As prolific as our species is at generating genocides, the Shoah was unique in this: the most industrially and scientifically advanced nation on earth descended into the abyss to create a system of INDUSTRIALIZED death manufacture. It showed us that no level of a society's industrial or scientific development is a barrier to genocidal barbarism if its people are brainwashed into believing the conspiracist mind virus that is the world's oldest and uniquely planetary hatred: anti-semitism. https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/wartime-lies-jew-baiters-and-haters-c3c890b3b773
The Rwandan and Ottoman genocides were pre-industrial, though the former was more efficient than the Nazis at manufacturing death: 800000 in just 100 days.
It's amnesiac to ignore the Germans' role in the Ottomans' Armenian genocide. If you read "Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East" you'll see that Germany's WWI jihadi revolt promotion in the British and French empires strategy was in part responsible for the Ottomans' Armenian genocide:
"Meanwhile, German consuls, bankers, and clerics in the empire were telling a different story from what von Oppenheim reported to Berlin.98
During the second half of 1915, they warned of how jihad rhetoric was inflaming Muslim hatred of Christians and determination to annihilate
them; how the jihad was just a cover for systematic looting, killing, and terror toward Armenians; and they provided detailed accounts of mass
deportations, killings, and concentration camps.
These Germans said they often heard the slogan from Muslims that jihad should begin by killing local Christians. They also noted that Ottoman officers and officials frequently said that Germany wanted the Armenians killed. German bankers told how Armenian employees and customers were disappearing. The Ottoman government then informed them that it was seizing the Armenians’ assets. The official explanation for German inaction was that Germany needed Turkey’s help as an ally
and so could say nothing. By early 1916 German officials in the Ottoman Empire had no doubt
about what was happening. Even the kaiser heard the news. The head of his military cabinet, Moriz von Lyncker, wrote in his diary on August 8, 1916: “Most terrible how the Turks rage against Christian Armenians, their subjects. Thousands—men, women and children—are slaughtered, others are driven purposely to death by starvation. Our
diplomats appear at this point powerless.”100 But in fact the German government never made the slightest attempt to discourage the mass
murders.The mass murder of Ottoman Armenians was the largest organized massacre against a civilian minority since medieval and probably since
ancient times. While it was carried out by the Ottomans, the Germans broadly inspired it, were well aware of it, and didn’t interfere with it."
it."
This jihad promotion strategy in WWI led to the Nazi-Arab alliance in WWII that made Mufti Amin al-Husseini a Hitler-Himmler buddy going on how-to exterminate visits to Nazi concentration camps in 1943-44 and recruiting Bosnian Muslims to the SS.
