The phrase “Never Again” was first chanted by the prisoners of Buchenwald upon their liberation. It has since become the central slogan for the annual marches of remembrance honoring Holocaust victims. Beyond its original context, “Never Again” now serves as a global call to prevent genocide. This shift reflects how the Holocaust is viewed as one of many mass atrocities in history.
In this essay, I argue that in order to demonstrate its singularity, contrasting the Holocaust with other gross human rights violations is inevitable and in principle does not undermine the Holocaust’s unique nature. However, such comparisons often risk trivializing the suffering of Jews and can even fuel anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, ultimately mobilizing antisemitic attitudes.
This is how, over time, the victim becomes a despised criminal. It seems as though this is happening even after Hamas’s murderous terror attack. Following the initial and short-lived outrage over the brutal killings, mutilations and torture, voices blaming Israel for not strictly adhering to the rules of international humanitarian law in its fight for survival have grown louder. But I ask: Is it reasonable to expect a nation to meticulously follow every rule when facing an enemy threatening its destruction, thereby contributing to its own demise?
I.
The assertion made in the 1980s by the historian Hans Mommsen was widely accepted and still valid: “This is the crime,” he wrote, “that remains an eternal moral burden for all those who participated in or passively accepted and acknowledged the persecution of the Jews. There has been no crime in history that can be compared to the Holocaust in its dimension and disgrace.”
“This is a ‘crime without a name’”—this sentence was spoken by Winston Churchill in a broadcasted speech in August 1941. Since then, “crime without a name” has become synonymous with the Holocaust, even though the word “Jew” was not mentioned in the speech. Later, Raphael Lemkin named this crime “genocide,” and since then, international law has used this term to denote various forms of extreme brutality when the motive is the destruction of a particular group. Referring to Churchill’s statement, the Jewish genocide is often considered unparalleled: The Holocaust is incomparable, unique, and without precedent. The Holocaust is not only nonpareil but also unparalleled; the word conveys extreme depravity, contemptibility, and evil.
As explained by Carl Amery, the crime of National Socialism is of such magnitude—this is what gives the Holocaust its singularity—that it stands outside of history. “The Third Reich and the Hitler phenomenon defy every model with which historical science and the philosophy of history have explained humanity’s path … and that is why Auschwitz is not part of history.”
True, according to the Nazis’ plan: The Jews were to be murdered in the “ahistorical no man’s land.” (Himmler conveyed this in his infamous Poznan speech: “The extermination of the Jews is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and never will be.”)
However, in our secular world that still proclaims the primacy of reason, it is unsettling if anything remains unexplained. It is therefore not surprising that scholars strive to find some rational cause behind the Holocaust, to offer a rational explanation for irrational fanaticism, and thereby place it back within the flow of history. The “historicization” of the Holocaust can occur through comparison with other mass killings, including genocides, as comparison is a traditional method of science (and of our everyday thinking). Indeed, any historical event is truly unique, unprecedented: Something distinguishes it from what is already known and makes it different in comparison. Absolute singularity would mean the end of past and future, of temporality, as if history were a series of independent, parallel, and isolated events existing solely on their own.
Without comparison, there is no incomparable. However, the historicization of the Holocaust and its comparison with other mass atrocities usually results in its uniqueness fading, confirming Jean Améry’s prediction: “One day, Hitler’s empire will become mere history, neither better nor worse than other dramatic eras. The Holocaust will be lumped together with the bloody expulsion of the Armenians or the shameful atrocities of the French colonizers, becoming just one among the events of the ‘century of barbarism’: regrettable, but by no means unprecedented.” And the comparison usually involves the relativization of the Holocaust and the devaluation of its horrors.
Those who deny the singularity of the Holocaust often cite the number of victims as an argument. The number of Native Americans exterminated for instance is estimated to be between 50 and 100 million according to David E. Stannard—this accounts for 90-95 percent of the hemisphere’s indigenous population. In comparison, the Germans and their allies, he continues, killed six million Jews, which constitutes 66 percent of European Jewry and 33 percent of the world’s Jewish population.
The German Charlotte Wiedemann, who advocates for the coexistence of cultures of memory and for understanding the suffering of others, is also shocked by the number of victims outside Europe. As strange as it may sound, she writes, “it shakes me every time to think of how many perished during colonization, even though I am prepared for the worst in the context of the Holocaust. Therefore, the number of victims is not insignificant; it can be crucial for analysis, as well as for the judgments of judges and historians.”
“Can be,” but Wiedemann also senses that numbers alone are insufficient to refute the uniqueness of the Holocaust. It is likely for this reason that she points to the similarity between the bestiality of colonizers and that of Nazi killers. She recalls how, in Malaya, British soldiers proudly photographed themselves with the severed head of an executed rebel. In the same way, Germans liked to have photographs taken for their family albums with their victims, both before and after killing them. Sometimes they also captured their eager helpers: The British photographed the collaborating Iban head-hunters, and the Germans photographed Lithuanians beating Jews to death.
In the same way, Germans liked to have photographs taken for their family albums with their victims, both before and after killing them.
But Wiedemann is aware that even this is not enough. The uniqueness of the Holocaust can only be questioned if it can be proven that Auschwitz was not the sole example of “completed senselessness.” Hannah Arendt used this term as the title of one of her essays, “Die vollendete Sinnlosigkeit.” “For while other anti-Jewish measures had some sense,” she writes, “Auschwitz itself was ‘completed senselessness.’” The gas chambers benefited no one; the genocide demoralized the army. But according to Wiedemann, the cruelty of the colonizers was equally devoid of any rationality. It was obvious that the subjugated peoples would gain independence within a foreseeable time, she writes. What rational reason, then, could there have been for “raping Kenyan women with bottles filled with hot water”?
Yet the parallel is flawed. It is true that every mass murder has episodes characterized by unrestrained excesses driven by sadistic impulses in the intoxication of unchecked freedom. However, Auschwitz was not a site for the unbridled indulgence of murderous instincts, but rather a place of genocide carried out with cold-blooded rationality, organized absurdity, and industrial-scale division of labor.
And let’s not forget: The exploitation, forced labor, and killing of the “inferior” Slavic race or the “primitive” African tribes aimed at subjugating an external enemy to gain “living space,” as Jürgen Habermas writes. In contrast, the Jews were killed because they were Jews. The seemingly pointless, arbitrary extermination of the entire Jewish people, devoid of any sense, was carried out not in the fight against an external enemy but against an “internal” enemy. The Holocaust serves as the link between the religiously motivated antisemitism of the Middle Ages and the racial-biological antisemitism of the modern era. “The basis of Christian hatred towards Jews is the recognition of the Old Testament faith, which is actually already surpassed but not yet fully eradicated, as the root of their own religion in the stubborn survivor, the internal enemy.” This murderous ambivalence is repeated in naturalized form in the “Aryan” German hatred toward the foreign heritage represented by the Jews. “The goal of maintaining the ‘purity of the race’ stems from the fear that mixing with ’foreign blood’ found in the population would lead to genetic impurity.” Therefore, the Jewish people were not to be exploited—and this is the essential difference between the Holocaust and colonial genocides—but were to be exterminated as the “internal enemy.” Only by ignoring this peculiar motive, fueled by the hatred against the “internal enemy,” which blends racial-biological and religious antisemitism, does the argument denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust gain any semblance of meaning.
The Holocaust serves as the link between the religiously motivated antisemitism of the Middle Ages and the racial-biological antisemitism of the modern era.
II.
From the historicization of the Holocaust, and what usually accompanies it, the relativization of its horrors, it is only a small step to reach the infamous conspiracy theories: “the Jews claim everything for themselves, now even the status of victimhood and the culture of remembrance.” The leading figure of the latest wave of Holocaust uniqueness denial, Dirk Moses, suspects outright conspiracy: Raphael Lemkin, driven by Jewish nationalist convictions, fabricated the concept of “genocide” to ensure that only the Holocaust would be considered a “true genocide,” making Auschwitz incomparable to anything else. All of this was allegedly done to justify the expulsion and oppression of Palestinians.
The target of Moses’s criticism is German memory culture, just as most attempts to relativize the Holocaust urge Germans to finally free themselves from the burden of Auschwitz. For German state leaders have repeatedly emphasized that it is their historical duty not to tolerate any form of antisemitism. After Hamas’s deadly terror attack, the German Vice Chancellor made it clear: “The security of Israel is vital to us as a state. Our special relationship with Israel stems from our historical responsibility, and referring to the complexity of the context must not lead to relativization. The creation of Israel was the promise that Jews could live in safety. It is our duty as Germans to contribute to the fulfilment of this promise. This is one of the historical foundations of our republic.”
Moses claims that the singularity of the Holocaust has now become an official religion in Germany. Until the beginning of the millennium, the progressive processing of the Nazi past was a merit of civil society, he writes. However, Holocaust remembrance has since ossified into a state-sanctioned, state-controlled official religion, a catechism. Intellectuals, politicians and journalists, acting as “anointed high priests” (“Hohepriester”), vigilantly ensure the adherence to the doctrines and impose these ossified dogmas on an increasingly diverse society. What was once genuine admission, guilt and shame has now calcified into a quasi-religious orthodoxy, a biblical-like true belief.
For many Germans the Shoah is in fact unique; this word preserves their lifelong terror, something they cannot overcome. “Our sin was born out of the conditions of our history, and we inherited this history, along with the circumstances that led to Auschwitz,” writes Martin Walser. “This does not mean that we are capable of committing such an atrocity again.” But experience tells us, he continues, “that something is missing in us: something intended by God and humanism.”
For many Germans the Shoah is in fact unique; this word preserves their lifelong terror, something they cannot overcome.
Walser is a member of the “Flakhelfer” generation, born in 1927. It seems that even among his compatriots a generation younger, there are those who feel similarly. For them, the Shoah is not just an element of their morality but also a source of ongoing oppression. “Without Auschwitz, we would never have been this good,” writes Lukas Hammerstein. But this is not self-satisfaction, because behind the sense of morality lies the shuddering, the horror, the shame: “If someone speaks loudly about normality, I flinch. If one of us preaches about the Good, I still see the old sin filtering through, as if we had distilled the Good from the former Evil.”
III.
As absurd as it may sound, Hamas’s murderous terrorist attack seems to have changed the Germans’ attitude: images of brutally murdered, burned, and mutilated bodies were present on social media for a short time, accompanied by outraged, condemning comments. But we haven’t heard of large solidarity demonstrations. On the contrary, hate crimes against Jews have significantly increased; thousands have taken to the streets, chanting slogans like “death to Jews” (note: not “death to Israelis”) and shouting slogans like “from the river to the sea,” while synagogues and Jewish hospitals have been set on fire.
Perhaps, however, this turn of events is not so absurd: The outrage following Israel’s fight for survival, during which surely innocent civilians also fell victim, might be alleviating Germany’s lingering guilt over the murder of Jews: “Look, maybe our ancestors weren’t so monstrous after all,” the generation of descendants might think.
One entry from Anne Frank’s diary is a chilling, grimly optimistic prophecy: “Who knows, maybe our faith will teach the world, and all nations with it, to be good, and it is only for this reason, and only this reason, that we must suffer.” Now, it seems that even in its bitterness, this prophecy proved overly optimistic.
Solidarity with Jews has been minimal even in the academic world, which preaches objectivity and freedom from prejudice. Outrage over the horrors of Hamas terror was quickly followed by a “but.” Often. Unbearably often.
Solidarity with Jews has been minimal even in the academic world, which preaches objectivity and freedom from prejudice.
A recent debate series was initiated on the constitutional law blog named Verfassungsblog, and the majority of authors writing in German and English belong to the academic elite. This time, the scholars discussed what the motto “Never Again” means to different people. They agreed that the international and constitutional legal system created after World War II has its origins in the Holocaust: The horrors of the Shoah inspired the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the tragedy of the Jewish people motivated the international community to reduce cases of statelessness (1961 New York Convention) and regulate refugee status (1951 Geneva Convention). But, as the editors note in their summary of the debate series, the meaning of the phrase “Never Again” varies based on each individual’s situation and perspective. (Thus, even Putin could invoke the motto “Never Again” to justify a war against the “Nazi Ukrainian state.”)
It’s therefore not surprising that for Princeton University professor Kim Lane Scheppele, “Never Again” brings to mind Orbán’s authoritarian regime. For years, she has analyzed and critiqued the dismantling of the rule of law in Hungary. Scheppele’s thesis is that Orbán has eroded the pillars of the rule of law by enshrining his actions in legal forms, cloaking them in authoritarian legality. While this legality appears to be law in form, it is not truly so in substance (“not quite law”). According to Scheppele, Netanyahu is doing the same. Both leaders consolidate their power through measures that appear legal but, in reality, cannot be considered true law.
From here, the connection is made to the terrorist attack of Oct. 7 and the ensuing armed conflict: Scheppele believes that Israel does something similar when it responds to criticisms of its military operations by interpreting international law. The justifications presented by its leaders also fall under what Scheppele would describe as “not quite law.”
At first glance, Scheppele’s writing seems unrelated to the source of “Never Again,” the Shoah. However, her warning about the dangers facing democracy and the rule of law evokes memories of Weimar and the tragedy of the Jewish people. It is no coincidence that German Jews, once again facing an existential threat after Oct. 7, 2023, ask the majority in their desperate manifesto: Does someone shouting “Death to the Jews” not also demand the death of democracy? Weimar proved weak and indecisive when there was still a chance to save rule-of-law democracy.
The analogy to 1930s Germany may seem too bold, but perhaps “militant democracy,” as described by Karl Loewenstein, could have held back the revolutionary, nationalist fervor and cheap demagoguery that stirred the masses, protecting democracy and the rule of law in this century as well. By recognizing the danger in time, suspending or limiting democratic and rule-of-law values could have prevented enemies of democracy from abusing these values to dismantle it. Loewenstein wrote that Weimar, with its pathological attachment to the values it proclaimed, including the rigid principle of legality, brought about its own downfall.
And now back to the present, back to Israel and the military operations of its army. It is a fact that these actions have innocent victims. But let’s not forget: Although the United Nations officially recognized Israel’s creation, many nations remind the Jewish state daily that it is still within some implicit statute of limitation and its birth certificate can be revoked at any time. And with Loewenstein’s warning in mind, I ask: Is it truly fair to expect a nation threatened with annihilation once again to so meticulously follow every rule of international law in its fight for survival, thereby risking its own destruction?
Károly Bárd is Professor Emeritus at Central European University in Vienna.
