NOTE: This is an excerpt from a longer article:

Jews Are NOT Oppressed: The Myth of Systemic Antisemitism

Tariq Acknickulous

·

August 18, 2025

Read full story

Holocaust exceptionalism is a cornerstone of Zionism. The overemphasis on the Holocaust, specifically the extermination of six million Jews, as some uniquely unprecedented event in human history is largely a Western, first-world phenomenon that reflects an extremely Eurocentric and Jewish-exceptionalist worldview. Several universities and research institutions even offer dedicated “Holocaust and Genocide Studies” programs and centers, further entrenching this exceptionalist viewpoint:

False uniqueness of the Holocaust and antisemitism

Outside of the colonial-imperialist first world, the global majority today does not place the Holocaust and antisemitism on special pedestals. The global majority has itself experienced countless holocausts at the hands of the first world powers. A cursory examination of history reveals that the Holocaust was simply one in a long continuum of settler-colonial genocides, including those perpetrated by Germany itself.

The Nazis themselves drew direct inspiration from earlier genocides in Africa, the Americas, and beyond. These include:

• The European colonization and genocide of Native Americans and Africans during the transatlantic slave trade (15th–19th centuries).

• British colonial genocides and man-made famines in Ireland and India (19th–20th centuries).

• The Belgian genocide in the Congo (1885–1908), which killed an estimated 11.5 million, 10–13% of Africa’s population at the time.

• The Herero and Nama genocide in Namibia by Imperial Germany (1904–1908), where over 70% of the populations were annihilated.

• The Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire (1915–1917), supported by Germany.

• The Libyan genocide by Fascist Italy (1929–1934), Nazi’s contemporary ally.

Other atrocities, such as Dutch massacres in Indonesia, French massacres in Vietnam, and American massacres in the Philippines, were openly celebrated by the Nazis.

Most of these genocides resulted in death tolls in the millions, with some reaching tens of millions. In particularly devastating cases like Namibia, Congo, Armenia, and Native American populations, over 70% of entire populations were exterminated. Germany refused to even acknowledge the Namibian genocide until 2015, more than a century after the fact. Similarly, Belgium has never admitted that its atrocities in Congo constitute genocide, despite recent estimates placing the death toll at approximately 11.5 million, representing a staggering 10-13% of Africa’s entire population at the time.

The ideological foundations of the Nazi genocide predated Hitler’s regime. Between 1886–1914, the concept of Lebensraum (”living space”) became increasingly used to justify German colonization of Africa and was a key factor in the Herero and Nama genocide, predating Nazi rule by three decades as part of Europe’s “Scramble for Africa.” In Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler explicitly referenced both Imperial Germany’s colonialism and America’s Manifest Destiny as models for European expansion, viewing the American westward expansion as a template for German eastward conquest. Nazi propaganda routinely referred to Eastern Europe as the “Wild East” and the Volga River as “Our Mississippi,” illustrating the direct continuity in European colonialism.

Even the term Holocaust itself refers solely to the six million Jewish victims of Nazi extermination camps from 1941 to 1945, ignoring the victims that preceded it, the remaining 11 million non-Jewish victims, and the tens of millions of war-related deaths in the Soviet Union. Other targeted groups—Slavs (Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians, Serbs), Romani, LGBTQ+ individuals, the mentally and physically disabled, Soviet POWs, Roman Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Spanish Republicans, Freemasons, people of color (especially Afro-German Mischlinge, called “Rhineland bastards” by the Nazis), and other non-Aryan groups—have no specific names for their genocides. Political victims including leftists, communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, anarchists and other dissidents are similarly overlooked.

The first groups of people to be imprisoned in concentration camps were German communists, social democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazi regime in March 1933. The repression of communists was what prompted Paul von Hindenburg and the old elite to cooperate with the Nazis. When the Nazis occupied a territory, communists, socialists and anarchists were usually among the first to be repressed and summarily executed en masse.

Beginning 1935, the Nazis set up ‘Gypsy camps’ where they imprisoned Romani people. A decree in December 1937 on “crime prevention” provided the pretext to their deportation to concentration camps. An estimated between 50%-75% of the entire Romani population in Nazi-occupied Europe had perished at the hands of the Nazis. At the Nuremberg Tribunals in 1947, former SS General Otto Ohlendorf told the judge that, in the killing campaigns, “There was no difference between Gypsies and Jews.”

The first groups to be systemically mass murdered were those with physical and mental disabilities as part of the Aktion T4 Program in 1939 where the Nazis experimented with chemically manufactured poison gas. This was preceded by the earlier “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring” enacted on 14 July 1933 which included the forced sterilization for people with mental and physical conditions. It’s estimated that 360,000 people were sterilized under this law by 1939.

A series of mass murders committed against the Polish intelligentsia (teachers, priests, physicians, and other prominent members of Polish society) took place as early as 1939 to 1940. Operation Tannenberg involved the extermination of tens of thousands of Poles in a couple of months starting around September 1939, followed by A-B Aktion in March 1940. The Generalplan Ost, the Nazi’s plan for the ‘Germanization’ of Eastern Europe, built on from these mass killing operations and was carried out through systematic massacres, mass starvation, chattel labor, mass rapes, child abductions, and sexual slavery.

The Nazis concocted the ‘Hunger Plan’ in December 1940, the intentional genocide by starvation of millions of Soviet citizens following the invasion. Starting in June 1941 following Operation Barbarossa, the plan created famine as an act of policy, with an estimated 2 million had already died by the beginning February 1942. Jews only started to get specifically targeted and put into concentration camps en masse around November 1938, with the mass extermination happening later in September to October 1941.

This pattern of industrialized, ideologically-driven mass murder extended far beyond Europe. The Asia-Pacific Theater experienced its own systematic horror, sometimes called the "Japanese Holocaust" or the "Forgotten Holocaust." This campaign of imperial conquest resulted in the deaths of an estimated 19 to 30 million people from 1937 to 1945 across East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The Imperial Japanese military was responsible for atrocities of comparable scale to those in Europe, including the state-sanctioned biological warfare experiments of Unit 731, the sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of "comfort women," and massacres like the Rape of Nanjing.

Yet, this "Asian Holocaust" remains overshadowed in global memory. This can be attributed to a Eurocentric historical focus, a Cold War-era cover-up by Allied powers who granted immunity to Japanese war criminals in exchange for their research data, and Japan's lack of approach to acknowledging its past. The scale and systematic nature of these atrocities—featuring medical experimentation, mass biological attacks, and policies of annihilation—demonstrate that the terrifying capacity for industrialized mass murder was not unique to Nazi Germany, but a recurrent phenomenon of 20th-century imperial aggression.

Jews as a scapegoat for anti-Communism

Before the rise of the Nazis, German Jews were among the most integrated Jewish populations in Europe. The Enlightenment and 19th-century reforms had brought full legal emancipation, and by the Weimar Republic they were active in public life, culture, and commerce, with many serving prominently in the German military during World War I. While antisemitism persisted socially, Jews generally enjoyed legal rights and civic participation unmatched in earlier centuries.

The virulent racial antisemitism that would later define Nazi ideology was not a mainstream force in Germany until it absorbed influences from outside its borders, particularly from the anti-communist, far-right White émigrés of the collapsed Russian Empire. The most direct link between Russian and Nazi antisemitism came through the myth of “Jewish Bolshevism” or “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which portrayed communism as a Jewish-led plot for global domination. This idea was fueled by the Russian Civil War, the 1917 revolutions, and propaganda from White émigrés, who blamed Jews for the fall of the Tsar and the spread of revolution. Central to this was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent Tsarist text published in 1903 claiming to reveal a secret Jewish conspiracy, which White émigré networks such as the Aufbau organization helped publish and circulate in Germany.

Other ideas that fueled this conflation of Jews and socialism is the “stabbed-in-the-back” myth originating around 1918 that states that the Imperial Germany Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield, but was instead betrayed by citizens in the home front, namely Jews, socialists and communists who were involved in the German revolution of 1918–1919, also known as the November Revolution.

Nazi figures like Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler drew heavily on these ideas. Hitler described Bolshevism in Mein Kampf as “Jewry’s twentieth-century effort to take world dominion unto itself.” In Nazi propaganda, “Jew,” “communist,” “Marxist,” “Bolshevik,” “Soviet,” and even “Slav” became interchangeable terms for an existential enemy. Eliminating communism became a central ideological mission, with Jews as the ultimate scapegoat alongside other groups marked for subjugation or destruction, including Slavs and Soviet citizens. This conflation of Jews with communism spread from Russia not just to Germany, but also to Poland (where it is referred to as Żydokomuna), Hungary, Finland, the UK and the US.

The reality of Nazi priorities is captured in the famous postwar poem by Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, First They Came… in which he recalls: “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out…” This poem reflects the fact that communists, socialists, and trade unionists were among the very first groups targeted for arrest and imprisonment after Hitler came to power in 1933, even before the regime’s full-scale assault on German Jews. For the Nazis, Jews, communists, and Soviet peoples were part of the same existential enemy—politically, racially, and ideologically—and eliminating them was framed as the necessary precondition for Germany’s survival and expansion. This fusion of antisemitism and anti-communism shaped the Holocaust and the war of extermination in the East, where ideological enemies and racial “undesirables” were murdered side by side.

In 1934, American sociology professor at Columbia University Theodore Fred Abel collected the largest single archive of first person accounts from people who joined the Nazi Party. 581 essays were written by Nazi militants for a competition advertised in a Nazi party journal on “Why I Became a Nazi.” This study provides a window into what the Nazis beliefs and what their priorities were. From the study, the following was summarized by Michael Mann in his book Fascists.

In terms of their core ideological drive:

• 32% of the essays’ central ideological theme was a transcendent Volksgemeinschaft (People’s or National Community)

• 23% expressed “super patriotism” (pride in Germany plus hatred of foreigners)

• 18% identified with Hitler as the embodiment of the Volk (cognate with the English word “folk”)

• 14% centered on antisemitism

• 6% centered on “blood-and-soil romanticism”

• 5% advocated military recovery of lost territories

In terms of their perceived primary enemy:

• 63% said Marxists / communists / socialists

• 18% said Jews

• 8% said liberals / capitalists

• 5% said Catholics

In terms of antisemitism and hatred of foreigners:

• ~33% of the essays showed no evidence of antisemitism

• ~50% revealed some antisemitism

• 13% showed obsession with antisemitism

• 22% showed hatred for foreigners abroad

• 15% showed hatred for “foreigners” in Germany

• 5% referred to a conspiracy between foreigners abroad and in Germany

In terms of what their specific hatred of the Weimar Republic was:

• 38% said because it was Marxist or “red”

  • 23% said because it was “liberal or capitalist” and “Marxist”

  • 9% said because it was Marxist

  • 6% said because it was “black” and “red”

• 30% said because it was run by Jews or other “un-Germans”

• 19% said because it was a multi-party system

• 3% said because it was liberal capitalist

The statistical evidence from these rank-and-file reveals a clear hierarchy of hatred that challenges simplified narratives. Their primary focus was unequivocally the elimination of the political left; most identified Marxists, communists, and socialists as their main enemy. Fewer than a fifth primarily named Jews, and about a third showed no evidence of antisemitism at all. Within this worldview, antisemitism functioned not as the core driver but as a powerful and useful secondary scapegoat used to explain national failure and unify supporters. While it was virulent and later catastrophic, the movement’s primary enemy was communism with Jews serving as a convenient ideological vessel for channeling nationalist fervor and consolidating power against a more immediate political foe.

Despite this broader context, scholars for decades have been attempting to paint the Nazi extermination of Jews as unique, with debates happening till this day. Western institutions like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the nation’s official memorial to the Holocaust, reinforces this supposed uniqueness. The museum calls it a “watershed event that must always be remembered,” while its founding chairman declared it “a unique crime in the annals of history” that “challenge Western civilization and modern, scientific culture.” The term “genocide” itself was coined by Raphael Lemkin, who also established the Genocide Convention, only because of the Holocaust. This exceptionalist narrative persists despite clear historical continuities with prior genocides.

Unprecedented reparations for the Holocaust

Many will point to the historical persecution of European Jews and the Holocaust as examples of how Jews face systemic oppression today. However, not only are these events in the past, but Jews have been well-compensated for these past atrocities having received unprecedented reparations paid by insurance companies and the governments of Germany, Austria, France, and many others with payments that continue to this day. This also includes countries that were ostensibly not on the side of the Nazis such as the UK. These payments are largely coordinated through the U.S.-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany aka the Claims Conference. The following is a list of some of the major reparations given to Jewish Holocaust survivors:

• Germany has paid more than €80 billion (~85-95 billion USD) since 1952 both to Israel and the Claims Conference for Holocaust survivors and their heirs by 2021 with annual payments guaranteed through to 2027 at least. These include direct compensation payments (pensions, hardship funds), home care services, holocaust education and community programs.

• Switzerland’s two major commercial banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion to survivors as restitution for lost assets.

• Austria created two funds totaling to $510 million funded by the government and private sector: $360 million goes to a settlement fund for Holocaust related lawsuits, and $150 million goes directly to Holocaust survivors.

• Several major European insurance companies agreed with the World Jewish Congress to settle claims on policies taken out by Holocaust victims, including in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. The funds were well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Italian insurance company, Generali, agreed to pay $100 million.

• France agreed to pay $60 million to survivors and their heirs worldwide

• Hungary agreed to distribute around $21 million to survivors. They also increased welfare pensions for survivors by 50% in 2017.

• Slovakia created a special fund for holocaust victims with $18.5 million put forward, including funds for cultural, social, and educational community programs, as well as renovations to synagogues.

• Czech Republic allocated 300 million Czech Korunas (~10 million USD) to alleviate property injustices incurred by victims of the holocaust.

• Serbia provides an annual payment of €950,000 (~1.12 million USD) to Jewish communities since 2016 until 2041.

• Negotiations facilitated by the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO) further restored property to Jews across countries including Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Moldova, North Macedonia, and Estonia.

Contrast this with the lack of reparations for slavery and colonialism inflicted on Africans and indigenous populations wiped out by Europeans. Aside from some extremely local examples, Africans and their descendants in the diaspora have not received major reparations for slavery. To this day, no federal bills have been passed in the U.S. for reparations to victims of slavery or their descendants. Estimates for the total reparations due to African Americans is about $97 trillion.

In fact, in many cases the opposite has happened. Haiti was forced to pay France for almost a century and a half after they gained independence and abolished slavery as “compensation to French plantation owners.” The amount paid far exceeded the actual losses. According to economists, had that money been retained by Haiti and invested domestically, it would have added more than $21 billion to the country’s economy over time. This is of course not to mention the endless political interference and military occupation the U.S. and France have engaged with in Haiti almost uninterrupted till today, including the overthrowing of governments and hand-picking of puppets. African nations today face Neo-colonial exploitation through Western-backed wars, crippling IMF debt traps, and economic warfare through sanctions.

If we compare this again to Native Americans, victims of one of the deadliest genocides in human history, with an estimated death toll of 50–60 million people across the Americas and population losses of 80–90%, the scale of reparations is almost nonexistent. The U.S. never provided comprehensive compensation for centuries of killings, land theft, and forced removals, offering instead small, fragmented settlements after long legal battles. Even these payments were framed as legal resolutions, not acknowledgments of genocide. Between post–World War II and 1978, the U.S. paid about $1.3 billion to tribes through compensation programs, less than $1,000 per tribal member. In 1980, the Supreme Court ordered the U.S. to pay the Sioux nation approximately $105 million for illegal land seizures, again, a mere fraction of what was wrongfully taken.

While Holocaust reparations have been vast, coordinated, and internationally enforced with tens of billions of dollars to survivors and their heirs, Native American reparations have been piecemeal, begrudging, and minuscule relative to the scale of harm, with most stolen land never returned and many reservations still facing poverty rates above 40%.

Liberia, often seen as a parallel to Israel for an oppressed group, was established in the early 19th century as a private settler-colonial project in West Africa by the American Colonization Society (ACS) with U.S. congressional support as a homeland for freed African Americans. Like Israel, it was created with Western backing, but the scale and consistency of aid could not be more different. Settlers faced mortality rates as high as 40% from tropical diseases, well known to the ACS, which nonetheless kept sending people. Although Liberia declared independence in 1847, the U.S. withheld recognition until 1862.

Economic exploitation followed, most notoriously through the 1926 Firestone concession, which saddled the country with crippling debt, put U.S.-appointed financial advisers in charge of its budget, and consumed nearly all government revenue by the early 1930s. Firestone’s rubber operations were linked to severe abuses, including forced child labor and dangerous quotas for workers as young as five. Liberia’s vulnerability was compounded by U.S. political meddling and public health disasters such as the 2014–16 Ebola epidemic, which killed nearly 5,000 people and collapsed an already fragile health system.

In stark contrast to Israel’s $150 billion in U.S. aid, over $15,000 per citizen, Liberia has received only about $6 billion total, or roughly $1,000 per person, a per-capita disparity of at least 14-to-1 that left it underfunded, politically marginal, and economically dependent while Israel was entrenched through sustained Western investment.

Critics such as Norman Finkelstein have also pointed out that leaders of Jewish organizations have exaggerated the size of the assets. Some Holocaust reparations also led to a massive scam where $57 million were fraudulently given to thousands of people who were not eligible for the funds.

Post-WWII Nazi targets were not Jews

Western society would make you believe the sole focus of Nazis was to target Jews. After WWII, the U.S. and largely the colonial West absorbed and recruited the Nazis to help them with espionage operations, wars, massacres and propping up brutal dictatorships across the globe. These fascists were primarily recruited to crush leftists, anti-colonial liberation movements, and uphold the Neo-colonial order. Many of these Nazis and fascists were repurposed as forces against subjugating the global working class and oppressed nations.

The U.S. helped set up the Gehlen Organization in 1946, an intelligence agency in post-war occupied West Germany which employed hundreds of former members of the Nazi Party. It was headed by Nazi military and intelligence officer, Reinhard Gehlen aka “Hitler’s Super Spy” and was defended by the CIA. The agency was the precursor to the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND or Federal Intelligence Service), the modern-day German equivalent of the CIA.

Ex-Nazi officer Klaus Barbie, backed by and under the protection of U.S. intelligence, trained the military dictatorships in Bolivia and Peru, playing a key role in identifying, torturing and executing leftists through disappearances and death squads during the 1970s and 1980s under Operation Condor. NATO and the CIA in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies organized Operation Gladio, clandestine “stay-behind” operations to crush left-wing movements and unions. This was done through supporting former Nazi SS officers, fascist militias and terrorists who used assassinations, psychological warfare, and false flag operations in Italy, Turkey, Greece, France, and many others. The CIA also ran Operation Bloodstone where former Nazis were recruited to work undercover in the Soviet Union, Latin America, Canada and even domestically within the U.S.

In Algeria, about 20,000 Wehrmacht and Waffen SS veterans joined the French Foreign Legion to fight “the war of the white race,” including Rolf Steiner who also fought alongside Western-backed regimes in Vietnam, Nigeria and Sudan. Notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried Müller who emigrated to Apartheid South Africa was employed by the military of Congo, then called Congo-Léopoldville, to crush the Simba rebellion, committing widespread atrocities and war crimes.

Even Mossad, the intelligence agency of the so-called ‘Jewish State’, had recruited SS officers into their ranks to spy on Arab states such as Otto Skorzeny and Hermann Valentin in Egypt, and Walter Rauff in Syria. In fact, Zionists and Nazis have had a long-standing close relationship, as documented by Lenni Brenner in his 2002 book, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis.

The Holocaust Industry: from Cold War to Six-Day War

There is an entire industry dedicated to exploiting the memory of the Holocaust for monetary and political gain that spans publishing houses pushing out a steady stream of books, the constant production of big-budget films and TV series, high-profile documentaries on streaming platforms, and an ever-expanding network of museums and memorials.

This vast industry, as Norman Finkelstein states in his book The Holocaust Industry published in 2000, has a specific historical origin and political function. Between World War II and the late 1960s, the Holocaust took little part in the lives of Americans including American Jews, with only a small number of books, films, and works of scholarship dedicated to it. As Finkelstein stated:

Between the end of World War II and the late 1960s, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. There was only one university course offering in the United States on the topic. When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, she could draw on only two scholarly studies in the English language Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg’s masterpiece itself just managed to see the light of day. His thesis advisor at Columbia University, the German-Jewish social theorist Franz Neumann, strongly discouraged him from writing on the topic (”It’s your funeral”), and no university or mainstream publisher would touch the completed manuscript. When it was finally published, The Destruction of the European Jews received only a few, mostly critical, notices.

Not only Americans in general but also American Jews, including Jewish intellectuals, paid the Nazi holocaust little heed. In an authoritative 1957 survey, sociologist Nathan Glazer reported that the Nazi Final Solution (as well as Israel) “had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.” In a 1961 Commentary symposium on “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals,” only two of thirty-one contributors stressed its impact. Likewise, a 1961 roundtable convened by the journal Judaism of twenty-one observant American Jews on “My Jewish Affirmation” almost completely ignored the subject. No monuments or tributes marked the Nazi holocaust in the United States. To the contrary, major Jewish organizations opposed such memorialization.

— Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000)

With the Cold War, Germany had now become a major U.S. ally against the Soviet Union, the nation that contributed by far the most in defeating the Nazis and the liberation of the concentration camps. In the immediate postwar period, the leaders of major American Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Committee (AJC), World Jewish Congress (WJC), and Anti-Defamation League (ADL) understood assimilation and access to elite power to be in their own interest. Consequently, they distanced themselves from the Holocaust, moderated demands for German de-Nazification, and even collaborated with McCarthyite witch-hunts including against Jews who opposed alignment with Germany. Remembrance of the Holocaust became a “communist cause.”

These Jewish organizations opposed cooperation with anti-Nazi German social democrats, opposed boycotts of German manufactures, opposed public demonstrations against ex-Nazis touring the U.S., and even publicly condemned Martin Niemöller, who had spent eight years in concentration camps, due to him being against the anti-Communist crusade. On the other hand, they enlisted and funded right-wing extremist organizations like the All-American Conference to Combat Communism and turned a blind eye as veterans of the Nazi SS entered the country. In a twisted turn of events, these Jewish organizations instead ironically invoked the Holocaust and pinned antisemitism on the Soviet Union:

Ever anxious to ingratiate themselves with US ruling elites and dissociate themselves from the Jewish Left, organized American Jewry did invoke the Nazi holocaust in one special context: to denounce the USSR. “Soviet [anti-Jewish] policy opens up opportunities which must not be overlooked,” an internal AJC memorandum quoted by Novick gleefully noted, “to reinforce certain aspects of AJC domestic program.” Typically, that meant bracketing the Nazi Final Solution with Russian anti-Semitism. “Stalin will succeed where Hitler failed,” Commentary direly predicted. “He will finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The parallel with the policy of Nazi extermination is almost complete.” Major American Jewish organizations even denounced Soviet repression in Hungary as “only the first station on the way to a Russian Auschwitz.”

— Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000)

The 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and the coalition of Arab states "gave birth to a memorial industry." After Israel's victory, the American government began a friendlier strategic relationship with it, aligning with Cold War interests. In response, the interests of American Jewish leaders changed. Their organizations pivoted to openly support Israel and espouse a Holocaust ideology that emphasized the event's uniqueness and its status as the climax of an eternal antisemitism. This ideology was cultivated to serve political ends: to defend Israel from criticism, secure financial reparations, and consolidate the influence of American Jewish institutions, fundamentally transforming the Holocaust into a central, symbolic event in the American mind.

Major Hollywood studios have turned Holocaust narratives into multi-million-dollar box office events. The publishing industry markets Holocaust memoirs and historical fiction as a perennial best-seller category, with some titles selling in the millions. Holocaust museums attract millions of visitors annually and receive substantial public and private funding. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) alone has an operating budget exceeding $150 million a year, funded in part by the federal government and wealthy donors. The global “Holocaust remembrance” NGO sector, including the World Jewish Congress, the Claims Conference, and Yad Vashem, commands hundreds of millions of dollars in combined annual budgets, with well-paid staff and a constant calendar of high-profile fundraising galas. The double standards of the USHMM have been criticized.

As Finkelstein put it:

The first question is why we even have a federally mandated and funded Holocaust museum in the nation’s capital. Its presence on the Washington mall is particularly incongruous in the absence of a museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history. Imagine the accusations of hypocrisy here were Germany to build a national museum in Berlin to commemorate not the Nazi genocide, but American slavery or the extermination of the Native Americans.

— Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000)

Even a country as remote as Australia, with a total population of only 27 million and less than 1% Jewish, has at least eight museums dedicated to the Holocaust, with more planned to be built so that every single state and territory will eventually have one. In contrast, there is no museum dedicated to the genocide of Indigenous Australians whose population was reduced from an estimated 1-1.5 million before invasion to fewer than 100,000 by the early 1900s; only scattered exhibits within larger museums.

According to Wikipedia’s List of Holocaust memorials and museums, there are at least 360 sites in 50 countries, spanning all continents around the world except Antarctica. These include not only former Axis and Allied countries, but also nations with no involvement in the Holocaust whatsoever, such as Albania, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala, Uruguay, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, and Suriname. The majority of the countries on the list (60%) have populations of less than 10,000 Jews.

The effects of this industry are highly successful in shaping global awareness. A 2014 poll by the ADL, surveying over 100 countries, found that despite 74% of respondents saying they had never even met a Jewish person, a majority (54%) had heard of the Holocaust. The Holocaust memory industry ensures that this single genocide occupies a unique, almost sacred place in the Western moral imagination. It generates not only cultural capital but financial and political capital, reinforcing a narrative in which the Holocaust stands apart from all other atrocities. This exceptionalism is then leveraged to justify the state of Israel’s claim to moral necessity and immunity from criticism.

Further reading:

Ophir, A. (1987). On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise. Tikkun 31(3), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/626029

Finkelstein, N. (2000). The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Verso Books.

Mann, M. (2004). Fascists. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511806568

Klein, S. (2025). The Growing Rift between Holocaust Scholars over Israel/Palestine. Journal of Genocide Research, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2448061

BadEmpanada. (2026, February 6). Holocaust Education Is for Israel. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/i0OkIVyBBVs