I am just wondering, when did it start getting called the Holocaust? It was not during the event. I just had a personal question on when did it gets its name.
Holocaust; a Hebrew word (olah) meaning "burnt offering.
In the Septuagint version (translated Hebrew Bible into Greek during
the reign of Ptolemy II, 3rd century B.C.), the word, olah, is
consistently translated by the Greek word, holokauston, "an offering
consumed by fire."
I'm not sure when it was first used in specific reference to the genocide of WWII.
Hansard - the "Congressional Record" of the House of Lords from 23 March 1943 - quotes one peer as proclaiming in a speech to the House: "The Nazis go on killing. If the rule [immigration statutes] could be relaxed, some hundreds, and possibly a few thousands, might be enabled to escape from this holocaust."
The word was used more and more frequently in newspapers during the following two years and is used as a blanket term without comment in 1945 in official papers filed as legal claims against Germany.
There's a good discussion of it here:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/HolocaustUsage.html
The gist of it is that, while it was being used before, during, and immediately after the Nazi period, it was really in the late 50s/early 60s that it acquired the capital "H" and attained it's current status as the accepted term for the genocide.
There was an interested piece I heard on NPR a few years ago about a box of recordings that were recently discovered. A Chicago psychiatrist (who had been born in Russia as a Jew and had converted to Christianity but was basically a secular person) had visited the Displaced Persons camps in Europe right after the war interviewing Jewish survivors of the camps. What was fascinating was that they hadn't yet formulated the experience into a larger context, like "The Holocaust." It was simply "that bad stuff that just happened." It really took about ten years before it was processed into something coherent, after people had re-established their lives and could begin to think about it. The Eichmann trial was a big stepping stone in the process.
I think it was the book QBVII that first used the term "The Holocaust" as a general term for the Nazi atrocities. Some time in the 1960s.
Wait a minute. Wasn't there a book that predates QBVII (and which is prominent in the book) called "The Holocaust?" Anyone?
I remember seeing a made-for-TV movie in the '70s called "The Holocaust". It was about an off-shore oil rig that went up in flames. Later in the '80s I saw a TV miniseries called "The Holocaust". It was about the Holocaust.