Never, since the dawn of history, had the world witnessed such a surge of extermination. The Holocaust was not simply an explosion of religious fanaticism, nor a wave of unrelated pogroms. Instead, an entire nation was handed over to a “legitimate” government, to be exterminated by technologically efficient agents organized and trained by that government. The Holocaust was a concerted campaign, supported by the entire nation, to murder men, women, the elderly, the young, the healthy and the sick: everyone, without chance of escape.

The question has frequently been asked: Was the Holocaust a unique, extraordinary, unprecedented event in human and Jewish history? Were there not past periods when Jewish people were murdered? At the end of the eleventh century, Crusading mobs murdered thousands of Jews. The Chmielnitski massacre of the mid-eventeenth century, as well as the pogroms in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—were these events not similar to the Nazi Holocaust?

No—despite an earlier tradition of sporadic antisemitic persecution, the sustained violence, bloodshed, and suffering of millions of innocent people during the years of Nazi Germany’s rule over all of Europe during World War II must be considered a unique and unparalleled destruction. The 1933-1945 Holocaust was different from all the earlier massacres in its conscious and concerted planning, in inorexable execution, and the absence of any human emotional element. It was executed with maximum determination to exterminate everyone! Every living Jew, everywhere!

The Nazis carried their racial hatred and vicious antisemitism to unparalleled heights.

In all the pages which Hitler devotes to the Jews in Mein Kampf, he does not bring forward a single fact to support his wild assertions. This was entirely right, for Hitler’s anti-Semitism bore no relation to facts, it was pure fantasy; to read these pages is to enter the world of the insane, a world peopled by hideous and distorted shadows. The Jew is no longer a human being, he has become a mythical figure, a grimacing, leering devil invested with infernal powers, the incarnation if evil, into which Hitler projects all that he hates and fears. Like all obsessions, the Jew is not a partial, but a total explanation. The Jew is everywhere, responsible for everything… (Alan Bullock, Hitler, a Study in Tyranny, Harper & Row, N.Y., 1962)

The uniqueness of the Holocaust consists in the combination of a series of events and factors that had never occurred before, not least the conjunction of racial antisemitism with advanced state bureaucracy and modern technology. We must hope and work hard to ensure that genocide will never be able to reoccur—neither against the Jewish people nor against any other people, anywhere in the world.

The events of the beginning of the twenty-first century—Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur, the threats of Ahmadinehad—call upon us to be silent no more. The growing hurricane of hatred and violence, to which we are now witnesses, must be stopped. We must fight against the conspiracy of silence, against a twenty-first century Holocaust. It is important to remember, and to act!

Zachor! Never again!