Holocaust

Remembrance and historiography

The scholarly literature on the Holocaust is massive, encompassing thousands of books. The tendency to see the Holocaust as a unique or incomprehensible event continues to be popular among the broader public after being largely rejected by historians. Scholar Omer Bartov points out how the Holocaust was unique in that it was "the industrial killing of millions of human beings in factories of death, ordered by a modern state, organized by a conscientious bureaucracy, and supported by a law-abiding, patriotic 'civilized' society." Another debate concerns whether the Holocaust emerged from Western civilization or was an aberration of it.