Two things: specificity and deliberateness. When the Final Solution was put into action at the height of WWII, it was with a view to wiping out entire classes of people – Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled, to name a few.
The Nazis undertook this work with a level of planning that was unprecedented in human history and has never been matched since. They made an earnest attempt to kill every single Jew in occupied Europe using all the techniques and technologies of the industrial age.
This is why the Holocaust was such an appalling event: firstly because we attach a special significance to genocide compared to other forms of mass murder, and secondly because of what an indictment of the industrial age it was.
To expand on this second point a bit, the Holocaust gave us – probably for the first time in history – an act of genocide in which the virtues of a supposedly civilised society were put to a perverted use, as tools of extermination. The Nazi regime coordinated countless soldiers, bureaucrats, engineers, scientists, doctors, politicians, and industrialists, and deliberately concentrated all of their talent and learning to destroy European Jewry.
For sheer numbers, Mao (and Stalin) put Hitler in the shade, but theirs were passive acts of mass murder, and they probably weren’t genocides. Mao starved millions in the 1960s, but the starvation wasn’t the goal – it was a simple by-product of CCP policies. Likewise, Stalin would probably be guilty of ethnic cleansing in his treatment of numerous ethnicities in the USSR, but these acts were always in service of his paranoia, and never because he made a concerted attempt to bring the state’s full industrial might to bear on a particular ethnicity.
Whether or not a certain dictator might have intended to kill so many people seems like a semantic difference, and to the victims it wouldn’t really matter. But, we differentiate between murder and manslaughter for a reason, and for the same reason we also put Adolf Hitler in a category of his own. Sheer numbers are not at issue here: what really matters to us when we compare these things is mankind’s capacity for evil, and the Nazis’ methodical genocide is a far darker reflection on our species than Mao’s criminal neglect.
Theodore Lee is the editor of Caveman Circus. He strives for self-improvement in all areas of his life, except his candy consumption, where he remains a champion gummy worm enthusiast. When not writing about mindfulness or living in integrity, you can find him hiding giant bags of sour patch kids under the bed.