What to call the genocides of the Second World War and why?

Résumé du document

"Historians are not always trustful guides when we have to reconstitute past". Those words, of Lucy DAWIDOWICZ -an American historian who wrote quite a lot of books about the historiography of genocides- directly aimed at criticizing historians of genocides, who treated the murder by the Nazis as a "normal" historical object, that is, comparing it with other historical phenomena, and categorizing it. Categorizing involves, among other things, to give precise and adapted definition of the genocides, and, at first, a relevant name for this historical event. Thus, we can say that the controversy about the proper name to give to the genocides perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War is a sensitive subject. Many historians have been, and are still today for some of them, arguing about this. Indeed, this field of the Holocaust studies is particularly interesting, because it started much earlier than the main stream of Holocaust studies. Indeed, after the Second World War, the public attention, and the historians' interest too, was mainly focused on the Resistance and the survivors.

Extraits

[...] The Armenians themselves used this term, and experts also. Holocaust was generally accepted as a synonymous for massacre. Nevertheless, after the WWII, this changed. The word holocaust started being identified to the genocide of the Jews, mostly in the 1960's (when the Genocide studies began flourishing). Since, meanwhile was also emerging a claim for uniqueness, capital letters were used, to differentiate the genocides perpetrated by the Nazis from other banal massacres (it is necessary to notice here that the capital letter is required for the slaughter of both the Jews and the Roma, but not for the Armenians, even though this is considered to be one of the major collective massacres ever). [...]

[...] The Tziganes use the word “porrajmos”, which means devouring, or Samudaripen, which means mass killing. Who knows those words? Who knows what they mean? There is no comparing the influence, and the public knowledge of the words, and the “Gypsies'” words. It is quite a shame indeed, but no surprising. The influence of the word reflects the political influence of the groups. There are floods of publications about the Jewish genocide, very few about the Gypsies; there is respect for the pain of the Jews; everything is forgotten about the Gypsies. [...]

[...] Entre la mémoire et l'oubli Pluriel Histoire Hachette Littérature -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porajmos Quotation from The Holocaust and the Historians, L.DAWIDOWICZ (1981) Throughout this essay, the terms murder or genocide will be used when not writing from the perspective of someone else, because those words are considered as more neutral than Holocaust or Shoah Quoted in L'Holocauste dans l'Histoire, MR MARRUS (1994) Quoted in Le livre Noir de l'Humanité I.CHARNY, (2001) Both from the preface, and the IXth chapter of Axis Rule in occupied Europe, R.LEMKIN (1944) IXth chapter of Axis Rule in occupied Europe, R.LEMKIN (1944) Available on http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm From The prevention of Genocide, L.KUPER (1985) Translation from the French, from Le livre noir de l'humanité cf. [...]

[...] The last one claims for the specificity and uniqueness of the genocide of the Jews (and the Jews only). Above those four categories, some human scientists have tried to qualify the genocides, like “ideological” or “punitive”[14] genocides. We can say that all this is a bit misty: all human scientists have tried to give their own definition of genocide. What we should remember here is that there is no compromise about what should be called genocide or not. Moreover, this is even true as far as the genocide of the Jews is concerned: Yehuda BAUER[15], one of the most famous specialists of the mass murder of the Jews, plainly claimed, for a redefinition of the word “genocide” which would exclude the “Holocaust”. [...]

[...] Another category, widely admitted, but which is not evoked by RUMMEL, is “genocidarian massacre”, which may be a genocide, with fewer victims. Ethnocide is another basic notion when talking about mass murders. Indeed, ethnocide consists in the voluntary deterioration of the living conditions of a population -who may be characterized by ethnicity, religion or nation-, the destruction of their political and cultural traditions. This would be roughly speaking similar to the notion of genocide towards Slavic populations that LEMKIN put forwards in 1943. [...]