Why the Holocaust is Better Known than Other Mass Slaughters

Genocide is deliberate mass killing of group of people based on their race, religion, or
ethnicity. Throughout history, particularly in the 20th century, there have been many recorded
examples of genocides. They include the Armenian genocide, Cambodian genocide, and the
Rwandan genocide. None of these genocides, however, is as well known as the Holocaust- the
systematic destruction of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and other people before and during the Second
World War by the Nazi Germany regime.
Factors that account for the fact that the Jewish Holocaust is more well known than other mass

slaughters

The main factor that accounts for the Holocaust’s better renown is that Allied soldiers
were able to witness its horrors first hand during the closing stages of the Second World War. It
is worth noting that prior to the Allies encountering concentration camps, reports of the
Holocaust horrors had already reached large portions of the Western public. However, like the
Armenian genocide before, these reports were treated with a mixture of indifference, disbelief,
and even denial. The opening up of the concentration camps to western reporters who took
photographs, newsreels, and other recordings of their horrors and transmitted them to their
audiences worldwide was decisive in registering the horrors of the Holocaust into public
consciousness.

How Abzug explains this fact in his book

In his book “Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi
Concentration Camps” Robert Abzug explains how images and newsreels taken by American
reporters and shown to Americans made the Holocaust the first genocide to really shock the
public conscious and leave a lasting imprint in their minds. In the book, Abzug explains how
initial skepticism about the horror stories of the concentration camps slowly began dissipating as
American and British soldiers liberated concentration camps such as Ohrduf and Nordhausen,
Dachau, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen.
In each of these concentration camps they found evidence of Nazi depravity in the form
of documents, crematoria, gas chambers, mass graves, diaries of victims, and severely
malnourished and ghostly Jewish, Russian, Gypsy, Polish, German, and other survivors from
across Europe. American generals such as Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George S.
Patton not only visited these camps themselves but also allowed in western reporters who wrote
back home about what they saw. For instance, Percy Krauth, a young American reporter wrote
that upon visiting Buchenwald concentration camp he found “men who were emaciated beyond
imagination. Their legs and arms were sticks with bulging joints and their eyes sunk so deep that
they looked blind” (Abzug 56).
The reports of journalists such as Krauther did a lot to corroborate what had earlier been
reported by soldiers such as Jan Karski and by Soviet media. However, the decisive evidence
was the photos and newsreels that were sent back to the U.S. Due to exaggerations and outright
falsehoods reported about German behavior during World War One, many Americans had
difficulties believing official reports about the genocide. They thought it was the same
propaganda as allegations of German soldiers killing Belgian children with bayonets in the First

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World War (Abzug, 88). However, with video and photo evidence, there are very few people
who remained unconvinced about the Holocaust.
As reporters were busy relaying evidence of the Holocaust to Americans so that no one
had reason to doubt Nazi atrocities, American generals also did their best to make sure that
Germans too got to know what their government had done. At Buchenwald, for instance,
Dwight Eisenhower forced local Germans to come and witness the horrors of the camps (Abzug,
129). This viewing of the camps by the Germans themselves meant that at the end of the war
there were hundreds of thousands of first hand witnesses of the Holocaust from both the Allied
and German side.
The massive evidence of Holocaust collected and relayed to millions of people across the
world and its witness even by people who had an interest in denying its horrors meant that the
Holocaust became the best documented and the most discussed genocide. That explains why it is
far better known than many other genocides, even those that were almost as horrific.

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Works Cited

Abzug, Robert H. Inside the vicious heart: Americans and the liberation of Nazi concentration
camps. Oxford University Press, USA, 1987.