Rosenbaum Chapter 4

In Steven T. Katz essay, "The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Dimension," Katz compares and contrasts the Holocaust to the exploitation of the Native Americans, the famine in the Ukraine, and the Armenian tragedy to show that the Holocaust is in fact a unique instance of genocide. Katz argues that the Holocaust is unique not because of the amount of victims, but because "a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific group," (55) the Jewish.

In the case of the Native Americans, the majority of those that died were killed by disease. The intentions of the US government was not to physically eliminate Native American but to at first, eliminate the culture. When attempts at this failed, the Native Americans were forcibly moved to reservations.

In the case of the famine in the Ukraine, in an attempt to eliminate Ukrainian nationalism, Stalin exported grain which was in limited supply to exploit the Ukrainians, not to physically eliminate them. The same can be said for the Armenian tragedy. The intent was not to physically eliminate Armenian people, but to eliminate their politics and religion.