This is why the Holocaust is unique

Time and again, I see in message threads and emails and statements from Jew-haters this theme: What’s so special about the Holocaust? Why is it any different from any other genocide?

Because it is the only one in which one nation got so many others to collude in the destruction of a single people, with the stated purpose being the elimination of every Jew on the face of the earth.

This is why.

Even after decades of in-depth Holocaust research, excruciating details are only now emerging about more than 1,100 German-run ghettos in Eastern Europe where the Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews.

And there were about 200 more ghettos than previously believed, said Martin Dean, editor of the recently published “Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II.” It’s part of a long-term effort to document every site of organized Nazi persecution, beyond the well-known extermination camps like Auschwitz.

[…] More Jews died during World War II in Poland and the western Soviet Union — today’s Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania — than the estimated 1 million gassed in Auschwitz, Langer said.

“The people are dead, but at least we have the memory of the place where they lived and some knowledge of who killed them,” said Langer, an 83-year-old professor of English emeritus at Boston’s Simmons College.

Researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington painstakingly collected details for the encyclopedia’s more than 2,000 pages from the communities where Germans herded Jews and killed them if they tried to escape.

Researchers and writers scoured the world to find new witnesses, study archives opened after the fall of communism and survivors’ texts and testimonies in many languages.

For town after town, village after village, and even just spots in the countryside, Dean and his team assembled pieces of a grisly puzzle, which he said “shows that the Nazis made a concerted effort to find every last Jew in every last place” and eliminate each one.

When you see an anti-Israel idiot saying that the Palestinians are undergoing a genocide, you know that person is an uneducated moron, a liar, and a bigot.

This is what genocide looks like.

Helen Segall, now 81, was 12 when she witnessed SS troops torch her town of about 2,000 residents, with hundreds of hidden Jews burned to death before they could escape. Others were killed outside the town.

“People had to undress and walk in small groups into the trench and lie facedown, where they were shot by an SS man helped by a Ukrainian Schutzmann,” she wrote, using a German word for local policeman.

In two days — Oct. 13 and 14, 1942 — the 300-year-old town “ceased to exist,” wrote Segall, who is now writing her own memoir.