We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191667 and marked it off-topic.

Of course you can. The number of innocent people murdered is a very meaningful number.

I never disagreed with the rest of what you said. I don't disagree with you that Jewish hatred was not a cornerstone of Nazi philosophy and that other European countries did not collaborate in anti-antisemitic policies.

However, it's not appropriate to just throw aside the number of lives lost as "not meaningful alone." What other single metric would you select to be considered to be more meaningful?

Genocidal intent; proportion of the group killed.

Is it possible you are just not well versed on the subject?

Further, any discussion on the topic requires special treatment of the Jewish holocaust because of its scope and how central it is to the politics of Naziism.

Well I took required history classes in high school and university and scored well enough in those courses. This is what I was taught. That's what my statement is about. I was aware that other ethnic groups were targeted, but did not know the numbers in some cases were similar to those that Jews suffered. I had a very real understanding they were, by a far margin, the largest group to suffer.

The latter is an interesting question and could potentially lead you to a better understanding of subjects you've missed. The former implies a systematic bias in the education about WWII history and assumes it based on a data point of one that goes against other data points (for instance my own).

Another thing you may not be well versed on, implication of a systematic bias in teaching the Holocaust is a standard part of the bag of dirty tricks that many neo-Nazi, white nationalist and other anti-semitic groups employ to paper over the Holocaust. They trot it out in venues where more extreme versions of Holocaust denialism or outright Holocaust justification won't fly.

The Native American genocide is barely recognized as even being real (and never officially in the US), even though it was directly funded (paid dollars per head killed--pretty blatant, isn't it?) by the US and California governments.

And for God's sake I'm not trying to say anything in support of racism or Nazis, as you alluded to, that's ridiculous and awful.

I find that in mentioning atrocities we don't even recognize as ever happening (Native Americans) as a really hard mental gymnastic maneuver required. How is it logically any different than Holocaust denial? I literally never covered the Cambodian or Native American genocides in school. I find it hard to believe others have had much different experiences in their educations as mine was very vanilla at large public schools and universities, but I would certainly like to know if that's the case or not.

I don't have any tolerance for racism myself, and please stop speaking in a condescending tone. It's unnecessary at this point as you've already made yourself clear that you view yourself as righteous and my comments as uneducated, and further doing so is not productive.

Can't we do more for Native American peoples? Isn't this a step in the right direction away from racism? Or, is their attempted-genocide deserving of continued denial? What do you think?

1-reloading the page shows karma is changing rapidly with a consistent average

2-http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california...

Pol Pot? This was something that was literally covered in my World History class in high school. I remember that mostly because we watched "The Killing Fields" and I was happy to have what I assumed would be an easy week, but that movie is pretty profoundly impressive.

We also covered Native American atrocities and read "A People's History of the United States", which at the time (20 some years ago) might have been out of the norm but now seems relatively common.

None of this is to condescend to you or to suggest you are uneducated generally, but rather to point out that something you are extrapolating as systematic in education is not. And for what it's worth I went to public high schools and public college in a not too progressive place.

I also didn't mean to imply you were aligned with anti-semitic groups, rather that anti-semitic groups use that misunderstanding as propaganda and you should probably be aware of that.

The US stance on the Native American genocide(s) is basically denial that it happened, or at minimum, failure to admit it.

It has never been officially recognized by the US government. It's not "simply a false statement," it's a fact. Yes, we both learned about the Trail of Tears, but we don't recognize Native American genocide as what it is. Your presenting the Trail of Tears as a strawman for Native American genocide.

There are a lot of people saying this.[1] I'm sorry you felt the need to write such a condescending remark about internet message board arguments, that in combination with a straw man argument is really low.

1-http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california...

More importantly: recognition of human suffering isn't zero sum. Acknowledging the scale of what happened to European Jewish people doesn't take away recognition of what happened to Native Americans --- in fact, in my experience, the genocide of Native Americans and European Jews are usually the two textbook examples of nationally-sponsored genocides.

Finally, I'll observe that nobody has condescended to you here.

I didn't learn about the Khmer Rouge in school (high school in Texas, graduated 2004). But I learned about it quickly afterward.

> Wow. Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims?

A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution). A lot of the other groups were either attacked for more general reasons (being allied to the "wrong" group, not being Aryan enough, speaking against the Nazi regime, to give three examples) or abused generally simply because many the Axis command structure where generally abusive and encouraged that sort of behaviour further down the chain.

Gas chambers disguised as showers, with nozzles that dispensed gas not water, were first used on people with learning disability.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nazi-persecution-of-the-...

> The doomed were bused to killing centers in Germany and Austria walled-in fortresses, mostly former psychiatric hospitals, castles, and a former prison — at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg. In the beginning, patients were killed by lethal injection. But by 1940, Hitler, on the advice of Dr. Werner Heyde, suggested that carbon monoxide gas be used as the preferred method of killing. Experimental gassings had first been carried out at Brandenburg Prison in 1939. There, gas chambers were disguised as showers complete with fake nozzles in order to deceive victims — prototypes of the killing centers' facilities built in occupied Poland later in the war.

> Again, following procedures that would later be instituted in the extermination camps, workers removed the corpses from the chambers, extracted gold teeth, then burned large numbers of bodies together in crematoria. Urns filled with ashes were prepared in the event the family of the deceased requested the remains. Physicians using fake names prepared death certificates falsifying the cause of death, and sent letters of condolences to relatives.

> Meticulous records discovered after the war documented 70,273 deaths by gassing at the six "euthanasia" centers between January 1940 and August 1941. (This total included up to 5,000 Jews; all Jewish mental patients were killed regardless of their ability to work or the seriousness of their illness.) A detailed report also recorded the estimated savings from the killing of institutionalized patients.

What about other groups that were deliberately target like mentally retarded, Roma, homosexuals etc?. Why they are less important in this discussion? Is it only because they still have no voice in our society, and (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?

Regarding the "killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews" comparison I was initially responding to, you can slice and dice the figures a great many ways to find such similarities. I'm not sure "polish jews" isn't too specific a category to be considered valid as a single absolute number. What are those figures as proportions of the all Poles and Polish+Jewish populations respectively? I suspect that the proportion of the European Jewish population is going to be a lot higher.

Yes thinking in pure numbers can seem somewhat heartless, and I fully understand if some groups feel unduly ignored, but it isn't being done to deliberately hide or discount the effect on those other groups. The groups that get a lot of the attention do so because the effect on their population was proportionately much higher then most (all?) others.

> (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?

Two points there:

1. That we treat them as badly is IMO simply wrong. When making statements like that you need to provide evidence to back it up. Society doesn't treat minorities as well in a great many cases, but I would say the orders of scale are not close to similar. Maybe as a white middle class male I'm misunderstanding the scale of something I myself don't suffer from, but if that is the case please show evidence to correct my understanding instead of a single vague (and potentially inflammatory) statement.

2. I recommend not using "Germans" in such statements, use "Nazis" instead. Many German people suffered too, and far from all the perpetrators were German, so the choice of word will to many flag your statement as unfairly targeted.

HN is for reflective conversation. If we're going to talk about the Holocaust we need to do it that way, not this way ("what about", "didn't lift a finger", etc.)

I admit that I allowed myself to be little provocative but I think it would be better not to censor comments, but instead moderate non-technical links from the forum before inconvenient discussions take place. If this is not a place for discussions like that, it's also not a place for links to articles that will start such discussion, right?

The first principle of HN is that it's not just a technical site. Please (re)-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

There's no substitute for commenters learning the ropes of how to self-regulate in discussions here, technical or non. One of the ropes is not to comment out of fury.

These Polish Jews were as much citizens of the country are all other minorities. They were part of Poland for close to 600 years. Poland lost 20% of population during WW2. The fact that half of the lost population were of a different religion does not make them any less Polish.

If you ask me why, at least in the US, there's so much attention paid to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, then the answer I'll give is that the Germans killed far more Jews, but also did so more deliberately and carefully, thus supporting that narrative.

I didn't go to US public school --- I went to Catholic school --- but we were always taught about the other victims of the Holocaust. At 12 I'd have told you the Nazis targeted not just Jewish people but also "gypsies", gay people, and communists. We were, for instance, taught about Maximilian Kolbe, a name I remember principally from the story I was taught in grade school.

See, the thing is, since Polish Jews were part of the country, were scientists, doctors, blacksmiths, or just regular farmers they were also killed by these bombings, and other forms of killings. The other side of the equation is that these people who died in the concentration camps were mostly Polish citizens. They count towards "polish losses". It's unfair to separate people simply because of their religion, and make it look like being killed by Zyklon B is so much worse than being torn apart by a bomb.

It's just sad that we even have discussion on this and that some people still think that one for of killing is "better" or "worse" than the other (and I'm not saying that you think that, but other commenters in this whole thread did.)

What my problem with this whole discussion is that people keep talking about as Jews as a totally separate group from all of the victims. They don't talk about {Polish| Russian| French |Other } citizens being killed in extermination camps. Yes, a lot of them were ethnic Jews. But a lot of these ethnic Jews did not thing about themselves as Jews, as they were being shipped of by the trains to Auschwitz. They were in their minds Russians, French, even Germans. But for some reasons these people were "separated" by some people to show how much more their group suffered. And then they claim that other groups just died "because of bombings" or in "work camps" as if this was so much better way to die.

To me it's infuriating that we talk about just one specific group that died, while ignoring the rest. And even more infuriating is suggesting that these others that died don't count as much simply because there were fewer of them or they were not from the "right group".

> But a lot of these ethnic Jews did not thing about themselves as Jews, as they were being shipped of by the trains to Auschwitz.

I don't know how you can say that especially bearing in mind the Nuremberg laws defined as someone with 3 or more Jewish grandparents. If you're that strongly Jewish by race, you're very unlikely not to have that as part of your core identity. And in any event, you're not addressing tptakec response to you with this.

> But for some reasons these people were "separated" by some people to show how much more their group suffered.

You may not have fully intended it, but that sentence comes across very poorly.

> To me it's infuriating that we talk about just one specific group that died, while ignoring the rest.

I don't know anyone that talks just about the Jews (you mean jews, right?) that died (were exterminated) and ignores the rest. It is an acknowledged fact that Jews suffered extermination disproportionate to any other race or nationality (90% of the 3 million Polish Jews, for instance). The only other group that's comparable when using the term Holocaust is the Romani (who's true numbers is still hard to hard estimate) who are mentioned (along with gays, the disabled etc.) in every reasonable discourse.

If there's one tiny thing we all can contribute to a discussion like this, it's not to let that happen.

Anyways, both I think we can all agree are bad. I just didn't know so many non-Jews died in the holocaust.

I only skimmed it but maybe because Jews suffered relatively more.

> Note: Polish losses amount to 11.3% of the 24.4 million ethnic Poles in prewar Poland and about 90 percent of the 3.3 million Jews of prewar times. The IPN figures do not include losses among Polish citizens of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity.

Maybe I an interpreting that wrong. But really not many Jewish people globally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country

Now, when you consider that these 11.3% of the 24.4 ethnic Poles and 90% of 3.3 mln POLISH Jews died, can you still say that Polish losses were smaller?