Indeed, to honor Heydrich and help create what Hitler referred to as "Germany's Garden of Eden" in the East, the Nazis chose the code name "Aktion Reinhard" for the extermination of two million people, most of whom were Jewish, in the General Government of Poland by the end of 1943.
The leader, speaking of Auschwitz, had said: "No other name so easily evokes the extermination of six million Jews - the principal victims of Nazi genocide" (my italics).
Then again, Mr. Lanzmann also argues that "Shoah" is not really a documentary, and that "Holocaust" is "a completely improper name" to describe the Nazis' extermination of six million Jews during World War II.
The factors it cited were the loss of young adults caused by the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis, a low birth rate, and an increasing propor tion of marriages to non‐Jews and withdrawal from Jewry.
It has been obscured by the pervasive horror of the Nazi era and by the sad fact that most Nazi-occupied European countries collaborated or acquiesced in the extermination of six million Jews.
What were the official justifications for his silence broken only by intermittent, generalized con demnations of "excesses," which could be construed by Germans as applicable as much to Allied bombings of their ci ties as to Nazi extermination of six million Jews?
Notes contained an extensive discussion of slavery, including a graphic description of its horrific effects on both blacks and whites, a strong assertion that it violated the principles on which the American Revolution was based, and an apocalyptic prediction that failure to end slavery would lead to "convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race".
The point is that, in the early nineteen-seventies, when the very term "the Holocaust" was hardly known and when the extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany was a little-discussed phenomenon, at a time before Claude Lanzmann made "Shoah," Lewis took it on.
