Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What is the origin of the word Holocaust?
The word "holocaust" originally derived from the Greek word holokauston, meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering," or "a burnt sacrifice offered to a god." In Greek and Roman pagan rites, gods of the earth and underworld received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full. The word "holocaust" was later adopted in Greek translations of the Torah to refer to the olah,[3] standard communal and individual sacrificial burnt offerings that Jews were required[4] to make in the times of the Beit HaMikdash (Temple in Jerusalem). In its Latin form, holocaustum, the term was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jewish people by the chroniclers Roger of Howden[5] and Richard of Devizes in England in the 1190s.[6]
Valiante compared Steyn to James Keegstra, an Alberta high school teacher who taught and tested his students on how Jews "created the Holocaust to gain sympathy. They basically talk about the same theories. This is not a civil dialogue." She said that, in Germany, long before the Holocaust, "it was the words that set the stage for what happened later on... We may end up with the same fate, and that is at the heart of why [the complainants] wanted to take this on."
The Hebrew word Shoah is preferred by some people due to the supposed theologically and historically unacceptable nature of the word "holocaust".[19] The American historian Walter Laqueur (whose parents died in the Holocaust) has argued that the term "Holocaust" is a "singularly inappropriate" term for the genocide of the Jews as it implies a "burnt offering" to God.[20] Laqueur wrote, "It was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim".[20] The British historian Geoff Eley wrote in a 1982 essay entitled "Holocaust History" that he thought the term Holocaust implies "a certain mystification, an insistence on the uniquely Jewish character of the experience".[20]
The sub-title of Hillgruber's book drew controversy with the Swiss historian Micha Brumlik in an essay entitled "New Myth of State" first published in "Die Tagezeitung" newspaper on 12 July 1986, commenting that the use of the word "Zerschlagung" (destruction) for the Germans indicated that an act of extreme violence was committed against the Germans while the Jews were assigned only the neutral term "Ende" (end) to describe the Holocaust. Brumlik argued that in his view, Hillgruber by his use of the word "End" to label the Holocaust implied that the "Shoah" was just something terrible that happened to the Jews of Europe, but it was not anybody's fault. Brumlik accused Hillgruber of reducing German history down to the level of "Landserheft" (a type of comics in Germany glorifying war). Brumlik argued that Hillgruber's thesis about the Holocaust as one of many genocides, instead of a unique event, was a form of "psychological repression" to avoid dealing with guilt over the Holocaust. Brumlik wrote: "Even if we do not look into Stanlist totalitarianism and its murderous work camps, the expansionism of the Soviet Union since 1945, the irresponsible foreign policy adventures of the Soviet Union and its thoroughly repressive regime, it now is becoming clear what role anticommunism played and plays in the political culture of psychological repression...Only if this equation is made; only if is further insinuated that the Soviet Union wanted to exterminate the Germans; other then does it seem legitimate that the nation conducting the war protected the annihilation camps". Brumlik wrote that Hillgruber was clearly trying to suggest that the Soviet Union was waging genocide against the Germans, which made the war effort of Nazi Germany in the East to be as Hillgruber would have it a "justified" defense of German civilians even as at the same time the defensive efforts of the Wehrmacht allowed the Holocaust to continue. Brumlik wrote though "Zweierlei Untergang" only covered the period from June 1944 to May 1945, it did served to implicitly to turn what was a war of conquest on the part of Germany into a defensive struggle to protect Germans while pushing the Jews being exterminated by the "Reich" into the background. Brumlik wrote that Hillgruber in "Zweierlei Untergang" had played up the role of Germans as victims in World War II at the expense of Germans as perpetrators. The American historian Gordon A. Craig expressed the view that Hillgruber's choice of the word "Ende" for the Holocaust suggested that the Holocaust was "something that just sort of happened".
In "Is the Holocaust Unique?" (1995), Shimon Samuels described the acrimonious debate in Holocaust scholarship between "specifists" and "universalists". The former fear debasement of the Holocaust by invidious comparisons. The latter consider it immoral to hold the Holocaust as beyond comparison. Peter Novick argued that it is "deeply offensive" to view the Holocaust as unique: What else can all of this possibly mean except 'your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary'  ... "
The term "African Holocaust" is preferred by some academics, such as Maulana Karenga, because it implies intention. One problem noted by Karenga is that the word "Maafa" can also translate to "accident", and in the view of some scholars the holocaust of enslavement was not accidental. Ali Mazrui notes that the word "holocaust" is a "dual plagiarism" since the term is derived from Ancient Greek and thus, despite being associated with the genocide of the Jews, no one can have a monopoly over the term. Mazrui states: "This borrowing from borrowers without attribution is what I call 'the dual plagiarism.' But this plagiarism is defensible because the vocabulary of horrors like genocide and enslavement should not be subject to copyright-restrictions."
Likewise, Broszat criticised Irving for accepting the "fantastic" claims of the SS "Obergruppenführer" Karl Wolff that he did not know about the Holocaust (Irving's argument was that if Wolff did not know about the Holocaust, how could Hitler have known), despite the fact that Wolff was convicted of war crimes in 1963 on the basis of documentary evidence implicating him in the Holocaust. Broszat accused Irving of seeking to generate a highly misleading impression of a conference between Hitler and the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy in April 1943 by re-arranging the words to make Hitler appear less brutally anti-Semitic than what the original notes showed. Along the same lines, Broszat maintained that the picture of World War II drawn by Irving was done in a such way to engage in moral equivalence between the actions of the Axis and Allied states, leading to Hitler's "fanatical, destructive will to annihilate" being downgraded to being "...no longer an exceptional phenomenon". The criticism by Broszat was considered to be especially damaging to Irving because Broszat had based his critique largely by examining the same primary sources Irving had used for "Hitler's War".
There was also a period when the spelling of a small number of words was altered in what is now regarded as a misguided attempt to make them conform to what were perceived to be the etymological origins of the words. For example, the letter "b" was added to "debt" (originally "dette") in an attempt to link it to the Latin "debitum", and the letter "s" in "island" is a misplaced attempt to link it to Latin "insula" instead of the Old English word "īġland", which is the true origin of the English word. The letter "p" in "ptarmigan" has no etymological justification whatsoever, only seeking to invoke Greek despite being a Gaelic word.
David M. Rubenstein, one of the founders of Carlyle Group, who had bought a Torah and donated it to Central Synagogue, sought the authenticity of scrolls by hiring Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust historian and former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Research Institute. Berenbaum said "What I found is the claim for the origin of the Torah could not be verified."
Czechoslovak–Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, stated: "Let us be clear: … Shoah, Churban, Judeocide, whatever we call it, is the name we give to the attempted planned total physical annihilation of the Jewish people, and its partial perpetration with the murder of most of the Jews of Europe." He also contends that the Holocaust should include only Jews because it was the intent of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews, while the other groups were not to be totally annihilated.[26] Inclusion of non-Jewish victims of the Nazis in the Holocaust is objected to by many persons including, and by organizations such as Yad Vashem, an Israeli state institution in Jerusalem established in 1953 to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.[27] They say that the word was originally meant to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such totality and specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.[27] Nobel laureate and Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, does consider other groups, besides the Jews, as Holocaust victims, declaring to President Jimmy Carter, "Not all the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but all Jews were victims," when he asked his support for a national Holocaust museum in Washington.
In 1984, the long-term efforts of a Navy Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff, to convince the Department of Defense to participate in the national DRVH were successful. For a number of years he had been making the case at many levels of military leadership that General Eisenhower had already initiated a remembrance program when, after U.S. forces liberated Ohrdruf (a sub-camp of Buchenwald), Eisenhower called for reporters from the U.S. and U.K. to document evidence of the Holocaust, so that, Eisenhower said, the time would never come when such atrocities could be denied, and reports about them could be regarded as mere propaganda. Additionally, Eisenhower's words -- "that the American GI did not always understand what he was fighting for, so he should see this evidence, to understand, at least, what he was fighting against" —became, Resnicoff successfully argued, the foundation of an historic military effort to remember and learn from the Holocaust that today's military had the duty to honor and carry on.
In 1996, BAV distributed its first book, originally published the previous year, entitled "Soykırım Yalanı" ("The Holocaust Deception" or "The Holocaust Lie"). The publication of "Soykırım Yalanı" sparked controversy. This book claims that "what is presented as Holocaust is the death of some Jews due to the typhus plague during the war and the famine towards the end of the war caused by the defeat of the Germans."
The Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County is a Holocaust memorial, a museum and a tolerance center in Glen Cove, on the North Shore of Long Island in New York State. The museum and tolerance center is situated within the original Gold Coast Mansion "Welwyn", in what is now Welwyn Preserve County Park. The memorial also includes the adjoining garden, which was originally designed by the Olmsted Brothers, the influential American landscape architectural firm.
In Turkey, in 1996, the Islamic preacher Harun Yahya distributed thousands of copies of a book which was originally published the previous year, entitled "Soykırım Yalanı" ("The Holocaust Lie") and mailed unsolicited texts to American and European schools and colleges. The publication of "Soykırım Yalanı" sparked much public debate. This book claims, "what is presented as Holocaust is the death of some Jews due to the typhus plague during the war and the famine towards the end of the war caused by the defeat of the Germans." In March 1996, a Turkish painter and intellectual, Bedri Baykam, published a strongly worded critique of the book in the Ankara daily newspaper "Siyah-Beyaz" ("Black and White"). A legal suit for slander was brought against him. During the trial in September, Baykam exposed the real author of the book as Adnan Oktar. The suit was withdrawn in March 1997.
'khurbn eyrope (חורבן אײראָפּע), is the term for the Holocaust in Yiddish. The term uses the word 'Khurbn' of Hebrew origin (Hebrew: חרבן‎; Hebrew pronunciation: 'Khur'ban') which means "Destruction", and translates as "Destruction of Europe". The word "Khur'ban/'Khurbn" is also used for the destruction of both the First and the Second Temple in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Max Kaufmann's early (1947) history of the genocide in Latvia was called Khurbn Lettland, that is, The Destruction of the Jews of Latvia.[40] Published later, Raul Hilberg's most important work was The Destruction of the European Jews.[41]
By the late 1960s, the term was starting to be used in this sense without qualification. Nora Levin's 1968 book The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945 explains the meaning in its subtitle, but uses the unmoderated phrase "The Holocaust". An article called "Moral Trauma and the Holocaust" was published in the New York Times on February 12, 1968.[16] However, it was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the generally accepted conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified and with a capital letter, a usage that also spread to other languages for the same period.[17] The 1978 television miniseries titled "Holocaust" and starring Meryl Streep is often cited as the principal contributor to establishing the current usage in the wider culture.[18] "Holocaust" was selected as the Association for the German Language's Word of the Year in 1979, reflecting increased public consciousness of the term.
Many authors argue that a metaphorical (or otherwise comparative) use of the word "Holocaust" constitutes Holocaust trivialization, and many consider such uses offensive. In the words of Holocaust survivor and memoirist Elie Wiesel,I cannot use [the word 'Holocaust'] anymore. First, because there are no words, and also because it has become so trivialized that I cannot use it anymore. Whatever mishap occurs now, they call it 'holocaust'. I have seen it myself in television in the country in which I live. A commentator describing the defeat of a sports team, somewhere, called it a 'holocaust'. I have read in a very prestigious newspaper published in California, a description of the murder of six people, and the author called it a holocaust. So, I have no words anymore.
According to David Caron, the comparison of AIDS and the Holocaust has inspired more anger than other comparisons relating to genocides. Arlene Stein writes that the AIDS–Holocaust metaphor is part of a discourse in which the "Holocaust has become a universal symbol of injustice". Susan Sontag was critical of the metaphor, telling a reporter that "The Holocaust was inflicted by human beings on human beings. It’s wrong to compare a situation in which there was real culpability to one in which there is none... The word [Holocaust] should not be used metaphorically". According to a 2013 Vanity Fair article, it is a "commonly heard metaphor about AIDS". However, research by Andrea Kalmin and Katherine Bischoping in 1999 indicated that most Americans did not make comparisons between the Holocaust and the victimization of sexual minorities. Critics maintain that the AIDS–Holocaust metaphor is a form of Holocaust trivialization.
Pressac was originally a Holocaust denier who, with Robert Faurisson, attempted to disprove what he considered historically inaccurate depictions of the concentration camps as extermination camps. However, upon visiting Auschwitz in 1979 and 1980, Pressac was able to view first-hand the extensive archive of original German documents thanks to the courtesy of the museum staff and administration unaware of the true purpose of his research. In Poland, Holocaust denial is punishable by law.
On April 18, 2007, in a "DRVH" ceremony held in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, President George W. Bush delivered an address that linked definitions and words—including the "new word", "genocide", that had come out of the Holocaust experience—to the challenge to remember:
This is a place devoted to memory. Inside this building are etched the words of the Prophet Isaiah: "You are my witness." As part of this witness, these walls show how one of the world's most advanced nations embraced a policy aimed at the annihilation of the Jewish people. These walls help restore the humanity of the millions who were loaded into trains and murdered by men who considered themselves cultured. And these walls remind us that the Holocaust was not inevitable; it was allowed to gather strength and force only because of the world's weakness and appeasement in the face of evil.
Pete McCloskey gave an address to the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in 2000. When he ran in the 2006 Republican Party primary for congress, there was controversy over exactly what he said about the Holocaust at the event. According to the "San Jose Mercury News" McCloskey said at the time, "I don't know whether you are right or wrong about the Holocaust," and referred to the "so-called Holocaust". McCloskey replied that he has never questioned the existence of the Holocaust, and the 2000 quote referred to a debate over the number of people killed. McCloskey said in an interview with the "Contra Costa Times" on January 18, 2006 that the IHR transcript of his speech was inaccurate. Journalist Mark Hertsgaard of "The Nation", in response to criticism of an article he wrote praising McCloskey's campaign against Pombo, stated that a tape he had viewed of McCloskey's speech to the IHR did not contain the "right or wrong" wording present in the transcript.
The sub-title of Hillgruber's book drew controversy with the Swiss historian Micha Brumlik in an essay entitled "New Myth of State" first published in "Die Tagezeitung" newspaper on 12 July 1986, commenting that the use of the word "Zerschlagung" (destruction) for the Germans indicated that an act of extreme violence was committed against the Germans while the Jews were assigned only the neutral term "Ende" (end) to describe the Holocaust. Brumlik argued that in his view, Hillgruber by his use of the word "End" to label the Holocaust implied that the "Shoah" was just something terrible that happened to the Jews of Europe, but it was not anybody's fault. Brumlik accused Hillgruber of reducing German history down to the level of "Landserheft" (a type of comics in Germany glorifying war). Brumlik argued that Hillgruber's thesis about the Holocaust as one of many genocides, instead of a unique event, was a form of "psychological repression". The American historian Gordon A. Craig expressed the view that Hillgruber's choice of the word "Ende" for the Holocaust suggested that the Holocaust was "something that just sort of happened".
The question [of whether the IHR denies the Holocaust] appears to turn on IHR's Humpty-Dumpty word game with the word Holocaust. According to Mark Weber, associate editor of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review [now Director of the IHR], "If by the 'Holocaust' you mean the political persecution of Jews, some scattered killings, if you mean a cruel thing that happened, no one denies that. But if one says that the 'Holocaust' means the systematic extermination of six to eight million Jews in concentration camps, that's what we think there's not evidence for." That is, IHR doesn't deny that the Holocaust happened; they just deny that the word 'Holocaust' means what people customarily use it for.
Popes have seldom spoken in direct simple sentences. Pius, a trained diplomat, was even less direct than most. Reading encyclicals and other papal statements often requires interpretive skills to determine just exactly what is said. As a result, people can read into some papal words what they want to hear. And looked at in hindsight, Pius' words of protest fall short when measured against the horror of Nazi machinery of destruction.
The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (German: Endlösung der Judenfrage) was the Nazis' own term, recorded in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, and translated into English for the Nuremberg Trials in 1945.[32] Before the word "Holocaust" became normative this phrase was also used by writers in English. For example, in William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the genocide is described as "The Final Solution" (in quotation marks; the word "Holocaust" is not mentioned).[33] In both English and German, "Final Solution" has been widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust".[34] Whereas the term "Holocaust" is now often used to include all casualties of the Nazi death camps and murder squads, the "Final Solution" refers exclusively to "the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people," as defined at the site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term Völkermord ("genocide"), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah.