Names of the Holocaust
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| The Holocaust |
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| Early elements |
| Racial policy · Nazi eugenics · Nuremberg Laws · Euthanasia · Concentration camps (list) |
| Jews |
| Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933 to 1939 |
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Pogroms: Kristallnacht · Bucharest · Dorohoi · Iaşi · Jedwabne · Lwów |
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Ghettos: Warsaw · Łódź · Lwów · Kraków · Theresienstadt · Kovno |
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Einsatzgruppen: Babi Yar · Rumbula · Ponary · Odessa |
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Death camps: Auschwitz · Belzec · Chełmno · Majdanek · Treblinka · Sobibór · Jasenovac · Warsaw |
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End of World War II: Death marches · Berihah · Displaced persons |
| Other victims |
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East Slavs · Poles · Serbs · Roma · Homosexuals · Jehovah's Witnesses |
| Responsible parties |
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Nazi Germany: Hitler · Eichmann · Heydrich · Himmler · SS · Gestapo · SA |
| Lists |
| Survivors · Victims · Rescuers |
| Resources |
| The Destruction of the European Jews Phases of the Holocaust Functionalism vs. intentionalism |
The Holocaust is the name commonly applied since the mid 1970s to the systematic state-sponsored persecution and genocide of various ethnic, religious and political groups during World War II by Nazi Germany, and especially to the destruction of European Jewry. There are a number of alternate names for the Holocaust as well.
[edit] "Holocaust"
The word holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holokauston, meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering", or "a burnt sacrifice offered to a god". In Greek and Roman pagan rites, gods of the earth and underworld received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full. The word Holocaust was later used to refer to a sacrifice Jews were required to make by the Torah.
Since the mid-19th century, the word has been used by many authors to refer to large catastrophes and massacres, particularly those caused by immolation. According to the OED, the earliest attested such usage dates from 1671, but it becamer common in the 19th century. In 1833 a historian writing about the medieval French monarch Louis VII, wrote that he "once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church". This refers to his invasion of Vitry-le-François in 1142 during which the 1,300 inhabitants of the town were burnt alive in the church. Even before the Second World War, the possibility of war was referred to as "another holocaust" (that is a repeat of the First World War). In the years following the war, writers in English tended to use the term in relation to events such as the fire-bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima, rather than the Nazi genocide. The term was also regularly used to refer to the destructive consequences of nuclear war.
By the late 1950s, documents translated from Hebrew used the word "Holocaust" to translate "Shoah", and the scholars began to use the word with this meaning--usually with some qualification, such as "The Nazi Holocaust". It was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified, and with a capital letter. The 1978 television miniseries titled "Holocaust" and starring Meryl Streep is often cited as the principal contributor to the current usage.[1]
[edit] "Final Solution"
The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem was the Nazis' own term, coined by Adolf Eichmann as a euphemism.
[edit] "Porajmos"
The Porajmos (also Porrajmos) literally Devouring, or Samudaripen (Mass killing) is a term coined by the Roma people to describe attempts by the Nazi regime to exterminate most of the Roma peoples of Europe. The phenomenon has been little studied and largely overshadowed by the "Shoah".
[edit] "Shoah"
The biblical word Shoah (שואה), also spelled Shoa and Sho'ah, meaning "calamity" in Hebrew (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the early 1940s. Churban Europa, meaning "European Destruction" in Hebrew (as opposed to simply Churban, the destruction of the Second Temple), is also used.
The Hebrew word Shoah is preferred by some Jews and non-Jews due to the supposed theologically offensive nature of the word holocaust whose original Greek meaning indicates a sacrifice to a god. There is also concern that the particular significance of the Holocaust becomes disassociated from its intended reference to European Jewry in the Nazis' "Final Solution," as use of the term became increasingly widespread in the latter half of the 20th century to refer generically to any genocide such as those in Rwanda, the Ukraine under Stalin, and the actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as "holocausts". The term was used before World War II by Winston Churchill among others in reference to the Armenian Genocide, their persecution during World War I.
[edit] References
- ^ Before the mid 1970s, the term Holocaust was not in general use to describe the horrific event. It was largely the 1978 TV miniseries The Holocaust which brought the term into general usage. See Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich New York:1960 Simon and Schuster Pages 963-979: The genocide is described as The Final Solution in quotation marks (the word Holocaust is not mentioned).
