The Holocaust as Genocide: Milestones in the Historiographical Discourse

Holocaust studies developed from the 1950s without referring to the broad context of the phenomenon of which the Holocaust is a part–the modern genocide. This chapter follows the broad historiographical discussions about the Holocaust and genocide that began in the 1950s. The study of genocide in its early stages, during the 1960s and 1970s, hardly attempted to integrate Holocaust studies. The chapter examines the different approaches, and the changes that the encounter between genocide and Holocaust studies underwent, and especially the approaches developed over the past two decades that offer an integrated and more universal view of Holocaust studies. Survivors’ memoirs and diaries written during the Nazi occupation period that began to be published after the World War II had an important effect. The most prominent analogy drawn in comparative studies of the Holocaust and other genocides is with the Armenian genocide, which led state of total war that facilitated the mass murder.