ABSTRACT
Winston Churchill described the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians during World War I as a holocaust. During World War II, the term holocaust was used to describe the mass murder of civilian populations by the Nazis, not just their assault on the Jews. The Nazis “dehumanized” Jews and other people including the Romani, homosexuals, people with handicapping conditions, socialists, anarchists, and communists to justify their extermination. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC identifies questions frequently asked by visitors that can be the starting point for a study of the European Holocaust. Unfortunately, the perpetrators of the European Holocaust were all too human. The novel Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, while fictional, is an important primary source. One of the paradoxes of European anti-Semitism was that Jews could be attacked at the same time as monopoly capitalists and international communists. Adolf Hitler charged that Marxism was “Jewish doctrine.” Some people identifiable as Jews were prominent in each group.
