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Is the Holocaust unique in the history of human massacre, so special that its horrors must be kept alive long after the world has forgotten, say, the Pakistanis' slaughter of 3 million Bengalis in 1971, the Nigerians' genocidal war against the Biafrans, the Khmer Rouge's homicidal administration of Cambodia at the moment? One of the century's most chilling questions was one Hitler asked two generations ago: "Who still talks nowadays about the extermination of the Armenians?"
The Nazis' genocidal ambitions pitched the Holocaust beyond any other historical atrocity. It was unique: in system, in execution, in mad, pointless intent unattached to any reason except, well, what? Race hate? Political convenience that would give the Germans some kind of common bond? The attempted destruction of the Jews occurred in one of the most advanced of the planet's civilizations and, as has been often repeated, one of its most cultured, the land of Goethe and Schiller and Mozart. There is a philosophical temptation to see in that highly developed murderous bureaucracy the end of civilization itself.
Was it bureaucratic banality? Psychosis, individual or collective? Satan himself? No one is sure about such things, and certainly not the people who made Holocaust. As Elie Wiesel wrote:
What it was we may never know; but
we must proclaim, at least, that it was,
that it is.
— Lance Morrow