Great question and one that truly informs much of how we understand and use the Holocaust in the United States today. As you first asked this question in a previous thread, I assume that you read the marvelous response of u/commiespaceinvader to “How accepted is the use of the term "Holocuast" when used to refer to events other than the Nazi genocide of Jews in the 1930s and '40s?”. He offers a great answer to the question itself as well as to the origins and development of the term “Holocaust” as the signifier for the murder of the Jews in Europe. However, for the sake of those poor souls who have not gone and read that thread, I will cover some of the same information—albeit more briefly—in my answer here.

a holocaust, the Nazi holocaust, and the Holocaust

As u/commiespaceinvader mentions, the use of “the Holocaust” as the English language designation for the murder of the Jews in German occupied Europe did not truly become dominant in academia until the mid-to-late 1960s and in U.S. popular culture until roughly 1978. It is notable that in the two documents which brought about the most scholarly and popular interest in the murder of the Jews in the early 1960s—Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961 and Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963—neither author chose to use the term “holocaust” in any significant way. Indeed, Arendt only used the term when quoting others.

Originally, some had used “a holocaust” or “the Nazi holocaust” as a designation which might signify either the assault on the Jews or the totality of the Nazi crimes against a number of groups. Further complicating matters, “holocaust” also found use in situations ranging from a fire in an apartment in New York to nuclear war. However, between 1957 and 1959, Yad Vashem and other research groups began to use “the Holocaust.” Gerd Korman, writing in 1972 on the development of the term stated that in spite of the use of “holocaust” in a number of contexts outside of WWII, “there appeared no formal effective opposition” to the specific usage. While true, the informal resistance to the exclusive coopting of term likely played a role in blurring some of its specificity in later years.

The Holocaust, if taken to mean the specific assault on the Jews, expresses important context and understanding. First, it recognizes difference between the reason for the murder of the Jews and the atrocities against other groups. It suggests that against the Jews, the Nazis based their assault in specifically racial/ethnic terms as opposed to the more individually, politically, and ideologically motivated atrocities against others. Second, it forces a conceptual view that takes in what could otherwise be considered quite disparate actions—such as the ghettoization of Jews across occupied Europe and the killing squads in the occupied Soviet Union—and forces them to be considered alongside one another. Without looking through a framework which specifically looks at the Jews as a separate victim group, one might be viewed as occupation policy and the other as military acts in a war zone. In other words, by focusing on the Nazi attack on the Jews, analysis takes in all actions the Nazis took against the Jews and considers them together.

However, if the Holocaust means the general assault by the Nazis on a great number of victim groups and individuals, then a different manner of contextualization is encouraged. Most importantly, the linkages of the murder of the Jews to Nazi racial policy is strengthened. Instead of considering only anti-Semitism, one recognizes the Nazi focus on creating ideal Aryans. This, in turn, resulted in the murder of the Jews, but also the disabled, homosexual men, and other “asocials.”

Both of these contextualizations have the potential to both limit and expand understandings of the murder of the Jews by the Germans. Further, neither truly makes greater or deeper contextualization impossible, they only guide interpretation to some degree. The tensions between the two contextualizations will be explored in this answer.

Anti-Semitism...the first wave of the Nazi assault

What does this have to do with the question? Well, all this means that when analyzing the origins of the Holocaust analogy in regards to the Soviet Union, we must begin before the Holocaust existed as such. We must return to a time before the murder of the Jews was contextualized as particular.

When Americans first began hearing of the various assaults on Jewish liberties in the 1930s, they recognized that the Nazis were targeting German Jews due to Anti-Semitism. At the same time, they also saw various other Nazi actions taken against communists, labor leaders, Christian churches, etc. An American reading newspapers during the 1930s most certainly recognized how the Jews were being treated in Nazi Germany, but also would have feared for the rights and lives of others in Germany as well.

Its location in relation to Western liberalism and American values, then, was the key to understanding Nazi Germany. The establishment of concentration camps in Germany and the assault on various peoples was best understood alongside the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act (which limited civil liberties and allowed Hitler to legislate without the legislature respectively). Lives were threatened in Germany because the vary nature of their government did not allow civil liberties. What lesson was to be learned? Civil liberties, such as those found in the Bill of Rights, secure citizens from threats like those posed by the Nazis.

The assault on the Jews and the Nazi crimes against others were further connected in works such as Franz Neumann’s Behemoth. In it, he posited that anti-Semitism acted as the spearhead of the Nazi assault on the world. In this formulation, the anti-Semitism of the Nazis served the purpose of garnering support from a populace. This has been further depicted by others in one of two ways. In the first, the Nazis used pre-existing anti-Semitism to gain support. Thus, Hitler, or the Nazis, was presented as being a politically savvy dictator who came to power by playing to the desires of the German people. Others saw the use of anti-Semitism as a way in which the Nazis distracted the German public by othering Jews. In either understanding, anti-Semitism was simply a way that the Nazis gained or held power. It was not a key understanding held firmly by the leaders of the regime.

Further, American Jews feared that suggesting that the United States oppose the Nazis because of their acts against the Jews might only lead to an increase in domestic anti-Semitism. They calculated that by presenting anti-Semitism as a part of the Nazi threat to freedom, democracy, and justice, Americans might be more likely to go to war with Germany. Further, this would keep Americans from seeing war in Europe as a war on behalf of the Jews. A pamphlet from 1941 entitled Nazi Poison, which was written with input from Neumann and a number of Jewish American groups, broadcast the “spearhead theory” to a broad populace. Its publication, and the debate surrounding it, suggests that Americans largely saw Nazi anti-Semitic acts as part the Nazi assault on liberty. They recognized the burning of Jewish synagogues, but saw them alongside the burning of books. They read about Jews sent to camps, but also read of communists and priests living in the camps alongside them. Neumann best expressed it when he wrote, as a definition of the “spearhead theory” that “ “the persecution of the Jews as practiced by National Socialists, is only the prologue of more horrible things to come. The expropriation of the Jews, for instance, is followed by that of the Poles, Czechs, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, anti-Nazi Germans, and middle classes.”

When Americans liberated the concentration camps of Western Europe and saw victims of all different ethnic groups and creeds, this understanding was validated. While in some, but not all, camps Jews were a majority of the victims this did not change the perception of American troops that the Nazis threatened all people with oppression or even extermination. The murder of the Jews, therefore, was deeply contextualized in the nature of the Nazi political and social experiment—not in essentially racial terms. Yes the Jews were targeted according to their race, but the attack was rooted in the nature of Nazi anti-liberal political ideology, not in a separate Nazi racial policy as an independent driver.

However, this perspective of the murder of the Jews does not fully develop how it became associated with the U.S.S.R. Enter Hannah Arendt and others.

Hey there,

Just a heads up that for reasons that remain a mystery to me, username pings in thread-bodies don't actually send out a ping. /u/kugelfang52 :)