What Is the Origin of the Term Holocaust?

By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Human history has few tragedies that rival the magnitude and moral bankruptcy of
the Holocaust, the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women,
and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World
War II. For the anti-Semitic Nazis who met at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on
January 20, 1942, this mass murder was the “final solution” to the so-called Jewish
question. The deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their
ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race was given a name, “genocide,” by Raphael
Lemkin, a Polish-born jurist who served as an adviser to the U.S. Department of War
during World War II. Genocide was made a crime that was punishable under
international law by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1946. But how
did this most infamous of genocides become known as the Holocaust?

In the years immediately after World War II, Yiddish-speaking Jews and

survivors of Nazi persecution called the murder of the Jews the Ḥurban
(“Destruction”), the same word used to denote the destruction of the First
Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the destruction of the Second
Temple by the Romans in 70 CE.

In Israel and France, Shoʾah, a biblical Hebrew word meaning

“catastrophe,” became the preferred term for the event, largely in response
to director Claude Lanzmann’s influential nine-and-a-half-hour 1985
motion picture documentary of the same name. The term Shoʾah is also
preferred by speakers of Hebrew and those wishing to be more particular about the
Jewish experience or who are uncomfortable with the religious connotations of the word
Holocaust. The term Shoʾah emphasizes the annihilation of the Jews—not the totality of
Nazi victims, which also included the Germans deemed intellectually, physically, or
emotionally unfit who were murdered through the T4 “euthanasia” program, as well as
the Roma and Sinti (pejoratively known as Gypsies), homosexuals, and Jehovah’s
Witnesses.

The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of

the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God.
This word was chosen, and gained wide usage, because, in the ultimate
manifestation of the Nazi killing program—the extermination camps—the
bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria or open fires.