Is the Holocaust “unique”? Newzz - current Ukrainian news from the network IV Reference apparatus ……………………………………………………………………………………………….

From the editor. An abridged version of this work has already appeared in print. We are publishing for the first time full version articles.

Soon after the end of the 2nd World War, when the topic of the Holocaust gradually began to occupy an important place in a number of modern historical and philosophical-theological developments, attempts began to be made to identify the complex of causes - in their historical, social, economic, psychological context - that made it possible carrying out the monstrous genocide of the Jews. In the corresponding analysis, researchers had to pay attention to the comparative characteristics of the Holocaust, previous and subsequent facts of racial elimination, which were considered as “genocides”. As a result, there has been debate for many years as to whether the Holocaust - the deliberate extermination of the Jewish people during World War II - can be considered a unique phenomenon, going beyond the traditional framework of the phenomenon known as "genocide", or the Holocaust fits well with others famous history genocides. The most extensive and productive discussion on this issue, called Historikerstreit, unfolded among German historians in the mid-80s of the last century and played an important role in further research. Although the main topic of discussion was the actual nature of Nazism, the issues of the Holocaust and Auschwitz, for obvious reasons, occupied a key place in it. During the discussion, two directions emerged, within which opposing theses were defended. The "nationalist-conservative trend" ("nationalists"), represented by Ernst Nolte and his followers such as Andreas Hilgruber and Klaus Hildebrand, defended the position that the Holocaust was not a unique phenomenon, but could be compared and placed on a par with other disasters XX century, such as the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, the Vietnam War and even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Moreover, according to Nolte, Hitler's crimes should be seen as a reaction to the equally barbaric actions of the Bolsheviks, which began more than two decades before Auschwitz. The “left-liberal trend” (“internationalists”) was represented primarily by the famous German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. The latter argued that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in German history and the psychology of the Germans, from which comes the special specificity of the Holocaust, focused on Nazism and only on it. Despite the presence of apologetic-extra-scientific elements in the position of the “national conservatives”, which raise doubts about their scientific integrity and even gave rise to accusations of them providing a “scientific” justification for Nazism and giving “respectability” to the idea of ​​Holocaust revisionism, the topics and arguments put forward were objectively raised in the discussion both sides undoubtedly gave significant impetus to subsequent scientific research and made important contributions to the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. A landmark work here, in particular, was the book of the American historian Charles Mayer, “The Irresistible Past,” who formulated three main substantive characteristics of the Holocaust, identified during the discussion and which became the subject of dispute between the parties: singularity(singularity), comparability(comparability), identity(identity) . In fact, it was precisely the characteristic of “singularity” (uniqueness, originality) that became the stumbling block in the later discussion. It is no coincidence that the largest scientist in the field, prof. Stephen Katz of Cornell University, who defends the idea of ​​the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, called his policy article"Holocaust: singularity of".

Before moving directly to the stated topic, it should be noted that it is extremely sensitive. The “painful center” of this topic is that when considering it, it collides, as Paul Zawadzki accurately defined, the language of memory and testimony and the language of academics. Viewed from within Jewry, the Holocaust experience is an absolute tragedy, since all suffering is Your own suffering and it is absolutized, made unique and forms the identity of Jewry: “If I take off ... the “sociologist’s cap” to remain only a Jew whose family was destroyed in time of war, then there can be no talk of any relativism. There can be no comparison, because in my life, in the history of my family or in my Jewish identification, the Shoah is a unique event.... The internal logic of the identification process pushes into side of emphasizing uniqueness." It is no coincidence that any other use of the word Holocaust (or Shoah, in Jewish terminology), for example in plural("Holocaust") or in relation to other genocide, usually causes a painful reaction. Thus, Zawadzki cites examples where strong protests of the Jewish public led to comparisons of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia with the Holocaust, comparisons of Milosevic with Hitler, as well as an expanded interpretation of the charges in the Klaus case Barbier at the 1987 trial in France as "crimes against humanity", when the genocide of Jews was considered only as one of the crimes, and not as a unique crime. Here we can add the recent controversy over the removal of unauthorized Catholic crosses in Auschwitz, when the question was debated whether Auschwitz should be considered solely as a place and symbol of Jewish suffering, although it became the site of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles and people of other nationalities. And of course, even greater indignation Jewish community prompted a recent incident in England when the famous Reform rabbi and writer Dan Kohn-Sherbok, who advocates the humane treatment of animals, compared modern cattle cars in England with the cars in which Jews were transported to Auschwitz, and used the expression “Animal Holocaust.”

Any generalization of the suffering of the Jews, again, often leads to the erosion of the specific subject of the Holocaust: anyone can find themselves in the place of the Jews, the point is not about the Jews or Nazism at all, but about “humanity” and its problems in general. As Pinchas Agmon wrote: “The Holocaust is neither a specifically Jewish problem nor an event only in Jewish history.” In such a production, the “Holocaust” sometimes loses its specific content altogether and becomes a generalized description of any genocide. Thus, even Marek Edelman, the only surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, readily compares the events of those years with the much more limited scale of events in Yugoslavia: “We can be ashamed ... of the genocide that is taking place today in Yugoslavia ... This is - Hitler's victory, which he wins from the other world, is the same, regardless of whether it is dressed in communist or fascist clothing." The logical development of deconcretizing the Holocaust is to strip it of even the signs of genocide itself, when the “Holocaust” is transformed into the most general model oppression and social injustice. German playwright Peter Weiss, writing a play about Auschwitz, says: "The word 'Jew' is not used in the play... I no more identify with the Jews than I do with the Vietnamese or the South African blacks. I simply identify with the oppressed of the world." In other words, any comparativism, invading the area of ​​individual and collective memory of Jews, inevitably relativizes the pathos of the exceptionalism of Jewish suffering. This situation often causes an understandably painful reaction in the Jewish community.

On the other hand, the Holocaust is a historical and social phenomenon, and as such, naturally claims to be analyzed in a broader context than just at the level of memory and testimony of the Jewish people - in particular, at the academic level. The very need to study the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon just as inevitably forces us to operate in academic language, and the logic of historical research pushes us towards comparativism. "One can also defend the idea that comparativism is the basis of knowledge... Comparativism is at the center social sciences to the extent that they use models." It is no coincidence that Steven Katz, proving the uniqueness of the Holocaust at the academic level, turns to a broad historical context and chooses comparative studies as the main tool. But here it is revealed that the very choice of comparative studies as a tool for academic research ultimately undermines the idea of ​​the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, in its social and ethical significance. After all, the content of the historical lesson of the Holocaust has long gone beyond the fact of the genocide of the Jews, and is considered as a model of any genocide - it is no coincidence that in a number of countries the study of the Holocaust is introduced into the school curriculum. program as an attempt at the educational level to overcome racist and chauvinistic prejudices and to cultivate national and religious tolerance. The main conclusion from the lesson of the Holocaust is: “This (i.e., the Holocaust) must not happen again!” e. is unique, unique, then it is necessary to stipulate to what extent the Holocaust can serve as a model: either the Holocaust is unique and cannot be a “lesson” by definition, or it is a “lesson”, but then it is to a certain extent comparable with other events of the past and present . As a result, it remains to either reformulate the idea of ​​“uniqueness” or abandon it altogether.

Thus, to a certain extent, the very formulation of the problem of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust at the academic level is provocative. But the development of this problem also leads to certain logical inconsistencies. Yes, argues one of the authors, “Katz’s impressive scholarship leaves essentially no doubt that the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been settled once and for all. But another, more fundamental question remains unanswered: “So what?” ". Indeed, what conclusions follow from recognizing the Holocaust as “unique”? Katz formulated the answer in his book: “The Holocaust illuminates Nazism, not the other way around.” At first glance, the answer is convincing: the study of the Holocaust reveals the essence of such a monstrous phenomenon as Nazism. However, you can pay attention to something else - the Holocaust turns out to be directly linked to Nazism. And then the question literally arises: is it even possible to consider the Holocaust as an independent phenomenon without discussing the essence of Nazism? In a slightly different form, this question was asked to Katz, perplexing him: “But, Professor Katz, what if a person is not interested in Nazism?”

Taking into account all of the above, we will still take the liberty of expressing some thoughts on the uniqueness of the Holocaust strictly within the framework of an academic approach. Additionally, we emphasize that this approach involves a refusal to use any theological models of the Holocaust. Recognizing the spiritual richness of a number of such models and their significance for reception by public consciousness, one cannot help but take into account that all of them are absolutely unverifiable from the point of view of the methodological approaches of modern humanities, and as such cannot be tools of academic research.

So, one of the generally accepted theses of modern academic science involved in Holocaust research is that the tragedy of the Jews carries with it general signs other genocides, but also has characteristics that make this genocide not just special, but still unique, exceptional, one of a kind. In principle, one can agree with this approach to the Holocaust. However, we would take the liberty of questioning the correctness of the traditional choice of those characteristics that are declared decisive for the definition of the Holocaust as a unique phenomenon and propose a different set of corresponding characteristics. Thanks to this, as we see it, the above-mentioned logical inconsistencies disappear, and in a certain sense, the above-mentioned contradiction between the socio-social significance of the Holocaust and the recognition of its “uniqueness” in the academic sense is removed.

In comparative studies, the Holocaust is inevitably compared with known historical genocides, or events close to genocide. Thus, Stephen Katz, who undoubtedly plays a leading role in such studies, compares the genocide of Jews with medieval witch trials, the genocide of Indians and blacks in America, as well as with other Nazi genocides of gypsies, homosexuals and various European ethnic groups. Moreover, Katz insists that the analysis can be carried out in purely quantitative, i.e. objective assessments.

As a result of such an analysis, the following are usually indicated as the three main characteristics of the Holocaust that determine its “uniqueness”, answering the questions “how”, “what” and “why”:

1. Object and purpose. Unlike all other genocides, the Nazis' goal was the total destruction of the Jewish people as an ethnic group.

2. Scale. In four years, 6 million Jews were killed - a third of the entire Jewish people. Humanity has never known genocide on such a scale.

3. Means. For the first time in history, the mass extermination of Jews was carried out by industrial means, using modern technologies.

These characteristics, taken together, according to a number of authors, determine the uniqueness of the Holocaust. But an impartial study of the comparative calculations presented, from our point of view, is not convincing confirmation of the thesis about the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust.

So, let's consider all the triarguments one by one:

A) Object and purpose of the Holocaust. According to prof. Katz, "The Holocaust is phenomenologically unique due to the fact that never before has it been aimed, as a matter of deliberate principle and actualized policy, at the physical destruction of every man, woman and child belonging to a particular people." If we get to the essence of this statement through a complicated verbal fabric, then it consists of the following: to the Nazis, who sought to make the world Judenrein, No one has ever deliberately intended to completely destroy any nation. The assertion seems dubious. Since ancient times, there has been a practice of complete elimination of national groups, in particular during wars of conquest and inter-tribal clashes. This task was solved in different ways: for example, by forced assimilation, but also by the complete destruction of such a group - which was already reflected in the ancient biblical narratives, in particular in the stories about the conquest of Canaan (Isa. 6:20; 7:9; 10: 39–40). Already in our time, in inter-tribal clashes, one or another national group is slaughtered completely, as for example in Burundi, when in the mid-nineties of the twentieth century. up to half a million Tutsis were massacred during the genocide. It is obvious that in any interethnic clashes people are killed precisely because they belong to the people participating in such a clash. Therefore, Elie Wiesel’s famous statement that, unlike representatives of other peoples or social groups, “Jews were killed simply because they were Jews,” essentially explains nothing. Moreover, if we accept the thesis that aggressiveness was a determining factor in the very development of mankind, then even more so Nazism is only an episode in the history of mankind, as a continuous chain of genocides.

Another important circumstance that defenders of the “uniqueness of the Holocaust” often refer to is that the Nazi policy aimed at the physical destruction of all Jews essentially had no rational basis, unlike other genocides that were determined by military, geopolitical, and ethnic factors. In a number of works, the socio-economic, psychological, historical roots of German anti-Semitism are consistently refuted, and the Holocaust is given a mystical-religious overtones of an attempt to kill the chosen people, and in their person the one God. In itself, such a point of view has a right to exist, if not for one serious “but”: modern historians have to argue about facts that clearly do not fit into the concept of the blind, reckless total murder of Jews on religious grounds. It is well known, for example, that when big money came into play, it interrupted the Nazi passion for murder. A fairly large number of wealthy Jews were able to escape from Nazi Germany before the start of the war. When, at the end of the war, part of the Nazi elite actively sought contacts with the Western allies for their own salvation, the Jews again happily became the subject of bargaining and all religious fervor faded into the background: when Goering’s party comrades called to account for the multimillion-dollar bribes, thanks to which Bernheimer's wealthy Jewish family was released from a concentration camp and accused of having connections with Jews; in the presence of Hitler, he uttered his famous and quite cynical phrase: Wer Jude ist, bestimme nur ich!(“Who is a Jew, only I determine!”) The dissertation of the American Brian Rigg caused lively controversy: its author provides numerous information that many people who were subject to Nazi laws on Jewish origin served in the army of Nazi Germany, some of them occupied high positions. And although these kinds of facts were known to the high command of the Wehrmacht, for various reasons they were hidden. Finally, we can recall the striking case of the participation of 350 Finnish Jewish officers in the war with the USSR as part of the Finnish army, Hitler’s ally, when three Jewish officers were awarded the Iron Cross, and a military field synagogue (!) operated on the Nazi side of the front. the facts, although they do not in any way diminish the monstrosity of the Nazi regime, still do not make the picture so clearly irrational.

b) The scale of the Holocaust. The number of Jewish victims of Nazism is truly amazing. Although the exact number of deaths is still a matter of debate, historical scholarship has established a figure close to 6 million people, i.e. the death toll represents a third of the world's Jewish population and between half and two-thirds of half of European Jewry. However, in historical retrospect, one can find events quite comparable to the Holocaust in terms of the scale of victims. So, Prof. himself. Katz provides figures according to which, in the process of colonization of America (North and South) by the second half of the 16th century. out of 80-112 million American Indians, 7/8 died, i.e. from 70 to 88 million. Katz admits: “If numbers alone constitute uniqueness, then the Jewish experience under Hitler was not unique.” At the same time, an interesting concept is put forward that, they say, mostly Indians died from epidemics, and there were not so many killed as a result of direct violence. But this argument can hardly be considered fair: epidemics accompanied the colonization process, and no one was interested in the fate of the Indians - in other words, the colonialists were directly responsible for their deaths. Likewise, during the deportation of the Caucasian peoples under Stalin, a huge number died from the accompanying deprivations and hunger. If we follow Katz’s logic, then the number of Jews “exterminated as a result of direct violence” should not include those who died of hunger and unbearable conditions in ghettos and concentration camps.

The Armenian genocide, which is considered the first genocide of the twentieth century, is similar in scale to the Holocaust. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, from 1915 to 1923, according to various estimates, from 600 thousand to 1 million 250 thousand Armenians died, i.e. from one third to almost 3/4 of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which by 1915 amounted to 1 million 750 thousand people. Estimates of the number of victims among the Roma during the Nazi period range from 250 thousand to half a million people, and such a reputable source as the French encyclopedia Universalis considers the figure of half a million the most modest. In this case, we can talk about the death of up to half of the Roma population of Europe.

Moreover, in fact, in Jewish history there have been events that, in terms of the scale of victims, are quite close to the Holocaust. Unfortunately, any figures relating to the pogroms of the Middle Ages and early modern times, in particular, the Khmelnytsky period and the subsequent Russian-Polish and Polish-Swedish wars, are extremely approximate, as are the general demographic data of the Middle Ages. However, it is generally accepted that by 1648 the Jewish population of Poland, the largest Jewish community in the world, was ca. 300 thousand people. The numbers of those killed during the decade of the Khmelnytskyi period (1648-58) vary enormously in various sources: Jewish chronicles talk about 180 thousand and even 600 thousand Jews; according to Graetz, more than a quarter of a million Polish Jews were killed. A number of modern historians prefer much more modest figures - 40-50 thousand dead, which amounted to 20-25% of the Jewish population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is also a lot). But other historians are still inclined to consider the figure of 100 thousand people more reliable - in this case we can talk about a third of those killed out of the total number of Polish Jews.

Thus, both in modern history and in the history of the Jews one can find examples of genocides comparable in scale to the Holocaust. Of course, the genocide of Jews has special features that distinguish it from other genocides, as many scholars point out. But in any other genocide you can find specific features. Yes, Prof. Katz believes that the Nazi genocide of the Roma during World War II, although similar in a number of characteristics to the Jewish genocide, was different from it: it not only had an ethnic background, but was also directed against the Roma as a group with antisocial behavior. However, such an argument also proves that the Roma genocide had a special character in comparison with other genocides, including the Holocaust. Moreover, the Roma are the only people who were subjected to mass sterilization by the Nazis, which can also be considered as a unique feature. So if the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust is defined based on its special, one-of-a-kind features, then every other genocide can then be defined as having a “unique” character. Obviously, in this case, the meaning of using such a strong concept as “uniqueness” (meaning the uniqueness of the phenomenon as a whole, and its individual features) in relation to the Holocaust is emasculated - the use of the more appropriate “peculiarity” seems much more justified here.

V) "Technology" of the Jewish genocide. Such a characteristic can only be determined by specific historical conditions: “The Holocaust originated and was carried out in a modern rationalistic society, at a high level of development of civilization and culture and at the peak of the achievements of human culture. The experience of the Holocaust contains extremely important information about the society of which we are members.” But remember, at the Battle of Ypres, in the spring of 1915, Germany used chemical weapons for the first time and the Anglo-French troops suffered heavy losses. Can we say that in this case, at the beginning of the 20th century, weapons of destruction were less technologically advanced than gas chambers? Of course, the difference here is that in one case they destroyed the enemy on the battlefield, and in the other - defenseless people. But both there and here they “technologically” destroyed people and at the Battle of Ypres, the first use of weapons of mass destruction also made the enemy defenseless. But even now the idea of ​​​​creating neutron and genetic weapons that kill a huge number of people, with a minimum of other destruction, continues to be discussed. Let's imagine for a second that this weapon (God forbid) will ever be used? And the “technological efficiency” of murder will be recognized as even higher than during the Nazi period. As a result, in fact, this criterion also turns out to be quite artificial.

So, each of the arguments individually turns out to be not very convincing. Therefore, as evidence, they speak of the uniqueness of the listed factors of the Holocaust in their totality (when, according to Katz, the factors “how” and “what” are balanced by the factor “why”). To some extent, this approach is fair, since it creates a more comprehensive vision, but still, we are talking more about the amazing atrocities of the Nazis, even more grandiose than even the most monstrous genocides, than about the radical difference between the Holocaust and other genocides. Any attempt to strengthen the element of “uniqueness” by attracting additional private characteristics, as for example, is done by Eberhard Jeckel: “never before has the state made a decision and declared by the power of a legally elected ruler that it will destroy a certain group of people...” only leads to the opposite result, because, as mentioned above, any genocide has unique particular characteristics.

But nevertheless, we are convinced that the Holocaust has a special and truly unique, in the full sense of the word, significance in world history. Only the characteristics of this uniqueness should be sought in other circumstances - which are no longer categories of purpose, tools and scale. A detailed analysis of these characteristics deserves a separate study, so we will only briefly formulate them:

1. The Holocaust became the final phenomenon, the apotheosis, the logical conclusion of a consistent series of persecutions and disasters throughout the history of the Jewish people. No other people knew such continuous persecution for almost 2 thousand years. In other words, all other, non-Jewish genocides were of an isolated nature, in contrast to the Holocaust, as a continuous phenomenon.

2. The genocide of the Jewish people was carried out by a civilization that, to a certain extent, grew on Jewish ethical and religious values ​​and, to one degree or another, recognized these values ​​as its own (the “Judeo-Christian civilization”, according to the traditional definition). In other words, there is a fact of self-destruction of the foundations of civilization. And here it is not so much Hitler’s Reich itself with its racist, half-pagan, half-Christian religious ideology that appears as the destroyer (after all, Hitler's Germany never renounced its Christian identity, albeit a special, “Aryan” one), as much as the Christian world as a whole, whose centuries-old anti-Judaism significantly contributed to the emergence of Nazism. All other genocides in history were not of such a self-destructive nature for civilization.

3. The Holocaust to a large extent turned the consciousness of civilization upside down and determined its future path of development, in which persecution on racial and religious grounds is declared unacceptable. Despite the complex and sometimes tragic picture modern world The intolerance of civilized states towards manifestations of chauvinism and racism was largely due to the understanding of the results of the Holocaust.

Thus, the uniqueness of the Holocaust phenomenon is determined not by the characteristic features of Hitler’s genocide as such, but by the place and role of the Holocaust in the world historical and spiritual process.

For discussion materials, see V : "Historiker-Streit", Die Documentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung. Munich, 1986. The history of the discussion and its course is described in detail in the monograph : Jurgen Manemann, "Weil es nicht nur Geschichte ist", Munster; Hamburg; LIT, 1995, pp. 66–114.

Is the Holocaust unique?

For many years now, there has been debate about whether the Holocaust - the extermination of the Jewish people during World War II - can be viewed as a unique phenomenon, going beyond the traditional framework of the phenomenon known as "genocide", or whether the Holocaust fits well into a number of others known to the history of genocides. The most extensive and productive discussion on this issue, called Historikerstreit (“dispute among historians”), unfolded among German historians in the mid-1980s and played an important role in further research. Although the main topic of discussion was the actual nature of Nazism, the issue of the Holocaust and Auschwitz, for obvious reasons, occupied a key place in it. During the discussion, two directions emerged that put forward opposing theses. The "nationalist-conservative movement" ("nationalists"), represented by Ernst Nolte and his followers such as Andreas Hilgruber and Klaus Hildebrand, defended the position that the Holocaust was not a unique phenomenon, but could be compared and placed on a par with others catastrophes of the 20th century, such as the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916, the Vietnam War and even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The “left-liberal trend” (“internationalists”) was represented primarily by the famous German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. The latter argued that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in German history and the psychology of the Germans, from which comes the special specificity of the Holocaust, focused on Nazism and only on it. Later, the American historian Charles Mayer formulated three main substantive characteristics of the Holocaust, identified during the discussion and which became the subject of dispute between the parties: singularity (singularity), comparability (comparability), identity (identity). In fact, it was precisely the characteristic of “singularity” (uniqueness, originality) that became the stumbling block in the later discussion.

First of all, it should be noted that the topic of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust is extremely sensitive, and often its discussion objectively causes painful reactions from its participants and society as a whole. The “painful center” of this topic is that when considering it, the language of memory and evidence and academic language collide, as defined by the French researcher Paul Zawadzki. Viewed from within Jewry, the Holocaust experience is an absolute tragedy, since all suffering is Your own suffering, and it is absolutized, made unique and forms the identity of Jewry: “If I take off ... the “sociologist’s cap” in order to remain only a Jew whose family was destroyed during the war, then there can be no talk of any relativism. There can be no comparison, because in my life, in the history of my family or in my Jewish identification, the Shoah is a unique event... The internal logic of the identification process pushes into. side of emphasizing uniqueness." It is no coincidence that any other use of the word Holocaust (or Shoah, in Jewish terminology), for example in the plural (“Holocausts”) or in relation to another genocide, usually causes a painful reaction. Thus, Zawadzki cites examples where strong protests from the Jewish public led to a comparison of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia with the Holocaust, a comparison of Milosevic with Hitler, an expanded interpretation of the charges in the case of Klaus Barbier at the 1987 trial in France as “crimes against humanity,” when the genocide of Jews was considered only as one of the crimes, and not as a unique crime. This also includes the recent controversy over the removal of unauthorized Catholic crosses in Auschwitz, when the question was debated whether Auschwitz should be considered solely as a place and symbol of Jewish suffering, although it became the site of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles and people of other nationalities. And, of course, the Jewish community was even more outraged by a recent incident in England when the famous Reform rabbi and writer Dan Kohn-Sherbok, who defends the humane treatment of animals, compared modern cattle cars in England with the cars in which Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and used the expression “Animal Holocaust.”

Any generalization of the suffering of the Jews, again, often leads to the erosion of the specific subject of the Holocaust: anyone can find themselves in the place of the Jews, it’s not about the Jews or Nazism, but about “humanity” and its problems in general. As Pinchas Agmon wrote: “The Holocaust is neither a specifically Jewish problem nor an event unique to Jewish history.” In such a production, the “Holocaust” sometimes loses its specific content altogether and becomes a generalized description of any genocide. Thus, even Marek Edelman, the only surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, readily compares the events of those years with the much more limited scale of events in Yugoslavia: “We can be ashamed ... of the genocide that is taking place today in Yugoslavia ... This is - Hitler's victory, which he achieves from the other world, is the same, regardless of whether it is dressed in communist or fascist clothing."

The logical development of deconcretizing the Holocaust is to strip it of even the signs of genocide itself, when the “Holocaust” is transformed into the most general model of oppression and social injustice. German playwright Peter Weiss, who wrote a play about Auschwitz, says: "The word 'Jew' is not used in the play... I no more identify with the Jews than I do with the Vietnamese or the South African blacks. I simply identify with the oppressed of the world." In other words, any comparativism, invading the area of ​​individual and collective memory of Jews, inevitably relativizes the pathos of the exceptionalism of Jewish suffering. This situation often causes an understandably painful reaction in the Jewish community.

On the other hand, the Holocaust is a historical and social phenomenon, and as such naturally claims to be analyzed in a broader context than just at the level of memory and testimony of the Jewish people, in particular at the academic level. The very need to study the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon just as inevitably forces us to operate in academic language, and the logic of historical research pushes us towards comparativism. But then it turns out that the choice itself comparative analysis as a tool for academic research, it ultimately undermines the idea of ​​the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust in its social and ethical significance.

Even simple logical reasoning based on the assumption of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, in fact, leads to the destruction of currently established ideas about the historical role of the Holocaust for humanity. In fact, the content of the historical lesson of the Holocaust has long gone beyond the historical fact of the genocide of the Jews: it is no coincidence that in many countries of the world the study of the Holocaust has been introduced into the school curriculum as an attempt at the educational level to cultivate national and religious tolerance. The main conclusion from the lesson of the Holocaust is: “This (that is, the Holocaust) must not happen again!” However, if the Holocaust is “unique”, that is, isolated, inimitable, then there can be no talk of any repetition of it initially, and this important conclusion becomes meaningless: then the Holocaust cannot be any “lesson” by definition; or it is a “lesson,” but then it is comparable to other events of the past and present. As a result, it remains to either reformulate the idea of ​​“uniqueness” or abandon it.

Thus, to a certain extent, the very formulation of the problem of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust at the academic level is provocative. But the development of this problem also leads to certain logical inconsistencies. Indeed, what conclusions follow from recognizing the Holocaust as “unique”? The most famous scientist who defends the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, US professor Steven Katz, formulated in one of his books the answer to this question: “The Holocaust highlights Nazism, and not vice versa.” At first glance, the answer is convincing: the study of the Holocaust reveals the essence of such a monstrous phenomenon as Nazism. However, you can pay attention to something else - the Holocaust turns out to be directly linked to Nazism. And then the question literally arises: is it even possible to consider the Holocaust as an independent phenomenon without discussing the essence of Nazism? In a slightly different form, this question was asked to Katz, puzzling him: “What if a person is not interested in Nazism, Professor Katz?”

Taking into account all of the above, we will still take the liberty of expressing some thoughts on the uniqueness of the Holocaust strictly within the framework of an academic approach.

So, one of the well-known theses of modern academic science involved in Holocaust research is that the tragedy of the Jews bears in itself the general characteristics of other genocides, but also has characteristics that make this genocide not just special, but unique, exceptional, one of a kind. The three main characteristics of the Holocaust that define its “uniqueness” are usually cited as follows.
Object and purpose. Unlike all other genocides, the Nazis' goal was the total destruction of the Jewish people as an ethnic group.
Scale. In four years, 6 million Jews were killed - a third of the entire Jewish people. Humanity has never known genocide on such a scale.
Means. For the first time in history, the mass extermination of Jews was carried out by industrial means using modern technology.

These characteristics, taken together, according to a number of authors, determine the uniqueness of the Holocaust. But an impartial study of the comparative calculations presented, from our point of view, is not convincing confirmation of the thesis about the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust.

Let's consider all three characteristics sequentially.

A) Object and purpose of the Holocaust. According to Professor Katz, "The Holocaust is phenomenologically unique due to the fact that never before has it been aimed, as a matter of deliberate principle and actualized policy, at the physical destruction of every man, woman and child belonging to a particular people." The essence of this statement is this: before the Nazis, who sought to make the world Judenrein (“clean of Jews”), no one had ever deliberately intended to destroy an entire people. The assertion seems dubious. Since ancient times, there has been a practice of complete elimination of national groups, in particular, during wars of conquest and inter-tribal clashes. This task was solved in different ways: for example, through forced assimilation, but also through the complete destruction of such a group, which was already reflected in the ancient biblical narratives, in particular, in the stories about the conquest of Canaan (Isa. 6:20; 7:9 ; 10:39-40). Already in our time, in intertribal clashes, one or another national group is slaughtered, as, for example, in Burundi, when in the mid-90s of the twentieth century, up to half a million representatives of the Tutsi people were slaughtered during the genocide. It is obvious that in any interethnic clashes people are killed precisely because they belong to the people participating in such a clash.

Another important circumstance, which is often referred to by defenders of the “uniqueness of the Holocaust,” is that the Nazi policy aimed at the physical destruction of all Jews, in fact, had no rational basis and amounted to a quasi-religiously determined total murder of Jews. One could agree with this point of view, if not for one serious “but”: modern historians have to argue about facts that clearly do not fit into the concept of irrational hatred of Jews. It is well known, for example, that when big money came into play, it overwhelmed the Nazi passion for murder. A fairly large number of wealthy Jews were able to escape from Nazi Germany just before the start of the war. When, at the end of the war, part of the Nazi elite actively sought contacts with the Western allies for their own salvation, the Jews again successfully became the subject of bargaining; when Goering's party comrades called him to account for multimillion-dollar bribes, thanks to which the wealthy Jewish Bernheimer family was released from a concentration camp, and accused him of having connections with Jews, in the presence of Hitler he uttered the famous and quite cynical phrase: Wer Jude ist, bestimme nur ich! (“Who is a Jew, only I determine!”) The dissertation of the American Jew Brian Rigg caused lively controversy: its author provides numerous data that many people who were subject to Nazi laws on Jewish origin served in the army of Nazi Germany, some of them they held high positions; although a number of similar facts were known to the Wehrmacht high command, for various reasons they were hidden. Finally, the striking fact of the participation of 350 Finnish Jewish officers in the war with the USSR as part of the Finnish army - Hitler's ally, when three Jewish officers were awarded the Iron Cross (although they refused to receive it), and a military field synagogue operated on the Nazi side of the front. All these facts, although in no way diminish the monstrosity of the Nazi regime, still do not make the picture so clearly irrational.

b) The scale of the Holocaust. The number of Jewish victims of Nazism is truly amazing. Although the exact death toll is still a matter of debate, historical science a figure close to 6 million people has been established, that is, the death toll represents a third of the entire Jewish population in the world and from half to two-thirds of half of European Jewry. However, in historical retrospect, one can find events quite comparable to the Holocaust in terms of the scale of victims. Thus, Professor Katz himself cites figures according to which, in the process of colonization of North America, mid-16th century century, of the 80-112 million American Indians, seven-eighths died, that is, from 70 to 88 million. Katz admits: “If numbers alone constitute uniqueness, then the Jewish experience under Hitler was not unique.” At the same time, an interesting concept is put forward that they mostly died from epidemics, and there were not so many killed as a result of direct violence. But this argument can hardly be considered fair: epidemics accompanied the colonization process, and no one was interested in the fate of the Indians - in other words, the colonialists were directly responsible for their deaths. Likewise, during the deportation of the Caucasian peoples under Stalin, a huge number of people died from the accompanying deprivations and hunger. If we follow Katz’s logic, then the number of dead Jews should not include those who died from hunger and unbearable conditions in ghettos and concentration camps.

The Armenian genocide, considered the first genocide of the 20th century, is similar in scale to the Holocaust. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, from 1915 to 1923, according to various estimates, from 600 thousand to 1 million 250 thousand Armenians died, that is, from one third to almost three quarters of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which by 1915 amounted to 1 million 750 thousand people . Estimates of the number of victims among the Roma during the Nazi period range from 250 thousand to half a million people, and such a reputable source as the French encyclopedia Universalis considers the figure of half a million to be the most modest. In this case, we can talk about the death of up to half of the Roma population of Europe.

Moreover, in Jewish history itself there have been events that, in terms of the scale of victims, are quite close to the Holocaust. Unfortunately, any figures relating to the pogroms of the Middle Ages and early modern times, in particular, the Khmelnytsky period and the subsequent Russian-Polish and Polish-Swedish wars, are extremely approximate, as are the general demographic data of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that by 1648 the Jewish population of Poland - the largest Jewish community in the world - was about 300 thousand people. The death toll for the decade of Khmelnytsia (1648-1658) varies enormously: it is now believed that the number of victims was exaggerated in Jewish chronicles. Some sources speak of 180 thousand and even 600 thousand Jews; according to G. Graetz, more than a quarter of a million Polish Jews were killed. A number of modern historians prefer much more modest figures - 40-50 thousand dead, which amounted to 20-25 percent of the Jewish population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is also a lot. But other historians are still inclined to consider the figure of 100 thousand people more reliable - in this case we can talk about a third of the dead of the total number of Polish Jews.

Thus, both in modern history and in the history of the Jews one can find examples of genocides comparable in scale to the Holocaust. Of course, the genocide of Jews has special features that distinguish it from other genocides, as many scholars point out. But in any other genocide one can find specific or, in accepted terminology, “unique” features. Thus, Professor Katz believes that the Nazi genocide of the Roma during the Second World War, although similar in a number of characteristics to the Jewish genocide, was different from it: it had not only an ethnic background, but was also directed against the Roma as a group with antisocial behavior. But such an argument also proves that the genocide of the Roma had a “unique” character in comparison with other genocides, including the Holocaust. Moreover, the Roma are the only people who were subjected to mass sterilization by the Nazis, which can also be considered as a “unique” phenomenon. In other words, each genocide can then be defined as having a unique character, and in this regard the very term “uniqueness” in relation to the Holocaust turns out to be unsuitable - the use of the term “specialness” seems much more justified here.

V)"Technology" of the Jewish genocide. Such a characteristic can only be determined by specific historical conditions. For example, at the Battle of Ypres in the spring of 1915, Germany used chemical weapons for the first time and the Anglo-French troops suffered heavy losses. Can we say that in this case, at the beginning of the 20th century, weapons of destruction were less technologically advanced than gas chambers? Of course, the difference here is that in one case they destroyed the enemy on the battlefield, and in the other - defenseless people. But in both cases, people were “technologically” destroyed, and in the Battle of Ypres, weapons of mass destruction, which were used for the first time, also left the enemy defenseless. But as far as we know, neutron and genetic weapons are still being developed, which kill a huge number of people with a minimum of other destruction. Let's imagine for a second that this weapon (God forbid) will ever be used. Then, inevitably, the “technological efficiency” of murder will be recognized as even higher than during the Nazi period. As a result, in fact, this criterion also turns out to be quite artificial.

So, each of the arguments separately turns out to be not very convincing. Therefore, as evidence, they speak of the uniqueness of the listed factors of the Holocaust in their totality (when, according to Katz, the questions “how” and “what” are balanced by the question “why”). To some extent, this approach is fair, since it creates a more comprehensive vision, but still, the discussion here may be more about the amazing atrocities of the Nazis than about the radical difference between the Holocaust and other genocides.

But, nevertheless, we are convinced that the Holocaust has a special and truly unique, in the full sense of the word, significance in world history. Only the characteristics of this uniqueness should be sought in other circumstances, which are no longer categories of purpose, tools and volume (scale). A detailed analysis of these characteristics deserves a separate study, so we will only briefly formulate them.
1. The Holocaust became the final phenomenon, the apotheosis, the logical conclusion of a consistent series of persecutions and disasters throughout the history of the Jewish people. No other people knew such continuous persecution for almost 2 thousand years. In other words, all other, non-Jewish genocides were of an isolated nature, in contrast to the Holocaust as a continuous phenomenon.
2. The genocide of the Jewish people was carried out by a civilization that, to a certain extent, grew on Jewish ethical and religious values ​​and, to one degree or another, recognized these values ​​as its own (the “Judeo-Christian civilization”, according to the traditional definition). In other words, there is a fact of self-destruction of the foundations of civilization. And here it is not so much Hitler’s Reich itself with its racist-semi-pagan-semi-Christian religious ideology that appears as the destroyer (after all, Hitler’s Germany never renounced its Christian identity, albeit of a special, “Aryan” kind), but rather the Christian world as a whole with its centuries-old anti-Judaism, which greatly contributed to the emergence of Nazism. All other genocides in history were not of such a self-destructive nature for civilization.
3. The Holocaust to a large extent turned the consciousness of civilization upside down and determined its future path of development, in which persecution on racial and religious grounds is declared unacceptable. Despite the complex and sometimes tragic picture of the modern world, the intolerance of civilized states towards manifestations of chauvinism and racism was largely due to the understanding of the results of the Holocaust.

Thus, the uniqueness of the Holocaust phenomenon is determined not by the characteristic features of Hitler’s genocide as such, but by the place and role of the Holocaust in the world historical and spiritual process.

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When 193,000 Holocaust survivors remained alive in Israel, out of the half million who returned to the country after World War II, their grandchildren decided to start this custom, the purpose of which is to ensure that the greatest disaster in human history is not forgotten. Some also supported another custom - they imprinted on their arms with tattoos the numbers that were assigned to their relatives in Auschwitz.

Yesterday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we went into several houses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and saw tears in people's eyes. But we also heard several stories that brought a smile to the faces of the storytellers.

Gabi Hartman experienced the war in Budapest as a small child. He told how he hid in a wardrobe for many months, and said that his most powerful memories were not the deportation of his family to Auschwitz, but the hunger: “It was terrible, it didn’t let me sleep, it didn’t let me breathe. And that’s why now I can’t even hear about diets.” Hugging his wife, Eva, he adds: “I never let her keep the fridge empty. I have such a mania now.”

Gabi and Eva met after the war and decided never to part and start in Israel new life. Their story is similar to the stories of many couples who survived the hell of Shoah and lost their loved ones in its fire. Their love was born on a land that, as Eve said, was flooded with tears, and here, without ceremony, celebrations or rabbis, they began a new life.

In another house in Jerusalem, 94-year-old Gerta Natovich and her 95-year-old husband, Moses, opened the doors to us. They told us that they met before the war in Poland, but in the summer of 1942 their families were sent to different concentration camps. “I was sent to Auschwitz, and Moses was sent to forced labor in Dresden,” Gerta continues her story. She survived the war and went to university in Krakow. “But I decided to interrupt my studies and go to Israel. I left Nice on the same ship with illegal immigrants. I knew that Moses’ sister lived in Jerusalem.” After the war, Moses returned to Krakow and first of all began to look for Hertha, but learned that she had gone to Israel. “And I did the same as she did: I boarded the ship. But I was less fortunate: the British did not allow us to reach the country and landed us in Cyprus.” During the eight months that he stayed in Cyprus, they wrote each other a hundred love letters. Finally, in the spring of 1947, he returned to Jerusalem. “And we got married right away,” they say in one voice.

North of Tel Aviv, in the city of Kfar Sava, we met 92-year-old Yehuda and his wife, Judith. They met as children in the Czechoslovak town of Samorin. Brother Judith was the best friend of Yehuda and his brother. At the beginning of the war, Yehuda was sent to a Hungarian labor camp, but his family did not yet realize the full danger of the situation. Yehuda's mother once said to Judith: “I know that you will become my daughter-in-law, but I do not know which of my sons you will marry.” Yehuda fled the camp and hid in the forests until the liberation of Czechoslovakia. At the end of the war, he returned to his hometown, began looking for his family, and realized that he was left alone. Judith, who ended up in Auschwitz at age 17, saw with her own eyes how the Nazis took her parents and one of her brothers to the gas chamber. She was the only survivor of those members of her family who ended up in the camp. “I was returning to my homeland in search of some distant relative in a horse-drawn cart. And suddenly I saw my brother and his friend - Yehuda... and then a new story began. We never parted again, we have one heart and one soul between us.” “Mom didn’t get to see this, but her prediction came true,” Yehuda adds in a sad voice.

IN FICTION Many examples of phenomena and conditions are described when what happened to our ancestors turns out to be more relevant for people than what is happening today. These phenomena and states have different names: the memory of ancestors, other people's memories, ghosts of the past. Despite the importance of the problem, social memory is rarely discussed in scientific works, and most often - element by element: as social ideas in psychology, mentality in history, transformation of culture in cultural studies.

Connections with the past, characteristic of any small nation, are usually not considered in psychological science. Nevertheless, the influence of significant historical events is very noticeable in the process of national identification, intra- and intergroup perception and interaction, self-awareness, self-perception, self-acceptance.

This work discusses the phenomenon of social memory from a perspective different from most works. We understand social memory as the influence of events experienced by ancestors on descendants. We assume the presence of information not recorded in material sources that circulates within the family and determines some aspects of the cognitive, emotional and behavioral spheres of the personality of descendants. The methods of transmitting information about experienced events are contained not only in oral family histories, but also in the style of raising children, family structure, and the life attitudes of family members who experienced these significant events. On the other hand, family experience of significant events influences not only the cognitive and emotional attitude of the younger generation towards them, but also deeper personal formations that are not directly related to this experience, which is the result of the influence of social memory.

It was not by chance that such a significant event as the Holocaust was chosen for analysis. On the one hand, the extermination of six million people simply for belonging to a certain nationality cannot go unnoticed by representatives of this nationality. According to American researchers, the Holocaust is considered the most important symbol of Jewish culture and history by 85% of adult Jewish Americans (Markova, 1996). On the other hand, there are still alive people who survived the ghetto or concentration camp, who saw the death of their loved ones and are now involved in raising their grandchildren. At the same time, there are many Jewish families who have no direct experience of the Holocaust. Thus, it is possible to find out not only the presence of social memory, but also to determine whether family experience of the events experienced is a necessary condition for its influence on subsequent generations, or whether social memory exists at the macro level, being an attribute not of the family, but of the people.

Basic approaches to the study of social memory

One of the authors who mentioned the concept of “social memory” was G. Tarde (Tard, 1996). He connects memory with consciousness, and consciousness with imitation. The individual's established, firm adherence to concepts and rules was at first a conscious imitation of his ancestors, gradually moving into the layer of the unconscious. For G. Tarde, imitation is the main mechanism for the formation of social memory, which in turn is defined as a repository of concepts, customs, prejudices, etc., borrowed from the life of ancestors.

Another classic of social psychology, G. Le Bon, following G. Spencer, without using the expression “social memory,” essentially talks about it (Le Bon, 1995). He divides the influence to which an individual is exposed throughout his life into three groups: the influence of ancestors, the influence of direct parents, and the influence of the environment. Further, using the example of race, G. Lebon speaks about social memory at the macro level, on the scale of a large group, and using the example of long-term intergenerational connections. A race, in his opinion, consists not only of living individuals who form it in at the moment, but also from the long line of the dead who were their ancestors. They control the immeasurable region of the unconscious - that invisible region which holds under its power all manifestations of the mind and character. The fate of the people is controlled to a much greater extent by the dead generations than by the living ones. They not only give us physical organization, they also inspire us with their thoughts. The dead are the only undisputed masters of the living. We bear the weight of their mistakes, we receive the reward of their virtues (Le Bon, 1995).

Guided by the logic of the influence of social memory, it is worth turning to an area adjacent to psychology - the history of mentalities. Despite the replacement of the term “social memory” with “mentality” and a less psychologized approach, the point of view of the followers of the Annales school on changes in history transferred to changes in mentality is very useful in understanding the mechanisms of social memory (Gurevich, 1993; History of mentalities, 1996) .

The well-known scheme of Braudel, who distinguished three types of duration in history, can, according to J. Duby, be applied to mental processes (History of mentalities, 1996).

Some of them are fleeting and superficial (for example, the resonance caused by a sermon, the scandal caused by an unusual work of art, short-term popular unrest, etc.). It is at this level that the relationship between the individual and the group is formed (the group’s reaction to the individual’s action and the individual’s reaction to pressure from the group arises).

Less fleeting, medium-duration mental processes affect not only individuals, but entire social groups. As a rule, we're talking about about smooth mental processes, without sudden changes. Transformations of this type (for example, a change in aesthetic taste among the educated part of the population) give rise to a phenomenon known to everyone: children reason, feel and express themselves differently than their parents did.

The next level is the “dungeons of long time” (according to Braudel), mental structures that stubbornly resist change. They form a deep layer of ideas and behavior patterns that do not change with the change of generations. The combination of these structures gives each long phase of history a specific flavor. However, these structures are not completely immobile: J. Duby believes that their change occurs as a result of fairly rapid, although perhaps imperceptible situations. Finally, J. Duby mentions another, most deeply lying mental layer associated with the biological properties of a person. It is motionless or almost motionless and changes along with the evolution of the biological properties themselves.

What exactly is the object of change? A.Ya. Gurevich introduces the concept of a world model - a “coordinate grid” for perceiving reality and constructing an image of the world. A person is guided in behavior by the model of the world, with the help of its categories he selects impulses and impressions and transforms them into internal experience - interiorizes. These categories precede the ideas and worldview that are formed among members of society or its groups and therefore, no matter how different the beliefs and ideologies of these individuals and groups, they can be based on universal, mandatory concepts and ideas for the whole society, without which the construction of ideas is impossible , theories, philosophical, aesthetic, political and religious concepts and systems.

The model of the world, according to A.Ya. Gurevich, consists of two large groups of categories: social and universal, cosmic. He includes the categories of the individual, society, freedom, wealth, property, law, justice, etc. as social. Cosmic, at the same time, defining categories of human consciousness include concepts and forms of perception of reality, such as time, space, change, cause, fate, number, the relationship of the sensory to the supersensible, the relationship of parts to the whole (Gurevich, 1993). The division of society into social and natural cosmos is very arbitrary, but for a better understanding of the problem it is quite understandable.

It is worth mentioning that the basic conceptual concepts and ideas of civilization are formed in practical activities, based on experience and traditions inherited from the previous era. A certain stage of development of production, social relations, etc. correspond to certain ways of experiencing the world. They reflect social practice and at the same time determine the behavior of the individual and groups. Therefore, they influence social practice, contributing to the fact that it is cast into forms that correspond to the model of the world into which these categories are grouped.

Representatives of the French sociological school speak not about memory, but about ideas. Social memory is considered here as a storage place and a way of transmitting social ideas from generation to generation. Let us present some aspects of S. Moscovici’s concept related to social memory.

The most general definition of this concept apparently belongs to D. Jodela, a student and follower of S. Moscovici: “The category of social representation denotes a specific form of knowledge, namely common sense knowledge, the content, functions and reproduction of which are socially determined. In a broader sense social representations are properties of everyday practical thinking aimed at mastering and understanding the social, material and ideal environment. As such, they have special characteristics in the field of content, mental operations and logic. The social determination of the content and the process of representation itself is predetermined by the context and conditions of their occurrence. channels of circulation, and finally, the functions they serve in interaction with the world and other people... they represent a way of interpreting and comprehending everyday reality, a certain form of social cognition, which involves the cognitive activity of individuals and groups, allowing them to fix their position in relation to situations, events, objects and messages affecting them" (Dontsov, Emelyanova, 1987).

According to the authors of the concept, social ideas are described by a model containing three dimensions: information, field of ideas and attitude. Information is understood as the sum of knowledge about the object of representation. A certain level of information – necessary condition emergence of social representation. The field characterizes representations from the qualitative side. It exists where a “hierarchized unity of elements” is presented, a more or less expressed richness of content, and figurative and semantic properties of representation are present. The content of the field is characteristic of certain social groups. The attitude expresses the general attitude of the subject to the object of representation. Unlike the previous two dimensions, an attitude can exist when the field of ideas is insufficiently informed and unclear. On this basis, S. Moscovici makes a conclusion about the genetic primacy of the attitude.

Social representations are figurative in nature, while S. Moscovici persistently defends its understanding as an active creative principle, and not a mirror image of an object. In addition to activity, representations are also characterized by indicative, directing activity. It is through representations that the facts of the surrounding world, in order to become knowledge used in everyday life, undergo transformation and evaluation.

Representations perform certain social functions: the function of cognition, decomposed into description, classification and explanation; mediation of behavior; adaptation of new social facts to already existing, formed views, assessments, opinions.

The process of formation of social ideas, so important for our problems, can only be judged conditionally from the concept of S. Moscovici. For the authors, “formation is rather a possible connection between phenomena” (Dontsov, Emelyanova, 1993). A phenomenon is an element of everyday consciousness, in the form and through which the subject gets acquainted with the world, that is, representation is a product of constructing reality from images and concepts.

To analyze how the object of representation is “fitted” into a previously developed, established system of knowledge, S. Moscovici introduces the concept of an “identification matrix”. It is evaluative in nature, connects incoming information with certain social categories, endowing the object of representation with appropriate meaning and significance. Undoubted for S. Moscovici is the social relevance of matrices, the dependence of what is permitted and prohibited on belonging to a certain class.

So, summing up the theoretical review of phenomena that are as close as possible to social memory, we can propose the following integrating scheme.

By social memory we mean the second level of influence, i.e. the influence of the parental family on the individual, ensuring slow transformations within the group. First of all, the social categories of the world model are subject to this influence.

Remembering G. Spencer as presented by G. Lebon, we can talk about the influence of ancestors, deep structures of mass consciousness on more superficial categories, and this also falls under the definition of social memory, but at the macro level. In addition, we made an assumption about the influence of parents on the “prisons of a long time,” that is, on structures of a deeper order. This hypothesis arose as a result of empirical research and requires more detailed discussion.

In practice, the problem of social memory was realized in psychotherapy. Methods of data collection and correction include, for example, the technique of analyzing early memories of A. Adler, described in detail in the article by E.N. Ispolatova and T.P. Nikolaeva (Ispolatova, Nikolaeva, 1998). The method is based on the position of psychoanalysis that the earliest childhood memories express a person’s basic life attitudes, the main difficulties in life and the way to overcome them, contain a person’s fundamental assessment of himself and his situation, in a word, everything that can be the result of the influence of social memory.

In other words, early childhood memories may serve as a storage site for information conveyed in the manner we describe, and therefore be highly diagnostic.

Another case of applying the concept of social memory in practice is directly related to our empirical problems. For several years now, meeting groups have been held at the annual conferences of the International Association of Family Therapists for children of Holocaust victims and German soldiers (Kaslow, 1998). It is believed that the trace of the Holocaust remained both in the collective unconscious and in the consciousness of each of these people. F. Kaslow, describing the work procedure of these groups in his article, notes that the most complex topic For his clients, he considers the parent-child relationship. Their parents are at two poles of a continuum: some talk about the Holocaust constantly, others don't talk about it at all. Often the father is reserved, and the mother is talkative. These people have one thing in common - an identity sharpened by the legacy of war.

The vast majority of them, writes Kaslow, have achieved a lot, made careers in the so-called humane professions, and are more concerned than others about the well-being of their parents. The shadow of the Holocaust forces children to navigate the horrific experiences of their parents more than fifty years ago. They are forced to mourn relatives whom they have never met, but feel their presence in their lives. All these qualities are found in people living both in Israel and in such prosperous countries as Sweden, the USA, and England.

Descendants of German soldiers usually talk about shame and guilt, distance from parents who do not discuss this period of history and their role in it with them, a lack of identification with their country and the need to love it, about the harm and comedy of denying what happened.

F. Kaslow’s conclusions once again confirm the influence of social memory on the entire personality structure, not only and not so much cognitive as emotional-volitional. This will be discussed in the empirical part of our study.

Experience in empirical research of social memory

The study was conducted on the basis of a specially developed questionnaire, three tests, one of which is aimed at studying the value-semantic sphere, and the other two represent drawing projective techniques, and a focused interview.

In the main part of the study, two categories of respondents were interviewed: 30 young people aged 16–22 of both sexes, whose relatives did not survive the Holocaust, and 30 people whose families had such extreme experiences. The second group consisted of eleventh grade students from Jewish schools in Moscow and Riga, grandchildren of people who survived the Holocaust and spent the war at the front or in evacuation.

Using focused interviews, 10 elderly people who survived the ghetto or concentration camp, and 12 people who were at the front or in unoccupied territories were interviewed.

The questionnaire included the following groups of questions:

(a) dedicated to knowledge about the Holocaust (number of victims, places of destruction, knowledge of other peoples subjected to genocide, etc.);

(b) affecting attitudes towards the Holocaust (should you tell children about the Holocaust, why, did your family tell you about it, associations with words directly related to the Holocaust: ghetto, Germans, Warsaw, execution, etc.);

(c) on national identification (from whom did you learn about your nationality, what feelings does belonging to it evoke in you, an invitation to write 7 adjectives characterizing a representative of the respondent’s nationality, the meaning of nationality when meeting, attitude to national traditions). The questionnaire also included projective questions aimed at identifying unconscious structures, namely word associations and unfinished sentences.

The value-semantic sphere of respondents was studied using the methodology for studying value orientations (VO). This technique, adapted by D.A. Leontiev, consists of scaling a fixed and previously known set of values ​​according to scales specified by instructions using ranking. It is based on the methodology of M. Rokeach, who distinguishes two classes of values ​​– terminal and instrumental. The stimulus material here is two lists of values ​​– terminal and instrumental (18 qualities in each). The subject is asked to rank both lists of values, and then estimate as a percentage the degree of realization of each of them in his life (Leontyev D.A., 1992).

In addition, respondents were offered two tasks with the following instructions: “on one sheet of paper, draw the past, present, and future, on the other - fear, and write a few words about the feelings that arise in you. Try to draw not specific objects, but symbols. Quality of the drawing doesn't play a role."

Research results and discussion

The purpose of this phase of the study was to explore how the personal experiences of Holocaust survivors influence their perception of historical events and, in particular, their perception of the Holocaust itself. The results showed that the emotional attitude of former ghetto prisoners to the war, the Germans, the Nazis, and the Holocaust was sharper than that of representatives of the second group. In the first group, the tendency to separate Jews into a special group and to classify themselves as one of them was much more pronounced among the first category of people than among the second. People who survived the ghetto are better informed about the details of the extermination of Jews, the number of dead, the places of extermination, etc. Among the members of the first group more people who honor national traditions, but in connection with the cosmopolitan tendencies of Soviet ideology it is difficult to talk about this. The starting point for further research was the information that the children and grandchildren of members of the first group are more effective and successful in life. Therefore, more interesting results were expected from the main stage, when Jewish youth became the object of the study.

The results obtained on the basis of a questionnaire of value orientations showed that adolescents whose ancestors survived the Holocaust are more focused on successful adaptation and positioning in society, both in the rational and emotional sphere, in contrast to adolescents who did not have such experience and relied on the first place is comfort and harmony of the inner world.

In addition, adolescents of the first group are guided by the ideal of a rational person, achieving certain goals, while in the second group such tendencies were not noticed. In general, representatives of the first group show more high level aspirations, motivation to achieve, orientation to the future, ignoring many factors that impede progress. But at the same time, they demonstrate the importance of the happiness of others in their lives and highly value the development of sensitivity and tolerance in themselves. In addition, adolescents of the first group value their actual family, which is presumably more united, more highly, and are more actively involved in its life than members of the second group.

Respondents of the first group demonstrated a more pronounced individualistic position and orientation towards personal goals. Their demands are relatively high, and at the same time they recognize the existence in society of positions with more pronounced demands, which are a guideline for them.

Summarizing the results of the survey, we made the following conclusions, some of which differed from the results of the CO questionnaires.

Firstly, as it turned out, the attitude towards the Holocaust, genocide, anti-Semitism, etc. It is much more emotionally charged among teenagers whose families have no experience of the Holocaust. In both groups (22 drawings of fear in the group with Holocaust experience and 24 drawings in the second group), the swastika took first place in terms of number: six drawings in each group. In the word association test for the word “fear,” 13% of associations in the first group and 18% in the second were associated with the Holocaust, as well as fascism, Nazism, pogrom, disaster, etc. A similar situation is with the words “grief” (6% and 10% of “military” associations, respectively), “pogrom” (10 and 12%), “horror” (67% and 33%), “anti-Semitism” (11% and 16 %). As can be seen, in most cases, teenagers who did not experience the direct influence of relatives who survived the Holocaust demonstrate a much more emotionally charged attitude towards these historical events. It is very difficult to explain this fact unambiguously. It can be assumed that Holocaust survivors diligently protect their children from traumatic information. It is possible that the events of the Holocaust were “domesticated” in the families that survived it, and therefore do not emerge in the ranks of associations in the first place. In any case, one must keep in mind the existence of a certain factor that equates the unconscious attitude of adolescents from both groups to these historical events.

Secondly, the future and present seem darker to teenagers with Holocaust experience than their peers, personal prospects are not so rosy and achievements are not so obvious. In addition, in their opinion, career, success, position in society in most cases are the result of luck, and not hard work and abilities.

Thirdly, teenagers with Holocaust experience in their families are more willing to identify themselves with children, show an infantile attitude towards the world and the people around them, and demonstrate an unwillingness to accept new age roles, which is why they differ from their peers from the second group. In the group of teenagers with extreme family experience, 20% of respondents said that family history begins with themselves, while in the second group this was only 4%. In general, “yaking” in the answers of the first group was much more common: in associations with the words “children,” “Jew,” and “people,” the pronoun “I” was very common. From here we can put forward the following assumption. It is possible that in families with extreme experience, the parenting style was more centered on children as an extension of life and highest value. A child, finding himself in such a situation, feels like the center of the universe and goes through life with this feeling. Then children's egocentrism never goes away over time; in this regard, the person remains infantile until the end of his days. Giving associations to the word “children,” 9% of adolescents from the first group and 38% of adolescents from the second wrote words associated with adult attitudes towards them: responsibility, pride, the meaning of life, the main value in life, hope. In our opinion, these data once again confirm the infantilism of adolescents from families with extreme experiences, identification of themselves with children and unwillingness to accept new age roles. This is inconsistent with the data of the CO questionnaire, where in the hierarchy of values ​​the first positions were occupied by those that are characteristic of adults.

Further, from the reactions of adolescents from families with extreme pasts, one can see how high the value of actual family relationships is, the expressed need to belong to a family, clan, how great is the special unity around the “hearth”, knowledge of family history, non-dissociation of past and present, observance of customs and traditions, preservation of family heirlooms, respect for the past in children. When talking about roots and family stories, teenagers from the group with Holocaust experience often remember material objects, such as a photo album, a vase, clothes, or the smell of shoe polish in a communal apartment. Twice as often, the family history for these teenagers begins with the generations preceding their grandparents; among them, unlike the other group, there are no people who do not know their genealogy. More often they express their attitude towards their family history with the words: “dear”, “holy”, “very important”, “pride”, etc.

And finally, the identification of adolescents from families with Holocaust experience with their nationality and historical homeland is not as pronounced as that of their peers who do not have such experience in social memory. For example, 13% of teenagers from the first group and 30% from the second feel themselves to be Jews “always”, 5% of respondents from the second group associate the word “people” with the word “Jews” and the word “Israel” with themselves and their country, while while in the first group there were no such answers. This is at odds with the working hypothesis that in families with extreme past experiences, more attention is paid to national education, especially if this experience is associated with genocide of an entire people, and children more acutely perceive their nationality as a possible source of discrimination. There could be several explanations here. The first, very superficial, is precisely connected with national discrimination, when parents, taught by bitter experience, do not consider it necessary to form a national identification in a child in order to protect him from oppression. The second explanation, like everything that is inconsistent with the main hypothesis, will be given below.

The data from the CO questionnaire paint a portrait of a socially successful, well-adapted person. In our opinion, adolescents from the first group gave socially desirable answers and answered questions that were relevant to them. social expectations followed the stereotype successful person. On a conscious level, these teenagers strive to conform to such stereotypes; social positioning and success come to the fore for them. This is confirmed by the fact that 13% of associations for the word “loser” in this group were “not me.”

Unconsciously, they correspond much less to the ideal they have drawn, and demonstrate infantilism, maladaptation, uncertainty, and an external locus of control. The conscious desire for adulthood and responsibility, encrypted in the high importance of the happiness of others, faces an unconscious unwillingness to accept this role, identifying oneself with children. In this regard, adolescents who do not have Holocaust experience behave much more adaptively and successfully, without creating a contradiction between their conscious and unconscious status. In addition, they do not suffer from the discrepancy between ideal and reality, because these two formations are very close to each other.

Perhaps this is due to the style of upbringing in the family, the ideal of social success and strict requirements for compliance with these ideals, coupled with a focus on the child, overprotection, and increased anxiety for the life and health of children. Both parts of this contradiction may be a consequence of extreme past experiences in the social memory of the family, but in action it creates the above-described discrepancies in the conscious and unconscious sphere. It can be assumed that in families where there is no experience of the Holocaust, such a contradiction, if it exists, is not so pronounced.

Another interesting discrepancy with the original hypothesis concerns the emotional attitude towards war, the Holocaust, genocide, and anti-Semitism. As noted above, adolescents from families without Holocaust survivors identify with these events much more often than adolescents with Holocaust experience in the family. In our opinion, this does not indicate a lack of influence of historical events within the family, but rather a broader framework, the influence of events affecting the entire nation on the entire generation of descendants, without distinguishing specific family experiences. In everyday language, the Holocaust affects a person not only if his grandfather was in the ghetto, but also if his neighbor's grandfather was in the ghetto. This is the same social memory at the macro level that G. Lebon spoke about.

In our case, adolescents of both groups experienced approximately the same influence of the Holocaust, with the only difference being that in the second group, fantasy additions, feelings of guilt for the better fate of their ancestors, and other mechanisms that enhance emotionality and correlation with the Holocaust are more often possible.

Another hypothesis that arises when analyzing the data obtained in our study is the presence of protective mechanisms in the case of adolescents from families with Holocaust experience. It is possible that the experience of the impact of this event is so strong that adolescents repress emotional information about it, unconsciously underestimating its significance in their lives. A similar situation may exist with national identification as a sign of belonging to an event, because the demonstrated indifference to one’s ethnicity cannot be typical for students of a national school.

LITERATURE

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2. Dontsov A.I. Emelyanova T.P. The concept of social representations in modern French psychology. – M., 1987.
3. History of mentalities, historical anthropology. – M., 1996.
4. Ispolatova E.N., Nikolaeva T.P. Modified technique for analyzing early memories of a person // Questions of psychology, 1998. No. 6.
5. Lebon G. Psychology of peoples and masses. – M., 1995.
6. Leontyev D.A. Methodology for studying value orientations. – M., 1992.
7. Tard G. Social logic. – St. Petersburg, 1996.
8. Kaslow F.W. A Holocaust Dialogue Continues: Voices of Descendants of Victims and of Perpetrators // Journal of Family Psychotherapy. 1998. Vol. 9 (1)
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For many years, there have been debates about whether the destruction of the Jewish people during World War II can be considered a special phenomenon that goes beyond the concept of “genocide,” or whether the Holocaust fits well into a number of other genocides known to history. The most productive discussion on this issue took place among German scientists in the mid-1980s. She played an important role in further research.

Although the main topic of discussion was the actual nature of Nazism, the issues of the Holocaust and Auschwitz, for obvious reasons, occupied a key place in it. During the discussion, two directions emerged that defended opposing theses. Supporters of the “nationalist-conservative trend” (“nationalists”) believe that the Holocaust was not a “unique” phenomenon and can be placed on a par with other catastrophes of the 20th century, for example, the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916, the Vietnam War and even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Representatives of the “left-liberal trend” argue that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in German history and in the psychology of the Germans, from which comes the special specificity of the Holocaust, which is focused on Nazism and only on it. In fact, it was precisely the characteristics of singularity (“uniqueness”) and uniqueness that became the stumbling block in the subsequent discussion.

SUBJECTIVITY OF PAIN AND THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE

First of all, it should be noted that the topic of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust is extremely sensitive. Viewed from within Jewry, the Holocaust experience is an absolute tragedy, since every suffering is personal, it is absolutized, made unique and forms the identity of Jewry. It is no coincidence that any other use of the word “Holocaust,” for example, in the plural (“Holocaust”) or in relation to another genocide, usually causes a painful reaction among Jews. Comparison of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia with the Holocaust, comparison of Milosevic with Hitler, expanded interpretation of the prosecution of the “butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbier in the 1987 trial in France as “crimes against humanity”, when the genocide of Jews was considered only as one of the crimes, and not as a crime unparalleled, caused strong protests from the Jewish public. We can also add here the recent controversy over the removal of crosses that had been put up arbitrarily by Polish nationalist Catholics in Auschwitz, when the question was debated whether Auschwitz should be seen solely as a place and symbol of Jewish suffering, although it was also the site of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles and people of other nationalities.

In other words, any comparisons, invading the area of ​​individual and collective memory of Jews, inevitably reduce the pathos of the exceptionalism of Jewish suffering. At the same time, the Holocaust loses its specific content and is considered as one of many genocides, or it acquires a “universal” dimension. The logical development of the deconcretization of the Holocaust is to deprive it of even the signs of genocide itself, when the “Holocaust” is transformed into the most general model of oppression and social injustice.

IN THE VISE OF CONTRADICTIONS

On the other hand, the Holocaust is a historical and social phenomenon, and as such it naturally aspires to be analyzed in a broader context than just at the level of memory and testimony of the Jewish people - in particular, at the academic level. The very need to study the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon just as inevitably forces us to operate in academic language, and the logic of historical research pushes us towards comparativism. But it immediately becomes apparent that the very choice of comparative analysis as a tool for academic research ultimately undermines the idea of ​​the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust in its social and ethical significance.

Even simple logical reasoning based on the assumption of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, in fact, leads to the destruction of the currently established ideas about its historical role for all humanity. In fact, the content of the historical lesson of the Holocaust has long gone beyond the historical fact of the genocide of the Jews: it is no coincidence that in many countries of the world the study of the Holocaust has been introduced into the school curriculum as an attempt to cultivate national and religious tolerance. The main conclusion from the lesson of the Holocaust is: “This (i.e., the Holocaust) must not happen again!” However, if the Holocaust is “unique”, i.e. is unique, unique, then there can be no talk of any repetition of it from the outset, and this important conclusion becomes meaningless: the Holocaust cannot then be any “lesson” by definition; or it is a “lesson” - but then it is comparable to other events of the past and present. As a result, it remains to either reformulate the idea of ​​“uniqueness” or abandon it.

Thus, to a certain extent, the very formulation of the problem of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust at the academic level is provocative. But the development of this problem also leads to certain logical inconsistencies. Indeed, what conclusions follow from recognizing the Holocaust as “unique”? The most famous scientist defending the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, US professor Steven Katz, formulated in one of his books the answer to this question: “The Holocaust highlights Nazism, and not vice versa.” At first glance, the answer is convincing: the study of the Holocaust reveals the essence of such a monstrous phenomenon as Nazism. However, we can pay attention to something else: the Holocaust, thus, turns out to be directly linked to Nazism. And then the question literally begs to be asked: is it even possible to consider the Holocaust as an independent phenomenon without discussing the essence of Nazism?

In view of the above, I will take the liberty of expressing some thoughts regarding the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, strictly within the framework of an academic approach.

ANALOGIES ARE INEVITABLE

So, one of the well-known theses of modern academic science involved in Holocaust research is that the tragedy of the Jews bears within itself the common features of other genocides and has characteristics that make this genocide not just special, but unique, exceptional, the only one in of its own kind. The three main characteristics of the Holocaust that make it “unique” are usually cited as follows:

1. Object and purpose. Unlike all other genocides, the Nazis' goal was the total destruction of the Jewish people as an ethnic group.

2. Scale. In four years, 6 million Jews were killed - two thirds of the entire Jewish people. Humanity has never known genocide on such a scale.

3. Means. For the first time in history, the mass extermination of Jews was carried out by industrial means, using modern technologies.

These characteristics taken together, according to a number of authors, determine the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust. But an impartial study of the comparative calculations presented, in our opinion, is not convincing confirmation of the thesis about the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust.

So, let's look at all three characteristics in turn:

a) The object and purpose of the Holocaust. According to Professor Katz, "The Holocaust is 'unique' by virtue of the fact that never before has it been intended - as a matter of deliberate principle and actualized policy - to physically exterminate every man, woman and child belonging to a particular people."

The essence of this statement is this: before the Nazis, who sought to make the world “clean of Jews,” no one had ever intended to deliberately destroy an entire nation. The assertion seems dubious. Since ancient times, there has been a practice of complete elimination of national groups, in particular, during wars of conquest and inter-tribal clashes. This task was solved in different ways: for example, by forced assimilation, but also by the complete destruction of such a group - which was already reflected in the ancient biblical narratives, in particular in the stories about the conquest of Canaan (Isa. 6:20; 7:9; 10 :39-40).

Another important circumstance, which is often referred to by defenders of the “uniqueness of the Holocaust,” is that the Nazi policy aimed at the physical destruction of all Jews essentially had no rational basis and amounted to a religiously determined total murder of Jews. One could agree with this point of view, if not for one serious “but”. It is well known, for example, that when big money came into play, it overwhelmed the Nazi passion for murder. Quite a large number of wealthy Jews were able to escape from Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the war. At the end of the war, part of the Nazi elite actively sought contacts with the Western allies for their own salvation, and the Jews became the subject of bargaining, and all religious fervor faded into the background. These facts do not in any way diminish the monstrosity of the Nazi regime, but they make the picture less clearly irrational.

b) The scale of the Holocaust. The number of Jewish victims of Nazism is truly amazing. Although the exact number of deaths is still a matter of debate, historical scholarship has established a figure close to 6 million people, i.e. about two-thirds of European Jewry. However, in historical retrospect, one can find events quite comparable to the Holocaust in terms of the scale of victims. Thus, Professor Katz himself cites figures according to which, in the process of colonization of North America, by the middle of the 16th century, out of 80-110 million American Indians, 7/8 died, i.e. from 70 to 88 million. Steven Katz admits: “If numbers alone constitute uniqueness, then the Jewish experience under Hitler was not unique.”

The Armenian genocide, considered the first genocide of the 20th century, is similar in scale to the Holocaust. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, from 1915 to 1923, from 600 thousand to 1 million 250 thousand Armenians died, i.e. from one third to almost 3/4 of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which by 1915 amounted to 1 million 750 thousand people.

c) “Technology” of the Jewish genocide. Such a characteristic can only be determined by specific historical conditions. For example, at the Battle of Ypres in the spring of 1915, Germany used chemical weapons for the first time, and the Anglo-French troops suffered heavy losses. Can we say that in this case, at the beginning of the 20th century, weapons of destruction were less technologically advanced than gas chambers? Of course, the difference here is that in one case they destroyed the enemy on the battlefield, and in the other - defenseless people. But in both cases, people were “technologically” destroyed, and in the Battle of Ypres, weapons of mass destruction, which were used for the first time, also left the enemy defenseless. As a result, this criterion also turns out to be quite artificial.

CIVILIZATION AFTER AUSCHWITZ

So, each of the arguments separately turns out to be not very convincing. Therefore, as evidence, they speak of the uniqueness of the listed factors of the Holocaust in their totality (when, according to Katz, the “how” and “what” are balanced by the “why”). To some extent, this approach is fair, since it creates a more comprehensive vision, but still, the discussion here may be more about the amazing atrocities of the Nazis than about the radical difference between the Holocaust and other genocides.

But, nevertheless, the Holocaust has a special and truly unique, in the full sense of the word, significance in world history. Only the characteristics of this uniqueness should be sought in other circumstances, which are no longer categories of purpose, instrumentation and magnitude (scale).

A detailed analysis of these characteristics deserves a separate study, so we will only briefly formulate them.

1. The Holocaust became the final phenomenon, the apotheosis, the logical conclusion of a consistent series of persecutions and disasters throughout the history of the Jewish people. No other people experienced such continuous persecution for almost 2000 years. In other words, all other non-Jewish genocides were of an isolated nature, in contrast to the Holocaust as a continuous phenomenon.

2. The genocide of the Jewish people was carried out by a civilization that, to a certain extent, grew up on Jewish ethical and religious values ​​and, to one degree or another, recognized these values ​​as its own (“Judeo-Christian civilization,” according to the traditional definition). In other words, there is a fact of self-destruction of the foundations of civilization. And here it is not so much Hitler’s Reich itself with its racist half-pagan, half-Christian religious ideology that appears as the destroyer (after all, Hitler’s Germany never renounced its Christian identity, albeit of a special, “Aryan” kind), but rather the Christian world as a whole , whose centuries-old anti-Judaism significantly contributed to the emergence of Nazism. All other genocides in history were not of such a self-destructive nature for civilization.

3. The Holocaust to a large extent turned the consciousness of civilization upside down and determined its future path of development, in which persecution on racial and religious grounds is declared unacceptable. Despite the complex and sometimes tragic picture of the modern world, the intolerance of civilized states towards manifestations of chauvinism and racism was largely due to the understanding of the results of the Holocaust.

Thus, the uniqueness of the Holocaust phenomenon is determined not by the characteristic features of Hitler’s genocide as such, but by the place and role of the Holocaust in the world historical and spiritual process.

Yuri Tabak - historian, translator, publicist
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