It was the application of modern technology to murder.
As long as there have been people, there has been murder, and while I agree that a person run through with a sword or having their head lopped off with a guillotine may not care about the difference between that and someone packed on a train, shipped across the continent and herded into a gas chamber, there is a difference.
It is the difference between a farmer who can slaughter three pigs a day, and a meat processing plant that leverages technology and business practices to slaughter 10,000 pigs a day.
Genocide is not new. But if you can show me where in history the techniques of mass production were employed to ensure that nothing went to waste from the murdered humans, ranging from hair to waterproof torpedoes, clothes to have the cloth recycled, spectacles to be reprocessed and human teeth for the gold in them, I would like to see it.
You make the mistake of thinking it is easier to hunt down law abiding citizens and shoot them on the in situ in front of their family, friends, neighbors and townspeople than it is to use bureaucracy to round them up and ship them to central spots for processing.
If the Nazis went to every single village and shot people, how long would it have been before that became impossible? The reason the Nazis were able to accomplish what they did on the scale they did was because the horror was largely hidden from the people they were rounding up.
I presume you know the mechanics of the mind set which are well documented in this instance of the Holocaust? That is, people did not want to believe. Even as late as 1944, there were Jews who refused to believe the Nazis were doing what they were. People who knew were ridiculed in many cases. Have you ever read “Night” by Elie Weiesel? There was a man who had escaped and made it back to his hometown. He tried to tell everyone what he had seen, and how they should all flee for their lives, but he was ridiculed, scorned and made a pariah in the town. That was in 1944.
There was a reason the Nazis did it that way, and it wasn’t that they were trying to protect the morale of their troops. It was that they didn’t want to panic the “cattle” on the way to the slaughterhouse, because a bunch of placid “cattle” walking into a building with no windows is much easier to handle than a herd of crazed cattle that have watched and smelled their brethren being slaughtered in front of their eyes.
That is why the Nazis were able to kill so many people in such a short time, that is why they did it that way. And that is why it was different.
In actual fact the Nazis were remarkably inefficient at killing lots of people quickly.
The Mongols routinely killed 100,000+ people in under an hour after capturing a city that had the nerve to resist them. Just distribute a few captives to each of your soldiers and on the signal everybody chops heads. Some claims are as high as 500,000, though this is probably exaggerated.
I believe Auschwitz never got much above an hourly rate of 1000.
I also disagree that rounding up the Jews for murder in their home locations would have been difficult. In most locations in Europe, unfortunately, most of the local gentiles were willing and eager to point out and even help round up the Jews.
The industrial uses Jewish resources and even bodies were put to is disturbing, of course, but surely the relevant point is that they were killed, not how they were treated after death?
You fail to convince me. Dead is dead.
The Nazis were vile beyond belief. Certainly some characteristics of their genocide were unique. They were different from those carried out by other peoples. That doesn't make them worse than other atrocities of similar scale.