Why is the Holocaust central to the post World War II concern with human rights?

The Holocaust, which is the genocide of European Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II, was the most wrenching massacre of our Contemporary History and was also the turning point for Human Rights History.

The Holocaust is one of the most blatant violations of human rights in History. The Nazi doctrine, clearly states not to recognize Jews, homosexuals, Slavs as human beings. They are said to belong to an inferior race, as parasites and deserved no attention so they had to disappear.The Nazi thinking was that, all people were not created as equal, that there were “superior” groups and “inferior " groups. They felt that some people, especially Jews, were at the bottom of the ladder.The Nazi took it to the extremes when they adopted the "Final Solution", which was introduced in 1942. These ideas led to the drama of Holocaust .Over ten million people, including nearly six million Jews, were killed.

This massacre was a sort of catalyst for the process of Human Rights legislation and it led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This document officially marks International law and mentions the fundamental principles for any human being in the world. Thus, in the following decades, other projects emerged gradually and built little by little the History of Human Rights and created the first fruits of universal conception of humanity.

Even there are conventions, declarations or any other documents, which promote and encourage the conscience of Human Rights; it does not prevent dictators from misbehaving. There are clear rules that recognize violation of human rights and justice for the victims (trial etc).

We can talk about the Nuremberg trials (1945). Crimes against humanity were considered for the first time as a category of specific crimes. However, specifying a criminal act is not enough to prevent them from being committed. This is an important step forward in acknowledging the facts and the responsibility of criminals.

At the end of the Second World War, many countries considered that they had to act to prevent such cruelty from taking place again.
While deploring this situation, the international community remained inactive for a long time, wondering whether they should intervene in domestic issues or not. (Fear of interference).

(Other massacres took place in the 20^th Century such as the Armenian, the Cambodian or the Rwandan Genocides for example. What can be interesting to mention is, that the word “holocaust” (with a lower case) is now use for any sort of massacre or extermination of people)