What was worse - slavery or the Holocaust?

Answer 1

I think the Holocaust would be worse.

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One cannot quantify or compare suffering.

One also has to remember that slavery is still on-going today, there has never been a time in human history without slavery.

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The comparison may be fashionable in some quarters, but it is a false comparison: both caused appalling suffering but were different (See previous answer).

Answer 2

This is an "apples-to-Oranges" comparison. They aren't really comparable.

The Holocaust involved a short-lived (but highly efficient) attempt to exterminate a group of individuals (primarily Jews) in Europe. Roughly half of all European Jews (about 6 million) were killed in 4 years, and the greater portion of Eastern European Jewish culture was wiped out.

Slavery (in particular, the trans-Atlantic slave trade) covers several hundred years and involved far larger numbers of individuals, with much longer-term socio-economic affects. Somewhere between 12 and 15 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to North and South American from the 16th to 19th century, with about 15% dying en-route. The effects on the African nations were generally little (as slaves were either sold to European traders by their compatriots, or already slaves of European colonists), but the suffering of the slaves themselves immense, uprooting entire villages and families and destroying them for shipment, let alone the ramifications of turning free people into property.

Overall, there's no real way to compare the two, as they are significantly different in too many ways. Let's just say they were both horrible.