GENOCIDE.

The twentieth century has sometimes been labeled as the "century of genocide." In view of historical events, this description hardly amounts to an exaggeration: never before has violence, systematically aimed at exterminating ethnic, national, or religious groups, claimed more victims than over the course of the twentieth century. The extent of collective violence as the century came to a close—such as the massacres in disintegrating Yugoslavia or Rwanda during the 1990s—dampened the hopes cherished after World War II that crimes such as the mass murder of European Jews could be prevented in the future and thus fundamentally challenged the idea of a progressive historical process.

The term genocide was coined by the Polish-Jewish specialist in international law Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959). He had recognized that cases like the persecution of the Armenians by the Young Turks during World War I and, above all, the extermination policy of the Nazis throughout occupied eastern Europe differed qualitatively from other forms of violence such as war crimes and thus required a specific term of their own. Lemkin's concept of genocide formed a basis for the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of the United Nations adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. However, not only specialists in international law grappled with the phenomenon of genocide. Since the 1980s, interdisciplinary research on genocide has also begun to establish itself, initially in the United States and Canada and more recently in Europe as well.

Genocide as first defined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944:

By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.…Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.… Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor's own nationals.

Source: Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington, D.C., 1944, p. 79.

RAPHAEL LEMKIN AND THE GENOCIDE CONVENTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS

The basic notion that minorities must be protected from persecution by international law dates back to the seventeenth century: the Peace of Westphalia concluded in 1648 already contained terms stipulating guarantees for religious minorities. Protection of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire was the express purpose of the treaties European Great Powers forced on the Ottoman government in the nineteenth century. However, this commitment to protecting minorities was not altogether selfless, because these provisions generally served the imperialistic powers as a welcome pretext for military intervention in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. Finally, at the turn of the century codification of the law of war contributed to the international protection of human rights, albeit to a limited extent. Among other things, the Hague Convention on land war of 1907 laid down the rules of conduct by a foreign occupying army toward the civilian population. However, massacres or atrocities committed by a government against a minority living within the national borders were not subject to these provisions and therefore did not constitute a statutory offense under international law.

The notion of an international law binding to all states, one that bans the persecution and murder of ethnic, national, or religious groups, only really began to take shape in the period between the world wars. The horrors of World War I and particularly the fate of the Ottoman Armenians quite drastically revealed to politicians and experts on international law the significance of such an international agreement. By issuing a joint declaration in March 1915 denouncing the massacre of the Armenians as a "crime against humanity," the governments of France, Great Britain, and Russia had already made it clear during the war that the murder of minorities by their own governments should not go unpunished. Following their victory over the Central Powers and their allies, at first the Entente Powers indeed made efforts to open international criminal proceedings for war crimes and "crimes against humanity." Yet these endeavors came to nothing. Contributing to this failure at first was the fact that politicians and legal experts could not agree on which acts to subsume precisely under the category of "crimes against humanity" and on which existing legal grounds to base this offense. Moreover, the Young Turk politicians responsible for the massacre of the Armenians evaded prosecution before an international court of law, because the Treaty of Sèvres, whose provisions actually stipulated such legal action, was never ratified. The victory of the Turkish nationalist movement led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) and the founding of the Turkish nation-state resulted instead in an "amnesty declaration," internationally approved in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which concerned any acts committed by the Ottoman Empire during World War I that may have been punishable.

Despite the lack of decisive and lasting success in these efforts to prosecute perpetrators of violations of human rights during the world war, in the interwar period experts on international law continued to work toward establishing a system protecting national and religious minorities. The so-called minority treaties under the League of Nations were one result of these endeavors. The parties to these treaties committed to guaranteeing the protection of minorities within their national borders. Raphael Lemkin began to make his mark in these debates on international law revolving around the protection of minorities.

Genocide as defined in Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Source: United Nations Treaty Series, no. 1021, vol. 78 (1951), p. 277.

Even as a youth, Lemkin, a native of Bezwodene in Poland, had already developed an interest in the prevention of state-organized persecution of minorities, especially since he also belonged to a minority that faced discrimination and persecution in eastern Europe. Moreover, the fate of the Anatolian Armenians had made a lasting impression on him. In particular, the sensational trial of Salomon Teilirian in June 1921 in Berlin had been a matter of concern to Lemkin. In March 1921 the Armenian Teilirian had shot and killed in broad daylight the former Turkish interior minister Talât Pa?a (1872–1921), one of the men responsible for the Armenian genocide. As his unpublished autobiography reveals, this act of vigilantism led Lemkin to conclude that an international law had to be created in order to make the deliberate annihilation of national and religious groups a punishable offense.

After obtaining his doctorate of philology from the University of Lvov in 1926, Lemkin rose to become a renowned expert in international law and a leading advocate of the protection of minorities. To him the protective provisions drawn up in the context of the minority treaties did not go far enough. For that reason he proposed, at the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law in Madrid (1933), the establishment of two additional statutory offenses in international law: "vandalism" and "barbarism" were to be included in the domestic criminal law of the thirty-seven participant states. By "vandalism" Lemkin meant the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a specific group; by "barbarism" the suppression and extermination of members of a racial, religious, or social group. However, the congress rejected Lemkin's proposals.

In 1939 Lemkin became a victim of persecution himself. He had to leave Poland and escaped to the United States via Sweden, initially teaching at Duke University and finally at Yale. The indifference the U.S. public displayed toward the extermination policy of the Nazis in eastern Europe was deeply troubling to Lemkin. He hoped that a treaty aimed at guaranteeing the protection of ethnic and religious minorities, signed by the Allies and the neutral countries, could deter the National Socialists from the annihilation of the European Jews. Yet his plans did not meet with any considerable echo among U.S. politicians.

In his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, which analyzed the brutal German occupation policy across conquered Europe, Lemkin made a powerful plea in 1944 for passing an international law outlawing and thus preventing the persecution and destruction of peoples and minorities. Since, according to the Hague Conventions on land war, the murder of a people by an occupying force during wartime was a punishable offense, now, Lemkin argued, a new international law would have to be in force during peacetime as well.

In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin introduced into international law the neologism he had coined: genocide. Lemkin compounded the word genocide from the Old Greek genos (race, people, or tribe) and the Latin verb caedere (to kill). The meaning of his definition of genocide was broad and narrow at the same time. Lemkin regarded as genocide solely the destruction of national groups. Yet he did not interpret "genocide" exclusively as the physical murder of all members of a nation but included all acts aimed at destroying their basis of life and culture. Moreover, in his work Lemkin explained the various "techniques of genocide" using the example of Nazi rule and exterminatory policy in Europe in political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious, and moral terms. The chapter on the concept of genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe concludes with the demand that the crime of genocide must elicit universal jurisdiction and ought to belong to the delicta juris gentium (offenses of international law) just like slavery, child trafficking, and piracy.

Genocide as defined by Helen Fein:

Genocide is a series of purposeful actions by a perpetrator(s) to destroy a collectivity through mass or selective murders of group members and suppressing the biological and social reproduction of the collectivity. This can be accomplished through the imposed proscription or restriction of group members, increasing infant mortality, and breaking the linkage between reproduction and socialization of children in the family or group of origin. The perpetrator may represent the state of a victim, another state or another collectivity.

Source: Quoted in Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, eds., The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. New Haven, Conn., 1990, p. 16.

Lemkin hoped that after the end of the war the statutory offense of genocide would be included in the charges brought by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) against the National Socialist war criminals, but this was not the case. In the so-called Nuremberg Trials lasting from 18 October 1945 until 1 October 1946 the twenty-two major German war criminals had to answer for, among other things, "crimes against humanity." The allegations included murder, extermination, enslavement or deportation, and persecution of the civilian population for racist as well as religious reasons. Consequently the indictment of the military tribunal charged the accused specifically with having systematically committed mass murders against racial and religious groups—above all, Jews, Poles, and Sinti and Roma—and to have annihilated them. The judges presiding over the court, however, linked the "crimes against humanity" to the war itself and thus differentiated between the persecution of the German Jews before the war and the German extermination policy during the war in the occupied territories. In order to include the persecution of the German Jews before the outbreak of war in 1939 in the charge nonetheless, the prosecutors and judges argued that these persecutions had served to prepare the German war of aggression, something even a representative of the French delegation deemed a threadbare line of argument. This linking of "crimes against humanity" with war soon posed an obstacle. Specialists in international law recognized that this new statutory offense was problematic for the future punishment of systematic persecution and massacres committed by a government during peacetime against an ethnic or religious group among its own national population. Therefore it would hardly be suitable as protection for minorities. New paradigms were called for in international law.

In April 1947, therefore, the secretary-general of the United Nations, Trygve Lie (1896–1968), commissioned Raphael Lemkin, the Romanian Vespasian V. Pella (1897–1952) who was president of the International Association of Penal Law, and Henri Donnedieu de Vabres (1880–1952), a French law professor and former judge at the IMT, to prepare a draft of an international criminal code against genocide.

Lemkin's concept of genocide constituted the basis of a possible draft, but the three experts on international law took differing views with respect to some crucial points. Lemkin deemed the deliberate destruction of a group's culture—for instance, by banning use of a language or destruction of religious and historical monuments—to be a form of genocide, something his two colleagues regarded as an inadmissible extension of the term. With the exception of the forced transfer of children into a different group, Pella and de Vabres did not consider forms of forced assimilation as being genocidal.

On 9 December 1948 the UN General Assembly meeting at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris eventually passed the final version of the Genocide Convention, which Lemkin, Pella, and de Vabres had agreed on, by a vote of 55–0–0. The convention came into effect on 12 January 1951, after being ratified by twenty countries as well. In arriving at the definition on which the convention was based the authors deliberately choose the formulation "in whole or in part," especially since the convention would otherwise only have taken effect if members of a certain group had already been murdered. By definition, political groups cannot be victims of genocide. The Soviet Union had opposed the inclusion of this group, fearing to come under suspicion of genocide itself because of the Stalinist terror.

Issues of the practical applicability and scope of the convention are detailed in the nineteen articles: Article 1 states expressly that genocide constitutes a crime according to international law, regardless of being committed during war or in peacetime. Furthermore, accordingtoArticle3, even the attempt to commit genocide is punishable by law. Article 6 provides that persons accused of genocide will be brought before a court of competent jurisdiction in the country on whose territory the acts were carried out or before the International Criminal Court.

The actual innovation of the Genocide Convention consisted of the juridical abolition of the principle of sovereignty. Until the end of World War II, governments had been able, in principle, to destroy parts of their population unpunished. The Genocide Convention issued by the United Nations put an end to this deplorable state of affairs.

Nevertheless, the Genocide Convention had no effect for a long time following its adoption. The absence of international jurisdiction—the Rome Statute on the establishment of an International Criminal Court only came into force on 1 July 2002—and of an effective monitoring and control system made the convention appear as a mere statement of intent and thus actually as a superfluous provision. Contributing to this above all were the political constellations determined by the Cold War. The superpowers, which would have had the means at their disposal to punish the crime of genocide, did not wish to meddle in the domestic affairs of their respective allies. They merely denounced the offenses perpetrated by the opposing side. Although the Genocide Convention was not applied at first, it nevertheless represented a frame of reference to document the severity of state-organized crimes against minorities.

The end of the bipolar world order of the Cold War helped the convention achieve greater significance. In connection with the war in Bosnia (1992–1995) and the murder of 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda in 1994 its provisions were actually applied at last. In February 1993 the UN Security Council decided to set up an ad hoc tribunal for the punishment of the "serious violation of humanitarian international law" that had been committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In November 1994 followed the resolution to entrust the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) with the legal prosecution of crimes committed in Central Africa. The statutes, very similar in both cases, included an assessment based on the Genocide Convention. On 2 September 1998, finally, the first verdict ever on the count of genocide was handed down, as the ICTR found Jean Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba, guilty as charged.

These developments gave cause for optimism that in future the UN Genocide Convention would be able to contribute more substantially to the prevention and punishment of genocides. Chief among them was the breakthrough achieved at the 1998 international conference in Rome toward establishment of an International Criminal Court, intended to serve as an effective instrument to punish genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. However, the helpless and largely indifferent reaction by the international community of states to the massacres of the minorities of the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masaalit initiated by the Sudanese government in 2003 in the province of West Darfur dampened this confidence. The example illustrates that the mere existence of provisions and instruments of international law alone does not suffice to prevent or punish genocides effectively.

Lemkin's role was second to none in the realization of an international law that makes systematic persecution of minorities a punishable offense. He not only provided the basis of the Genocide Convention in international law but also, as a lobbyist, fought untiringly for its realization. Lemkin, though, deserves credit not just because of his achievements in international law. He had also dealt in detail with the historical background to past genocides and was planning to publish a comprehensive work on forms of collective violence in human history. However, he was unable to find a publisher, as a result of which his manuscripts, for instance, on the murder of the Herero in German South-West Africa (1904–1908) and on the genocide of the Armenians remain filed among his unpublished papers. Only since the beginning of the twenty-first century have historians recognized the significance of Lemkin's historical works. Lemkin is now regarded as a pioneer of a new branch of research: genocide studies.

THE CONCEPT OF GENOCIDE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

The interdisciplinary study of genocide started in earnest only in the 1980s, but by the early twenty-first century had managed to gain a firm foothold in the academic work at universities. Genocide studies comprise a broad field and are concerned, apart from questions of international law, with the social and individual psychological motivation of genocide perpetrators; they also deal with survival strategies as well as post-traumatic stress management for victims of persecution. Further, this research explores forms of remembrance and representation of genocide in literature and art and deals with the question of how this complex and straining topic ought to be conveyed in schools.

Transferring the concept of genocide as derived from international law into the social sciences has been rather difficult, posing a number of methodological problems. According to the definition of genocide by the United Nations, the express intention of perpetrators is to destroy a people partially or entirely, a constitutive feature of genocides. In international law, only proof of this subjective element of the offense can result in a conviction on the count of genocide. Such an intentionalist argument is difficult to reconcile with the insights of empirically oriented historical research, which contends that governmental extermination policies generally constitute complex processes that undergo various phases of radicalization and depend on a range of situational factors such as the course of a war. Studies on National Socialist population and extermination policy and on other mass murders have revealed that these cases were not murders exclusively organized by central authorities and carefully planned long before the actual crime. For instance, the mass deaths of Soviet prisoners of war during World War II, caused by hunger, disease, and exhaustion, or of the Herero and Nama in concentration camps during the colonial war from 1904 to 1908 in German South-West Africa were not brought about premeditatedly. If, therefore, one were to keep strictly to the definition of genocide by the United Nations, one could not call either of these two cases genocides. Yet causing the deaths of members of an ethnic or religious group by imposing unreasonable living and prison conditions nevertheless has to be characterized as being genocidal, because the prisoners' deaths were willingly accepted.

The UN definition of genocide excludes political groups and social classes as potential victims of genocide. The reasons for this restriction are political, certainly not scientific, and have their origins in the intervention of the Soviet Union. With respect to the murder of more than 1.5 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 by the Khmer Rouge, the strict interpretation of the United Nations' definition of genocide is highly unsatisfactory. To be sure, the murderous violence committed by Pol Pot (1928?–1998) and his followers was directed against ethnic and religious groups as well, thus constituting the offense of genocide. However, the majority of victims belonged to the ethnic group of the Khmer themselves. The Khmer Rouge strove to wipe out the bourgeois class comprising, in their view, city dwellers and merchants. According to the criteria and provisions of the UN Convention on Genocide, this crime strictly speaking does not constitute genocide, even though it involved the attempt by the ruling authorities to exterminate a defenseless group.

Due to these methodological problems and inadequacies inherent in the concept of genocide, a small number of scholars fundamentally reject its application outside the area of international law. The great majority of social scientists, though, who do not wish to do without the term, feel compelled to remedy shortcomings of definition and to redefine the term in part. As a result, by now a great variety of definitions of genocide exist. The lack of a generally accepted definition as well as the use of numerous competing terms such as ethnocide and politicide, often used synonymously for genocide, is contributing to the vagueness attached to the concept in the social sciences. The large numbers of different definitions make broad agreement impossible with regard to which historical cases of mass murder should be classified unequivocally as genocide.

Nevertheless, a few definitions of genocide, useful for analyzing and categorizing mass murders, have gained acceptance among researchers. The definition provided by the sociologist Helen Fein (b. 1934) has provided a solid working basis. The great value of Fein's definition derives from the inclusion of political and social groups as possible victims. Moreover, she emphasizes that genocides are not only committed by states. Hence Fein also interprets the destruction of indigenous societies by settlers acting independent of state control as a form of genocide. The question of whether the expulsion or decimation of indigenous peoples by settlers in the age of European colonialism was actually genocidal is subject to controversial discussions among historians. As the following argument will show, the hypothesis often advocated in the scholarly literature—that genocides are only committed by modern state machineries—takes too narrow a view.

GENOCIDE AND THE MODERN AGE

Raphael Lemkin felt that genocide was "an old practice in its modern development." In fact, the annihilation of peoples by others is as old as history itself. Several examples have come down from ancient times, such as the devastating campaign by Athens against Melos (416 b.c.e.) and the destruction of Carthage by the Romans (146 b.c.e.). Most researchers on genocide, however, assume that the genocides of the twentieth century differ substantially from those of premodern times.

To begin with, the connection between genocide and the modern age was a matter of scholarly investigation for the two philosophers and co-founders of the Frankfurt school of social research, Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), in their work Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment). Adorno and Horkheimer located the root causes of fascism in the European Enlightenment. They ascertained that the rationalist disenchantment of the world, its turn away from magic, had changed into its opposite, creating a "modern mythology of science and technology." Ethics, they argued, had been sacrificed to the thirst for understanding inherent in the Enlightenment. In the end such fanaticism of knowledge had produced a favorable effect on the rise of fascism, considering after all that it had furnished the state with superior technology; at the same time, it had undermined moral scruples about the uninhibited exercise of an all-pervasive state power. This Enlightenment critique was taken up by the Polish-born British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (b. 1925). He established that Enlightenment thought underlying the modern age favored forms of terror that strove to subjugate human societies to an ideological scheme by means of violence. To Bauman, rationality, bureaucracy, a cult of science, the idea of nation-states, and the ambitions and industriousness of political technocrats intending to create the perfect society (societas perfecta) were typical attributes of the modern age. Bauman compares the implementation of such utopian societal models to the work of a gardener, as human societies were, like ornamental gardens, slated to be redesigned according to clear organizing criteria. In Bauman's view, attempts to found nation-states or to establish "racially homogenous" societies were therefore bound to result in expulsion and genocide.

For historians working empirically, however, the distinction between modern and premodern genocides is rather difficult to prove. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 saw the slaying of close to eight hundred thousand Tutsi within a matter of mere months by means of very simple weapons such as machetes. This seems to contradict the thesis that the genocides of the twentieth century were more devastating than premodern genocides only because of advanced technology and the greater destructive potential resulting from it. Advocates of the thesis about the different quality of modern genocides recognize modern, predominantly racist ideologies as the essential distinguishing feature. The French genocide scholar Yves Ternon (b. 1932) thinks that prior to the twentieth century the destruction of peoples had taken place because of vindictiveness, profit mongering, or thirst for conquest. The Armenians and the European Jews were murdered, however, because the Young Turk and National Socialist perpetrators, respectively, intended to put into effect their racist worldview. This conclusion is problematic. Neither the annihilation of the Armenians nor the murder of the Jews can be regarded simply as ideological genocides. Such a perspective involves the risk of monocausality. After all, empirically sound studies of both these genocides in the twentieth century have revealed that seemingly ordinary motives such as rapaciousness combined with racist and nationalist attitudes to contribute to the Turks' and Germans' readiness to use violence. As a rule, genocides are carried out for a variety of reasons. European settlers in Australia and America committed atrocities against the indigenous populations not solely because of their greed for land. At the same time, a religious sense of being chosen and of racial superiority was firmly embedded in the minds of the European conquerors, fostering their propensity for violence against the natives and simultaneously providing an ideological basis of justification.

COLONIAL GENOCIDES

Since the beginning of European overseas expansion in the fifteenth century, the indigenous population in the Americas had been decreasing drastically. In the period from 1500 to 1600 alone, the numbers of indigenous people diminished from approximately seventy million to about ten million. Even though the European conquerors treated the Native American inhabitants ruthlessly and contributed substantially to their weakening by subjecting them to forced labor, this decline in population cannot be viewed as the consequence of genocide. The occurrence of previously unknown infectious diseases, for instance smallpox and measles, proved decisive for the deaths of most people.

Nonetheless, the history of European colonialism is tied closely to the destruction of foreign peoples and civilizations. Victims of genocides were the indigenous populations in the Australian, North American, and African settlement colonies. Commonly extermination processes got under way when the natives were dispensable to the colonial economy and their lands earmarked for the settlement of European immigrants. The British colonialists in New England and later in Australia in any case believed the extinction of Native Americans and Aborigines to be part of a divine plan of salvation. The mass deaths of the natives due to newly introduced epidemics was interpreted by the Puritans as a result of divine providence. The demonization of the indigenous population and the firm belief in their own chosen status underpinned the settlers' ideological claim to land in the "New World." Armed confrontations with the natives such as the Pequot War (1637) and King Philip's War (1675) saw the line to genocide sometimes being overstepped. Thus the New England settlers declared the Pequot nation to be dissolved after they had massacred the majority of this people and sold the survivors into slavery. In 1763 Lord Jeffrey Amherst (1717–1797), the commander in chief of the British army in North America, ordered his subordinates to exterminate natives by distributing blankets contaminated with smallpox. In following the order, the British handed over blankets to chiefs of the Delaware Indian nation, who had arrived at Fort Pitt for negotiations. Indeed, shortly afterward a smallpox epidemic was raging among the Delaware natives. The European colonizers believed that by their murderous deeds they were doing God's bidding, feeling that the gradual extermination of pagan native inhabitants matched the divine will.

By the nineteenth century a social Darwinist justification was beginning to replace the religious one. European settlers in America and Australia now viewed confrontations with the indigenous population as "racial struggles." Consequently the fight for land and the right to exist in the New World became a zero-sum game, since the settlers believed that only the strongest would be able to triumph in the end. Now Europeans considered the destruction of the natives as an important step toward the conquest and cultivation of new living space. As a result, in Australia the racially justified violence against the Aborigines assumed devastating proportions. Settlers took the initiative and organized lethal campaigns against natives. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the degree to which extermination was organized also underwent change and assumed more modern features. Instead of settlers' associations acting independently, the period saw the establishment of special army and police units by the state that were entrusted with fighting the indigenous population. For instance, in November 1864 the Third Colorado Cavalry commanded by Colonel John Chivington committed a massacre against the Cheyenne on Sand Creek. And in Australia, the government's Native Police of Queensland, cynically made up of nonlocal Aborigines and European officers, was responsible for the expulsion and murder of natives on the "frontier" in Queensland, where land was required for settlers breeding livestock.

Cultural contact between European colonizers and the indigenous population was not solely characterized by massacres and displacement. Nevertheless, a genocidal quality seems to be fundamentally inherent in colonialism. Even colonialists' attempts to integrate native populations into their modern development projects were quite frequently carried out in a violent way. For instance, in order to force natives into the African settlement and plantation colonies as paid laborers, colonizers often felt they first had to destroy traditional socioeconomic and political structures, the essential elements of indigenous culture. The elimination of the economic basis for life of indigenous hunter-gatherer societies, for instance, by forced settlement of nomadic groups, runs throughout the history of European colonialism. According to the UN definition of genocide and consequently in the legal sense, this and other forms of forced assimilation, which could certainly also serve a supposedly humanitarian purpose in the Europeans' self-image as proponents of a "civilizing mission," do not, strictly speaking, constitute genocide. An exception is the forced transfer of children from one ethnic or religious group to another. Yet many forms of forced assimilation clearly correspond to Lemkin's concept of "cultural genocide," which he could not incorporate in the UN Genocide Convention.

In the final analysis, the distinction frequently encountered in the scholarly literature between modern and colonial genocide makes little sense. After all, in the context of European colonialism, racism and social Darwinism, which are fundamental ingredients of the exterminatory ideologies of the twentieth century such as National Socialism, have also served as an ideological basis contributing to the destruction of indigenous peoples overseas. One example underscoring this view is the genocide committed in South-West Africa in 1904–1908.

THE GENOCIDE OF THE HERERO AND NAMA IN GERMAN SOUTH-WEST AFRICA

"I believe that the nation as such must be destroyed." Those were the words the German general Lothar von Trotha (1848–1920) used to express his opinion about how the war on the Herero ought to be ended after they had been defeated militarily in the Battle of Waterberg on 11August1904.Whathadstartedon12January 1904 as a colonial war—not unusual in those days—developed into a real genocide against the South-West African native nations of the Herero and Nama, causing close to eighty thousand deaths and altering permanently the socioeconomic and political structures of the indigenous societies.

The German Empire became a colonial power in 1884, after Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) had declared present-day Namibia a German sphere of influence and imperial protectorate. The start of colonization proved to be extremely difficult because Bismarck and his successors were not prepared to provide significant funds for the prestigious colonial project. In terms of implementing the German claim to power, therefore, the German governor Theodor Leutwein (1849–1921) had to rely on support from the chiefs of the local Herero and Nama, who primarily lived off raising livestock. Leutwein pursued a perfidious policy of "divide and conquer," thus gradually extending German influence.

The revolt of the Herero against German colonial rule broke out on 12 January 1904 in Okahandja. During the first months of the war the military initiative was with the Herero. Theodor Leutwein's inability to crush the rebellion quickly prompted Kaiser William II (1859–1941) and the German chief of general staff, Alfred, count von Schlieffen (1833–1913), to entrust General von Trotha with the military command in South-West Africa. This transfer of command led to a radicalization of the German conduct of war. Von Trotha was an experienced colonial warrior, who had already participated in suppressing the so-called Chinese Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and, prior to that, had waged an extremely ruthless war on the Wahehe nation in German East Africa. The German general made no secret of his aversion to Africans. He simply shrugged off the arguments put forth by members of the colonial administration in South-West Africa that the Herero were indispensable to the economic development of the colony as workers. Instead, he waged a war of extermination aimed above all at Herero women and children.

After the military defeat at the Battle of Waterberg, the Herero and their families fled into the Omaheke desert, the frontier to British Botswana. Von Trotha ordered pursuit of the fleeing survivors and had access to the watering places closed off. He deliberately accepted that thousands died an agonizing death of thirst. On 2 October 1904 the general issued his notorious genocide order, instructing his troops to shoot any Herero inside the German borders. He was absolutely determined to put an end to the Herero's existence in German South-West Africa. This intention was derived from the understanding, inspired by social Darwinism, that the war on the Herero was an inevitable "racial war."

The government in Berlin, however, feared that von Trotha's extermination policy might jeopardize Germany's reputation in the world and the very economic basis of the colony. Eventually he received orders to revoke his "shooting order" and to take the surviving Herero into concentration camps. Forced labor, inadequate nutrition, and poor hygienic conditions in these camps meant that half of the prisoners perished during this second phase of the genocide.

Following the bloody suppression of the Herero rebellion in 1904, the Nama rose up against the colonial rule. What ensued was a guerrilla war lasting several years, in the course of which German troops practiced a scorched earth policy in an attempt to destroy the basis for life of the Nama living in the south of Namibia. Captured Nama were also penned up in concentration camps.

Until 1908 the Herero were officially prisoners of war and hired out in exchange for a fee to private companies for work on the railways or on farms. According to the plans of the German colonial administration, any type of "tribal organization" in the colony was to cease to exist. Enactment of the so-called Native Peoples Act in 1907 aimed at permanently guaranteeing the power relationships in the colony, with the indigenous population to be transformed into a manipulable working class subjected to total control. Among these decrees was the obligation to carry a passport. All Herero were forced to wear a tin tag with a number around their necks. Nevertheless, the Herero found ways to circumvent the rigid German monitoring system and to reorganize over time. In historiography, the process of social reconstruction among the Herero has raised adequate interest only since the late twentieth century.

Forty years passed between the genocidal colonial war in Namibia and the murder of the Jews by the Nazis. Without any doubt, there are continuities between these two events that are rooted in intellectual history. Both the war on the Herero and the National Socialist genocide of the Jews in eastern Europe during World War II were viewed by the perpetrators in a characteristically social Darwinist manner as a struggle for living space. Moreover, even the type of violence used suggests continuities: just as the German colonial authorities approved of the mass deaths of their prisoners in the concentration camps, the Nazis readily accepted the deaths of Soviet prisoners of war and Jewish forced laborers due to exhaustion and hunger. Yet this constituted, of course, only a preliminary stage on the path toward systematic murder committed by using gas. To be sure, research into this and additional connecting links thus cannot aim at a monocausal argument tracing back the Holocaust to the first genocide committed by Germans in Africa. Nonetheless, the murder of the Herero and Nama has a significant place in the global history of genocide. As a colonial war waged by one state it represents, as it were, a connection between the destruction of indigenous populations in North America and Australia, which was largely carried out by settlers' associations, and the bureaucratically organized genocide by the Nazis. Certainly the genocide directed against the Armenians during World War I, eleven years after the murder of the Herero, did not reveal the same degree of bureaucratic organization as the National Socialist mass murder. Yet in terms of the historical evolution of genocidal violence, it nonetheless constitutes a further negative quantum leap, because in this case a government intended to exterminate a bothersome ethno-religious minority by using the state machinery at its disposal.

THE GENOCIDE OF THE ARMENIANS

The Armenians had been living in the region between the Caucasus and Taurus since about 1000 b.c.e. After their King Tiridates III (286–344) had been baptized in the year 301, the Armenians adopted Christianity. In the Ottoman Empire, they had been tolerated for centuries. As non-Muslims they did not suffer systematic persecution but faced permanent discrimination nevertheless. For instance, they were not allowed to bear arms, and before a court of law their word did not carry the same weight as a Muslim's testimony. Furthermore, they had to pay a special tax. Relations between Armenians and Muslims gradually deteriorated when the Ottoman Empire began to disintegrate in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Above all, it was the Armenians' "cultural renaissance" observed at this time by contact with Protestant missionaries from Europe and the United States that made their coexistence with Kurds and Turks more difficult. The Armenians now stressed their national identity and sometimes organized in small armed groups to defend themselves against attacks by Kurds. The fact that the Armenians had, in cooperation with U.S. missionaries, managed at the 1878 Congress of Berlin to make the "Armenian question"—the question concerning the Armenians' legal status and their safety in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire—a subject of international diplomacy worsened mutual relations between Armenians and Muslims even further.

In the end, pressure exerted by the European Great Powers on the Ottoman Empire to improve the Armenians' status proved counterproductive. In the period from 1894 to 1896 serious anti-Armenian pogroms shook the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, with about 100,000 people falling victim to the violence. There is evidence that these violent clashes did not take place spontaneously but were encouraged by Sultan Abdul-Hamid II. These actions by no means aimed at the expulsion or murder of all Armenians. Rather, they represented an attempt to restore and cement the traditional order, in which Christians had been dominated by Muslims.

In 1908 the opposition Young Turks toppled the sultan and launched ambitious reform programs that were supposed to improve the status of ethno-religious minorities such as the Armenians. However, severe military defeats during the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913 and the annexation of Libya by Italy in 1914 caused the Young Turks to abandon this course. Additionally, when in spring 1914 Russia planned to destabilize the Ottoman Empire even further, pushing for an international plan for reform that would have granted the Armenians greater autonomy, the Young Turks fully came to view their Armenian citizens as a "fifth column" threatening the survival of the empire. Immediately after the Ottoman Empire's entry into World War I on the side of the Central Powers, paramilitary units began carrying out systematic attacks on Armenian villages on the border with Russia. Yet it was not before February 1915 that the Young Turk policy toward the Armenians underwent a radicalization leading to genocide. Just prior to this, the Russians had inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ottoman army under the command of Enver Pasha (1881–1922) at Sarikamis. While the Russian army now advanced from the Caucasus, Allied forces were preparing a landing at Gallipoli. Increasingly, fears of complete collapse dominated the thoughts and actions of the Young Turk leadership. After substantial Turkish provocation, an Armenian uprising in the Anatolian city of Van in April 1915 confirmed the Young Turks in their view that the Armenians posed a significant military threat. But that was not all. An additional motive for the genocide of the Armenians had a material background: the Young Turks required the wealth of the murdered Armenians to ensure they could sustain the continued war effort financially. The Young Turk war administration intended to leave the lands expropriated from the Armenians to Muslims who had been expelled from lost territories in the Balkans and the Caucasus.

The detention and murder of Armenian intellectuals, artists, and politicians in Istanbul in April 1915 is considered the actual start of the genocide. In the eastern provinces, where most of the Armenians lived, the local authorities ordered Armenian men and older boys to be executed outside the villages and towns. Women and children were driven on foot to concentration camps in the Syrian desert. These were death marches and by no means militarily necessary resettlements, as the Turkish government maintains. Those in power in Ankara continue to deny the genocide. But overwhelming evidence shows that the deportees were poorly supplied and that the authorities deliberately took them on detours on their way to Syria. Repeatedly, Kurds and members of special military units attacked the deportees. Armenian women suffered not only from hunger, exhaustion, and from the heat but also became victims of sexual violence. Whenever the deportation marches passed through larger towns, local Turks and Kurds bought young women and children from the gendarmes and forced them into their households.

The authorities had made hardly any preparations for the arrival of the expellees in the Syrian desert. The Armenians were imprisoned in concentration camps, where hygienic conditions were atrocious. About 870,000 Armenians reached the final destination of the deportation in 1915. By early 1916 only around 500,000 of them were still alive, and from April to September 1916 another 200,000 became victims of systematic massacres. Overall, anywhere from 800,000 to 1.4 million Armenians were killed. For the time being, a more accurate count of the victims is impossible, as contemporary statistics are not reliable.

The murder of the Armenians during the world war was, like the expulsion of the Anatolian Greeks in the postwar period, an important prerequisite for the transformation of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire into a Turkish nation-state, which was initiated by the Young Turks and completed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. By accepting this fact at the Middle East conference at Lausanne in 1923 and refraining from punishment of the Young Turk perpetrators of the genocide, western diplomacy set a fatal precedent—for in Europe, revisionist and right-wing nationalist circles, including leading figures of the forming National Socialist Party in Germany, regarded the genocide of the Armenians as an admittedly unpleasant but all the more successful model for "solving" minority questions.

THE NATIONAL SOCIALISTS' POPULATION AND EXTERMINATION POLICY

The terms Holocaust and Shoah have become generally established as generic names for the National Socialist murder of the Jews during World War II. Both terms are problematic, however. The word Holocaust is derived from Greek, with the original meaning being "burnt offering or burnt sacrifice." The Hebrew expression Shoah too originally has a religious connotation. In the Hebrew Bible, Shoah is used to denote a divine cloud, encompassing catastrophes and disasters threatening Israel, which have as a source God's anger. Such religious references are evidently out of place in this context. Another argument against the use of these terms is the fact that they leave out the overarching context of the National Socialist extermination policy, which also took the lives of Sinti and Roma, Russians, Poles, and patients of psychiatric hospitals. The Nazis were aiming not only at exterminating the Jews; they were rather pursuing visions of a gigantic pan-European displacement of peoples according to racial criteria. This scheme intended eastern Europe to be acquired as "lebensraum" and to be "Germanized." With respect to Poles and Russians, the German settlement plans such as the notorious General Plan East provided for partial extermination, deportation to Siberia, or transformation into a people of working slaves without any access to education.

The Jews had an essential position within the Nazi ideology. They were regarded as the dark force threatening to prevent the rise of the "Aryan race." Hitler very early on had expressed his intention to exterminate Jewry. Nevertheless, the genocide committed during World War II was not the outcome of years of careful planning. In the early twenty-first century historians generally view the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis as a process, in which several bursts of radicalization led to genocide.

At the outset, Nazi policy toward the German Jews was aimless and marked by sporadic violent clashes. It attained a more systematic nature through the enactment of the so-called Nuremberg Laws in 1935. Henceforth the objective was to exclude the Jews socially and to classify them racially as well as to "Aryanize" their property. As well, the Nazis increasingly relied on radical terrorist measures, such as during the November Pogrom in 1938, in order to force Jews to emigrate. For a while the Nazis' calculation proved right. Between 1933 and 1937 more than 130,000 Jews left Germany. However, when the United States and neighboring European countries began regulating the admission of Jews, emigration was no longer an effective means to "solve the Jewish question."

Following the German military victory over Poland in 1939, the Germans had within their sphere of influence a population of 3.5 million Jews, whom they forced into ghettos. German population policy experts contemplated resettling the Jews to either Madagascar or Siberia. However, these utopian and rather crude plans proved impracticable not least for logistical reasons. Apparently the German authorities intended to make a final decision on a "solution of the Jewish question" only after the German military victory that was expected to materialize soon farther east.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 the line toward genocide was crossed. The planned murder of millions of Jews and Russians by mass shootings or due to hunger was part of the military strategy and matched a perfidious economic rationality, which ultimately corresponded with the racist worldview of the Nazis. The goal was to deprive the Jews and Slavs—racially inferior and "unworthy of life" according to the Nazis—of material goods and food in order to utilize these resources in the military effort that would bring "Aryan" victory in the "racial war." Above all, it was the so-called Einsatzgruppen (special task groups) that carried out massacres of the Jewish population, and they frequently operated behind the front, sometimes in tandem with the German Wehrmacht.

The definitive decision for the "Final Solution" came at some point after the initial invasion of the Soviet Union. On 20 January 1942 high-ranking officials meeting at the Berlin suburb of Wannsee discussed and coordinated the murder of all European Jews. The crucial element in this decision, which could hardly have been more radical, was not merely the Nazis' seemingly irrational racial hatred. In fact, expropriating European Jews made it possible to generate resources and funds essential for the conduct of war and to pass on the war-related social burdens faced by the populations in Germany and in the occupied territories.

About 6 million Jews became victims of the National Socialist extermination policy. Not only was the extent of the Nazi genocide inconceivable: in addition, the industrialized killing of 2.5 to 3 million people (90 percent of them Jews), carried out in a heinous division of labor at the extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Treblinka, and elsewhere, stands out in the global history of collective violence and genocide, representing a staggering assembly line of death. Here genocide reached its culmination.

See alsoArmenian Genocide; Concentration Camps; Convention on Genocide; Hague Convention; Holocaust; Wannsee Conference.

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Dominik J. Schaller