'That it could have happened only in Germany' is an open question IMO. Or at least, if it isn't, then it's not obvious why (bearing in mind most people are not historians).
> The NKVD personnel reviewed local telephone books in order to speed up the process and arrested persons with Polish-sounding names. In Leningrad alone, they rounded up almost 7,000 citizens. A vast majority of such "suspects" were executed within 10 days of arrest.
Just 100 000 people, not during war against west, so nobody knows about this.
It was really common in history to kill the inconvenient people. We only hear about this when it's convenient for someone else to bring this up (and he wins the PR battle).
Today Holocaust stand on its own and it's evil to even try to compare it to anything other. I think it's bad for humanity.
Armenian genocide seems like a similar phenomenon, although interestingly not very far removed from Nazi Germany in time and space. So while it might show that such things could happen 'elsewhere' it doesn't really prove that they could happen 'anywhere.'
The example of the NKVD seems a totally different matter. The wikipedia article describes it as a top secret operation. And obviously against a backdrop of numerous other political murders by the same regime.
Care to explain how that is an open question? I was not speaking specifically about WW2, I guess at that time it 'made sense' that it happened in Germany. My point is that something like the Holocaust can happen anywhere. There is no populace on earth that is somehow 'immune' against supporting regimes with such agendas.
For few pre-WW2 examples:
Even Hitler refered to genocide of Armenians in Turkey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide
Just before WW2 there was ethnic cleaning of Poles in USSR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD_%2...
> The NKVD personnel reviewed local telephone books in order to speed up the process and arrested persons with Polish-sounding names. In Leningrad alone, they rounded up almost 7,000 citizens. A vast majority of such "suspects" were executed within 10 days of arrest.
Just 100 000 people, not during war against west, so nobody knows about this.
It was really common in history to kill the inconvenient people. We only hear about this when it's convenient for someone else to bring this up (and he wins the PR battle).
Today Holocaust stand on its own and it's evil to even try to compare it to anything other. I think it's bad for humanity.