Talk:Holocaust remembrance

To do

• The Holocaust in North Africa /Yvwv (talk) 00:49, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

In scope?

On the island of Jersey, the Jersey War Tunnels (or Hohlgangsanlage 8) were dug in part by slave labour. As far as I can tell, the slaves were mostly POWs from Russia and Poland, some from the Spanish Civil War. Is that in scope for "the Holocaust", or is it a different kind of atrocity? ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 17:44, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

It's part of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the entire Nazi machinery of murder and slave labor; we need to recall that the Nazis didn't try to preserve the lives of the people they enslaved but intended for the slavery to kill them. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:38, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

From looking at the website, this seems like it should be added to WWII in Europe but not here. I think most people would consider "The Holocaust" to be specifically about the Nazi's treatment of and policies surrounding Jews and the attempted genocide of European Jews. "6 million Jews" is the most commonly reported Holocaust death toll. I strongly disagree with the notion that "the Holocaust" is about all Nazi murders and slave labor. That to me waters down the term to be synonymous with "war deaths" which doesn't sound so atrocious given that we expect death in war. As far as I can tell, the website itself does not mention the tunnels as being part of "The Holocaust" either. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 11:31, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

I say this as a Jew: The Holocaust, while directed above all toward the annihilation of Jews and secondarily Romani/Sinti people, was emphatically not only about the murders of Jews. The Nazis and their collaborators also murdered Soviet POWs, Romani/Sinti people, non-Jewish Poles, Serbs, disabled people and gay people in large numbers, and there were loads of people from other occupied countries, as well as Jews and members of the aforementioned groups, who were deliberately worked to death. It's fair to say that since the entire Nazi state was directed toward genocide, it can be difficult to separate their genocidal actions from any others, but it is quite reasonable to cover the war in terms of military actions against military targets - recognizing that precision bombs and missiles did not exist and no power tried hard to avoid killing civilians in a targeted city - while reserving Holocaust remembrance for actions by the Nazis and their collaborators that were taken against people they seized as prisoners or actions they took without any pretense of hitting any military targets, such as by utterly annihilating the population of a town and burning it to the ground as a reprisal against partisan activity. Ikan Kekek (talk) 16:35, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

Note that this is how the article begins:

"The Holocaust was a campaign of deportation, forced labour and mass murder during World War II, carried out by Germany's Nazi regime and some other Axis states. Among the victims were Jews; Roma people; Slavs, especially Poles, Serbs and Soviet prisoners of war; homosexuals; political opponents; and people with disabilities. About 6 million Jews were killed, along with at least 5 million people of other ethnic origins."

If you believe we should briefly address any controversy about the scope of Nazi and Nazi collaborator actions that are considered to be part of the Holocaust, that's something we can discuss, but I wholeheartedly support the definition of the Holocaust already in the article. Ikan Kekek (talk) 16:38, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

Note that Wikipedia defines the Holocaust as "the genocide of European Jews during World War II" and says "The Holocaust is understood as being primarily the genocide of the Jews, but during the Holocaust era[8] (1933–1945), systematic mass-killings of other population groups occurred." So perhaps we should change our definition too (I think as a general matter we should follow Wikipedia for questions of fact/definition as it's much more thoroughly written and argued) though I don't think it matters much and I probably don't intend to debate the point any more beyond this comment. Ar2332 (talk) 13:31, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

I see your point. The tension between the Holocaust as specifically a campaign of annihilation against the Jews and a mass murder of Jews and other people is expressed in w:The Holocaust#Definition:

Holocaust historians commonly define the Holocaust as the genocide of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945.[a] Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, in The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (2000), favor a definition that includes the Jews, Roma, and disabled people: "the systematic, state-sponsored murder of entire groups determined by heredity".[30][g]

Other groups targeted after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933[33] include those whom the Nazis viewed as inherently inferior (some Slavic people, particularly Poles and Russians,[34] the Roma, and the disabled), and those targeted because of their beliefs or behavior (such as Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, and homosexuals).[35] Peter Hayes writes that the persecution of these groups was less uniform than that of the Jews. For example, the Nazis' treatment of the Slavs consisted of "enslavement and gradual attrition", while some Slavs were favored; Hayes lists Bulgarians, Croats, Slovaks, and some Ukrainians.[23] In contrast, according to historian Dan Stone, Hitler regarded the Jews as "a Gegenrasse: a 'counter-race' ... not really human at all".

My feeling is that what's most accurate is to say that the Nazis were working to wipe out the Jews above all and had plans to wipe out other "inferiors" that they got a substantial head start on. In Berlin, I've seen memorials to the persecution of the Jews, the Romani and the gays by the Nazis, so I think it's clear that today's German government sees members of all three groups as victims of the Nazis, whether or not we use the word Holocaust to describe those murders and persecutions. So should we rename this article "Remembrance of Nazi persecutions?" I don't want to weaken the point that the Nazis worked to wipe out the Jewish people, but neither do I want us to ignore the murders and persecutions of others by the Nazis. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:10, 20 August 2022 (UTC)