Holocaust Inversion

INTRODUCTION

The word "Holocaust", which literally means "a complete burned sacrifice", has since 1957 been the principal English-language referent to the systematic Nazi mass murder of European Jews. This was influenced by Yad Vashem's¹ adoption since 1957 of the word as the English translation referent to the systematic Nazi mass murder of European Jews. Prior to that, the word shoah at Yad Vashem had usually been translated into English as "Disaster", "the Great Disaster", "the Destruction Period", and "the European Catastrophe".² The word "Holocaust" as the dominant referent to the Nazi genocide of Jews is said to have entered mainstream American and British public discourse as a result of the Eichmann capture in 1960 and his trial in 1961; and the acceptance of the word as the appellation for the Nazi persecution and mass murder was hastened by the writer Elie Wiesel who also disseminated the term. In Israeli official and academic circles, however, the word shoah remained dominant and the word "Shoah" with a capital S has been used in English-speaking circles since the early 1990s as an alternative to, or as a synonym for, "Holocaust".

THE MEANING OF "HOLOCAUST"

Despite its acceptance in the English-speaking world as the principal referent to the Nazi mass murders, the meaning of the word "Holocaust" varies according to whether or not it refers to non-Jewish death as well as Jewish death during the Hitler period, and according to when the Holocaust is said to have begun. For example, President Carter's 1979 Executive Order that created the United States Holocaust Memorial Council defined "the Holocaust" as the ". . . extermination of six million Jews and some five million other peoples."³ Today, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum follows a version of this definition and defines "the Holocaust" as the "murder of six million Jews and millions of non-Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II."⁴ Britain's National Holocaust Museum and Centre in Nottinghamshire does not offer a definition but seeks to separate the Nazi Judeocide from non-Jewish death during the Hitler period by describing itself as offering "Exhibitions exploring the history of the Jewish Holocaust and other 20th-century genocides."⁵

The online Encyclopaedia Britannica defines "Holocaust" as "the 12 years (1933–45) of Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities . . . climax[ing] in the 'final solution'."⁶ The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (2007) defines Holocaust as "The (period of the) mass murder of Jews (or transf. of other groups) . . . 1939–1945."⁷ The American Heritage College Dictionary (1997) defines "Holocaust" as "The genocide of Jews, Gypsies, and others by the Nazis during World War II."⁸ The Oxford Modern English Dictionary (1996) defines "Holocaust" as "[T]he mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis 1941–1945."⁹ The Random House Webster's College Dictionary (2000) gives a narrow but not uncommon meaning of "Holocaust" as "the systematic mass slaughter of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II."¹⁰ This definition places a significant portion of Jewish death by the Nazis outside the term's boundaries. Finally, it's worth noting the broad description of the Holocaust in the Chambers Dictionary of World History:

The attempt by Nazi Germany to destroy systematically European Jews. From the inception of the Nazi regime in 1933, Jews were deprived of their civil rights, persecuted, physically attacked, imprisoned, pressurized to emigrate, and murdered. With the gradual conquest of Europe by Germany, the death toll increased, and a meeting at Wannsee (Jan 1942) made plans for the so-called "final solution." Jews were herded into concentration camps, slave labour camps, and extermination camps. By the end of World War II in 1945, more than 6 million Jews had been murdered out of a total Jewish population of 8 million in those countries occupied by the Nazis. Of these the largest number, 3 million, were from Poland. Other minorities (gypsies, various religious sects, homosexuals) and millions of Soviet prisoners were also subject to Nazi atrocities, but the major genocide was against the Jewish people.¹¹

This is a broad description...