This article was published with the support of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah
Article translated from English by Odile Demange
The choice of the most relevant term for an unnamed crime, the Nazi murder of six million Jews in the extermination camps and killing sites of Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945, has been the subject of much debate.
The Nazis themselves resorted to a euphemistic formula, the “final solution of the Jewish question” ( Endlösung der Judenfrage ), to disguise their crime. The jurists of the Allied powers preferred the term “genocide” (“genocide” in English, Völkermordin German), coined by the Polish-American jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1944. The problem was that this word “genocide” was used in the years following the Second World War to describe other mass crimes, thus depriving the destruction European Jews with the specificity it deserved.
The term “Holocaust” has also been used, perhaps because it had already been in use in the Middle Ages when it was synonymous with pogrom, but more probably because this word had been commonly used in the between the wars to talk about the genocide of the Armenians perpetrated in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. A “holocaust” is an immense massacre or destruction by fire, like the massive immolations of animals sacrificed to the gods in the Greece and ancient Rome. After being killed, the animal was completely ( olos ) burned ( caustos ) to feed the gods with the smoke of its calcined flesh.
If the idea of total destruction by fire contained in the term holocaust seemed relevant, the non-existence of any deity to which the Nazis could have worshiped by killing Jews, and the absence of ritual in the killing of six million human beings, made the term seem inappropriate. It is widely employed today in the English-speaking world, where it was popularized by the 1978 American television series titled Holocaust , as well as in Germany, as evidenced by the debate surrounding the Berlin Holocaust-Denkmal in 1998. Israel, the Hebrew word Shoah, meaning disaster, seems to be the only one in use since the creation of the national day of remembrance (Yom Ha-Shoah) in 1951. But Holocaust is also used in English translations of Holocaust-related documents, notably at the Yad Vashem memorial. . The term Holocaust is undeniably the most used term in English to refer to the massacre of European Jews by the Nazis.
In fact, this name referred to an essential characteristic of the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis: the desire to completely destroy the targeted population, to erase it from the face of the earth and even from culture and memory. men. Early Nazi plans envisioned turning the Jewish Quarter of Prague (in present-day Czech Republic) into a permanent museum of Jewish culture, exhibiting what Jewish reality had once been like. It was all that was to remain of the Jews of Europe once the Holocaust was accomplished.
As for the individuals, they were to be killed and burned. Cremation was not only chosen for practical reasons, because it made it possible to dispose of bodies in a more satisfactory way than mass graves. It also represented the annihilation of beings, reduced to smoke and ashes. Graves, which materialized the existence of ancient human beings, were therefore excluded as such. Let us add that in the strongly “biologized” discourse of the Nazis, the Jews were considered a virulent threat, a hotbed of infectious germs. Politics (domestic and foreign) being confused with biology and alterity reduced to a disease, the Nazis never considered that these “others” should be treated conventionally. international conventions, common law or human customs only had relevance when applied to human beings. Since the Jews were not human, it was normal to deny them all humane treatment, even after death. Hence the dispersion and reification of human ashes, sometimes sold as fertilizer.
This major aspect of the Nazi criminal enterprise is highlighted by the term “Holocaust”. In 1943, Heinrich Himmler declared in a famous speech in Poznań, Poland, that the “Final Solution” was a “glorious chapter” in German history, “a chapter that was unwritten, and never would be. . The victims themselves, but also the very memory of the crime, had to disappear. In this sense, the will of the Nazis was clearly accomplished by those who are called “deniers”, who in different parts of the world deny the very reality of this crime.
However, the word “Holocaust” should not make us forget that the massive assassination of six million human beings was decided after the elaboration and abandonment of other projects. As explained in other articles in this journal (see: Shoah), the final decision was not taken until 1941, after the abandonment of a plan for mass deportation to Madagascar and after the rapid victories of the German armies in the East brought several million Eastern European Jews under the jurisdiction of the German Reich.
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