The word holocaust is derived from the biblical Greek term holocauston, meaning a "burnt offering" made in sacrifice to God. The term came to be widely used in the early 1970s to refer to the mass extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers of an organized system of death camps initiated by German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and the Nazi Party during World War II. In the 1980s, some scholars argued that the word holocaust imputed more meaning to the event than it deserved and began calling it the Shoah, a Hebrew term referring to a time of desolation. The connotations of the latter have come to color even the meaning of the former.

In World War II nearly 30 million people died in combat or as random civilian victims of war. History is filled with wars and massacres, but genocide is something else. While the Turkish attempt to...