>The ethnically targeted nature of the holocaust is the main claim to 'worst of the worst' status, but honestly it isn't obvious to me that a dead Jew is more horrific than a dead anyone else. They are both pretty bad.
What made the holocaust particularly heinous, apart from the ethnic cleansing and antisemitism (the latter of which was not entirely uncommon in Western culture, unfortunately) was the industrial scale and effort applied to it. The Nazis weren't just killing Jews, which would have been bad enough, they set up (possibly the first ever) large scale automated data collection and processing network using IBM tabulators to efficiently process census data and find the Jews to kill, as well as organize and correlate the resources, personnel and urban infrastructure to be able to kill them by the trainload, with the eventual goal of killing every single Jew in Europe.
While it is true that other groups were targeted by the Nazis, the holocaust was still in a class of evil all of its own. It's one of the events that led to the coining of the word "genocide," after all.
What made the holocaust particularly heinous, apart from the ethnic cleansing and antisemitism (the latter of which was not entirely uncommon in Western culture, unfortunately) was the industrial scale and effort applied to it. The Nazis weren't just killing Jews, which would have been bad enough, they set up (possibly the first ever) large scale automated data collection and processing network using IBM tabulators to efficiently process census data and find the Jews to kill, as well as organize and correlate the resources, personnel and urban infrastructure to be able to kill them by the trainload, with the eventual goal of killing every single Jew in Europe.
While it is true that other groups were targeted by the Nazis, the holocaust was still in a class of evil all of its own. It's one of the events that led to the coining of the word "genocide," after all.