Bauman did not see the Holocaust as a freak event or historical aberration. Instead, he argued that the Holocaust revealed something essential about modernity itself. It wasn’t the breakdown of civilization, but rather the product of certain features of modern civilization taken to an extreme. According to Bauman:

• The Holocaust was deeply rooted in the structures and logic of modern society: bureaucracy, rationalization, scientific management, and social engineering.

• It demonstrated how rational systems and institutions, when divorced from ethical constraints, could produce horror rather than progress.

• Bauman challenged the comforting assumption that the Holocaust was the result of barbarism or pre-modern savagery. He emphasized that it emerged from within modern rational order, not in spite of it.

This argument was especially provocative because it suggested that the potential for genocide lies not just in extreme ideologies, but also in everyday modern institutions—and that we cannot easily separate ourselves from the conditions that made it possible.

So yes, Bauman thought the Holocaust wasn’t an exception but a revelation—an unsettling mirror showing what parts of the modern world had become, or could become.