"A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas "
What about other groups that were deliberately target like mentally retarded, Roma, homosexuals etc?. Why they are less important in this discussion? Is it only because they still have no voice in our society, and (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?
In part at least: numbers. The patients killed in the earlier "experiments" numbered tens of thousands, perhaps close to a hundred depending which figures you count (not all the records are meticulously kept at the time and some were destroyed later so some guesswork is involved). The number of jewish people killed (I'm not sure if this is just in the camps or more generally) is counted in millions.
Regarding the "killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews" comparison I was initially responding to, you can slice and dice the figures a great many ways to find such similarities. I'm not sure "polish jews" isn't too specific a category to be considered valid as a single absolute number. What are those figures as proportions of the all Poles and Polish+Jewish populations respectively? I suspect that the proportion of the European Jewish population is going to be a lot higher.
Yes thinking in pure numbers can seem somewhat heartless, and I fully understand if some groups feel unduly ignored, but it isn't being done to deliberately hide or discount the effect on those other groups. The groups that get a lot of the attention do so because the effect on their population was proportionately much higher then most (all?) others.
> (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?
Two points there:
1. That we treat them as badly is IMO simply wrong. When making statements like that you need to provide evidence to back it up. Society doesn't treat minorities as well in a great many cases, but I would say the orders of scale are not close to similar. Maybe as a white middle class male I'm misunderstanding the scale of something I myself don't suffer from, but if that is the case please show evidence to correct my understanding instead of a single vague (and potentially inflammatory) statement.
2. I recommend not using "Germans" in such statements, use "Nazis" instead. Many German people suffered too, and far from all the perpetrators were German, so the choice of word will to many flag your statement as unfairly targeted.
Your comments in this thread stand out as provocative and inflammatory, as do some others'. We need you and everyone else not to comment this way on HN—not on any topic and especially not this one.
HN is for reflective conversation. If we're going to talk about the Holocaust we need to do it that way, not this way ("what about", "didn't lift a finger", etc.)
I don't see what's wrong with reminding people that there were other groups of people that we killed in WW2.
I'm also surprised that "didn't lift a finger" is considered inflammatory.
I admit that I allowed myself to be little provocative but I think it would be better not to censor comments, but instead moderate non-technical links from the forum before inconvenient discussions take place. If this is not a place for discussions like that, it's also not a place for links to articles that will start such discussion, right?
There's no substitute for commenters learning the ropes of how to self-regulate in discussions here, technical or non. One of the ropes is not to comment out of fury.
What about other groups that were deliberately target like mentally retarded, Roma, homosexuals etc?. Why they are less important in this discussion? Is it only because they still have no voice in our society, and (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?