Talk:The Holocaust

Picture at top right of page

The information describes to be sent left was to the gas chambers, to be sent right forced labour. To my knowledge, this is true, but that is facing away from the entrance to aushwitz, the picture is facing to the entrance. This does have relevance to the picture as the SS officer is clearly pointing to the gas chamber hence why the women with the baby is going there. I don't want to change anything without discussing this first and getting the facts right. Shaunthered (talk) 22:24, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Add to the "See Also Section" * Incendiary Weapons * Napalm * White Phosphorous * Molotov Cocktail * Agent Orange etc...

As the title of this article suggests, via etymology it clearly has failed to link to corresponding articles. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.0.76 (talk) 19:30, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Too tangential/obscure. The 'see also' section is already massive, and these topics are not obvious follow-up material for someone interested in this topic. Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 22:22, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

It's a disingenuous request, implying that the "real" meaning of holocaust is destructive burning... as at Dresden. Paul B (talk) 22:27, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Then all use of the word Holocaust within the article is disingenuous verbiage. In addition; "This article is semi-protected indefinitely in response to an ongoing high risk of vandalism." The semi-protection of the invalid article (see "The Holocaust" and the application of the word within) by moderators has yet to be explained when its contents are misleading and can be construed as vandalism of language and misleading those in pursuit of historical revision materials. If the intended goal of the article is the one sided propagation of war & atrocity material for personal goals then it should not be hosted on a site that alleges to be a Free Encyclopaedia and kept to a private web address.

"The writing is on the wall."

Lead image

I appreciate that changes to articles like this are often controversial, so I'm asking here first. Basically, the current lead image is used here under the non-free content criteria- meanwhile, we have a a large number of free images which illustrate the subject. Could we please have a free image to lead the article? J Milburn (talk) 22:47, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

The Holocaust was not only a European event as stated by Dr. Robert Satloff in his book, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands.

It is wrong to define the Holocaust as the murder of 6 million EUROPEAN jews. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum took out the word "European" in 2006, following request from top Holocaust scholars. Yad Vashem tells the story of the Shoah in French North Africa - Tunisia, ALgeria and Morocco, in Italian Libya, in Iraq (Farhud) and in Palestine.

See hsitorically correct map of German expansion at: http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/about/related/maps/german_expansion.pdf

The Holocaust is a Jewish tragedy as stated by Sir Martin Gilbert, who correctly declared that the Holocaust in French North Africa was part of the Shoah in France. It is very unfortunate that there is a wrong consensus to make the Holocaust a European event - the Nazi regime planned to kill Jews - period. The RESULTS of the Final Solution was the tragic destruction of Jewish communities in the continent of Europe.

Holocaust scholars cannot state that the specifity of the Shoah was that the Nazi regime wanted to kill Jews everywhere (correct statement by Bauer), and then limit the genocide of the Jews to the European continent.

A correct meaningful definition of the Holocaust as per statements by Yehuda Bauer, Sir Martin Gilbert, Himmler, Hitler, the USHMM and others:

Definitions that focus only on antisemitism in the ideology of the perpetrators and only on Jews as victims, limit the scope of Holocaust education. Elie Wiesel appropriately declared that all the Jews were victims, but not all the victims were Jewish. Y. Bauer, an Israeli scholar and a most respected authority on the subjects of the Holocaust, declared that Nazism’s goal to reorganize humanity according to race all over the globe did not endanger the Jews only. The Nazis planned to implement a global solution to the Jewish question, and to create a racist world dominated by the “Aryan” race. He explained that the unprecedentedness of the Holocaust is “based on unprecedentedness of National Socialism/Nazism as a threat to all humans” – thus, Shaked stated: The Nazis decided who did not have the right to live. I combined different definitions (mainly Bauer; Yad Vashem, and the USHMM), and came up my own definition, which I think reflect the impact of Nazism and the historical realities of the Holocaust era:

The Holocaust refers to the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored massacre by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, of more than 11 million undesirable ‘others’/Christians/Gentiles and Jews, during the Holocaust era, 1933-45. Because of WHO they are: “Although Jews were the primary victims, millions of others/Gentiles/Christians labeled “undesirable,” “enemies of the state,” or “subhuman” were also murdered. “Nazis targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority:" Roma (Gypsies), the handicapped - the physically and mentally challenged - at least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled people were murdered in the Euthanasia Program-, the “Black” or Afro-German, African-American and Jewish American soldiers, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles - the Germans targeted the Christian Polish intelligentsia for killing, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet citizens for forced labor in Germany or in occupied Poland; Russians - more than three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment, and others).

Because of WHAT they did: Other groups were persecuted on political and behavioral grounds - because of WHAT they did: Among them Communists, Socialists and trade unionists, Jehovah's Witnesses - religious dissidents- and homosexuals (from the earliest years of the Nazi regime, homosexuals and others deemed to be behaving in a socially unacceptable way were persecuted). Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.” Shoah. “At the center of the Holocaust stood the Shoah. Shoah is a Hebrew term, “meaning great disaster, and also applied to such natural catastrophes as floods and earthquakes.” “The word Shoah was chosen in Israel and institutionalized by the Knesset on April 12, 1951, when it established Yom Ha-Shoah Ve Mered Ha-Getaot, the national day of remembrance.”

The Hebrew term Sho’ah is used to describe the murder of approximately six million Jews including 1,500,000 children, the almost complete destruction of the European Jewish communities, and the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people, from France in the west to the Soviet Union in the east and from Latvia in the north to French North Africa and Italian Libya in the south, in Iraq (Farhud), and in the rest of the world.

“… Shoah is an accurate description of the genocide of the Jews from a Jewish perspective, since it evokes the fact that this was indeed a disaster for the Jewish people. It is free of religious connotations … Since Claude Lanzmann’s film entitled Shoah, French intellectuals have tended to use that Hebrew-language term.”  
“Germans use the troubling term ‘Judenvernichtung,’ same term which Nazis used and because “destruction of the Jews” evokes a scientific, methodical, detached, clinical operation (effect of creating detachment, both personal and moral; has a bureaucratic ring, military neatness …) ....”  “… industrial methods were used for the mass extermination of a whole people.”  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Edith Perlman (talk • contribs) 23:36, 27 September 2010 (UTC)