Нацистский геноцид евреев: разнообразие терминов и споры об определении.

List of names for the genocide of Jewish people under Nazi rule
Names of the Holocaust vary based on context. "The Holocaust" is the name commonly applied in English since the mid 1940s to the systematic extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II. The term is sometimes erroneously used in a broader sense to include the Nazi Party's systematic murder of millions of people in other groups they determined were "Untermenschen" or "subhuman," which included, besides the Jews, Slavs, the former having allegedly infected the latter, but also Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Czechs, the Romani people, Balts (especially Lithuanians), people with disabilities, gay men, and political and religious opponents. In Hebrew, Shoah (שואה), meaning "a catastrophe, a ruin" became the standard term for the Holocaust (see Yom HaShoah).

Some people find the use of "holocaust" for the WWII period Nazi extermination of Jews unacceptable, on account of the theological and historical nature of the word "holocaust". The American historian Walter Laqueur (whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust) has argued that the term "Holocaust" is a "singularly inappropriate" term for the genocide of the Jews as it implies a "burnt offering" to God. Laqueur wrote, "It was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim". The Compact Oxford English Dictionary and Microsoft Encarta give similar definitions. The Encyclopædia Britannica defines "Holocaust" as "the systematic state sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women and children, and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II", although the article goes on to say, "The Nazis also singled out the Roma (Gypsies). They were the only other group that the Nazis systematically killed in gas chambers alongside the Jews." Czechoslovak–Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, stated: "Let us be clear: Shoah, Churban, Judeocide, whatever we call it, is the name we give to the attempted planned total physical annihilation of the Jewish people, and its partial perpetration with the murder of most of the Jews of Europe." He also contends that the Holocaust should include only Jews because it was the intent of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews, while the other groups were not to be totally annihilated. Inclusion of non Jewish victims of the Nazis in the Holocaust is objected to by many persons including, and by organizations such as Yad Vashem, an Israeli state institution in Jerusalem established in 1953 to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. However, Nobel laureate and Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel considered non Jewish victims to be Holocaust victims, declaring to President Jimmy Carter, "Not all the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but all Jews were victims," when he asked his support for a national Holocaust museum in Washington. British historian Michael Burleigh and German historian Wolfgang Wippermann maintain that although all Jews were victims, the Holocaust transcended the confines of the Jewish community – other people shared the tragic fate of victimhood. Hungarian former Minister for Roma Affairs László Teleki applies the term Holocaust to both the murder of Jews and Romani peoples by the Nazis. In The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, American historians Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia use the term to include Jews, Romani and the disabled. American historian Dennis Reinhartz has claimed that Gypsies were the main victims of genocide in Croatia and Serbia during the Second World War, and has called this "the Balkan Holocaust 1941 1945".

The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (German: Endlösung der Judenfrage) was the Nazis' own term, recorded in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, and translated into English for the Nuremberg Trials in 1945. Before the word "Holocaust" became normative this phrase was also used by writers in English. For example, in William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the genocide is described as "The Final Solution" (in quotation marks; the word "Holocaust" is not mentioned). In both English and German, "Final Solution" has been widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust". Whereas the term "Holocaust" is now often used to include all casualties of the Nazi death camps and murder squads, the "Final Solution" refers exclusively to "the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people," as defined at the site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term Völkermord ("genocide"), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah.

The biblical word Shoah (שואה), also spelled Shoa and Sho'ah, meaning "calamity" in Hebrew (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the 20th century Holocaust as early as the early 1940s. In recent literature it is specifically prefixed with Ha ("The" in Hebrew) when referring to Nazi mass murders, for the same reason that "holocaust" becomes "The Holocaust". It may be spelled Ha Shoah or HaShoah, as in Yom HaShoah, the annual Jewish "Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day". Shoah had earlier been used in the context of the Nazis as a translation of "catastrophe". For example, in 1934, when Chaim Weizmann told the Zionist Action Committee that Hitler's rise to power was "an unforeseen catastrophe, comparable to another world war" ("unvorhergesehene Katastrophe, etwa ein neuer Weltkrieg"), the Hebrew press translated Katastrophe as Shoah. In the spring of 1942, the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) used Shoah in a book published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland to describe the extermination of Europe's Jews, calling it a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people. The word Shoah was chosen in Israel to describe the Holocaust, the term institutionalized by the Knesset on April 12, 1951, when it established Yom Ha Shoah Ve Mered Ha Getaot, the national day of remembrance. In the 1950s, Yad Vashem, the Israel "Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority" was routinely translating this into English as "the Disaster". At that time, holocaust was often used to mean the conflagration of much of humanity in a nuclear war. Since then, Yad Vashem has changed its practice; the word "Holocaust", usually now capitalized, has come to refer principally to the genocide of the European Jews. The Israeli historian Saul Friedländer wrote in 1987 of "the growing centrality of the Shoah for Jewish communities in the Diaspora" and that "The Shoah is almost becoming a symbol of identification, for better or for worse, whether because of the weakening of the bond of religion or because of the lesser salience of Zionism and Israel as an identification element". Published later, Raul Hilberg's most important work was The Destruction of the European Jews.

The Porajmos (also Porrajmos) literally "Devouring", or Samudaripen ("Mass killing") is a term adopted by the Romani historian Ian Hancock to describe attempts by the Nazis to exterminate most of the Romani peoples of Europe. The phenomenon has been little studied.

Even though most countries adopted translations or transliterations of the term "Holocaust" or "Shoah" (e. g. lang es; Холокост Kholokost; ; etc. ), there are instances in which certain populations, frequently those populations which were affected by the Holocaust itself, have adopted 'unique' names which denote the event. In Polish, for instance, the Holocaust is frequently referred to as Zagłada Żydów, or "Destruction of the Jews", although Holokaust is used in more general contexts. In Sweden, the Holocaust is most commonly called Förintelsen ("the annihiliation"), a term etymologically similar to the German word Vernichtung, used in Hitler's prophecy from his 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech.