Holocaust (disambiguation)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Look up holocaust in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Holocaust can mean:

  • The Holocaust, or Shoah, the systematic killing of mainly Jews, but also Gypsies, Poles, and other groups in Europe during World War II. Since the 1970s, this has been the main meaning of the English term.
  • holocaust (sacrifice), a burnt offering, from Greek holo-kauston "all burnt". The original sense, referring to a completely-burnt sacrifice
  • By extension the word was used in English to refer to other acts of obliteration by burning. See:

[edit] Other genocides

Post-1970s coinings of the type "name Holocaust" in the sense of "genocide" or "mass murder" imply a comparison to the Shoah and are often used polemically.

    • African holocaust, or Maafa, Pan-Africanist term for the suffering of African peoples through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasions, oppression, and exploitation.
    • Armenian Holocaust, used to describe the Armenian genocide prior to coinage of the term "genocide".
    • Asian Holocaust, in Asia and the Pacific islands under the Japanese Empire.
    • Assyrian Genocide, a systematic killing of Assyrians during World War I.
    • Black Holocaust, the death of Africans on slave ships.
    • Cambodian Holocaust, or Cambodian Genocide, the 1,800,000 Cambodians killed in the 1970s at the hands of Pol Pot's forces.
    • Native American Holocaust, or Native American massacres
    • Prussian Holocaust, infrequently used term for sacking of Leuven during World War I and World War II evacuation of Germans from East Prussia.
    • Ukrainian Holocaust, the Holodomor during Soviet collectivisation.
    • Rwanda Holocaust, or Rwandan Genocide (1994) that killed 1,000,000 people..

[edit] Other uses

[edit] See also

In other languages