Matt references The Zone of Interest, a film that depicts the lives of the Auschwitz commandant and his family in their luxury villa outside of the death camp. Naturally, The Zone of Interest completely erases Jews from the narrative of the Holocaust, which is why it’s easy for Matt to weaponize it to make such inaccurate and offensive comparisons.
WHAT IS HOLOCAUST UNIVERSALIZATION?
"[Holocaust universalization turns the Holocaust into] a joke, a mere moment in history that is no longer relevant unless through an exaggerated comparison, [and] terms of reference that have lost all depth and all substance."
- Dr. Elana Heidenman, Holocaust Historian
Holocaust universalization is the tendency to treat the Holocaust as “public property,” stripping Jews of their unique experience. Instead, the Holocaust is treated as a tragedy that befell onto mankind, rather than a genocide that specifically and intentionally targeted Jews. It’s the tendency to use the Holocaust as a rhetorical tool, a measure of comparison, or political football.
The universalization of the Holocaust erases Jews’ “right” to the memory and understanding of the Holocaust. The world largely treats the Holocaust as a “lesson to be learned,” rather than a genocide that decimated the Jewish community.
YES, THE NAZI TREATMENT OF THE JEWS WAS UNIQUE...
...But that doesn’t mean that Jews have suffered “more” or that other people’s traumas aren’t as important. Acknowledging the uniqueness and particularity of the mechanism and motivations behind the Holocaust is not an invalidation of the suffering of others.
So what makes the Holocaust unique?
- Industrialization: the Nazis quite literally developed technology to systematically exterminate the largest amount of Jews as possible in the shortest amount of time possible. This has never happened in any other genocide at this scale, before or since.
- A foundation of antisemitism: unlike genocides that have targeted other religious, ethnic, national, and racial groups, the Nazis and their collaborators had over 2000 years of deeply-engrained antisemitic propaganda working in their favor. This allowed for widespread collaboration, complicity, and indifference across Nazi and Axis-occupied territories in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
THE "OTHER 5 MILLION"
A major excuse for Holocaust universalization is the fictitious “6 million Jews and 5 million others” Holocaust victim figure.
In the 1970s, Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal felt frustrated about the non-Jewish world’s lack of care about the Holocaust. So he invented a figure to de-emphasize the Jewish nature of the genocide, knowing that the world would likely be more interested in the plight of others. Historians who knew him say that he chose the figure carefully: 5 million was a large number, but not a number large enough to obscure the 6 million Jewish victims.
35 million people died in World War II as a result of Nazi aggression. That said, no more than half a million non-Jewish civilians were exterminated in death camps.
Jews and Jews alone were universally condemned to the Nazi policies of the Final Solution. Only Roma and Sinti were subjected to similar treatment based on “race” alone, though in their case, the Nazis’ policies of extermination were applied inconsistently across Europe. While Disabled individuals were murdered in the Nazis’ Aktion T4 “Euthanasia” (euphemism for eugenics) program, Aktion T4 was discontinued in 1941 after widespread public outcry. No such outcry would’ve stopped the Nazis’ genocide of Jews, nor did such outcry even exist, thanks to 2000+ years of deeply-engrained European antisemitism.
THE ANTISEMITISM OF IT ALL
It’s important to understand that the Nazi persecution of many other non-Jewish groups was ultimately rooted in their antisemitism. For example, the Nazis believed homosexuality was rampant in Judaism and a Jewish “disease” that needed eradication. The Nazis targeted the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, for instance, which worked for the advancement of the rights of transgender individuals, because its founder, Magnus Hirschfeld, was Jewish.
Throughout its course, the attitude of the Nazi regime toward homosexuality was that “homosexuality was wrong because it was a sick perversion of the Jews, while Jews were bad because they were sodomites and pedophiles just like homosexuals.”
Likewise, the Nazi persecution of communists and Slavic ethnic groups, as well as their invasion of the Soviet Union, was rooted in antisemitic conspiracies of alleged “Judeo-Bolshevism.” According to a conspiracy put forth by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, the “Judeo-Bolsheviks” were behind the 1917 Russian Revolution with the aim to destroy western civilization.
NEVER AGAIN
Like everything to do with the memory of the Holocaust, the phrase “never again” has now been widely universalized (e.g. “never again for anyone”), stripping the expression, in this particular context, of its origin and true meaning.
In the context of the Holocaust, the expression “never again” has its roots in the Zionist poem “Never Again Shall Masada Fall,” written by Yitzhak Lamdan in 1927. The poem was not obscure to the victims of the Holocaust by any means; in fact, it became a rallying cry for the partisans of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
After the American forces liberated Buchenwald in 1945, the freed prisoners displayed signs with “Never Again” in a number of languages. However, there was a split between Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners regarding the meaning behind this message. For the non-Jewish prisoners, who were largely political prisoners, “Never Again” meant never again to fascism. On the other hand, the Jewish prisoners understood “Never Again” to mean never again to the specific tragedy that had befallen them and their families.
By the late 1940s, “Never Again” had become a motto for kibbutzniks in Mandate Palestine and the nascent State of Israel. Abba Kovner, a Jewish partisan who later made Aliyah, further popularized the phrase in Israel, understanding it to mean “never again [will] Jewish blood be spilled unavenged.”
FROM UNIVERSALIZATION TO DENIAL
Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that asserts that the Holocaust is either a myth, an exaggeration, or a fabrication.
Holocaust denial takes many forms. Sometimes it’s outright denial that the Holocaust happened. Most Holocaust denial, though, does not entirely deny the genocide of 6 million Jews but instead distorts established facts about the Holocaust. This is also known as Holocaust revisionism or soft Holocaust denial.
"[The Holocaust] is not an example of man's inhumanity to man. It was man's inhumanity to Jews."
- Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel
A SLIPPERY SLOPE
Holocaust universalization is an inevitable, slippery slope into Holocaust denial. When we make things into the Holocaust that are not the Holocaust, we inherently distort the established facts about the Holocaust. That in itself is Holocaust denial.
The Frank family was not hiding because they were ashamed of their Jewish identity or because they feared deportation. They were hiding because they knew that if they were found, they would be exterminated.
LEAVING SURVIVORS BEHIND
Holocaust universalization not only distorts the memory of the Holocaust and carves a pathway for Holocaust denial to take root, but it actually harms the health of Holocaust survivors.
- Holocaust universalization is exploitative. Think of the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to you. Now imagine that trauma carelessly depicted everywhere, all the time. How would you feel? Increased Holocaust exposure for second and third generation survivors correlates with higher incidences of mental illnesses or behaviors, such as disordered eating.
- The universalization of the Holocaust obfuscates the Nazis’ antisemitism, which in turn makes it harder to adequately fight antisemitism. Meanwhile, today’s antisemites continue harming Holocaust survivors: from Hamas, which murdered and kidnapped Holocaust survivors on October 7, to the murder of Holocaust survivor Karen Diamond in the antisemitic firebombing of a hostage rally in Boulder, Colorado this year.
SOME TOUGH QUESTIONS
How many of you who relentlessly compare every issue to the Holocaust ever pause to care for the destruction that the Nazis left behind? How many of you have dedicated your time, energy, and resources to relieve aging Holocaust survivors of their plight, including high rates of poverty and medical conditions, often exacerbated by the abuse they endured at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators?
While you carelessly plaster the darkest memories of the Holocaust all over your social media feed, do you ever take time to combat the evil — that is, unchecked antisemitism — that actually caused the Holocaust in the first place? Do you take the concerns of Holocaust survivors seriously vis-à-vis the shocking resurgence and normalization of the world’s oldest hatred? Or do you only listen to the few Holocaust survivors that validate your pre-existing views, while ignoring the cries of the majority?
Here’s the bottom line: you don’t actually care about the Holocaust if you insist on continuing to cause harm to those the Nazis once victimized. So find another tragedy to exploit and leave the Jewish community alone.
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