Genocide research from a comparative perspective

Presentation at the international conference “Johannes Lepsius and Dealing with the Armenian Genocide” on 26/27 November 2010 at the House of Brandenburg-Prussian History in Potsdam.

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The 20th century is historically labelled as the saeculum of genocides. The Herero Uprising in “German Southwest Africa,” perceived by contemporaries as a rebellion of a colonial people, executed as a campaign of annihilation by German troops, is just beginning. The Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire in the First World War Carried, with One and a Half Million Victims, All the Characteristics of State Terror Against a Minority: Ideologically Based Intent, Systematic Implementation, Camouflage Based on Reason of State and Denial of Patriotic Motives by the Successor State. The Holocaust was unique because of its ideological focus, because of the combination of propaganda against those affected with the aim of acceptance of the genocide by the majority society and at the same time secrecy of the methods, places and personnel of its implementation. And the murder of six million European Jews was unprecedented, even in its dimension.

In Cambodia, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, came to power in 1975. He is trying to build a rural radical communist system. In 1975, in year zero of the new era he founded, money is abolished, cities are dissolved, the extermination of owners, people, and foreigners begins. Death marches of urban populations into rural communities, in prisons, torture centers, through hunger and epidemics, through massacres and murder kill people on a scale of between 1.6 and 2.4 million. According to moral categories, there is no doubt as to the facts of genocide.

The genocide in Europe in the 1990s, which broke out in the Balkans when the state of Yugoslavia fell into agony and disintegrated, had its own, new name. The term “ethnic cleansing”^[1] It was soon on everyone's lips, was first used in the media and finally also in science.^[2] The self-evident way in which the vocabulary was used and thus objectified irritated only a few. György Konrad lamented the lack of sensitivity and stated the nonchalance with which the facts described by the ominous term were also accepted: “The euphemistic and without quotation marks adoption of an obscene racist word into international language usage marks the ambiguous relationship of those responsible to the subject.”^[3]

A Commission of Experts Appointed by the UN Security Council stated in May 1992 that “ethnic cleansing” meant the deliberate policy of an ethnic or religious group to remove the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from a specific territory by means of violence and terror. The aim of such a policy is the occupation of the area to the exclusion of the displaced group. But the issue of “ethnic cleansing,” as the expert commission made clear, goes far beyond the facts of expulsion. “Ethnic cleansing” includes “mass murder, torture, rape and other forms of sexual assault, serious bodily harm of civilians, mistreatment of civilian prisoners and prisoners of war, use of civilians as human shields, destruction of private and public property and cultural assets, looting, theft and robbery of private property, forced expropriation of land and houses and attacks on hospitals, medical personnel and facilities involving the Red Cross or the Red Crescent.”^[4]

The Last Major Genocide of the 20th Century Took Place in Front of the World Public, Observed from Close Range by Units Wearing Blue Helmets Sent by the UN. From April to July 1994, hundreds of thousands from infants to old people were slaughtered by murder gangs on behalf of the government because they belonged to the Tutsi ethnic group.^[5]

Genocide has become a central metaphor for politics in the twentieth century.^[6] However, the scientific, i.e. comparative and generalizing study of it only got off the ground late, after a first approach, Raphael Lemkin's study “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” from 1944, had been received primarily as an instrument of new international law.^[7] Six decades later, Jacques Sémelin presented a comparative analysis at the highest level.⁸ As a working term, Sémelin uses the term “massacre” as the lowest common denominator. It is understandable that he strives to overcome the narrow legal definition in terms of its political application, but the terminological abstinence of the social scientist must be problematized in the face of widespread attempts at marginalization (such as Turkish politics, which seeks to relativize the genocidal dimension of Armenian murder in the First World War with the terms expulsion and massacre) as well as in the face of opposing efforts on the part Interested parties, such as Expulsion of Germans from East To stylize Central Europe after 1945 as Intentional genocide with reference to excesses (“massacres”) that took place.

Nevertheless, Sémelin must agree that it is primarily not a question of terminology, but of the puzzle of how abstract fantasy of annihilation is concretized through the power of annihilation to the suffering of victims, who are subjected to torment before murder, which acts as an expression of atavism and barbarism of military and bureaucrats, of citizens and neighbors as easily as difficult to explain. Sémelin's method is comparison and his purpose as an enlightener is to understand the motives of violent action. The objects of consideration and analysis include three genocides, the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda and the crimes in Bosnia. Methodologically, the theoretically reflected comparison of all options in the social sciences, which includes psychological approaches as well as historical and sociological issues. In search of explanations for the state-initiated, socially sanctioned collective destructive violence against ^[8]Civilians, Sémelin convincingly pleads for emancipation from the definition of lawyers in favor of social science disciplinary autonomy. The Recognition that the 1948 UN Definition of Genocide, which dates back to Raphael Lemkin, falls short, confirms the efforts to bring criminal justice by the young UN war crimes tribunal no less than the public debates, which are hindered by normative terminology or instrumentalized by it.^[9]

The judicial atonement of genocide has been a topic of law since the main war crimes lawsuit against the still tangible elite of the Nazi regime, although the term genocide or the offence of genocide did not yet exist. It took decades until the goal of establishing a permanent International Criminal Court was achieved, but wasHe exists and works. In addition to legal atonement, prevention and the search for peace and justice or reconciliation after the disaster are necessary.

When looking at mass violence, which is not lacking in the 20th century, from Abyssinia to Bangla Desh, Sri Lanka to Guatemala or East Timor, the historian's perspective must also include phenomena that cannot be intentionally defined as genocide, even if they followed ideological driving forces.^[10] A comparison of the crimes of the Nazi regime with excesses of Stalinism violence often used by followers of a one-dimensional theory of totalitarianism^[11] Concerns Holodomor, the Starvation of Millions in Ukraine, the Caucasus, on the Volga and Don, in Kazakhstan. The order of magnitude — five to seven million people — corresponds to the murder of Jews under Nazi ideology, but research has identified the differences that contradict understanding the Holodomor as a genocide like the Holocaust. However, enemy images were still driving forces of state terror, which was directed against nationally proud (i.e. anti-Soviet) Ukrainians and against farmers who defended their economic independence against collectivization.

Resentment against Sinti and Roma, which resulted in genocide, has a centuries-old history that was characterized by ostracism and criminalization long before National Socialism. With the Nuremberg Laws 1935, the racial ideology of the Third Reich defined “Gypsies” as an unwanted group standing outside the “national community.” In 1938, a “Reich Center to Combat Gypsy Crime” was formed in the Reich Criminal Police Office; on December 8, 1938, Himmler decreed as Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police that the “settlement of the Gypsy question” must be carried out “from the essence of this race.” NS institutions such as the “Racial Hygiene Research Center” of the Reich Health Office prepared pseudo-scientific reports that served the police as a basis for the persecution. Ghettoization in camps, such as in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and other major cities, had begun in 1936; Sinti and Roma were often also sent to concentration camps as “antisocials.”

With the Outbreak of War in 1939, they were forcibly settled down and registered by Himmler's Decree. The organized deportation of Sinti and Roma from the territory of the German Reich to Poland began in May 1940. “Gypsies” were murdered in concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Majdanek and in death camps such as Treblinka or Chelmno; in the Baltic States, Ukraine, Croatia and Serbia, they were killed in mass executions by SS, Wehrmacht and local assistants of German racial politics. The facts of genocide for racist reasons cannot be doubted; only the number of victims is disputed or cannot be precisely quantified.^[12]

With the Second World War, one of the largest waves of resettlement, emigration and expulsion in history began in Europe in autumn 1939. The first phase of mass migration involved over nine million people who were resettled, relocated, “Germanised”, “repopulated” or abducted in an area bordered by Finland in the North, Ukraine in the East, Greece in the South and France in the West. (This figure does not include the millions of European Jews who were deported and murdered as part of the National Socialist “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”) National Socialist popular policy celebrated the resettlement and deportations as a success, as they brought hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans “home to the Reich,” where they became available for the Germanization of the former Polish territories that annexed Germany. Around 1.2 million poles had to leave their homes in the new “Reichsgauen” Wartheland and Danzig/West Prussia and move to the so-called General Government. The goals behind the Germans' population policy measures are outlined in a memorandum issued by the National Socialist Party Racial Policy Office of November 25, 1939, i.e. shortly after the defeat of Poland, which propagated the “creation of a racially and thus spiritually and ethnically uniform German population.” The author of the memorandum consistently continued: “It follows that all elements that cannot be translated into German must be recklessly eliminated.”^[13] The resettlement of the “ethnic German” was linked to the destruction of “alien species.”

The military and political collapse of the German Reich in spring 1945 was followed by the Eastern Movement in Central, Southeast and Eastern Europe by an equally violent Western movement. Long before the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, it was clear that the Sudetenland would once again be part of the Czechoslovak Republic, but without its German inhabitants, it was a fact. So the Westward Shift of the Reemerging Polish State, as Stalin kept Eastern Galicia (which was granted to the Soviet Union after the Agreement with Hitler in 1939) as part of Ukraine in the Soviet Union. East Prussia, whose northern half was claimed by the Soviets, and the areas of Pomerania, the Mark of Brandenburg and Silesia lying east of the Oder-Neisse line, were to be separated from the territory of the German Reich and remain under Polish administration, under which they had already placed the Soviets on April 21, 1945. However, the expulsion of Germans from their territory was then carried out not only by the Poles, but also by Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania.

As the Allies had discussed at their war conferences in Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945) and sealed in Potsdam, the expulsion of the Germans should establish peace within the new borders and resolve minority problems once and for all, as Churchill explained in the British House of Commons in December 1944: “Because expulsion is, as far as we are able to overlook it, the most satisfactory and lasting means. There will be no mix of people, creating endless inconveniences, as in the case of Alsace-Lorraine, for example. Pure table will be made.”^[14] For Czechoslovakia, President Benesch had called for the complete expulsion of the German minority, the 3.5 million Sudeten Germans, in exile in London as early as 1941.

Hardly anyone tended to pity the millions of affected Germans; the suffering caused them by National Socialist Germanization and German occupation policies during the Second World War was too great among Germany's Eastern Neighbors. On the other hand — this was especially true for the western powers — it was also considered possible to carry out the gigantic population transfer in a somewhat humane way. As the suffering and losses of displaced persons proved, this was an erroneous assumption for many reasons. But the expulsion of the Germans from their homeland was not genocide simply because there was no intention to destroy them. The enemy images and resentments that had Arisen during and through National Socialist Rule or had deepened and intensified contributed significantly to the acceptance of what had happened and prevented feelings of compassion in the unpleasant surrounding circumstances, which often preceded and accompanied the expulsion.^[15] The Expulsion of Germans is part of the canon of mass violence perpetrated in the 20th century. But it wasn't genocide.

It is difficult to assess what is happening in Darfur, the western province of Sudan, where conflicts for ethnic and religious, political and economic reasons have been exploited by various interested parties for decades. Disasters of drought and famine form the backdrop to mass violence in the form of a civil war with genocidal features. The ongoing conflict claimed lives on an unknown scale. The estimates range from 70,000 to half a million; the causes, diseases, hunger, violence, are indiscriminate with certainty. US organizations launched a “Save Darfur” campaign, which is based on the fact of genocide and follows the moral postulate that the indolence of the world public, as lamented by the genocide in Rwanda, should not be repeated under any circumstances. The campaign began in 2005 with an event organized by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and thus has an ethical position that allows hardly any objection and guarantees high media coverage.^[16]

However, simple explanatory models and recriminations along the lines of Arabs against Africans, Muslims against others are as unhelpful as conjuring up the Holocaust or exploiting it for political interests. After all, a UN Commission came into action which, at the beginning of 2005, was unable to identify any signs of genocide or targeted state terror by the government of Sudan. But crimes against humanity have occurred, as have war crimes in the sense of international law, and the International Criminal Court has been seeking punishment since 2007. But the killings continue, beyond efforts to identify militias or rebels, government forces or gangs as the culprits. The Massacres and Mass Exodus in the Darfur Conflict are also based on distinctive ideas of enemies that have developed from prejudices and condensed into indissoluble resentment.

The murder of Jews under National Socialist ideology remains the paradigm for comparative genocide research. The uniqueness of the Holocaust in the dimension, systematics and perfection of targeted murder and because of the territorially unlimited claim of annihilation is not affected by the comparative analysis of other genocides.

Genocide research is a young discipline that essentially thrives on comparing events and phenomena. The traditional marginalization of genocidal events and — taking up the recently created and suspiciously rapidly naturalized term — “ethnic cleansing” in public discourse has been replaced as complementary behavior by a skewed comparison, which wants population transfer without genocidal motives to be understood as genocide on the basis of its phenomenology in order to assert interests. The efforts to build a “center against expulsions,” in which the intention to commemorate German suffering in particular stands out, can be interpreted as a reflex to public remembrance of the Holocaust, as a desire to install similar rituals. The reactions to criticism of the intellectual concept of the project lead to the conclusion that incomparable would be equated out of political intent, causes would be concealed from their effects, and consequences such as the integration of former displaced persons into the host societies of the two post-war German states would play no significant role in relation to the suffering and losses suffered. Criticism of skewed comparisons and attempts at instrumentalization is intentionally misunderstood as a refusal to attempt to create a place for victims of expulsion in the culture of remembrance. That is not the point, but it is about intellectual honesty: The Expulsion of Germans from East-Central Europe was not genocide and attempts to bring the sad events of the post-war period close to the Holocaust are dishonest.

The interaction of ideology, political program, intention on the one hand and the outbreak of atavistic violence on the other is an essential determining factor for the phenomenon of genocide and similar manifestations of mass violence. Triggering driving forces such as Nationalist rage, racial hatred, economic interests, social frustration, existential anxiety, and redemption wishes are the motives that give rise to the need to release violence.

A binding definition of the crime of “genocide” — despite Raphael Lemkin's proposal, which is the basis of the 1948 UN resolution — is only indicative. Because lawyers think differently than historians and politicians follow completely different needs than the disciplines of truth-seeking science. The Relatives and Descendants of the Perpetrators have their own difficulties in dealing with the events. The tendency, through denial or marginalization, through reversal of debt, to give priority to the respective national pride over truthfulness is great and is reflected in media assurances such as statements by politicians that genocide was only an “expulsion” or a population transfer, the side effects of — the death of many people — are immediately regretted if you do not immediately blame the victims for their downfall pushes.

Comparative genocide research is aware of the particular nature of the event. Comparison as a scientific method does not mean “equating,” leveling or marginalizing. Comparative genocide research also does not encourage victims' competition and cannot be used to serve political interests.

Mass violence, the field described with political metaphors such as deportation, expulsion, “ethnic cleansing,” genocide, is often cultivated with greater effort in emotion than in cool reason: The flushes of national sentiment in Turks show that passions do not help to recognize the respective facts and their dimension. On the other hand, the misconception that a detailed examination and description of historical facts must be accompanied by too little empathy for the victims or too little sense of national identity is apparently indissoluble. But only when you know what it was like, when the historical context is reconstructed and presented, is it possible to overcome the trauma of ostracism, persecution and destruction, for the descendants of perpetrators and victims alike.

The nature of genocide — as the examples given should show — includes not only the state organization, the ideological intention underlying it, but also the emotions of the perpetrators (shame, sense of guilt or defiant defense) and the traumas of the victims and their respective descendants. In addition to reconstructing what happened and analysing the motives, driving forces and interests, comparative genocide research therefore also includes the consequences of the genocide, namely the social, political and legal processing of the genocide and its psychological and moral effects in the context in which the genocide took place. The aim of comparative genocide research remains prevention (comparative action is essential for this) — even though the speaking historian cannot avoid a certain resignation in view of the multiple outbreaks of genocidal mass violence in the six decades since the National Socialist Murder of Jews.

^[1] Cf. Norman M. Naimark, Flaming Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century, Munich 2004; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, New York 2005 (German Hamburg 2007).

^[2] Stuart D. Stein, Ethnic Cleansing, in: Ellis Cashmore (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnic Studies, Routledge 2003; Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing, London 1996.

^[3] György Konrád, People and House Must Not Be Separated, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14.11.1998.

^[4] Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), 27 May 1994.

^[5] Alison Des Forges, No Witness Must Survive The genocide in Rwanda, Hamburg 2002; see Robert Stockhammer, Rwanda. Writing about another genocide, Frankfurt am Main 2005.

^[6] Yves Ternon, The Criminal State. Genocide in the 20th Century, Hamburg 1996.

^[7] Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, Washington 1944.

^[8] Jacques Semelin, Purge and Destroy The politics of massacres and genocides, Hamburg 2007.

^[9] Gerd Hankel/Gerhard Stuby (eds.), Criminal Courts against Human Crimes. On international criminal law 50 years after the Nuremberg Trials, Hamburg 1995; William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law, Hamburg 2003.

^[10] See Boris Barth's overview, Genocide. Genocide in the 20th Century. History, Theories, Controversies, Munich 2006; cf. also Imanuel Geiss, “Ethnic Cleansing,” Massacre and Genocide. A historical overview, in: Social. History 19 (2004), No. 1, pp. 44—73; see Wolfgang Benz, Exclusion, Expulsion, Genocide. Genocide in the 20th Century, Munich 2006; Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide. Utopias of Race and Nation, Princeton 2003; Dominik J. Schaller/Rupen Boyadjian/Vivianne Berg/Hanno Scholtz (ed.), Expropriated — Expelled — Murdered. Contributions to genocide research, Zurich 2004.

^[11] On the comparability of mass violence under National Socialist and Communist ideology, see in our context Susanne Heim, Population Economy, Deportation and Extermination, in: Dittmar Dahlmann/Gerhard Hirschfeld (eds.), Camp, Forced Labor, Expulsion and Deportation. Dimensions of Mass Crimes in the Soviet Union and in Germany 1933 to 1945, Essen 1999, pp. 501—513; Dieter Pohl, National Socialist and Stalinist Mass Crimes. Considerations on scientific comparison, in: Jürgen Zarusky (ed.), Stalin and Germany, Munich 2006, pp. 253—263.

^[12] Michael Zimmermann, Racial Utopia and Genocide. The National Socialist “Solution to the Gypsy Question,” Hamburg 1996.

^[13] E. Wetzel/G. Hecht, The question of the treatment of the population of the former Polish regions according to racial policy aspects, Archiv Institut für Zeitgeschichte MA 125/9, p. 380.

^[14] Winston S. Churchill, speeches 1944, collected by Charles Eade, Zurich 1949, p. 459 f., cit. P. 468.

^[15] There is now extensive literature on the suffering of displaced persons and their integration. The author is working on a monograph on the causes and effects of the expulsion of Germans from the East, which will be published in 2011.

^[16] Gerard Prunier, Darfur. The “Ambiguous” Genocide, Hamburg 2007.