Chapter 4 The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Dimension

In this chapter, Steven T. Katz explains that his argument that the holocaust is unique is justified with the argument that "never before has a state set out, as a mater of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people." The genocide of the Native Americans was almost without exception caused by microbes, not militia: "Disease unaided, disease per se, along with the internal social and communal dislocations it created, was the primary, unavoidable, and ubiquitous agency of death among North American Indians between 1492 and 1900." Concerning the famine in Ukraine, what makes the Ukrainian case nongenocidal, and different from the Holocaust at the same time, is the fact that the majority of Ukrainian children survived, but most specifically, were permitted to survive. Another plausible reason is the fact that the famine was neither intended nor man-made. Concerning the Armenian Tragedy because Armenians had the possibility of Armenian Christian conversion to Islam as a way of avoiding deportation and worse, the Armenian Tragedy differs from the Holocaust as well.