A Plea for Commemorative Equality: The Holocaust, Factual Specificity, and Commemorative Prioritisation

ABSTRACT

This article argues that there exists an undesirable link between the factual specificity of the Holocaust and its commemorative prioritization. Following a discussion of the rise of the Holocaust to the moral pinnacle of global memory culture, two primary examples of the enduring nature of this problematic link are advanced. In the first place, the importance afforded to factual specificity functions as an obstacle to the betterment of Eastern European memory. Though disingenuous actors certainly seek to play down local responsibility for the Holocaust, the commemorative primacy afforded to the Holocaust, on the basis of its factual specificity, clouds efforts to distinguish between collaborator apologists and those who inaccurately draw factual comparisons between the Holocaust and other events in order to attain commemorative equality. Second, present-day historians retain the use of words such as “unique”, “unprecedented” and “singular”. These words are often applied to the Holocaust in such a way that implies that the Holocaust is the only such event, thus mixing the inherently political into scholarly debate. This article argues that both sides of, for example, the recent “German Catechism Debate”, ought to abandon the notion that the facts of an event are relevant to commemorative prioritization. Instead, scholarly disagreements over comparative studies should be definitively separated from commemorative decisions. A failure to achieve this separation has repeatedly blocked intellectual progress. Importantly, in criticizing the link between factual specificity and commemorative prioritization, this article avoids a universal denunciation of Holocaust memory (which is often multidirectional) and instead offers a way forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust
• memory
• German catechism
• uniqueness
• Eastern Europe
• Eichmann trial

This article contends that “collective Holocaust memory”¹ developed in such a way that its commemoration to this day is prioritized over that of other mass murders, on the basis of its “factual specificity”.² I challenge the moral and logical veracity of the link between the factual specifics of an event and its commemorative prioritization. Though there is serious disagreement about the extent to which it has been for better or for worse, most scholars agree that the Holocaust has attained an “iconic status”, certainly in Western culture, and possibly around the globe. Even if the facts of the event are often absent from its portrayal in certain regions, Alon Confino is correct that “the Holocaust – understood as a network of symbols – has been attached to causes that are global, such as human rights, genocide, and ethnic cleansing”.³ Without denying its benefits, and though I am keen to acknowledge that Holocaust memory has grown increasingly multidirectional,⁴ this article presents a number of examples which display the persistence of an unsavoury use of the factual specificity of the Holocaust in order to downplay other mass atrocities.

A Five-Point Memory Model

Throughout this article I employ and thus propose a model which may prove useful in ongoing and future attempts to establish a fair commemorative culture. The model consists of five key points.

First, the model applies only to instances of mass murder inflicted upon a group, set of groups, or set of disparate individuals. That is, commemorative efforts should compare apples and apples. This is, of course, a grey area, because there will always predictably be disagreement on what constitutes “mass”. Nonetheless, it is important to make the point because the intention is not to call for commemorative equality between events that are entirely dissimilar. The key reason to limit the scope of the model in this way is that mass murder always affects enough peoples (and groups) such that official and societal commemoration is beneficial. Of course, this is not to say that there are not events which are not mass murders that deserve societal commemoration on a level akin to that afforded to mass murder. For example, it could be (and has frequently implicitly been) argued that the murders of certain prominent individuals affect sufficient portions of society to justify societal commemoration similar to that afforded to mass murder. The model proposed in this article deliberately avoids this debate because it is purely on a case-by-case basis that one can assess whether the impact of the death of a much-loved figure is as far-reaching and extreme as that resulting from mass murder. Though not a murder, the death of Queen Elizabeth II has certainly engendered a perhaps surprisingly powerful emotional reaction from some portions of the United Kingdom. But, even amongst the most committed royalists it is highly unlikely that the social and emotional effect of the Queen’s death comes close to what would be experienced by the relatives of mass murder victims. So, the proposed model limits itself to instances of mass murder. Individual murders are not “less bad” than murders within mass murders. Rather, they are oranges, not apples, in that apples (mass murder) in this analogy necessarily represent widespread and deeply engraved social impacts which oranges (individual murder) do not necessarily command.

Establishing this distinction brings us to the second and most central theoretical contention of this article. In the article I will repeatedly call for a separation of the factual specificity of any given mass murder from decisions about its commemorative prioritization (albeit with some caveats). In the first point of this memory model I distinguished mass murders from single murders, applying the model only to the former. Leading on from this, in my view, it is not possible for the factual specificity of a mass murder to change the widespread social uprooting and destruction inherent to every mass murder in such a way that the empirical features of the crime can plausibly be used to prioritize the commemoration of one event over another. In other words, no logical or acceptable model has been proposed that quantifies the mass experience of murdered individuals such that one can create a hierarchy of suffering or any other form of commemorative hierarchy. In the real world, as Yair Auron puts it, “to the victims and their loved ones it matters not at all whether they have been chosen to be murdered because the perpetrators view them as belonging to a racial group, or because they are members of a national minority or belong to a social class singled out for extermination.”⁵ Tony Judt concurs, arguing that “human suffering should not be calibrated according to the goals of the perpetrators.”⁶ Similarly, Dirk Moses acknowledges that “clearly, the deliberate destruction of a people is a terrible crime” but then rightly questions whether it is actually “worse than the foreseeable destruction of many people?”⁷ Elsewhere, Dan Stone has argued that the study of “collective memory” rests not on the existence of a fictional “social mind” but rather on the link between meaningful human living and one’s existence in a “social setting”.⁸ This conceptualization assists in challenging the link between factual specificity and commemorative prioritization because the destruction of one’s “social setting” occurs in both genocidal mass murder and non-genocidal mass murder. There is no physical “collective” to which genocide poses a special threat. Though there may well be real “imagined communities” whose destruction is more common during genocidal attempts, we should not place the destruction of such imagined communities above the destruction of real communities, the type of which occurs in every mass murder, genocidal or otherwise.⁹

The following question is key: By which route can we hope to distinguish one mass murder from another such that one or other event recieves greater commemorative prioritisation? Dan Diner belies notions of comparative suffering but then states that a greater “cognitive horror” emanates from the Holocaust than from other incidents of mass murder, because it contained “a fundamental denial of otherwise valid anthropological basic assumptions about human actions and behaviour”.¹⁰ Yet, though comparative suffering is apparently off the table, Diner does not specify what the precise resulting commemorative impulses are. What if someone else claims that another mass atrocity denied other “basic assumptions” that are of greater importance to them than those contravened at Auschwitz? Each individual will be shocked by different things in a way that is personal to themselves. Should we really order societal commemorative priorities according to highly subjective assessments of the extent to which perpetrator motivations were “shocking”? Dan Diner has not told us what the commemorative implications of his approach are, nor its benefits.

One of the logical suppositions behind the previously discussed commemorative separation of mass murder from other murders is that mass murder affects and involves enough individuals to benefit from society-wide commemoration. This assertion is similar to the assertion that thousands of children missing school regularly across a country represents a societal problem which requires both a governmental and societal response in a way that the case of one child missing school on one random day does not. Similarly, mass murders always go beyond the threshold that requires societal and governmental action. Of course, something being widespread merely determines that governmental and societal action would be beneficial, but not the magnitude of the commemorative or preventative action. For example, a government would probably prioritize dealing with mass knife crime over mass school non-attendance because, on a societal level, one can qualitatively differentiate between the impact of mass death in a society and mass non-attendance at school. Yet, it is easy to distinguish between the latter two examples because the events are clearly morally different. Would anyone disagree with the notion that death is worse than non-attendance at school?

But using what measures should we adjust the positions of various genocides on a hierarchical scale? In answering this question, it is worth remembering that commemoration serves two key purposes: prevention and memorialization/victim honouring. When it comes to prevention, events do not reoccur as carbon copies of any previous atrocity. The mass murders of the 20th century were perpetrated for vastly different reasons, ranging from pure economic utility to fanatical “racial” fantasies. Equally, when it comes to memorialization/victim honouring, it is exceedingly difficult to make an argument which hierarchizes perpetrator intentions in such a way that wider society would agree that a certain type of motivation warrants commemorative prioritization. Dan Diner’s suggestion offers no solution because various forms of mass murder may shock different groups to different degrees. Should we really calibrate our societal commemoration based on perpetrator intentions? And, if we should, who decides how? And then, what about a numerical hierarchy? If one were to use statistical comparisons to propose commemoratively prioritizing one mass murder over another, one would have to explain why the practical implementation of this higher prioritization does not morally also apply to the “competing” mass murder which was numerically less devastating. In other words, the key question is: if one mass murder resulted in 4,000,000 deaths and another resulted in 3,500,000 deaths, what practical measures could be taken to implement the commemorative prioritization of the numerically larger event which the numerically smaller event would not deserve? Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago, in the context of the dual installation at the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banska Bystrica of two separate plaques commemorating the Holocaust and the Porrajmos, describe for us how such undignified arguments may go in practice:

Apparently, some voices behind the scenes demanded that the plaque to the Holocaust of Jewish victims be more conspicuous—perhaps bigger than the one devoted to the Roma. But then, quantity could become quality—why should the plaque to the Roma victims be smaller in size than the Jewish one? Should it be smaller in mathematical terms? If six million victims deserve a plaque of a certain size, should the Roma one be proportionally smaller? Or relative to the overall numbers of victims, or to the proportion of victims among that particular group, Jews or Roma? Or perhaps the size of the plaques should reflect the percentage of Jewish losses in Slovakia as compared to losses among the Roma?

Earlier in this model I suggested that the proposed separation of the factual specificity of an event from decisions about its commemorative prioritization is only a contextualized separation. In keeping with this, I now introduce another caveat: the third principle of this article’s memory model is that commemorative equality must be subordinated to temporal and geographical considerations, for the purpose of prevention and reconciliation. These considerations reflect the self-evident need for a country to deal with the remnants of perpetrators, victims, and perpetrator structures as quickly as possible. Thus, it is not just atrocities committed outside the country in question that should naturally be put on the backseat but also those within the country that do not necessitate an instant course of action because they occurred outside of living memory. Equally, it is certainly appropriate that groups (e.g. Jews) prioritize the commemoration of their own tragedies.

Fourth, though the specificity of each event is irrelevant in determining commemorative prioritization (aside from the exceptions above), elements of the specificity must feature within the commemoration. Throughout this article, “specificity” refers to the key factors which delineate one particular atrocity from other atrocities. It is important to include such differences, thus avoiding universalistic labels like “victims of Nazism”, because commemoration serves a preventative purpose. Prevention cannot be effective unless commemorating parties become aware of the mechanisms and specifics by which groups were targeted. Equally, there will always be victims but knowing who they are is the only way commemoration can actually mean something.

Fifth, although individuals can be both victims and perpetrators, we must be careful to distinguish between, on the one hand, advocating for commemorative equality and, on the other hand, advocating for the commemoration of one’s own group by falsely creating a victimhood or using a real victimhood to justify perpetration of atrocities. The reason why this principle is so important will become clear when we analyze a number of examples later on in this article. In brief, opponents of commemorative equality and the concomitant separation of the factual specificity of an event from decisions regarding its commemorative prioritization, often disparage legitimate initiatives working toward commemorative equality by associating them with attempts to attain commemorative equality via factually inaccurate rewritings of the past, especially those rewritings which rehabilitate perpetrators by justifying their actions on the basis of real or imagined victimhood. As we shall see, many opponents of commemorative equality use the same argument to counter every form of advocacy which seeks to draw non-Holocaust crimes to the commemorative level of the Holocaust (or beyond it, in the immoral cases). As one example, the German Catechism Debate featured many an attempt to associate Dirk Moses with the immorality of Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber during the 1980s Historikerstreit.¹¹ Though it is indeed true that all 3 actors intended to advance the commemoration of non-Holocaust mass atrocities, it has been ignored that the means by which Moses attempted this are quite different to the means used by Nolte and Hillgruber. The latter two historians sought to obfuscate and sanitize Wehrmacht perpetration of atrocities on the Eastern Front (as well as their delaying of the end of WW2) by portraying the fear of Communism as justifying the army’s protection of Nazism. Thus, a false state of victimhood was instituted to justify the perpetration and defence of mass atrocities. Such dishonest scholarly actions are frequently compared to Moses’s legitimate efforts to draw real victim groups onto a level commemorative playing field with Holocaust victims. Yet, to categorize Moses’s attempts alongside those of Nolte and Hillgruber is analytically fragile because it assumes that the fact that all three historians fought against the commemorative primacy of the Holocaust means that all three historians employed the same arguments, which they didn’t. As an aside, none of this is to say that individuals cannot be both perpetrators and victims. Rather, being a victim does not justify perpetration and, furthermore, advancing commemorative equality by denying perpetration (Nolte/Hillgruber) is far removed from advancing commemorative equality by rightly pointing out commemorative imbalances (Moses). The problem, of course, is that there is indeed a great deal of factual-editing and perpetrator-excusing associated with the promulgation of the commemorative equality of legitimate victims in Eastern Europe. The key solution I advance in this article is that we should be careful to distinguish between the immoral and moral forms by which commemorative advocacy occurs. A way to do this is to make sure that we reject immoral forms (e.g. Nolte/Hillgruber) not on the basis of the factual specificity of the Holocaust but rather on the basis that both false and real narratives of victimhood do not justify perpetration or the rehabilitation of perpetrators! The "factual specificity" (or "uniqueness") tool is a poorly crafted and overbearing stone age cudgel that cannot help but target legitimate commemorative initiatives in the wild swings which are characteristic of those who wield it.

The Holocaust Ignored 1945–1960 (Approximately)

The post-1945 global attitude to the Holocaust – the murder of those the Nazis labelled as “Jews”¹² – can be generalized into two major camps of thought. Unifying the camps was what Tony Judt calls the “striking” and “universal character of the neglect”.¹³ What follows is an extremely brief overview.

The first major camp was Communist Europe. The plight of self-identifying Jews was not entirely ignored in this context. On a low-key level and amidst censorship, some Jews did write about the lost Jewish world.¹⁴ Yet, such instances were exceptional and were not endorsed by the Communist authorities. It was not so much that what happened in the Eastern European death camps was ignored – because that was not really possible – but, rather, the school children who were marched past horrific images of suffering were not informed that the vast majority of camp victims had been “Jewish”.¹⁵ In Eastern Europe, then, as John-Paul Himka remarks, “by and large the specifically Jewish Holocaust was downplayed or ignored under Communism”.¹⁶

The second major camp was the “Western” world, comprising the nations who, in the Cold War context, now stood at war with the Eastern bloc. The Cold War necessitated a shift away from denazification towards an understanding of Nazism as having been a totalitarian episode.¹⁷ This allowed comparison with the current enemy – the former ally – the Soviet Union. Rather than acknowledging the widespread collaboration which had enabled Nazi crimes and power retention, blame was apportioned largely to evil national leaders who had, apparently against the will of their peoples, obliterated multiple groups.¹⁸ This naturally obscured the specificity by which the Nazis targeted “Jews” because antisemitism and its genocidal manifestations relied upon societal participation and specific national histories. Totalitarianism allowed national guilt to be swept aside after key figures had been dispensed of at major show trials. In France, Rebecca Clifford points out that “Jewish survivors were scarcely apparent amongst the far larger mass of non-Jewish returnees, which obscured the fact that Jews had comprised nearly half of all deportees from France”.¹⁹ This theme recurred in a number of countries, partly because "Jewish" deportees were amongst those least likely to survive. Such astounding levels of ignorance compounded the suffering experienced.²⁰

Outside Western Europe, the situation was similar. Historiographically, Jews were once viewed as having remained largely silent about the Holocaust in the early postwar decades. Yet, this was only outward facing and was a reaction to the extent of wider society’s actual and perceived receptiveness. As several influential works have shown, Jews in this period were far from silent about the Holocaust in actuality.²¹ Holocaust survivors fought a battle for recognition against a cult of resistance. This battle was given institutional form through the struggles between Holocaust survivors and pre-Holocaust emigrees for the control of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial organization.²² Because the establishment wished for Jews to throw off their victim status, Israeli Holocaust survivors were generally spoken of in official discourse as resistance members, or not at all. In America, the situation was much the same.²³ Around the world, then, the factual specificity of the process by which “Jews” were targeted was ignored and subsumed under universalizing banners: “antifascists”,²⁴ “resistance”,²⁵ “deportees”,²⁶ “heroes”,²⁷ and “victims”.²⁸ As Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner neatly summarize: “The two narrative worlds featured dictators, Nazi thugs, heroic resistance fighters, morally unblemished soldiers, evil capitalists, and suffering civilians. Yet neither master narrative acknowledged Jewish victimhood.”²⁹

The Holocaust in Vogue: The Western World from the 1960s

Many of the debates about the nature, benefits, and multidirectionality of Holocaust memory culture rest on a fundamental truth. This truth is that Holocaust memory has come to, as Robert Gordon puts it, “settle at the centre of a widespread ‘memory culture’”.³⁰ Or, as Tony Kushner and Donald Bloxham describe, “in a western world where many seek to be seen and treated as victims, the murder of European Jewry has developed an iconic status.”³¹ Typically opposing historians rarely differ on these matters. For Dirk Moses, Holocaust memory emerged after the Eichmann trial in 1961, giving rise to a “politics of recognition and entitlement … in which the Holocaust represents the maximal crime.”³² From across the historiographical aisle, Omer Bartov agrees: “the Eichmann trial heralded the emergence of the Holocaust in the United States and subsequently also in Western Europe as the paradigm of evil and the fate of the Jews as the epitome of victimhood”.³³ Even for those who contest the globalization thesis on the basis that the factual specificity of the Holocaust is far from the minds of certain populations, it is clear that these disconnected populations understand Hitler to be the go-to example of evil,³⁴ reflecting a kind of Holocaust "aestheticism".³⁵

Beyond the immediate catalysts, there existed two fundamental geographical and demographical prerequisites that quite naturally promulgated Holocaust memory: the global spread of victims and the transnational nature of European perpetrator culpability. Victims and perpetrators alike were thus conduits for memory production. Though the Eichmann trial acted as a catalyst, Jewish survivors were behind the subsequent explosion of Holocaust memoirs.³⁶ With Western Europe experiencing various moments of truth from as early as the 1960s, the notion that the Holocaust had been a “transnational phenomenon” quite rightly took hold in the wake of the fall of Communism.³⁷ Thus, it is important to state categorically that it is not the natural widespread presence of Holocaust memory that is under scrutiny in this article.

Another natural reason the Holocaust gained an unparalleled infamy is that non-Jewish victims simply did not have a voice in the Western world. For the other group that had been subjected to continental genocide, though antisemitism obviously remained (and remains) an issue, there is a degree of truth to Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago’s claim that “unlike the Jews, whose situation today is clearly distinct from the tradition of persecution, the Roma have continued to be victims of discrimination and atrocities”.³⁸ The number of dead Roma was also far lower than the number of dead Jews, thus ensuring that the latter had more of a shock value. Similarly, dead Soviet prisoners of war hardly mattered in a new world where the Soviets were the enemy.

As for the more immediate causes, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 is widely understood to have been a turning point for Holocaust memory in the West.³⁹ Certainly, in Israel, the Eichmann trial heralded what Dan Stone calls a “deliberately orchestrated attempt to bring Holocaust memory into the centre of Israeli public (as opposed to private) consciousness”.⁴⁰ In many ways, Holocaust memory in America and Israel was tightly intertwined. Peter Novick ascribes particular importance to the 1967 and 1973 wars as providing a practical reminder of the vulnerability of Israel.⁴¹ If pre-Eichmann American and Israeli Jewry had attempted to downplay the victim status of Jews, the wars in the 1960s and 1970s functioned as the high-water mark of a crescendo that flipped the narrative on its head. In the words of Louise Bethlehem, what had been at stake in the Eichmann trial was “a delineation of the specificity of Jewish suffering in a highly determinate political context”.⁴² Revealed by the extensive witness testimonies, the idea that there had been something special about the Jewish Holocaust was propelled to the fore of American and Israeli Jewish consciousness. Eichmann, the head of an office which had dispatched delegates to various parts of Europe with the express purpose of gathering those the Nazis defined as "Jews", was the perfect defendant to reveal how the Holocaust had differed from other Nazi atrocities.

Elsewhere, a wide variety of events heralded a similar but self-critical rise of Holocaust memory which exposed internal perpetrators. In West Germany, a series of investigations into Eastern Front atrocities functioned as a trigger, bringing German criminality into focus.⁴³ Then followed the Eichmann trial and the 1963–1965 trials of Auschwitz guards.⁴⁴ That change had got underway was reflected by ten German länder in 1962 making the years 1933–1945 a required history subject at school.⁴⁵ In France, the Eichmann trial was not quite as important as it had been elsewhere. Samuel Moyn has argued that a national debate over Jean-François Steiner’s book⁴⁶ featured one of the first public discussions of the difference between concentration and death camps (and thus also between resistance members and racial victims), thereby functioning as the turning point in French Holocaust memory.⁴⁷ Yet, sustained calls for official recognition of France’s wartime antisemitism only surfaced after 1989. This notwithstanding, the roots of change originated in the 1960s when what Rebecca Clifford calls “Gaullist and Communist narratives of the Resistance” began to face a systematic challenge.⁴⁸ All of these turning points centred public attention specifically on the Jewish plight. Similar processes occurred elsewhere in Europe.

Thus, a key feature of the process by which the Holocaust attained an iconic status was an inculcating of a new focus on the Nazi targeting of Jews (implicitly understood to be self-identifying ones). This change was a direct challenge to prior notions of “resistance fighters”, “deportees”, and “victims of National Socialism”. Many groups were labelled as “subhuman”, but the public began to learn that Jews had been seen as particularly dangerous, an invidious evil that required special prioritization. Historiographically, “redemptive antisemitism”⁴⁹ and “permanent security”,⁵⁰ models proposed by otherwise opposing scholars, rightly conclude that the Nazis thought there was something negatively special about the Jews. This negative prioritization, though historically correct, morphed into a commemorative prioritization, examples of which are given in the remaining sections of this article. Without denying that Holocaust memory has grown increasingly multidirectional, it is nonetheless the case that the Holocaust attained (and retains) an “iconic status”, a fact which implies that other similar factually delineable events cannot justifiably be given the same status. The fact that victims could not have cared less that they were dying “only” as a part of an economic clear-out of the East, rather than as a part of a genocidal plan, did not figure in the calculations of individuals such as United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) council member Sigmund Storchlitz. Storchlitz, when deliberating on the inclusion of non-Jewish experiences within the term “Holocaust”, objected to such an inclusion only implicitly on the grounds of the Holocaust’s factual specificity, citing the claim that Jewish suffering had somehow been greater.⁵¹

The deliberations specifically over the potential inclusion of the Roma genocide in the USHMM are also rather revealing, for different reasons. Comparative suffering was apparently not on the agenda. Rather, the arguments in favour of including the Roma genocide, advanced primarily by the English and Linguistics professor Ian Hancock (the special adviser on “Gypsy matters” to the Holocaust Memorial Council) point us to the heart of the matter.⁵² Hancock and others (Gabrielle Tyrnauer and Sybil Milton) attempted to draw parallels between the Holocaust and the measures inflicted upon the Roma.⁵³ As Guenther Lewy summarizes most succinctly, “According to Hancock, the Gypsies too had been murdered simply because of who they were”.⁵⁴ Neither side questioned whether the intended total destruction of a group because of "who they were" (which is one element of the factual specificity of the Holocaust) warranted commemorative prioritization over the intended partial destruction of a group. Rather, attempts were made to substantiate sometimes inaccurate numerical, proportional, and ideological claims about similarities between the two crimes, with an assumption that proving that the Nazis had intended the “total destruction” of the Roma should and would lead to commemorative prioritization. It is rather interesting, too, that Guenther Lewy’s commentary on these debates presents only the factual distortions of the pro-inclusion proponents, without considering that the latter’s counter-factual arguments were made from a position of weakness whereby the Holocaust had already been granted pole commemorative position. This prioritization rested on the Holocaust’s factual specificity and was manifested quite blatantly in the name of the museum itself. This incident, then, is just one example of how, though notions of “comparative suffering” would fade into obscurity, the post-1960 period (as a reaction to the pre-1960 obfuscation of Holocaust specificity) burdened society with a link between the Holocaust’s factual specificity and its commemorative exceptionality which would prove difficult to shake. Though both the participants in the contemporary 1980s debate and Guenther Lewy in 1999 explicitly avoided claiming that Holocaust victims suffered more than Roma victims, the unaddressed elephant in the room was why perpetrator intentions had any bearing on the decision over whether to include one genocide or another in the USHMM. On one page Lewy writes that “The purpose of raising these issues is not to engage in what has been called the vulgar exercise of comparative victimization … At stake … is the accuracy of the historical record”, before then abruptly switching over to a discussion of how “the question of similarities in the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies and the Jews became a divisive issue in the planning of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum”.⁵⁵ Lewy offers no commentary on the inherent contradiction present here.

The Holocaust Disputed: Eastern Europe after Communism

Since the fall of Communism, many Eastern European countries have attempted to join the Western European bloc. How, then, may they do this? There are many facets to accession but, as Tony Judt has written, “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket”.⁵⁶ On an official level, Jelena Subotić notes that “many Governments in East European states accepted this new regulation … being careful not to jeopardize the delicate process of EU accession”.⁵⁷ Yet, as she continues, they also “rejected much of the established canon of European memory politics”.⁵⁸ Bearing this in mind, there seem to me to be three primary Eastern European approaches to Holocaust memory since the fall of Communism. The first two, as John-Paul Himka and Joanna Michlic detail, occur in two phases. The first phase came into being “immediately after the fall of communism”, a phase characterized by “(ethno)nationalist” tendencies.⁵⁹ In this first phase, “the memory of the Holocaust continued to be repressed in public discourse”, this repression featuring alongside a “new wave of recycled and modified nationalistic and anti-Semitic narratives about the Jews as perpetrators during the communist period”.⁶⁰ For Himka and Michlic, “a theme of Judeocommunism” has served “to justify and minimize any wrongdoing against the Jews during the Holocaust and to reinforce the narrative of one’s own victimhood during World War II and in the post-1945 communist period.”⁶¹ With reference to point 5 of this article’s memory model – though I do not want to assume that Himka and Michlic would agree - I would point out that it is the use of the “Judeocommunism” conspiracy theory as a way to highlight victimhood which is problematic here. That much of Eastern Europe was indeed victimized under Communism is not in doubt and, equally, it would indeed be possible to propose commemorative equality between Eastern European victims and Holocaust victims without denying the simultaneous existence of Eastern European perpetrators and without making up antisemitic excuses. We now return to Himka and Michlic’s chronology. As the two historians continue, the “second phase of restoration of memory gradually crystallized by the late 1990s and the first years of the new millenium”, a phase featuring “progressive, pluralistic, and civic” concepts which aimed at “endorsing the complex, painful memory of the Holocaust”.⁶² In my view, a third mode of Eastern European memory formation features implicitly within Himka and Michlic’s “second phase”. Alongside, though sometimes in opposition to, the wholesale acceptance of the European memory regime, exists a desire to attain commemorative international (and national, where applicable) equality such that crimes committed against the various nations of Eastern Europe are recognized as commemoratively equal to the Holocaust. This third road, which sits between the denialist-focused ethno-nationalist approach and the “entry ticket”-style acceptance of the primacy of Holocaust memory, has not received proper recognition as a viable way forward.

The problem of differentiating between genuine advocacy for commemorative equality and subtle attempts to avoid facing the Holocaust past can be somewhat eased, though perhaps not entirely solved, with reference to point five of my five-point model. As an example, the attempts by some Ukrainian nationalists to rehabilitate Stepan Bandera⁶³ are quite different to the attempts by some Poles to portray the mass-murder of Poles in WW2 as the beginnings of a deliberate plan to wipe out all Poles.⁶⁴ The latter comparison blurs the distinct differences between the ideological motivations for Nazi persecution of the Jews and Poles and is factually problematic to this extent. Yet, though this contravenes point four of the model (that the facts must feature in the commemoration), it does not justify the actions of a perpetrator by claiming that the undeniable victimhood of Ukraine at the hands of the Soviet Union in the decades prior to WW2 excused Bandera’s participation in mass killings of Poles and Jews during the Nazi invasion. Of course, it would be far better if the Poles who inaccurately portray the Nazis’ intentions against Poles as being akin to the Nazis’ intentions against Jews did not see the need to draw inaccurate similarities. Yet, let us be empathetic. Why do such similarities tend to be drawn? Attempts by various Eastern European nations to draw conceptual links between the Holocaust and other events – though sometimes motivated by a desire to diminish it – just as often function as a reaction to the commemorative prioritization assigned to the Holocaust on the basis of its factual specificity. In other words, had the Holocaust’s factual specificity not been used as a justification for its commemorative rise, Eastern Europeans in the present may not have felt the need to invoke Holocaust similarities to draw commemorative attention to their own plights.

This is not to excuse the factually inaccurate misportrayals of Nazi ideology, nor the even more heinous and malicious excuse-making for perpetrators that is still a common feature of Eastern European discourse. Rather, as Michael Shafir has written, “for trivialization of the Holocaust to lose its largely East European prevalence, we (meaning Jewish historians, political scientists, social scientists) might well stop and ask whether we do not sin ourselves in trivializing other genocides”.⁶⁵ Or, as Anton Weiss-Wendt writes, “the greatest challenge is to explain to the Estonians (or Latvians and Lithuanians for that matter) the difference between Auschwitz and Kolyma, without rushing to emphasize the ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust. Context is everything”.⁶⁶ Note here, as I discuss in the next section, “uniqueness” is a damaging concept not because it is incorrect (as, indeed, every event is unique) but rather because attaching it to only one event implies not a factual uniqueness but a commemorative one. Thus, though instances of both overt and subtle Holocaust denial are rife in Eastern Europe, our opposition to these occurrences must not stray into asserting that the Holocaust is more deserving of commemorative attention than other atrocities.

To conclude this section, it is helpful to discuss several practical examples of how historians often confuse attempts to draw commemorative equality between legitimate Eastern European victim groups and Holocaust victims with the dishonest fact-bending by those who wish to deny perpetrator actions or excuse perpetration with false or real victimhood narratives.

Randolph Braham, when discussing Hungarian president Mátyás Szűrös’s 1989 speech to Hungary’s parliament, took issue with the fact that “Szűrös found it necessary to generalize the Holocaust, lumping the martyrdom of those who perished on racial grounds—a people destined for total liquidation—with the suffering endured and the losses incurred by the Hungarian military during the war”.⁶⁷ Braham is correct that Szűrös was wrong to advocate for a memorialization of the Hungarian military; the Hungarian military had indeed been another factor in the delayed defeat of Nazi Germany and thus were not victims. Yet, despite the fact that the Hungarian military should never have even been in the commemorative conversation, Braham’s stated reason for the inappropriateness of Szűrös’s comparison is that the Hungarian military was not targeted “for total liquidation” in the same way that Jews were. The problem with this reasoning is that it could just have easily been used to justify downplaying the suffering of Hungarian victims of Communism who do deserve recognition. The difference in perpetrator intentions should have been irrelevant. Instead, Braham should have criticized Szűrös because he compared non-victimized perpetrators to Jewish victims. To be clear, even if the Hungarian army had been a victim (which it was not), this would still not justify a non-critical memorialization of the army which ignored its perpetration and assistance of Nazi perpetration. In other words, while Braham had the correct target in his sights, his reasoning reflects a wider commemorative hierarchy which affords prioritization to the victims of the Holocaust on the basis of its factual specificity.

Such considerations are reflected across the field in the use of highly disapproving tones which seemingly deride the suffering of actual Eastern European victims. Omer Bartov, whilst rightly noting how earlier Estonian textbooks ignored “the German war of extermination in the Soviet Union” then goes on to complain that “more recent textbooks tend to create the impression that under German rule all suffered equally terribly”.⁶⁸ The surrounding chapter unempathetically smudges the differences between legitimate desires for recognition of Eastern European suffering under Communism and Nazism on the one hand and, on the other hand, the often-separate claims that Jews were the real perpetrators or that it is right to commemorate perpetrators. As discussed during the earlier exposition of my memory model, the idea that Jewish victims suffered more than other victims (even though Nazism targeted various groups in radically different ways) has no basis. Bartov distinguishes between levels of suffering where, in fact, he should acknowledge that commemorative equality is legitimate but not if it utilizes denial of perpetration and factual distortions. Even if advocacy for commemorative equality is often mixed with factual distortions, one must be careful to counter such distortions with the correct argumentation, thereby ensuring that the “commemorative equality” component is not dismissed.

It is for this reason that it is worth pausing for a moment and differentiating once again between the two primary ways by which people try to advance the commemoration of their own group. The first type is an anti-factual denial of perpetration which amounts to advocacy not for commemorative equality but for a new commemorative inequality where the new group sits atop the hierarchy in place of Holocaust victims. The second type is, in a sense, not anti-factual but afactual in that its primary contention is that the specifics of the mass atrocity should not determine its commemorative position. Yet, despite there being clear differences, and because both of the above methods do not accept that the factual specificity of the Holocaust should grant it a special commemorative position, opponents of commemorative equality find that it suits their purposes to dishonestly lump the two approaches together. This rhetorical tactic of reductio ab Historikerstreit is used to imply that critics of Holocaust memory necessarily wish to memorialize perpetrators. It is easier to apply this attack to Eastern Europeans because their region has a history of promulgating such factual inaccuracies. Yet, if we sever the partnership between factual specificity and commemorative decision-making, it not only allows for commemorative equality between vastly different mass murders but also, crucially, gives us more effective tools to combat the anti-factual perpetrator denials. Let us ask ourselves which of the following is a more effective argument, in the case of Braham’s criticism of the decision to designate the Hungarian military as martyrs. Is it more effective to decry this decision because the Nazis hated Jews in a special way that supposedly justifies a special commemoration or is it more effective to point out the fact that the Hungarian military’s perpetration is not excused by its victimhood, real or imaginary?

Challenging Holocaust Hegemony: “Uniqueness” under the microscope

Functioning alongside the public display of the specificity of the Holocaust, Steffen Klävers argues that “authors such as Saul Friedländer (1977), Yehuda Bauer (1978) and Lucy Dawidowicz (1981) developed the first theses about a historical uniqueness of the Holocaust”.⁶⁹ Although these historians quite brilliantly assisted in revealing which specific features of the Holocaust were unique (in the same way as one can do for any genocide), their contributions also occurred alongside and bolstered the development of a tendency to assert that “the Holocaust is unique” (or “unprecedented”, or “singular”). The position of the Holocaust as commemoratively iconic has proven to be intensely controversial. Understandably, on the basis that factual elements of the Holocaust were mustered as evidence for its singular significance, attacks on the Holocaust’s commemorative status naturally also mix criticisms of the factual extent to which the Holocaust was unique and complaints about the detrimental nature of Holocaust memory culture. In what follows, apart from my criticisms of the “uniqueness” paradigm, I argue that the inclusion of comparisons between the Holocaust and other genocides within arguments for commemorative equality are ultimately counterproductive.

There seem to me to be three specific routes by which attempts have been made to de-pedestal Holocaust memory. Each of these three “attacks” on Holocaust memory culture occurred one after another, in a series of tangled stages. In the present, though, they function simultaneously. It is this mixing of arguments which delays the resolution of the debates. The first route of attack was rooted in the pre-1960 situation (see section entitled ‘The Holocaust Ignored' above) and consisted of various attempts to defend perpetrators by pointing to the existence of a usually false victimhood. Yet, such ahistorical comparisons did not stop after 1960. As described in section 3, Eastern Europe has been blighted by a tendency to rehabilitate fascist collaborators and deny their complicity with Nazi crimes. Another example is that represented by Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber in the 1980s Historikerstreit, discussed in point five of this article’s memory model. A final example of the conflation of perpetrators with victims is the school of thought that rejects the notion of WW2 as being a “good war” in such a way that essentially posits the Nazi defence of its interests as justified.⁷⁰ It is important to note that this first route of attack - the attempted justification of perpetrators’ actions – is frequently invoked to disparage proponents of the other two routes of attack.

The second route of attack, which experienced something of a peak in the 1990s, but continues to this day, attempted to erode the extent to which the field understood the Holocaust to be factually unique.⁷¹ The foremost achievement of these early salvos was destroying the notion that it was somehow impossible to compare the Holocaust to other events without casting doubt on the unique elements of the Holocaust. As I go on to argue, this second route has not, and will not, succeed in defeating the notion of “Holocaust uniqueness”.

The third route of attack argues that the Holocaust has subtracted attention from other crimes in the past and present. Poorly conceptualized echoes of this third route also featured alongside the other two routes of attack but the route has gradually crystallized into a coherent set of arguments. Developing in response came an argument that Holocaust memory represented a “commendable emergence of a cosmopolitan memory” such that it, as Małgorzata Pakier describes, created a “moral community of remembrance, that in a common effort of ‘Never again!’ transgresses any national boundaries”.⁷² Yet, as Amos Goldberg argues, there is no consensus on this issue. ⁷³ Aside from the criticisms about whether one can truly label Holocaust memory as “global”, criticisms subsequently emerged that pointed to how Holocaust memory has had detrimental effects on the commemoration and prevention of other events. Key examples in this vein include: the placing of public restrictions on criticism of Israel (on the basis of the latter’s eternal victim status, resulting from the Holocaust),⁷⁴ Israeli justification of violence against Palestinians on the basis that the latter pose a threat akin to Nazism, and, finally, that the concept of genocide has been given a commemorative and preventative status that affords importance to the specificity of the crime in determining whether one should act. This last critique was most cogently advanced by Dirk Moses in his 2021 book The Problems of Genocide. This work contended that the Holocaust and genocide have become inextricably linked as an ultimate standard of morality, with Moses citing as an example how one Holocaust survivor had switched to opposing intervention in the Biafran conflict in Nigeria from 1967–1970 when investigations concluded that genocide was not on the cards.⁷⁵ The relative inconsideration given to the non-genocidal crimes committed against Eastern Europeans in WW2 fits within this argument. Many other similar critiques have been advanced, with Elisabeth Weber providing examples of an inconsistently applied standard of genocide remembrance, based on the Holocaust paradigm.⁷⁶ Elsewhere, Carol Kidron has proposed that “the proliferation of a ‘universal semiotics’ of genocide suffering and multidirectional memories” may serve to silence particular voices.⁷⁷

Evidence for the problematic connotations of genocide is everywhere. For example, take Eugene Finkel’s influential article which stated that “What’s happening in Ukraine is genocide. Period”. The article does indeed focus on the factual question of whether genocide is occurring in 2022.⁷⁸ Yet, an underlying tone within the article seems to imply that there is something beyond the purely factual at stake in genocide identification because, as Finkel writes, “genocide is considered the absolute nadir of human behaviour”. It is for similar reasons that Elisabeth Weber characterizes the primacy of genocide as entailing a “legal exceptionality”.⁷⁹ For her, the effect this exceptionality has on “the formation of theory” is vast, including in “the development of scholarship, whether or not perpetrators of genocide are or have been brought to trial, whether denial is legal or illegal, and whether or not there are institutional barriers to exploring questions potentially embarrassing for the most powerful states, questions that carry the risk of exposing double standards or active falsification”.⁸⁰ Though the memory of the Holocaust has been used in a variety of positive multidirectional ways, it is quite clear that, by virtue of its linkage to a specific archetypal event, the importance assigned to genocide risks the opportunistic exclusion of particular events from commemorative consideration in the past or preventative action in the present.

“The German Catechism”⁸¹

In what follows, I analyze the recent “Catechism Debate” and its precursors, bringing my critique of the link between factual specificity and commemorative prioritization into the present, with a specific focus on Germany. Aside from continuing this critique, a corollary aim of this section is to exemplify how a resolution to the vitriolic debates over Holocaust memory is being blocked by conflations of the three routes of attack just described. Defenders of the status quo compare honest proponents of the third route of attack to the dishonest proponents of the first route of attack. Equally, proponents of the third route of attack muddle their arguments by incorporating the second route of attack, despite its irrelevance to their goals. Both epistemological mistakes ultimately owe their failure to the unconvincing link between the factual specificity of the Holocaust and its commemorative prioritization.

A good starting point in advancing these critiques is to examine a rather emblematic criticism of Moses’s “Catechism” article. Sybille Steinbacher attacked Moses on a number of fronts. What was particular revealing was her accusation that “attempts to equate the systematic murder of European Jews with other crimes always carry an ideological message”.⁸² The first half of this claim, if we approach it from a factual as opposed to a commemorative angle (and if we focus specifically on the word “equate”), is patently baseless. When discussing various genocides, Moses writes that “the Nazi one differs in important respects from previous solutions because it was perpetrated by a modern and powerful state, and because one of its targets, “the Jews”, were posited by most people as globally dispersed”.⁸³ Elsewhere, Moses, though seeing links between the Holocaust and colonial crimes, acknowledges that the Nazis viewed Jews through a fundamentally different lens than they did other groups.⁸⁴ Setting aside what one thinks of the concept of “permanent security”, it relies on the specificity of each murderous incident because nations and ideologies assess various population groups as being greater or lesser threats to their “permanent security”. Where is the factual equating?

Given that we can dismiss the claim that Moses factually equated the Holocaust (as a whole) with other genocides, one has to wonder whether Steinbacher has unwittingly revealed the motivation behind the assertions of those who, like her, describe the Holocaust as “unprecedented” or “unique”. All such assertions, given the fact that the factual specificity of each event (its uniqueness) is a pre-requisite reality, reveal a much-concealed notion of commemorative hegemony. In other words, Steinbacher is opposed to commemorative equating (or, equality).

Let us turn then, to how the words “unique” and “unprecedented” are commonly deployed. The responses to Donald Bloxham’s 2010 book The Final Solution: A Genocide are particularly revealing.⁸⁵ Doris Bergen believed that she had caught Bloxham in a contradiction, whereby Bloxham’s decision to devote his attention to a book-wide analysis of the Holocaust ran counter to his attacks against “Holocaust uniqueness”.⁸⁶ Bloxham’s response is illuminating: “Bergen mistakes that special uniqueness for the mundane sort [emphasis mine]” thus “ignoring what is special about the claim of the Holocaust’s uniqueness” in the context of the debate.⁸⁷ Though noting that Bergen was correct that writing about a topic entails an acknowledgment of factual “uniqueness”, Bloxham rightly describes this observation as “irrelevant to the discussion of uniqueness in the sense meant”.⁸⁸ Bloxham is operating on the basis that every event is necessarily unique. Therefore, the assertion that an event is unique is a truism. One presumes that Bloxham respects the historians who make such assertions, which is perhaps why he (and I) assume that they are making a political argument for the commemorative prioritization of the Holocaust. It is for this reason that the position of Alan Rosenbaum on this issue is quite mindboggling. In a book entitled Is the Holocaust unique?, he displays an awareness that the phrasing of his book title asks an already-answered question but then complains that critics of “Holocaust uniqueness” trivialize “its unprecedented character” when they dare to remind everyone that “the Holocaust, like all other sociohistorical events, is unique”.⁸⁹ In his view, “recourse to such abstract universalisms fails to account for real event-specifics like context, scope, and dimension; intention; methods; opportunity; blame; and responsibility”.⁹⁰ Clearly, Rosenbaum understands quite well that the question his book really meant to ask was: “In what ways is the Holocaust unique?”. Rather than feigning ignorance of the politicization of the term, he could have simply renamed his book in such a way that its title reflected what the book actually sought to do.

The use of “uniqueness” and/or “unprecedentedness” at the core of seemingly analytical assertions plagues the field of Holocaust studies. For example, Steven Katz’s claim that the Holocaust is the only genocide, though a little evidentially selective, is not necessarily problematic. The problems start to emerge, though, when he asserts with what he presumably takes to be profundity that “the Holocaust … is historically and phenomenologically unique”,⁹¹ as if this were somehow in question and dependant on Katz’s previous achievement of “proving” that the Holocaust was the only genocide. As Norman Finkelstein responds: “even if the evidence sustained Katz’s central thesis, which it does not, it would only prove that The Holocaust contained a distinctive feature. The wonder would be were it otherwise”.⁹²

Dan Michman provides yet another example of a confused usage of the concept of “uniqueness”. He contends that “[Christopher] Browning’s statement [describing the Holocaust as singular] ironically appears in a volume edited by Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses, who have argued against uniqueness”.⁹³ What Michman completely disregards, in a similar manner to Bergen, is the fact that Bloxham and Moses have never argued against the claim that the Holocaust is unique, but only the commemorative hegemony implied when stating such a truism. Michman then goes on to ask, “what, then, should we understand by his [Bloxham’s] term ‘exceptionality,’ or by Browning’s ‘singularity,’ except that there is apparently something in the case of the Holocaust that is impossible to ascertain in other examples of genocide?”.⁹⁴ As I re-read Michman’s chapter, I feel compelled to challenge him to produce a single historical event that does not have something which is “impossible to ascertain” in other events. This is clearly not what is being argued about. Michman completely misreads Bloxham's past comments about “uniqueness”, and those of other anti-“uniqueness” interlocutors. Michman's bizarre victory speech suggests that the ‘uniqueness' debate is merely about acknowledging the standard “uniqueness” which is inherent to every historical event. This incident is yet another example of how intellectual entanglements about the factual specificity of the Holocaust distract from the real commemorative debate. Future advocates for commemorative equality should entirely avoid discussions of the facts of the Holocaust because the extent to which it has links with other events is absolutely irrelevant to commemorative equality. One can only speculate, but perhaps Timothy Snyder, like many Eastern Europeans, fell into this trap. Snyder’s method for advancing the cause of commemorative equality involved comparative analysis in Bloodlands,⁹⁵ linking the Holocaust and the Holodomor (Stalin’s starvation policy in Ukraine) without attempting to find congruent explanations.⁹⁶

The crux of the matter is what follows. I differ from Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner’s argument that the position of “the Holocaust as the defining event of the twentieth century” faces a serious challenge from “scholars who study genocide from a comparative perspective and integrate the history of the Final Solution into the history of modern colonialism”.⁹⁷ The same argument is also advanced by Elisabeth Weber, who contends that “comparative genocide studies as well as research within Holocaust studies have made the claim to exceptionality untenable”.⁹⁸ The commemorative hegemony of the Holocaust may have been irrationally built upon its factual specificity, but it cannot be torn down by arguments which draw comparisons between the Holocaust and other mass atrocities. Though making those arguments is often prohibited by those whom Moses calls “priests”, the arguments themselves do not serve the cause of commemorative equality. As Norman Finkelstein astutely realized, “each time an argument for Holocaust uniqueness is empirically refuted, a new argument is adduced in its stead”.⁹⁹ In other words, one can never prove that an event was not unique. Thus, our arguments should completely ignore notions of factual uniqueness and instead question why a universal feature of every event has afforded a special place to one event.

Moses’s “German Catechism” article, although powerful and effective in provoking debate, thus confused matters by mixing advocacy for commemorative equality with factual comparisons. Moses is a prime proponent of the need to separate factual specificity from commemorative prioritization, as evidenced by how his recent book The Problems of Genocide centres on a critique of the link between genocide (one manifestation of factual specificity) and preventative prioritization. Yet, at one point, in his “German Catechism” article, during a discussion of colonialism, Moses interjects regarding one particular detail that “this may appear unprecedented to the priests”, thus moving away from a discussion about metaphysical “unprecedentedness” to one about the extent to which the Holocaust was factually unprecedented.¹⁰⁰ This creates the impression that there exists an epistemological linkage between the cause of commemorative equality and the scholarly exercise of comparing genocides (even if Moses does not explicitly say this). Of course, it was not so long ago that factually comparing the Holocaust with other genocides was forbidden. Thus, while the results of Moses’s comparisons are irrelevant to the main task of advocating commemorative equality, they function as a performative, rebellious, and defiant assertion of “the right to compare”.

Leading on from this, Moses’s concept of “permanent security” may well be useful as an analytical concept. Yet, though Moses could legitimately argue that “permanent security” offers a better analytical framework than “genocide”, he should be careful not to be seen advocating a displacement of “genocide” from its commemorative hegemony only to place “permanent security” at the top of the food chain. For, “permanent security”, despite being a more inclusive concept, is another manifestation of “factual specificity” and should have no place in the realm of commemorative decision making. The commemorative hegemony of “genocide” should be overturned but must not be replaced.

As a result of Moses’s approach, and also because the Holocaust’s commemorative position was built upon the shoulders of its specificity, respondents to Moses frequently invoke arguments relating to specificity as a generalized response. Saul Friedländer writes that “Dirk Moses and others now question the singularity of the Holocaust from the perspective of comparative genocide research and with a view towards the history of colonial violence. Contrary to Moses’s assertion, however, it is not a question of faith if one views the Holocaust as unique or not, for the Holocaust is not different from other historical crimes only in minor respects; it is fundamentally different.”¹⁰¹ Moses's approach thus enables Friedländer to dodge the real criticism. Friedländer glosses over the metaphysical ‘uniqueness' which Moses frequently highlights, instead latching onto the latter's various empirical digs. We never get to hear how Friedländer responds to the link between the Holocaust's factual specificity and its commemorative prioritisation. Yet, Friedländer’s assertion that “it is not a question of faith if one views the Holocaust as unique or not” is an inherently political statement because it implies that other genocides are not necessarily unique, which they are. The word “singular” may be a clever way to avoid seeming to argue in an intransigent manner, but it nonetheless functions in an almost identical fashion to “unique” and “unprecedented”, with every event having “singular” features such that asserting that an event is “singular” is analytically pointless.

More subtly displaying many of the elements found in the above examples, Yehuda Bauer provided a most complete expression of the current dominant position in a 2008 speech.¹⁰² First, he describes the Holocaust as “unprecedented” rather than “unique” on the grounds that “unprecedented” means “unique, for now” with the possibility of repetition, thus justifying historical analysis. This word also maintains the Holocaust’s status as the first of its kind, even if it were to be repeated. Second, Bauer includes the mandatory, and assuredly heartfelt disclaimer, that the “suffering of the victims … is always the same” from genocide to genocide. As did those who sidelined the Roma from the USHMM, so too Bauer is careful to denounce comparative suffering. The most important part of Bauer’s remarks comes next. He goes on to say that “because it’s the most extreme case, we have to start from that … which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t deal with the other things, quite the contrary, you start with the paradigm, with a paradigmatic genocide and then you deal with others if you can”. Bauer's assertion that “you start with the paradigm” reveals a commemorative subtext. An event cannot be the most extreme genocide whilst being paradigmatic of genocide (i.e. a typical example) in a purely empirical sense because something cannot both rupture normality and define it. In order to make sense of Bauer's remarks, we must see that the Holocaust can only be extreme and paradigmatic if it is paradigmatic not in the factual but rather the commemorative realm. If I have understood Bauer correctly, for him the Holocaust represents not what a "normal" genocide looks like but rather what a genocide which deserves the highest form of commemoration looks like. It is possible that the above interpretation is slightly uncharitable. But, Bauer then subsequently emphasizes that the Holocaust is “unprecedented”, ignoring the fact that every event is unprecedented (even if aspects may be precedented). Analyzing how the Holocaust is “unprecedented” would be a more useful venture and Bauer has contributed to this task in an exemplary fashion within the cited speech and elsewhere.

Conclusion

So, what are the benefits of separating the factual specificity of various mass murders from decisions about their commemorative prioritization?

First and foremost, the clarity of debate would improve. The key question would now be whether various interlocutors favoured affording every instance of mass murder commemorative equality. Of course, debates about what constitutes “mass” would begin, but at least the debates there would be productive moral and policy debates about what matters to a society. Indeed, a turn to this debate would by no means be a failure. Up to now, the debate has been about the wrong things. Arguments have focused on futile pushing and pulling on the commemoratively irrelevant scale which denotes the extent to which the Holocaust was unique. The hope which infused the writing of this article is not that all debate would end, but rather that the debate would turn to relevant subjects. Perhaps the result will be that individuals who previously disagreed about empirical comparisons come together around more important topics.

Second, by virtue of the above clarity, it will become far easier to counter the arguments of denialists. Currently, all too often, the specificity of the Holocaust is wielded like a magic weapon by both virtuous and unvirtuous individuals alike. Yet, the blade has dulled because it catches in its wide arc not just denialists but also perfectly legitimate thinkers. And, even when it catches a denier in its net, the result is not a neutralization of perpetration denial but rather increased indignation at the implication that the suffering of Eastern Europeans is too mundane to be included in the grand European entry ticket.

Acknowledgments

With heartfelt thanks to Dan Stone, Donald Bloxham, Bill Niven and Joseph Cronin for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Harry Legg

Harry Legg is a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh and holds a BA and MRes from Royal Holloway University of London. He has published a recent article on the topic of non-Jews who were labelled as ‘Jewish' by Nazi law. His PhD is a macro-level everyday life analysis of such individuals in Nazi Germany.

Notes

1 I treat “collective Holocaust memory” as the highly varied output of societies, communities and individuals, to one another, about the Holocaust, this being distinctly separate from actual internal memory. As a subsection of “collective Holocaust memory”, this article focuses on commemoration, which I define broadly as all the ways in which we honour a past event and its victims. Thus, commemoration includes not just overt memorial ceremonies but also the societal semantic choices and relative importance assigned to particular events.

2 “Factual specificity” refers to the multitude of features within any event that distinguish it from any other event.

3 Alon Confino, “The Holocaust as a Symbolic Manual: The French Revolution, the Holocaust, and Global Memories,” in Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age, eds. Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, 2015), 56–69 (63).

4 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

5 Yair Auron, “Holocaust Versus Genocide: Teaching Holocaust and Genocide in Israel”, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 25, no. 1 (2011), “Research Forum – Holocaust and Genocide”, 337–346 (338).

6 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Vintage, 2010), 828.

7 Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: University Printing House, 2021), 25.

8 Dan Stone, The Holocaust, Fascism, and Memory: Essays in the History of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 143.

9 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso: New York and London, 1983).

10 Dan Diner, ‘Das kognitive Entsetzen über den Holocaust', Faz (8 July, 2021), available at <https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/warumder-vergleich-von-massenverbrechen-grenzen-hat-17426250.html>.

11 Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Munich: Siedler, 1986). Ernst Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht mehr gehalten werden konnte”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986.

12 “Jew” is written in quotation marks to indicate its Nazi usage. When written without quotation marks, self-identifying Jews are being referred to.

13 Judt, Postwar, 808.

14 Himka and Michlic, Bringing, 5.

15 Judt, Postwar, 822.

16 John-Paul Himka, “Obstacles to the Integration of the Holocaust into Post-Communist East European Historical Narratives”, Canadian Slavonic Papers 50, no. ¾ (2008), 359–372 (360).

17 Rothberg, Multidirectional, 118; Pieter Lagrou, “Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France and the Netherlands 1945-1965”, Past and Present 154, no. 1, (1997), 181–222, 211; Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, (London, Bloomsbury, 2000, 2nd edn.).

18 These ideas were subsequently discredited by proving the limits of coercion.

19 Rebecca Clifford, Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 32.

20 For ludicrous examples of the results of this ignorance see: Lagrou, “Victims”, 192 and Judt, Postwar, 805–806.

21 For two key works which argue against the “Myth of Silence”, see Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York, NYU Press, 2009) & David Cesarani & Eric J. Sundquist, eds., After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012). For works which discuss the remarkable extent of Jewish’ historical production in the postwar years, see, Natalia Aleksiun, “The Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland 1944-1947”, in Gabriel Finder, Natalia Aleksiun, Antony Polonsky, Jan Schwarz, eds., Making Holocaust Memory (Oxford: UK and Portland, OR, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 74-97; Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record!: Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 138; Mark L. Smith, The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019), 124.

22 Boaz Cohen, “Holocaust Survivors and Early Israeli Holocaust Research and Commemoration: A Reappraisal,” in How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives, eds. Martin L. Davies and Claus-Christian W. Szenjmann (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 139–48.

23 Novick, Holocaust, 1-2.

24 See, James Young, The Texture of Memory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 73.

25 For the primacy of the Resistance myth see Doron Bar, “Holocaust and Heroism in the Process of Establishing Yad Vashem (1942-1970)”, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 30, no. 3 (2016), 166–190 (167) and Robert S. C. Gordon, “Which Holocaust? Primo Levi and the Field of Holocaust Memory in Post-War Italy”, Italian Studies 61, no. 1 (2013), 85-113, (91).

26 Robert S. C. Gordon, “Which Holocaust?”, 91 and Rebecca Clifford, Commemorating, 32–34.

27 This term featured heavily in Israeli circles, and more widely in relation to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, see Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 94 and Piotr Forecki, Reconstructing Memory: the Holocaust in Polish Public Debates (Frankfurt: Peter Lang GmbH, 2013), 79.

28 See especially: Novick, The Holocaust, 8.

29 Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner, “Introduction: The Field of Holocaust Studies and the Emergence of Global Holocaust Culture” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, eds. Claudio Fogu, Kansteiner and Presner (London & Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–42 (5).

30 Gordon, “Which Holocaust?”, 85.

31 Bloxham and Kushner, Holocaust, 7–8.

32 Moses, Problems, 15.

33 Bartov, “Defining”, 803.

34 Confino, “Holocaust”, 56 & 63.

35 Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 12.

36 Kushner, -Holocaust, 29.

37 Dan Stone, “Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography After the Cold War”, Patterns of Prejudice 44, no. 5 (2010), 454–468 (466).

38 Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago, “The Politics of Memory: Jews and Roma Commemorate Their Persecution” in The Roma – a Minority in Europe: Historical, Political and Social Perspectives, eds. Stauber and Vago (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013), 117–33 (page not available).

39 Dan Michman, “The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits? Current Challenges of Interpretation and Scope,” in Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches, ed. Norman J.W. Goda (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 17–38 (18); Kansteiner and Presner, “Introduction”, 7; Stone, The Holocaust, 150.

40 Stone, The Holocaust, 150.

41 Novick, Holocaust, 149–51.

42 Bethlehem, Marking Evil, 171–192 (179).

43 Judt, Postwar, 810.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Jean-François Steiner, Treblinka: la révolte d'un camp d'extermination (Fayard: Paris, 1966).

47 Samuel Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005).

48 Clifford, Commemorating, 6 & 52.

49 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution: 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).

50 Moses, Problems.

51 Novick, Holocaust, 219.

52 Key texts to read for Hancock’s position: Hancock, “Uniqueness, Gypsies and Jews” in Remembering for the Future, ed., Yehuda Bauer et al (Oxford: OUP, 1989), 2:2017-2025 and Hancock, “Responses to the Porrajmos: The Romani Genocide,” in Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan Rosenbaum (Boulder: Westview Press, 2009, 3^rd edn.), 75–101.

53 Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press, 2000), 224–28.

54 Lewy, 226.

55 Ibid., 225–26.

56 Judt, Postwar, 803.

57 Jelena Subotić, “The Appropriation of Holocaust Memory in Post-Communist Eastern Europe”, Modern Languages Open 1 (2020), 1–8.

58 Ibid.

59 John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic, eds., Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 7.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid, 8.

63 David R. Marples, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 104.

64 Young, Texture, 123.

65 Michael Shafir, Between Denial and “Complete Trivialization”: Holocaust Negationism in Post-communist East Central Europe (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 2002), 69.

66 Weiss-Wendt, Bringing, 195–222, (219).

67 Randolph L. Braham, “Antisemitism and the Holocaust in the Politics of East Central Europe,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 8, no. 2 (1994), 143–63 (155).

68 Bartov, Bringing, 663–94 (687).

69 Steffen Klävers, “Paradigm Shifts – Critical Reflections on the Historikerstreit 2.0, the Catechism-Debate, and their Precursors”, Society 59, no. 1 (2022), 16–24 (17).

70 Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler!, 29–77.

71 This mostly occurs in the fields of comparative genocide and colonialism studies. See, recently: Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster, LIT Verlag, 2011). In the 1990s, key comparative criticisms included: David Stannard, “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” in Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan Rosenbaum (Boulder: Westview Press, 2009, 3^rd edn.), 295–340 & Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1997).

72 Małgorzata Pakier, The Construction of European Holocaust Memory: German and Polish Cinema After 1989 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), 11. For the seminal formulation of this viewpoint: David Levy and Natan Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

73 Amos Goldberg, Marking, 3–29 (7).

74 Moses, “The German Catechism”.

75 Moses, Problems, 443.

76 Elisabeth Weber, Probing, 389–410.

77 Carol Kidron, Marking, 146–70 (163).

78 Eugene Finkel, “‘What’s happening in Ukraine is genocide. Period”, The Washington Post, 5 April 2022 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/05/russia-is-committing-genocide-in-ukraine/.

79 Weber, “Catastrophes”, 394.

80 Ibid.

81 Dirk Moses, “The German Catechism”, Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 May (2021), available at: https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german-catechism/.

82 Belltower News, interview with Sybille Steinbacher, “Der Holocaust ist Präzedenzlos”, March 31 (2022), available at: https://www.belltower.news/historikerstreit-2-0-der-holocaust-ist-praezedenzlos-129787/.

83 Dirk Moses, “Dialectic of Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, New Fascism Syllabus, (21 June 2021).

84 Moses, Problems, 277–331.

85 Jürgen Matthäus, Martin Shaw, Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen and Donald Bloxham, “Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Journal of Genocide Research 13, no. 1–2 (2011), 107-152.

86 Ibid, Doris Bergen, “Challenging uniqueness: decentering and recentering the Holocaust”, 129–34.

87 Ibid, Donald Bloxham, “Response – Discussing genocide: two moralities and some obstacles”, 135–152 (142).

88 Ibid.

89 Rosenbaum, Unique?, 3.

90 Ibid.

91 Katz, Unique?, 55–102 (55).

92 Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London & New York: Verso, 2003, 2nd edn), 44.

93 Michman, “Jewish Dimension”, 19.

94 Ibid.

95 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011).

96 Tom Lawson, Review of Bloodlands, Reviews in History, no. 2036 (December 2016), available at <https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2036>. [accessed 24 May 2022].

97 Kansteiner and Presner, “Introduction”, 34.

98 Weber, “Catastrophes”, 389.

99 Finkelstein, Holocaust, 43.

100 Moses, “German Catechism”.

101 Saul Friedländer, “A Fundamentally Singular Crime”, The Journal of Holocaust Research 36, no. 1 (2022), 39–43 (40).

102 Yehuda Bauer, “Comparing the Holocaust to Other Genocides”, Yad Vashem YouTube Channel, uploaded 17 April 2008, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsfz8qWPcAw&t=342s.