Most people associate the term Holocaust with the murder of approximately 6 million people of Jewish heritage in Nazi concentration camps in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. The American Heritage Dictionary notes, however, that the use of the capitalized term "The Holocaust" to refer specifically to the death of Jews in Germany only became widespread beginning in the 1950s. The more traditional meaning of the word is to refer to "the massive destruction of humans by other humans" (American Heritage Dictionary n.p.). In this sense of the word there is no question that the European slave trade, which caused the deaths, enslavement and forced labor of millions of Africans from the 15th through the mid-19th century was a holocaust ("The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade" n.p.).
In early 1999, several nations, including Germany and the United States, began negotiations to consider compensation for the approximately 700,000 to 1.6 million survivors of Jews who were either killed during the German holocaust or who were forced to perform slave labor in the concentration camps. The fund that was established to pay claims as a result was estimated at approximately 4.8 billion. Apparently, there was very little argument that the victims of the German holocaust had been robbed of life and liberty by the Nazis and their supporters and that the victims deserved to be compensated for their loss and suffering.
If one looks at the German holocaust, therefore, and the fact that what occurred during the 1930s and 1940s is today unquestionably considered to be a "holocaust," one is compelled to conclude that the European slave trade of Africans was also a holocaust. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, the European slave trade was a commercial scheme that routinely traded in the lives, liberty and labor of African people. Just as were the Jews in Nazi Germany, Africans were targeted and massacred in huge numbers; numbers far in excess of those at...