The Holocaustwashing of Every Cause
Far too many people keep invoking the Holocaust to describe modern events, cheapening its horrors and turning memory into a manipulative weapon.
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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is a word for what keeps happening, and we should start naming it plainly: Holocaustwashing. It is the reflexive habit of borrowing the language, imagery, and moral gravity of the Holocaust and pasting it onto contemporary causes that may be serious, urgent, and emotionally charged — but are nowhere near the scale, intent, or horror of what actually happened to the Jews of Europe.
This is not a defense of injustice. It is a defense of truth, proportion, and memory.
The Holocaust was not a generic human tragedy. It was an industrialized, state-engineered project of total annihilation. It involved the systematic dehumanization, dispossession, deportation, and murder of six million Jews — men, women, children, infants — across an entire continent. It used ghettos, slave labor, starvation, mass shootings, gas chambers, crematoria, and a bureaucracy designed to make extermination efficient, repeatable, and irreversible. It was not metaphorical. It was not rhetorical. It was not a warning sign. It was the end state.
Whole communities were wiped from existence: families, towns, and centuries of culture were erased almost overnight. The population shifts brought on by the Holocaust, combined with postwar Jewish emigration, were staggering. Europe’s Jewish population fell from approximately 9.5 million in 1933 to about 3.5 million in 1950. In 1933, 60 percent of the world’s Jews lived in Europe; by 1950, only a third did.
Some of the continent’s largest communities were virtually destroyed. Poland, which had more than three million Jews in 1933, saw its population reduced to roughly 45,000 by 1950. Romania’s Jewish population fell from nearly 800,000 to 300,000. Central Europe was devastated: Germany from over 500,000 to 37,000; Hungary from just under 500,000 to 190,000; Czechoslovakia from 350,000 to 17,000; Austria from 200,000 to 18,000. Southern Europe fared no better: Greece from 70,000 to 7,000; Yugoslavia from 70,000 to 4,000; Italy from 50,000 to 30,000; and Bulgaria from 50,000 to 7,000.
The scale, speed, and intent of this destruction are what make the Holocaust incomparable. No modern tragedy, no political failure, no human-rights violation — even those deserving of our time and attention — approaches this combination of systematic intent, industrialized efficiency, and sheer numbers.
Yet, today, Holocaust language is deployed casually and strategically, less to illuminate reality than to weaponize moral shock. This is not accidental. Holocaustwashing thrives because it instantly confers moral authority, short-circuits debate, and rewards maximalism. In an outrage economy where the most extreme framing wins attention, Holocaust comparisons function like a nuclear option: Once invoked, disagreement becomes immoral by definition.
Police detention centers are called “concentration camps.” Politicians are likened to Adolf Hitler. Gaza is described as a “ghetto.” Police misconduct is equated with the Gestapo. Right-wing parties are reflexively branded “Nazis.” Each comparison may feel righteous. Each may generate outrage, clicks, and applause. But all of them flatten history — and when history is flattened, atrocity is cheapened.
Nazi concentration camps were not simply places of detention. They were instruments of terror, forced labor, and mass death. Prisoners were starved, tortured, worked to exhaustion, and murdered arbitrarily. Most did not leave alive. Applying that term to detention facilities, however flawed or in need of reform, is not moral clarity; it is moral inflation. And when everything is a concentration camp, nothing is.
The Hitler comparison follows the same logic of collapse. Hitler was not merely a controversial leader or demagogue. He abolished elections, eradicated civil society, launched a world war, and oversaw the systematic extermination of an entire people. Turning him into a stand-in for any disliked politician does not signal vigilance; it signals historical illiteracy that reduces the most extreme figure of modern history to a rhetorical shortcut.
Calling Gaza a “ghetto” is no less reckless. Nazi ghettos were sealed holding pens created explicitly as waystations to death camps. Jews were trapped, starved, denied medicine, and shot for attempting to leave. What Gaza went through since October 7, 2023, can be described as tragic and unfortunate, shaped by war, ideology, and governance — but it is not a Nazi ghetto. Insisting otherwise does not elevate Palestinian suffering; it falsifies Jewish history.
Equating modern police overreach or mistakes with the Gestapo continues this moral flattening. The Gestapo was a secret police force designed to crush dissent and enforce racial law through terror, disappearance, and deportation. It was not an imperfect institution struggling with accountability. It was an institution designed for domination. Erasing that distinction erases meaning.
This same impulse now consumes Anne Frank. She is routinely repurposed as a universal symbol for “children in conflict zones,” her image and words recycled to collapse all modern suffering into Holocaust equivalence. Her diary is quoted alongside contemporary war imagery to imply that today’s conflicts are simply the same crime repeating itself.
But Anne Frank was not a generic child caught in conflict. She was a Jewish child hunted for extermination because of who she was. She did not die because diplomacy failed or a war dragged on. She died because a regime had decided that no Jewish child, anywhere, had the right to live. There was no scenario in which she survived if the Nazi project succeeded. Her death was not a byproduct of violence; it was its purpose. She was one of over a million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust alone — a number so vast it defies imagination and renders every contemporary metaphorical appropriation almost trivial in comparison.
Stripped of that reality, Anne Frank becomes a floating moral weapon, detached from her Jewishness and from the ideology that murdered her. This does not universalize her story. It hollows it out. If Anne Frank means “every child in every conflict anywhere,” she ultimately means nothing.
No word better illustrates this collapse than genocide. Genocide is not a synonym for suffering, war, displacement, or civilian death. It is the intentional destruction of a people as such. The Holocaust was not genocidal because many Jews died; Jews died because it was genocidal. Intent mattered. Ideology mattered. Totality mattered.
Today, genocide is deployed as a moral accelerant: a word meant to end argument rather than describe reality. War becomes genocide. Harsh conditions become genocide. Tragedy becomes genocide. When everything is genocide, the word loses its diagnostic power. Worse, it loses its warning function. If genocide is always happening, it becomes harder to recognize when it truly is, and easier to dismiss when it matters most.
For Jews, this erosion carries an added cruelty. The word genocide exists because of what was done to us. It was coined to name an unprecedented crime. To see it diluted, misapplied, and even turned back on Jews themselves is nothing short of historical vandalism.
For Jews, this erosion carries an added and unforgivable cruelty. The word genocide exists because of what was done to us. It was coined to name an unprecedented crime that had no adequate language before it — a systematic attempt to erase an entire people from existence. That word is part of the moral record of Jewish destruction. It is not abstract. It is not transferable property.
To see it diluted and misapplied is already damaging. To see it turned back on Jews themselves is something far worse. It is not merely wrong; it is obscene. It takes the language created to describe our near-annihilation and repurposes it as an accusation against the descendants of its victims. It transforms memory into a weapon and reverses moral gravity itself.
This inversion is not accidental. Once Holocaust language is stripped of precision, it becomes infinitely reusable, and therefore easily weaponized. The moment genocide is no longer about intent to destroy a people as such, it becomes a tool for erasing Jewish history rather than preserving it. Jews are no longer the paradigmatic victims of genocide, but its convenient stand-ins as perpetrators. The crime that once demanded Jewish remembrance is redeployed to delegitimize Jewish existence.
That is why this is not simply semantic sloppiness. It teaches a generation that Jewish suffering is provisional, that Jewish memory is negotiable, and that the moral lessons of the Holocaust can be flipped on demand. It tells Jews that even the language forged from our destruction is not safe from appropriation.
There is no moral universe in which this can be excused as “criticism” or “solidarity.” When the vocabulary born of Jewish extermination is used to indict Jews, something essential has collapsed — not just in language, but in conscience.
And I could go on and on: Immigration enforcement is framed as “deportations” in the Holocaust sense, collapsing administrative or legal processes into echoes of cattle cars and one-way journeys to death. Food shortages or blockades are described as “starvation as a weapon,” stripped of the historical reality that Nazi starvation policies were total, intentional, and designed to kill, not to pressure or compel. Military responses are branded “collective punishment,” not as a legal claim to be examined, but as a Holocaust-coded accusation meant to suggest Jews are now doing what was once done to them.
Certainly, many people who engage in this language believe they are acting in good faith, but intention does not neutralize consequence. The effect of Holocaustwashing is not heightened moral awareness; it is moral exhaustion. “Never Again” was meant to sharpen attention, not flatten it into permanent hysteria. When atrocity has no threshold, memory becomes unusable.
None of this is an argument for indifference. Suffering deserves attention. Injustice deserves opposition. Abuse deserves accountability. But history offers many frameworks for critique — authoritarianism, state violence, war crimes, civil rights violations — without hijacking the most extreme atrocity in modern history to win a debate or silence critics.
Memory is not preserved by volume or repetition. It is preserved by precision and restraint. The Holocaust does not need to be invoked to make a cause matter. And when it is invoked carelessly, it does not elevate the present. It diminishes the past, and leaves us less prepared to recognize real evil when it appears again.
Intentional misuse of language is the purpose. Very good article. And if it weren't so sad, it would be close to absurd. What other person has to start every sentence with why "our case" was different. It puts every discussion on a downward slope, with the Jews pushing their heavy burden harder and higher.
During the Obama administration I went head to head with some art colleagues, arguing that no, babies and toddlers were not treated "just like concentration camps" when they were put in separate metal cribs - "cages." NO it is not. There, in Auschwitz where my mother spent time, babies and toddlers were killed immediately. No need for cribs or beds at all.
I was called a foreigner and a monster.
It was inevitable from the moment somebody decided to "universalise" the Shoah.