Caesar

Caesar
>slaughtered 2 millions Gaul
Genghis Khan
>70 millions
Timur
>20 millions

>Hitler
muh 6 millions, war criminal, most evil man in history

So Adolf just born at wrong time and wrong place ?

They killed those guys.

Hitler killed his own guys.

But come on. He was a white man born into the modern age in the western world. He should've known better.

>implying Hitler only killed Jews

The civilian death toll of the German rampage was at least 20 million

Without sounding like Carlin, noone knows the names of Caesar, Khan or Timurs victims. There aren't survivors of their atrocities still alive today.

you can say he was asking for it :^)

>Another Hitler thread

The reason the holocaust is historically significant is not because of the number, but because of why and how he ended up killing them

Everyone else you mentioned killed people as a result of military campaigns. Sure, they may have slaughtered innocent people along with their enemies, but that's been common in human experience since time immemorial. They were killed because they were in the way, and for no other reason. A tragedy for sure, but not uniquely evil.

The Holocaust is unique because, first of all, it occurred at a time when the West had convinced itself that they were past something like that. Civilian casualties may be unavoidable in warfare, but the Europeans convinced themselves that such killings should be minimised as much as possible, as indiscriminately slaughtering innocents for the sake of slaughtering innocents was not something civilised people did. The Holocaust was shocking because, not only did the Germans not care about killing innocents, they went out of their way and dedicated valuable resources to the unceasing slaughter of innocent people until they could physically no longer do it, as if it was more important than the war itself. It was heretofore unthinkable that a "civilised" European nation would do such a thing.

Secondly, it was significant because of how it was carried out. The Holocaust took the greatest accomplishment of the modern era - the Industrial Revolution - and perverted it, took the foundation of the 20th century and used it to commit barbaric atrocities of an unprecedented scale. The same techniques that had been used to create the railroad, the automobile, and the airplane were used not to create or advance, but to destroy and regress back into the Dark Ages - except the sheer scale of it far surpassed anything that could have been accomplished in the Dark Ages.

continued

this

Thirdly, it was significant because of the population it targeted. Yes, disabled people, gays, and gypsies were also killed, but it's undeniable that the Jews were its main focus. The Holocaust killed a full 66% of Europe's population - whole Jewish communities, like the Sephardim communities in the Balkans, were made virtually extinct. But more than that, it represented something fundamental about European society taken to its logical conclusion. For a thousand years, Europeans had persecuted Jews, almost for sport. From the Rhineland massacres to the Inquisition to the Russian pogroms, the Jews were regularly singled out and persecuted by Western Europe for millenia. They were blamed for virtually every misfortune - unexplained disappearances of small children, the Black Death, the Great Depression. It was actually acceptable to characterise oneself as "anti-Semitic" in public, and a good portion of the population of Europe vaguely disliked, if not despised, Jews. This was the result of a multitude of factors - religious tension, perceived racial superiority, suspicion of insular and isolated communities, jealousy at their successes, continued frustration at their inability to solve the "Jewish question" - but it all came to a head in the Holocaust. Upon its conclusion and discovery by the wider world, the Holocaust shocked Europe by showing it the logical conclusion of their views. The acts of incomprehensible brutality and inhumanity to man that characterised the Holocaust were so sickening and revolting to Europeans partly because they realised that the views they'd held up until this point had made it possible. European society had always viewed the Jews as lesser than other Europeans, second-class citizens at best and subhuman at worst, but the Holocaust forced them to confront the fact that Jews were human beings like any other. The Jewish question wasn't a question at all, because the Jews were just people - they weren't even foreigners, really.

All of this, and then the fact that your OP doesn't even make sense. You act like your average joe doesn't immediately view Genghis Khan as a barbaric, war mongering villain, or Caesar as the original corrupt iron fist dictator.