Names of the Holocaust

The Holocaust is the name commonly applied since the mid 1970s to the killing of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II. The term is also used more broadly to include all the victims of Nazi genocide and persecution between 1933 and 1945: political dissidents, Soviet POWs, the disabled, the Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, and gay men.

A number of other terms are also used to describe the genocide.

"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 used to refer to a sacrifice Jews were required to make by the Torah.

Since the mid-19th century, the word has been used by many authors to refer to large catastrophes and massacres, particularly those caused by immolation. According to the OED, the earliest attested such usage dates from 1671, but it became common in the 19th century. In 1833 a historian writing about the medieval French monarch Louis VII, wrote that he "once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church". This refers to his invasion of Vitry-le-François in 1142 during which the 1,300 inhabitants of the town were burnt alive in the church.

By the early twentieth century the term was widely used to refer to massacres of Armenians in Turkey, particularly during World War I. The Armenian Genocide was called The Holocaust (1920) and The Smyrna Holocaust (1923). In 1929 Winston Churchill referred to "helpless Armenians, men, women, and children together, whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust" (The World Crisis).

Even before the Second World War, the possibility of war was referred to as "another holocaust" (that is a repeat of the First World War). In the years following the war, writers in English tended to use the term in relation to events such as the fire-bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima, rather than the Nazi genocide. The term was also regularly used to refer to the destructive consequences of nuclear war.

By the late 1950s, documents translated from Hebrew used the word "Holocaust" to translate "Shoah", and the scholars began to use the word with this meaning--usually with some qualification, such as "The Nazi Holocaust". It was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified, and with a capital letter. The 1978 television miniseries titled "Holocaust" and starring Meryl Streep is often cited as the principal contributor to the current usage.

The term became increasingly widespread as a synonym for "genocide" in the last decades of the 20th century to refer to mass murders in the form "X holocaust" (e.g. "Rwandan holocaust"). Examples are Rwanda, the Ukraine under Stalin, and the actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

In order to suggest comparison with Nazi murders other historical events have also been labelled "Holocausts", for example the oppression of lower caste groups in India ("Sudra Holocaust") or the slave trade ("African Holocaust"). Such usages are often heavily disputed. Even more contested is the use of the word in the older sense of "immolation" to refer to Allied WW2 bombings, since this is sometimes adopted to imply equivalence between the Allied and the Nazi war record.

"Final Solution"
The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem was the Nazis' own term, coined by Adolf Eichmann as a euphemism. 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). 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 genocide of Jews.

"Shoah"
The biblical word Shoah (שואה), also spelled Shoa and Sho'ah, meaning "calamity" in Hebrew (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the early 1940s. Churban Europa, meaning "European Destruction" in Hebrew (as opposed to simply Churban, the destruction of the Second Temple), is also used.

The Hebrew word Shoah is preferred by some Jews and non-Jews due to the supposed theologically unacceptable nature of the word holocaust whose original Greek meaning indicates a sacrifice to a god.

"Porajmos"
The Porajmos (also Porrajmos) literally Devouring, or Samudaripen (Mass killing) is a term coined by the Roma people to describe attempts by the Nazis to exterminate most of the Roma peoples of Europe. The phenomenon has been little studied.