Names of the Holocaust
The word holocaust was later adopted in Greek translations of the Torah to refer to the olah,[2] standard communal and individual sacrificial burnt offerings that Jews were required[3] to make in the times of the Temple in Jerusalem.
In its Latin form, holocaustum, the term was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jewish people by the chroniclers Roger of Howden[4] and Richard of Devizes in England in the 1190s.
[10] In the early twentieth century, possibly the first to use the term was journalist Melville Chater in 1925, to describe the burning and sacking of Smyrna in 1922 in the context of the Turkish genocide against Anatolian Christians.
This use can be found as early as May 23, 1943 in The New York Times, on page E6, in an article by Julian Meltzer, referring to feelings in the British mandate of Palestine about Jewish immigration of refugees from "the Nazi holocaust.
"[16] One significant early use was in a 1958 recollection by Leslie Hardman, the first Jewish British Army Chaplain to enter Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, where he ministered to survivors and supervised the burial of about 20,000 victims, Towards me came what seemed to be the remnants of a holocaust – a staggering mass of blackened skin and bones, held together somehow with filthy rags.
'My God, the dead walk', I cried aloud, but I did not recognise my voice... [peering] at the double star, the emblem of Jewry on my tunic - one poor creature touched and then stroked the badge of my faith, and finding that it was real murmured, 'Rabbiner, Rabbiner'.
[18] However, it was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the generally accepted conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified and with a capital letter, a usage that also spread to other languages for the same period.
[19] The 1978 television miniseries titled "Holocaust" and starring Meryl Streep is often cited as the principal contributor to establishing the current usage in the wider culture.
[27] Czechoslovak–Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, stated: "Let us be clear: … Shoah, Churban, Judeocide, whatever we call it, is the name we give to the attempted planned total physical annihilation of the Jewish people, and its partial perpetration with the murder of most of the Jews of Europe.
[33] In The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, American historians Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia use the term to include Jews, Romani and the disabled.
[34] American historian Dennis Reinhartz has claimed that Gypsies were the main victims of genocide in Croatia and Serbia during the Second World War, and has called this "the Balkan Holocaust 1941-1945".
[35] The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (German: Endlösung der Judenfrage) was the Nazis' own term, recorded in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, and translated into English for the Nuremberg Trials in 1945.
For example, in William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the genocide is described as "The Final Solution" (in quotation marks; the word "Holocaust" is not mentioned).
[40][41] The word Shoah was chosen in Israel to describe the Holocaust, the term institutionalized by the Knesset on April 12, 1951, when it established Yom Ha-Shoah Ve Mered Ha-Getaot, the national day of remembrance.
In Sweden, the Holocaust is most commonly called Förintelsen ("the annihiliation"), a term etymologically similar to the German word Vernichtung, used in Hitler's prophecy from his 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech.
