Let me start by saying that yahoo thread you posted is awful, When you compare the goals of the two systems there were completely different The African slave trade was conducted to enrich various European Empires through cheap labor because Native American slaves died too quickly from European diseases. The purpose of the Holocaust was the extermination of the whole Jewish race, the Nazis used Jewish labor because it was then needed for the war effort, but looking at the cost of resources in executing the Holocaust shows their fanaticism as Eastern Front railways that could have moved supplies and troops to collapsing German forces were instead ordered from the top ranks of the Nazi government to move millions to death camps. Over 12 million Jews, Slavs and other undesirables were killed in the short thirteen year span of the Third Reich, and it should be noted that over 15 million people were used as slaves in some capacity by the Nazis during that time span as well. The slave trade is tragedy but its purposes were competently different, but just as ignoble. But regarding your actual question about comparing Jewish Slavery during the Holocaust to African slavery, I think a good compassion is CLR James The Black Jacobins which covers the most brutal and inhuman colony in the history of the Transatlantic slave trade, Hispaniola. In the sugar cane fields of the French colonies slaves were literally worked to death and because they made up over 90% of the islands population their owners used the most brutal methods to keep them in fearful submission, they were adverse to punishing them with mutilation of limbs and branding, or in the worst cases even burying them up the neck and leaving them to die of exposure. The average life of slaves in this condition once they arrive in chains to Haiti was less than seven years. Haiti and the other sugar islands are not the whole picture of the slave trade. What is often lost in discussions of slavery was the fact that in the 17th century Irish Convicts were used as slaves in these British Caribbean Sugar plantations. The Irish were viewed as racially inferior by the British, but the motives for enslaving them were to remove potentially rebellious segments of the England's Irish Colony whilst profiting from it. Slavery in the Thirteen Colonies was less brutal because until the invention of the cotton gin it wasn't as profitable: working slaves to death would mean you would have to buy more of them, and in the 18th century Tobacco didn't generate the same amount of profit as sugar cane. I think the best book on American Slavery is Time on the Cross. I sadly haven't read much how African slaves fared in the Spanish and Portuguese Colonies, so I cannot comment on their unique conditions. But it should be noted that over 20 million people were enslaved and displaced over a 400 year period. Both are without a doubt the worst tragedies in human history, they share similarities in that they were the products of Empires which purposely degregated and tortured their victims to make them more submissive and thus better workers. But the main difference is motivation, African culture was destroyed as consequence of the slave trade, it should be noted that the African slaves were supplied from MANY inland tribes of the Ivory Coast and other parts of Africa, not from a single cultural group. Over time the mixing of these various groups in the African Diaspora produced unique new cultures. The whole propose for the Holocaust was the actual extermination of the Jewish and other groups plus the massive enslavement of all Slavic people that fell under control of the Reich.