In Murder in Our Midst (1996), Omer Bartov notes that the Holocaust was the almost “perfect reenactment of the Great War,” with the important correction that “all the perpetrators were on one side and all the victims on the other.” Everything else was there: the barbed wire, the machine guns, the charred bodies, the gas, the uniforms, the military discipline, the barracks. But this reenactment had the great advantage that it was "totally safe for the guards.”
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The Holocaust was the other side of the coin of the First World War: mass death created by a nation-state. Warfare as genocide; genocide as warfare. 

But the Holocaust (at least for a time) was considered an anomaly or abnormality. Now, some historians aspire to normalize the Holocaust.

I say that what is "normal" may be deeply pathological. Mass-slaughter of human beings by other human beings is a profound form of psychopathology, even if mass-slaughter has occurred frequently in history.

Cancer occurs frequently, but we have no trouble saying that cancer is a form of pathology.

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Ray Charles/Richard Koenigsberg