation, and of urgency. Throughout the first years of Nazi rule the search for a definitive solution led to the exclusion of Jews from many spheres of life, expropriation and impoverishment, and an increasingly coerced emigration.

After the beginning of WWII in September , in the occupied territories, policies escalated and new measures were undertaken: concentration, marking Jews, forced labor, defamation and even random killings were implemented. During the second half of and the beginning of in broadening geographical circles, policies coalesced into systematic mass murder, called by the German bureaucracy the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

The systematic murder campaign of Jews started in killing sites in the occupied Soviet Union and counted for almost half of the Jewish victims. Some scholars assert that this kind of wholesale murder of a group had its roots in German genocidal acts against the Nama and Herrero in Namibia at the dawn of the twentieth century. But another major aspect of the Holocaust that is usually seen as new, is the industrialized murder represented by the extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau the Nazi term was Vernichtungslager, extermination camps , a term that is deeply rooted in their ideology, since those who were to be exterminated in them were deemed to be less than human and were considered to be pests in need of extermination.

This enterprise, which spanned the length and breadth of most of Europe can certainly be considered to be new. The broad, transnational, modern and apocalyptic nature of the Holocaust, which encompassed Jewish communities of North Africa as well, thus stands out as different from other cases of genocide. In those cases, the conflict is between two entities, and mostly relating to domination over certain territories; thus, they were more restricted and their basis more concrete.

Consequently, Nazi Germany implemented its anti-Jewish policies in every occupied country and the ideologues and planners envisioned its implementation far beyond Europe.

Moreover, this enterprise was joined by people across the large swath of land they came to dominate either as occupiers or as senior partners in alliances. Indeed, they were even concerned with protecting the patents for their products. German engineers working for Topf and Sons supplied one camp alone with 46 ovens capable of burning bodies an hour.

Adjacent to the extermination camp at Auschwitz was a privately owned, corporately sponsored concentration camp called I. Auschwitz, a division of I. This multi-dimensional, petro-chemical complex brought human slavery to its ultimate perfection by reducing human beings to consumable raw materials, from which all mineral life was systematically drained before the bodies were recycled into the Nazi war economy: gold teeth for the treasury, hair for mattresses, ashes for fertilizer.

In their relentless search for the least expensive and most efficient means of extermination, German scientists experimented with a variety of gases until they discovered the insecticide Zyklon B, which could kill 2, persons in less than 30 minutes at a cost of one-half-cent per body. Near the end of the war, in order to cut expenses and save gas, "cost-accountant considerations" led to an order to place living children directly in the ovens or throw them into open burning pits.

The same type of ingenuity and control that facilitates modern industrial development was rationally applied to the process of destruction. Life for Jews in Pre-War Germany. Simon Wiesenthal's 36 Questions. Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust. Displaced Persons. Glossary of Terms. Holocaust Maps. Resistance to the Holocaust. Who's Who in Nazi Germany. Concentration Camps. American Victims of the Holocaust. Euthanasia Program.

Final Solution. Forced Labor. Medical Experiments. Nuremberg Laws. Nazi War Crimes. Yellow Badges. Timeline of Jewish Persecution. The Nazis. Nazi Party Platform. Public Opinion.