Symposium: “The Vanguard of Comparative Genocide Research”
Schedule
・March 27 th , 2004 (Saturday) 10:30-18:00
・Gakusai Koryu Hall, 3rd Floor, Gakusai Koryu Building ,University of Tokyo , Komaba Campus
・Japanese/English simultaneous interpreting provided
Programm
◇Opening and Introductory Comment: Prof. Yuji Ishida ( University of Tokyo )
◇General Chair: Dr. Tadahisa Izeki( DESK, University of Tokyo )
Session One: The Armenian Massacres
Presentations:
■Takayuki Yoshimura ( University of Tokyo )
■Dr.Tessa Hofmann (the Institute for East European Studies of the Free University Berlin
Session Two: Genocide in World War Two
Presentations:
■Dr. Akiko Shimizu ( Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
■Dr. Susanne Heim (Max Planck Institute)
■Prof. Yuji Ishida ( University of Tokyo )
Commentators:
■Prof. Hirofumi Hayashi ( Kanto Gakuin University )
■Prof. Hidemitsu Kuroki (Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
■Prof. Shigeko Inoue ( Sophia University )
◇Closing comments: Prof. Yoichi Kibata ( University of Tokyo )
■Held by Comparative Genocide Studies (CGS)
■Annihilation, Impunity, Denial: The Case Study of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire (1915/16) and Genocide Research in Comparison
Dr. Tessa Hofmann
(Not to be cited or quoted without permission of the auther)
A definition of genocide
"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.“
Raphael Lemkin: Axis Rule in Occupied Europe . Washington DC , 1944, p. 79 f.
Introduction
A conquered and divided country, a dispersed nation:
Key elements of Armenian history
Armenia : Once a vast highland in the north of the Near East , covering more than 300,000 square kilometres. Being of strategic importance and crossed by ancient roads of transit trade, Armenia became a bone of contention, and regional powers fought on Armenian territory in order to possess and control it. Devastation by war, conquest, foreign rule and foreign law, the partition of the country between contesting hegemonies - all this was known to the Armenians at a very early stage of their nearly three millenniums of history.
After the Turkic Seljuks from Uzbekistan conquered Armenia and other parts of the then Byzantine Empire in 1071, hundred of thousands Armenians flew their homeland. This was the origin of a lasting Armenian Diaspora ( spyurk ) whose number increased at every crisis in Armenian history Today, only 2.5 of the estimated eight or nine millions of the Armenian world population live in Armenia .
Under Ottoman Rule: Armenians as part of the ?raya“. Attempts for legal emancipation, European intervention, failing reforms and Turkish reactive nationalism: the stage is set for genocide
After 150 years of wars, the Treaty of Diyarbekir ended the Iranian-Turkish fight over Armenia with a partition which brought nearly all Armenian territories under Ottoman rule. The Christian Armenians were, as all Non-Muslim nations treated as a part of the so called flock, the raya . This meant that they were permitted to exercise their religion, but under numerous restrictions. Their loyalty was questioned, and therefore they were excluded from national service. They had to pay additional taxes, and they were obliged to indicate by their dresses that they belonged to a despised minority. According to Muslim conventional law, Jews and Christians were inferior to Muslims and lacked many civil rights.
The European powers, in particular Great Britain , France and Russia urged the Ottoman government to improve home affairs by reforms, and reluctantly, after several military defeats, the Ottomans gave in. During the tanzimat -period of 1839-1876, two Imperial decrees were released, promising the legal equality of all Ottoman citizens, and the first Ottoman constitution of 1876 secured equality, however, without abolishing the Muslim millet -system, which caused the political and legal hierarchy among the various populations. Nevertheless, even this incomplete constitution was almost immediately abolished by sultan Abdulhamit II.
Before the background of a collapsing feudal empire whose colonies gained one after the other independence, the Ottoman government reacted with increasing nervousness to European urges for the implementation of the Armenian reforms , accepted by the defeated Ottoman Empire at the Berlin Congress in 1878. Abdulhamit tried to prevent the collapse of the Ottoman Empire by Pan-Islamism , thus unifying the Empire's Muslim nations and channelling their religious bias against the ?treacherous“ Ottoman Christians. Successfully delaying the implementation of any reform for 30 years, the Abdulhamit understood very well the irresolution of the European Powers, caused by conflicting national interests. He also understood that the European demand for reforms was lip-service, and that neither France , nor Russia would intervene for the ?schismatic“ Armenians, whose church did not belong to the Catholic or Orthodox camp. They would not fight for the Armenians, as France had done for the Catholic Maronites of Lebanon, or Russia for the orthodox Bulgarians, Serbs or Greeks.
During 1894-1896, up to 300,000 Armenians were killed in subsequent pogroms in Sasun, Constantinople, Erzurum, Trabzon, Urfa, Van and other cities, and 100,000 more fled the country. Entire regions had been laid waste. A new slaughter occurred in Cilicia , in April 1909, this time with a victim toll of 30,000 and after the chauvinist Committee for Union and Progress (CUP; Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti ) had overthrown Abdulhamit's rule in a military coup d'etat.
Mets Yerern - the Great Crime: Profile of a Genocide
1. The initial phase:
ideological preparation: dehumanising the victim group in self-defence
Genocide starts in the mind of the perpetrator. It starts the moment when a human being or even a fellow citizen is traditionally despised or belittled and eventually reduced to be a traitor, an ?internal enemy“ or worse, to be a ?microbe“, a ?virus“ or even a ?cancer“ threatening the sound body of the entire nation. As one of the responsible CUP state officials wrote: ?The Armenian bandits were a load of harmful microbes [ mikroplar that had afflicted the body [ bunye ] of the fatherland [ vatan ]. Was it not the duty of the doctor to kill the microbes?“ Others compared the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire to weeds and the perpetrator's task with a gardener, who has to weed his garden. It is no surprise that the expression of ?cleansing“ goes back to the Young Turks.
Defensiveness is another feature of the perpetrator's psychology. According to genocide vindication, the perpetrator kills in self-defence.
b) elimination of potential resistance
From the point of view of a genocide perpetrator, genocide planning demands the elimination of potential resistance at an early stage of preparation. The Young Turks expected resistance from the politically most active fragment of the Armenian population. Those were the members of two socialist parties, which in the past had fought the regime of Abdulhamit, including armed attacks on representatives of the repressive state or its institutions. After the revolution of the Young Turks in 1908, however, these parties refrained from such activities. Nevertheless, Paramaz, the leader of the more radical Hnchaks was arrested together with 19 other members of this party as early as July 14, 1914. Nearly a year later the 20 Hntchaks were executed by hanging in front of the War Ministry. Arrests of members of the less radical Dashnaktsutyun Party followed, once a political ally of the exiled Young Turks. Until early April 1915, most Dashnak were imprisoned.
The elimination of potential resistance was not limited to political activists. Young Turks had introduced national service for all Ottoman citizens , regardless of their religion. As early as 1914, Christian conscripts were rounded up for compulsory labour, starting with Greeks aged 18 to 45 or older, and in September 1914 with the Armenians, who were conscripted from the age of 16 until 60. In all, there were up to 120 Ottoman labour unit battalions, the so called hamalar taburlari - units for carrying provisions and heavy loads of ammunition for the combat troops - or amele taburlari - units fixing roads. The Ottoman Army's labour units of those years consisted of Non-Muslims, most of them Armenians. Working conditions were horrible. They were malnourished, not provided proper uniforms, boots or lodging. Subsequently, they died by the thousands from starvation, exhaustion, and epidemics. Those surviving were finished off with bayonets, once they had completed their task.
After the massacres of 1909, the Ottoman government not only allowed Christians to possess firearms for defence, but in many places encouraged or even compelled them to obtain weapons. Under the pre-text of confiscating these guns, beginning in the autumn of 1914. Armenian villages, cities or quarters were raided. The raids were accompanied by torture and humiliation of male inhabitants, often priests, and by the rape of women. Terrorised as they were, the raided Armenians agreed to ?deliver“ allegedly hidden weapons, even if they had to buy them for this purpose, usually at tremendous expense. The confiscated weapons were then photographed, and the photographs served as a concocted proof of an Armenian uprising and treason.
Under these circumstances, organised resistance to genocide was impossible. But despite the lack of experienced leaders and despite the lack of weapons and ammunition, the inhabitants of several cities reacted with attempted resistance to the increasing persecution and finally annihilation. The first case was in the city of Van , where Armenians outnumbered the Muslim population. After 24,000 Armenians had already been slaughtered in the province of Van, 70,000 reached the Armenian quarter of the city of Van and were able to defend themselves from April 7 (old style), 1915, until the advancing Russian Army reached Van a month later. The resistance at Van was immediately used by Ottoman authorities to justify further and reprisals.
c) decapitation of the victim group: the elimination of the Armenian elite - the meaning of April 24
The history of Constantinople 's Armenian community goes back to the 6th century. In the 19th century, The City was one of the most important Armenian cultural centres.
From April 24, 1915 hundreds of Armenians were arrested and, after a few days in the Central Prison of Constantinople deported first to the village of Ayas or the town of Cank?r? , both near Ankara , where they stood trial. After the court failed to prove any guilt of treason, the more prominent Armenians were sent via Adana and Aleppo towards Diyarbekir. According to the Turkish scholar Akcam, the total figure of arrests is 2,345. Only few of them were released. Some were killed on the way, the others tortured, tried and murdered in Diyarbekir.
For Armenians, April ksanchors - ?the 24th of April“ - marks the starting point of their genocide, and is annually commemorated as a day of morning by all Armenian communities. For it was on this day that the elite of the Ottoman Armenians perished. Among the victims were excellent poets, journalists, scholars and spiritual leaders.
2. In full swing: the main phase
a) massacres and holocaust; explaining the historic origin of the word
Massacres occurred in the initial phase of the extermination, for their main tactical purpose was terror and elimination of potential resistance. Therefore their victims were predominantly adult men. Under guard, they were led away from their native towns and killed at the first remote spot.
Burning victims alive was already practised during the reign of Abdulhamit II. Corinna Shattuck, a missionary from the USA , described in a letter the death of 3,000 Armenians, burnt alive in their cathedral at Urfa on the 29th of December, 1895, as a Holocaust. This expression was repeated by the Jewish-French journalist Bernard Lazare in 1898 and by the Englishman Duckett Z. Ferriman in his book on the slaughter of Armenians in April 1909.
As a means of mass killing, burning was frequently repeated in 1916 during the liquidation of concentration camps in Mesopotamia . On October 9, 1916, the police chief of Deir-ez-Zor, Zekki Bey, ?ordered to pile great stacks of wood and spilt 200 cans of petroleum on the whole stack. He lighted it and then had 2,000 orphans, bound hand and feet, thrown into the pyre.“ At the same town of Deir-ez-Zor , the Jewish officer of the Ottoman army, Eytan Belkind, observed the following: ?The Armenians were told to collect thistles and thorn and to pile them to a huge stack. After that all Armenians were bound hand to hand, about five thousand people, and arranged to a circle around the thorn stack, and then they were torched... The screams of the unfortunate victims, who burnt to death in the huge fire, could be heard for miles.“
Caves in the oil-rich area of north Syria were used for the same purpose of mass burning. In the caves of Shaddadeh ( Syria ), which is still called Ditch of the Armenians (Chabs el-Ermen), 80,000 deportees were burnt or suffocated in burning petroleum.
b) deportation as death march
Since ancient times, rulers in the Near East used to deport populations in order to consolidate their own regime or improve the economy of their kingdoms. Such was the habit of the ancient Assyrian and Iranian rulers, the Byzantine emperors and Ottoman sultans.
However, the deportations forced upon the Ottoman Armenians, which started as early as February 1915 in Cilicia and then continued in the Eastern provinces, did not continue this tradition. Although t he Young Turks of 1915 gave the deportation a legal appearance with a Temporary Law issued by the Council of Ministers on May 27, 1915 , three months after the deportations began, they did not intend the deportees to survive. The Temporary Law did not even mention the Armenians. In the administrative language of the time, suspicious persons were relocated .
After a time of high tension and terror, when the prominent Armenians of a town or region had already been arrested, tortured and killed, and many of the adult men conscripted to the labour battalions, the remaining population was notified that they had to leave their homes within a few days, in some cases even within a few hours. They were not allowed to carry many possessions with them. Most valuables sold before deportation were sold far below the market price. If the deportees were allowed to use carts and draughts, these were taken away as soon as the conveys approached the mountains. For most of the time, they had to walk by foot, regardless of age, gender or health. Naturally, old people, infants, the sick, disabled and pregnant women were the first victims of these marches. The deportees walked in conveys guarded by armed policemen, who alone decided when to rest and when to drink. The most difficult, tiring and preferably lonesome roads had been chosen, for the planners of these death marches tried to avoid witnesses. En route, the defenceless deportees, in particular those from the Eastern provinces were attacked, robbed and slain by gangs of the local Muslim population or by killing squads of the Special Organisation . The further south they went, the more the deportees resembled staggering, agonized skeletons.
Secondary victims of these death marches were the local Muslim population in areas crossed by Armenian deportees, who in lack of any hygiene became infected with typhus and other epidemics. Under conditions of war, the Ottoman government had no human resources to cover up the death marches. Corpses lay unburied, often in wells for drinking water. The river Tigris and the Euphrates turned red from the many killed floating there after the deportees had crossed these rivers. Infected by the living and dead deportees, at least one million Muslim Ottoman citizens fell victim to typhus. ?This was the vengeance of the murdered Armenians against their henchmen“, wrote the Austrian Military Plenipotentiary, Joseph Pomiankowski.
c) the liquidation of the concentration camps 1916
Despite massacres, exhaustion and starvation en route, about 870,000 Armenian deportees had arrived in the desert areas of Syria and Mesopotamia . Several concentration camps had been established near stations of the Baghdad railway which ran along the banks of the Euphrates . Living conditions were disastrous. In a very short time of six or seven months, ten-thousands died from epidemics and starvation. But for the organizer of this genocide, this went not quick enough, and the concentration of Armenian deportees in the area did contradict their settlement ideal of no more than six percent of an ethnic group in an area.
Therefore a second phase of annihilation started from spring 1916: Most camps were ?cleared“ by death squads of the Special Organisation , who butchered the population of one camp after the other or burnt or suffocated ten-thousands alive in oil-rich cave systems, as already mentioned. In other cases, Armenians were driven into the interior of the desert region and left to a ?natural“ death of starvation or typhus. In all, 630,000 of the 870,000 deportees concentrated in Mesopotamia died; of these victims, 200,000 died during massacres in the area of Ras-ul-Ain and Deir-ez-Zor.
Impunity and Denial
- The reasons of failing justice
As soon as May 24, 1915, Great Britain , Russia and France warned the Ottoman government in a joint note of protest: “For about a month the Kurd and Turkish populations of Armenia has been massacring Armenians with the connivance and often assistance of Ottoman authorities. (...) In view of those new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible [for] these crimes all members of the Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres. ”
However, political and economical competition in the Near East among the victorious Allies led to failing justice and impunity. Between 1919 and 1922, Russia - now under Soviet rule -, France, and Britain not only accepted the chauvinist Kemalist rebels at Ankara, but provided material goods and financial support and concluded bilateral treaties, despite the fact, that the Kemalist regime continued the CUP program of terror, expulsion and annihilation, this time directed mainly against the Greeks of Asia Minor. Despite earlier promises to Armenian representatives at the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and the Treaty of Sevres (1920), the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) did not mention the Armenians, nor an Armenian homeland or state. The results of a decade of purposeful monoethnization and the death of more than 3 million Ottoman Christians were tacitly accepted by the signatory states.
After the Armistice, the Ottoman parliament built up a commission to enquire the crimes of the CUP regime, including the deportation and killings of Armenian and Greek fellow citizens in Asia Minor and Thrace . Since January 30, 1919, the Ottoman government started to arrest and try CUP leaders, although those mainly responsible had managed to escape, among them the previous Home Minister and Grand Vizier Talaat, War Minister Enver and Naval Minister and High Commander Cemal. They received the death penalty in absentia. CUP hard-liners and strongmen Dr. Naz?m and Dr. Behaettin ?ak?r had found refuge in Berlin , together with Talaat and Cemal Azmi, the governor-general of the Trabzon province. Two Ottoman requests for extradition of Talaat were declined by the German FO Minister Dr. Solf, on the reason that these requests came without an official sentence and secondly, that Talaat had proved to be a true friend of Germany during WW1. After 41 of the arrested Young Turks had been set free, the British interned 55 Young Turks in Malta on May 28, 1919, and further twelve in Mudros. Under the pressure of the Kemalist counter-government at Ankara and in exchange for British hostages, taken prisoner by the Kemalists, the Internees at Malta were set free in October 1921. Many of them received high posts under the nationalist government at Ankara , including ministries. On March 31, 1923, the Turkish government declared a general amnesty for all CUP members suspected or sentenced for the mass killing of Armenians and Greeks.
- Trading territorial integrity for genocide punishment: the Ottoman Special Military Courts 1919/20 and their failure
On a national level, justice failed, for the conflicting Turkish governments at Constantinople and Ankara clearly tried to trade justice for the preservation of Ottoman territorial integrity. Urged by the Entente states, the ruling Sultan at Constantinople had promised on December 14, 1918, to prosecute those responsible for the deportation and the slaughters. From the 5th of January 1919 until January 1921, Special Military Courts operated in Constantinople and in the provinces. Prison conditions for the arrested Young Turks were never strict. They freely communicated with each other, received visitors and even left the prison temporarily. They did not escape, however, because they were convinced that they would be set free eventually. All their guards belonged to the secret organisation Karakol Cemiyeti (?Vigil Society“), already established by Enver and Talaat before the war's end in October 1918. It became a useful network for organising the flight of CUP members from areas occupied by the allies to those controlled by Turkish nationalists.
When it became obvious in spring 1920 that the Allies would not accept Turkish territorial claims for Anatolia ,the Turkish interest in the legal prosecution of the CUP leaders declined rapidly. One day after the Treaty of Sevres whose paragraph 226-230 stipulated the prosecution of the guilty Young Turks, the Kemalist government at Ankara ordered the dissolution of all Special Military Courts in their sphere of influence.
Failing justice on international and national levels caused the revenge by Armenian survivors. The most spectacular case of five hit-and-run actions was that of Soghomon Tehlirian, who shot Talaat on March 15, 1921, in Berlin and was exculpated by a Berlin jury court on June 3, 1921.
- The final phase of genocide: denial of facts; the official Turkish version and present state of affairs;
During and shortly after WW1, when there was still a high awareness of the crimes committed against the Armenians and other Christians in the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish government tried to justify the deportation of Armenians and Greeks as a necessity urged by war conditions and the alleged unreliability of the deportees. All human losses suffered during the deportation were explained by the war regime's inability to provide enough escorts for the convoys. The responsibility for atrocities and mass killings was transferred to non-Turkish ethnic groups, in particular Kurds. Furthermore, figures of victims were reduced to 300,000.
Justification and minimisation were followed by silence, then by straightforward denial of the genocide as a fact of Turkish history. Talaat and Enver the two ministers, most responsible, were transformed into national heroes. Places and boulevards are named after them, not only in Turkey , but also in the Turkish quarters of Cyprus . Even heads of death squads such as the notorious ceteba?? Topal Osman are held in high respect in recent Turkey . In 1983, general Kenan Evren erected a monument of Topal Osman in his birthplace Giresun. In 2002 and 2003, the Turkish minister of education ordered the denial not only of the Armenian genocide, but also the genocide of Syriac Orthodox Christians and Pontic Greeks; in 2003, he decreed an essay writing competition in the denial of the genocide of these Christian populations, including the participation of Armenian schools in Turkey .
Genocide researchers agree that all forms of denial - justification, minimisation, playing down - represent the final stage of the crime and an integral part of it. Denial causes permanent pain to the survivors of genocide and their descendants. Denial prevents that genocide becomes history.
Denial is not the exception, but the rule, as far as the genocides of the first half of the 20th century are concerned. Progress in the punishment of genocide in the late 20th century, in particular the establishment of a Permanent International Court , marks a victory over such denialism. But while we achieved progress in this aspect, the problem of denial of earlier genocides, such as the Armenian genocide, remains.
The Case Study of the Armenian Genocide and Comparative Genocide Research
- 1. Was the Armenian genocide the ?first Genocide of the 20th century?“ A comparison to the German genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes of Namibia in 1904
Often labelled as the ?first genocide of the 20th century“, the Armenian genocide has been preceded by two genocide events in Africa, the genocide of up to ten millions of Congolese, who were killed and mutilated in King Leopold's “private” colony during 1885 and 1908 , and the genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes of Namibia during 1904-1908 - at the time the German colony of “Southwest Africa”. After numerous cases of injustice against the native Africans, including many cases of sexual harassment and rape of Herero women by the German colonial power, the Herero tribe, then consisting of 80,000 people, followed their leader Maherero in rebellion, and killed 130 German settlers. The Herero uprising was soon followed by a military retaliation under the governor and commander of the German colonial forces, General Adrian von Trotha, who merciless led this ?fight of races“ (?Rassenkampf“), despite protests by the German national assembly (?Reichstag“) against Trotha's ?barbarian way of warfare“. Previously, von Trotha was commander of the First Far Eastern Infantry Brigade, which oppressed in the most brutal way the so-called Boxer uprising in China .
60,000 Herero men, women and children and 10,000 members of the Nama tribe were slaughtered, or perished in concentration camps as slave labourers and in desert areas after their lands were confiscated by an Imperial order, issued on Christmas day 1905. The Hereros never recovered from this genocide or regained their previous economical or social influence.
Compared with the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians, three common features come to mind:
- the colonial relation between perpetrators and victims: In both cases the politically dominant ruler ?obtained“ a territory by dubious ways or violence and ruled it without powersharing, after having subdued indigenous nations. Attempts of the subjugated to improve their situation or to regain their previous status were brutally oppressed. Active resistance or self-defence was regarded as uprising or treason and answered by annihilation of the entire community, including women and children.
- the similarity in the annihilation system: killing the adult male population, either in unequal fights (in the case of the Herero) or in concentration camps, leaving the others to famine, starvation, thirst and epidemics in desert areas, or reducing their numbers by means of slave labour.
- denial: Even 100 years after the genocide of the Hereros, the German government is trying to avoid a clear statement of official apology. Only two of Germany 's parliamentarians signed in 2003 an appeal by the German NGO Society for Threatened Peoples calling on the German government to apologise for the injustice of the past and to acknowledge Germany 's special responsibility for the descendants of survivors. As the main reason for their continuing refusal to acknowledge the genocide of Hereros and Namas, the German government points out that it tries to avoid any statement which may lead to compensation. Meanwhile, the Riruakos Hosea Kutako Foundation has filed a case against the Federal Republic of Germany and several German enterprises, claiming a compensation of two billions USD. The prospect of winning this case, however, is not promising.
As to the Armenians, not only Turkey , but Germany as well may fear compensation claims, for Germany has benefited from the slave work of Armenians, provided by the Ottoman Army Supreme Command for the Baghdad Railways. However, in lack of a clear representative of the Armenian nation or an All-Armenian umbrella organisation there are no general and clear statements about the Armenian point of view on compensation. From the start on the post-Soviet Republic of Armenia had made it clear that the recognition of the genocide is no pre-condition for bilateral diplomatic relations with Turkey , which however never materialised, after Armenia refused to influence the Armenian Diaspora to refrain from the claim on genocide recognition. The Republic of Armenia represents only 2.5 - 3 million nationals and not the entire Armenian nation of nine million.
Although one could conclude that denial is mainly caused by fear for compensation claims, the perseverance of descendants of genocide victims is a contribution to genocide prevention.
- 2. The Armenian genocide as part of the transformation of an feudal multiethnic society into a ?modern“ monoethnic state: A comparison with the genocide crimes of Ittihadists and Kemalists on the Aramean speaking Christians and the Greeks of Asia Minor
The Young Turk policy of ethnic homogenisation did not only concern the Armenians, but all ethnic Non-Turks of the Ottoman Empire . There were plans for deporting and resettling Muslim nations, too. The general idea was to resettle the uprooted nations in such a way, that no ethnic group would consist of more than 5 to six percent of the local population. The program was also directed against nomadic groups, to force them to convert to a fixed residency. Liberation movements were seen as a threat. For this reason, the oppression and persecution of Arab nationalists and Jewish Zionists was equal. A Jewish source mentioned that half of the Jewish settlers in Palestine - 55.000 victims - already perished as victims of Ahmet Cemal Pasha's persecution during WW1, while the other half was only saved by the arrival of the British army.
However, the Christian nations of the Ottoman Empire had developed a firm identity at a very early stage. This identity seemed difficult to be destroyed. In case of compulsory islamization, these nations would preserve their lingual identity. And they would preserve their religious identity, if circumstances compelled them to assimilate their language. Armenians and Greeks as the largest indigenous Christian groups of Asia Minor , became especially suspicious of the Young Turk point of view their alleged irredentist aspirations. An independent Greek state had emerged after the Greek liberation from Ottoman rule in 1821-29, and the Armenian homeland was divided between the conflicting Ottoman and Russian Empires.
Once the Young Turks had started to look at their Christian compatriots as internal enemies, assimilation and expulsion seemed not enough to exclude the alleged danger. It was feared, that exiled enemies could return and take revenge. The deportation routes chosen by the Young Turks and Kemalist successors did in most cases not lead to the nearest border or port, but into remote semi-desert areas.
Contemporary and recent calculations assume that the Ottoman Greek pre-war population - East Thrace and Asia Minor (including Pontos) - was 2.5 - 3 millions, and that about one million to 1.5 million of these perished between 1912 and 1923. As the American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau and other observers pointed out, the Greeks became victims of the Turkish homogenisation policy before the Armenians did. But their persecution and annihilation lasted longer, with changing emphasis. The continuity of genocide techniques and policy becomes in particular obvious, if the example of the Greeks is studied. A smaller Christian nation, the Aramaic speaking Christians (Syriacs) of four different denominations were victimised mainly in 1915/16. They describe their annihilation as ?sayfo“ (?sword“), thus indicating, that most of their victims were killed during massacres. The surviving Syriacs estimate, that a third of their nation was killed, a third was forcibly converted to Islam, and a third escaped. If we consider, that there were roughly about five million native Christians in the Ottoman Empire before WW1, than about 3 to 3.5 millions were killed or perished until the Lausanne Treaty. A set of laws prevented the return of survivors. Republican Turkey did not accept their citizenship, and their property was forfeited. Despite so many common features, scholars of genocide do usually not study the crimes committed against the Ottoman Christians during the transitional period of late Ottoman history as a whole, but limit themselves to the Armenian genocide. Limited are therefore many conclusions, too. Recently, representatives of Greek or Aramean/Assyrian communities started to complain publicly about these politics of exclusivity.
- 3. The genocides of World War I and II: a comparison between the Armenian genocide and the Shoah; the Armenian genocide and the Shoah as empirical base of the UN convention on the punishment and the prevention of genocide; Raphael Lemkin, Franz Werfel and Robert Kempner - three European Jews reacting to the Armenian Genocide
When the Russian-Jewish lyric Ossip Mandelstam described Armenia in 1930 as ?younger sister of the Hebrew land“, he had in mind many similarities between Jewish and Armenian history and destiny. But at that stage he could not know about the most striking parallel: the attempted total annihilation, committed during a World War and by a racist regime. Wars provide the necessary smoke-scream for genocide, and the abolition of parliamentary control, combined with the introduction of emergency laws are supportive factors.
Impunity of state crimes committed during WW1 led soon to oblivion. Only a few contemporaries remembered and warned, but in vain. It is not by coincidence that these were Jewish voices of concern: Raphael Lemkin, a jurist from Poland , tried already in 1933 ( Madrid ) to initiate an international convention against genocide, but succeeded only after WW2 and a further genocide. The ?father“ of the UN Convention drafted this important agreement on the empirical base of the Armenian and the Jewish genocide. The Jewish-Austrian writer Franz Werfel wrote his novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh which depicts an episode from the Armenians' genocide before the background of the increasing threat for Europe 's Jewry. German and Turkish reviewers were furious about obvious parallels. Although an immediate best-seller in the USA , Werfel's novel was censored and burnt in Europe only two month after its publication in late November 1933. The world did not listen to Lemkin or Werfel, but negotiated with Hitler who appealed to German military commanders in a speech on August 22, 1939, few days before the attack on Poland :
(...) Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality; Genghis Khan has sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. As to what the weak Western European civilisation asserts about me, that is of no account. I have given the command and I shall shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines, but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so for the present only in the East I have put my death-head formations (Totenkopfverbande der SS) in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus we can gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians? (...)
Hitler and many of his comrades were fascinated by Mustafa Kemal, who, to Hitler's view had freed Turkey from the danger of Allied plans for division and from its internal enemies. As we can learn from Hitler's speeches, the Armenians, on the other hand, symbolised weakness in Hitler's opinion. Weakness in a nation was not acceptable. Therefore the Armenians deserved their doom. In the mind of Hitler and many of his compatriots, the ideal of ethnic homogenisation justified the expulsion, deportation and even annihilation of ?weaker“, but at the same time dangerous and inferior groups ("races“).
Robert Kempner, a German Jew, had been an attentive observer of the Talaat Pasha Court Case at Berlin in 1921, when he was a graduate student of law. Emigrated to the USA , Kempner became the chief prosecutor of his chosen homeland at the Nuremburg Tribunal since 1945. In retrospective, he wrote in 1980: ?The killing of 1.4 million Christian Armenians, ordered by the Turkish government, was the first genocide program of this century. The journey from this holocaust with at least 1.4 million Christian Armenians to the holocaust of six millions Jews took only 20 years. (...)“
There are typological similarities between Turkish and German nationalism: Both states are latecomers, compared to Great Britain or France , where democracy developed gradually and created well established safe-guards for the rule of law. Late-coming national statehoods, however, seems to be prone for a certain kind of reactive, elitist nationalism, which is hostile to minorities. It can rapidly grow into an ideology containing genocidal elements.
Distinctive features:
- Scholars of comparative genocide research have pointed out that one of the main distinctive features between the Jewish and the Armenian genocide is the Nazi concept of racism and as a consequence the ideal of racial ?cleanliness“. With the exception of brothels in concentration camps, sexual intercourse - ?sexual disgrace“ - with Jews was prohibited by law. On the other hand, sexual misuse and torture of Christian women was part and parcel of the motivation of the Young Turkish henchmen. Scholars also took the fact that thousands of Armenian women and children had been abdicted, islamised and forcibly integrated into Muslim households as a proof that the Young Turks did not follow any concept of racial segregation or at least were not in a situation to prevent the compulsary assomilation of Armenian women and children. One may question this conclusion. If we look closer, both treatments seem to be caused by the same contempt and also by fear of the victim. In hygiene-obsessed Germany , possible sexual contacts were regarded as ?unclean“ and a threat to the ?national health“. In the Turkish case, the Armenian nation was identified with its women: In a concept of collective honour and disgrace which is equally familiar to Christians and Muslims in the Near East , the violation, humiliation and also possession of a woman or child came next to violating and humiliating the entire group. Comparison regardless to the cultural context and value system may lead to wrong conclusions.
- legal punishment and denial of responsibility: For the first time in the 20th century, genocide became part of an international tribunal in 1946, although not in the full scale. For the Nuremberg Tribunals, the Shoah was still a minor topic: Only three of the 256 pages of the Nuremberg sentence mention the annihilation of the European Jews. Later trials brought more justice and more public awareness, in particular the trial of Eichmann in Israel (1961) and the Auschwitz-Trial in Frankfurt/Main (1963). Denial by the succession state was never a problem in the Jewish case. Post-war Germany did acknowledge the guilt of the predecessor and its own responsibility for survivors and descendants of victims. But it is very doubtful whether these achievements would have happened without the urge by the victorious Western allies, in particular the USA . The denial of the Jewish genocide in Germany is prohibited by law.
- Armenians normally emphasise the colonial dimension of their genocide and the fact that their nation was annihilated not as a minority, but as natives in their country. The term armenocide had been suggested to describe this situation. The Greeks of Asia Minor call the same aspect in their genocide xerisomos (?uprootal“).
- 4. The Armenian genocide compared with the ?total genocides“ of the second half of the 20th century: R. Melson's definition of ?total genocide“ and the four case studies of Armenia , the Shoah, Cambodia and Rwanda .
The United Nations differentiate between genocide at-whole and genocide at-part. On the basis of these categories Prof. Robert F. Melson developed a system of four categories: domestic and foreign genocide, with the varieties of total and partial genocide. As total domestic genocides Melson named the genocides of the Ottoman Armenians and European Jews, of Cambodia and Rwanda . There has been criticism, however, since the Shoah was a domestic, as well as a foreign genocide.
Compared to the cases of Cambodia (1975-79) and Rwanda (1994), the common features with the Armenian genocide are not well researched. From the case of Cambodia with at least 1.671 million victims, we can clearly understand, that the perpetrators of every genocide, but of this in particular, are guided by different motives: political, religious, economic and social. The better off, educated of the Cambodian society fell victim to this state crime as well as Buddhist monks, nuns and foreigners (Chinese and Cham). Pol Pot, the main responsible for these crimes, was arrested not earlier than on July 23, 1997, and not for this mega-crime of a genocide, but for killing his own comrades and for treason. It was a case of ?the revolution., devouring her own children“, similar to killings among Young Turks and even more similar to killings of Young Turks by the regime of previous Young Turk Mustafa Kemal in 1926 . A special feature of the Rwanda slaughters of 1994 was the active participation of women and children in butchering about 600,000 members of the Hutu tribe and at least 200,000 oppositionals of the Hutu majority. The general belief that women are by nature peaceful and not prone to propaganda of violence had been belied by the Rwanda genocide of 1994; single cases of active participation of women in a genocide, however, occurred already during the Armenian genocide. At the same time the genocide in Rwanda has no religious dimension, in contrast to the earlier cases of the Armenian genocide and the Shoah.
- Lessons to be learnt: A Conclusion
Wars and transitional periods offer ample opportunities to those, planning a genocide. The prevention of war and violence is therefore contribution to genocide prevention, as is the support for the development of democratic institutions and civil societies in states of transition.
What means do we have to prevent genocide? Not too many, it seems. The main tools, however, are justice - genocide punishment - and education. Despite national laws and international conventions, effective genocide punishment became a reality since a permanent International Criminal Court of the United Nations emerged in 1998. Previously, an International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had been established in The Hague in 1993. The claims of survivors and their descendants for the recognition of genocide as a matter of fact and for subsequent compensation is a another way of establishing justice. However, as the case of the Armenians shows, it is a time-taking, tiring way for surviving Diaspora communities, which have to deal with many other problems at the same time.
Genocide education is about genocide awareness. It is in particular necessary in societies where genocide took place in the past. As Turkish scholars and dissidents have rightly said, the denial, or even justification of genocide, leads to the general acceptance of violence in a society. As we can see from the case of Germany - a democratic, European country with established rule of law - recognition of its colonial genocide in Namibia is difficult even a hundred years post factum . The denied or hidden genocides of today are those of the colonial past, be it the colonial past of European states, or Turkey 's Ottoman colonial past.
As we also learn from the genocide of the Armenians and European Jews, religion is not the main reason for modern genocides. The Young Turk authors of the Armenian genocide and the Nazi ideologists were irreligious. But they accepted and even played into the hands of older and widespread religious biases among the majority population. As comparative conflict studies show, every religion can be improperly used against minorities.
tanzimat: ?decree“, ?instruction“; free translation: ?reform“ period
Quoted from: International Affirmation of the Armenian Genocide. - http://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.160/current_category.7/affirmation_detail.html
The two main churches being the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Old Church of the East (?Nestorians“, ?Assyrians“).
Quotation from: Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939. Third Series, Volume 7. (London 1954), p. 258
The gouvernor of the Diyarbakir province (March 1915 - March 1916), Dr. Mehmet Re?id (1873-1919), a high CUP functionary and physician, in a conversation with Mithat ?ukru (Bleda), the secretary general of Ittihat ve Terakki in 1915; quoted after Kieser, Hans-Lukas: Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873-1919): A Political Doctor. In: Der Volkermord an den Armeniern, op.cit., p. 262
By the amendment of the Ottoman conscription law (July 1909). Muslims or Non-Muslims (Jews and Christians) could avoid national service only by paying a very high amount of exemption tax (bedel-i nakdi) , which only the well-to-do could afford. The first recruitment of Christian conscripts occurred in October 1909. - Compare Zurcher, Eric Jan: Ottoman Labour Battalions in World War I. In: Der Volkermord an den Armeniern, op.cit., p. 190.
Affirmed by the deposition by an Armenian lawyer, quoted after Dadrian, Vakan N.: Documents, p. 353-354
Quoted from a letter to the editor by the correspondent Hannes Stein ( Jerusalem ), published in ?Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung“, August 4, 1998
A Pictorial Record of Routes and Centres of Annihilation of Armenian Deportees in 1915 within the boundaries of Syria . Ed. Robert Jebejian. Aleppo 1994, p. 65
See Hochschild, Adam: King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. New York : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998
Delius, Ulrich: 100 Jahre Volkermord an Herero und Nama. Gottingen: Gesellschaft fur bedrohte Volker, Janaur 2004 (Menschenrechtsreport N. 32 der Gesellschaft fur bedrohte Volker)
Bohm, Adolf: Die zionistische Bewegung. Band 1: Die zionistische Bewegung bis zum Ende des Weltkrieges. 2., erweiterte Auflage. Tel Aviv: Hozaah Ivrith Co. Ltd., 1935 [The Zionist movement. Vol. 1: Die Zionist movement until the end of the World War. 2nd., enlarged ed.], page 643 following
Kieser, Hans-Lukas; Schaller, Dominick: Volkermord im historischen Raum 1895-1945. In: Der Volkermord an den Armeniern, a.a.O., S. 43
Further reading: Bibliography
- Adalian, Rouben: Armenian genocide resource guide. Washington , D.C. , 1988
- Hovannisian, Richard G.: The Armenian Holocaust: A bibliography relating to the deportation, massacres and dispersion of the Armenian people, 1915-1923. Cambridge/Mass., 1980
- Salmaslian, Armenag: Bibliographie de l'Armenie. Jerevan 1969 (rev. and enlarged edition of the ed. of 1946)
- Vassilian, Hamo: The Armenian Genocide: A comprehensive bibliography and library resource guide. Glendale/Calif., 1992
Armenia - Past and Present
- Afanasyan, Serge: L'Armenie, l'Azerbaijan et la Georgie de independance a l'instauration du pouvoir sovietique 1917-1923. Paris 1981
- Armenia at the Crossroads: Democracy and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era. (Hg.) Gerard Libaridian. o.O., 1991
- Armjanskij vopros: Encyklopedija (The Armenian Question: Encyclopedia; in Russian). K.S. Chudawerdjan (Ed.). Erevan 1991
- Chaliand, Gerard; Ternon, Yves: The Armenians: From Genocide to Resistance. London 983
- Hofmann, Tessa: Annaherung an Armenien: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Approaching Armenia: Past und Present). Munchen: C.H. Beck, 1997. (Beck'sche Reihe.1223). 242 p.
- Hofmann, Tessa, (Ed.): Armenier und Armenien - Heimat und Exil. (Armenians and Armenia - Homeland and Exile) Reinbek bei Hamburg : Rowohlt, 1994 (rororo-Sachbuch 9554). 255 p.
- Hovannisian, Richard G.: Armenia on the Road to Independence , 1918. Berkeley/Los Angeles 1967
- Hovannisian, Richard G.: The Republic of Armenia . Berkeley/Los Angeles 1971-1996: Vol. 1 (The First Year: 1918-1919), Vol. 2 (From Versailles to London: 1919-1920), Vol. 3 (From London to Sevres: February-August 1920), Vol. 4 (Between Crescent and Sickle: Partition and Sovietization)
- Institut fur armenische Fragen (Ed.): Tagebucher von Westenek. Munchen, 1986
- Kieser, Hans-Lukas: Der verpasste Friede: Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ostprovinzen der Turkei 1839-1939. Zurich: Chronos, 2000. 642 p.
- Koutcharian, Gerayer: Der Siedlungsraum der Armenier unter dem Einflus der historisch-politischen Ereignisse seit dem Berliner Kongres 1878. Eine politisch-geographische Analyse und Dokumentation. Berlin: Reimer, 1989. 317 S. (Freie Universitat Berlin/Abhandlungen des Geographischen Instituts-Anthropogeographie. Bd. 43)
- Lang, David Marshall: Armenia : Cradle of Civilization. London 1968
- Lang, David Marshall: The Armenians: A People in Exile. London/Boston (u.a.) 1981
- Mouradian, Claire: L'Armenie. Deuxieme edition corrigee. Paris 1996
- Nalbandian, Louise: The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley/Los Angeles 1963 (Diss., Stanford 1959)
- Pasdermadjian, H.: Histoire de l'Armenie. 2. ed.., Paris 1962
- Walker, Christopher: Armenia : The Survival of a Nation. Rev. Second Ed. New York 1990
- Zurrer, Werner: Kaukasien 1918-1921: Der Kampf der Grosmachte um die Landbrucke zwischen Schwarzem und Kaspischem Meer. Dusseldorf 1978
- Zurrer, Werner: Die Nahostpolitik Frankreichs und Ruslands 1891-1898. Wiesbaden 1970
Massacres and Genocide (1894-1922):
- Akcam, Taner: Armenien und der Volkermord: Die Istanbuler Prozesse und die turkische Nationalbewegung. Hamburg : Hamburger Edition, 1996. 429 p.
- Alexander, Edward: A Crime of Vengeance: An Armenian Struggle for Justice. New York , Toronto , 1991
- Arbeitskreis Armenien (Ed.): Volkermord und Verdrangung: Der Genozid an den Armeniern - die Schweiz und die Shoah. Redaktion: Rupen Boyadjian. Zurich: Chronos, 1998. 198 p.
- Balakian, Peter: Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir. New York : Basic Books, 1997
- Barton, James Levy: The Story of Near East Relief (1915-1930). New York : The Macmillan Co., 1930
- Beylerian, Arthur (Hg.): - Les Grandes Puissances, l'Empire Ottoman et les armeniens dans les archives fran c aises (1914-1919): Recueil de documents. Paris 1983 (Publications de la Sorbonne. Serie Documents. 34.)
- Bryce, J.: The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16. Compiled by A. Toynbee. London : Sir Joseph Causton and Sons, Ltd, 1916 (Second edition with a preface by Moussa Prince, Beirut 1979)
- Dadrian, Vahakn N.: The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus . Providence , Oxford 1995
- Dadrian, Vahakn N.: German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity. Watertown/MA: Blue Crane Books, 1996. 304 p.
- Dadrian, Vahakn N.: The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. In: ?Holocaust and Genocide Studies“, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1986 (p. 169-192)
- Davis, Leslie A.: The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917. Ed. by Susan K. Blair. New Rochelle , New York 1989
- Ferriman, Duckett Z.: The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust in Asia Minor , during April 1909. London 1913
- Gesellschaft fur bedrohte Volker (Ed.): Das Verbrechen des Schweigens: Die Verhandlungen des turkischen Volkermordes an den Armeniern vor dem Standigen Tribunal der Volker (Paris, 13.-16.4.1984). Ed. by Tessa Hofmann. Gottingen 1985. 191 p.
- Goltz, Hermann (Hg.): Deutschland, Armenien und die Turkei 1895-1925: Dokumente und Zeitschriften aus dem Dr. Johannes-Lepsius-Archiv an der Martin-Luther-Universitat Halle-Wittenberg, Mikrofiche-Edition. Tl. 1: Katalog: Dokumente und Zeitschriften aus dem Dr. Johannes-Lepsius-Archiv an der Martin-Luther-Universitat Halle-Wittenberg. Compiled and ed. by Hermann Goltz and Axel Meissner. Munchen: K.G. Saur, 1998. XXVIII, 622 S.
- Graber, G.S.: Caravans to Oblivion: the Armenian Genocide, 1915. New York , Chichester (and others) 1996
- Gust, Wolfgang: Der Volkermord an den Armeniern. Die Tragodie des altesten Christenvolkes der Welt. Munchen; Wien: Carl Hanser, 1993. 335 p.
- Hilsenrath, Edgar: Das Marchen vom letzten Gedanken: Roman. Munchen, Zurich 1989
- Hoss, Anette: Die turkischen Kriegsgerichtsverhandlungen 1919-1921. Diss., Wien 1991
- Hofmann, Tessa; Koutcharian, Gerayer (Hg.): Armenien: Volkermord, Vertreibung, Exil; Menschenrechtsarbeit fur die Amenier 1979-1987. Gottingen; Wien: Gesellschaft fur bedrohte Volker. 1987. (pogrom-themen. Bd. 1). 146 p.
- Housepian Dobkin, Marjorie: The Smyrna Affair. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971
- Hovannisian, Richard G. (Ed.): The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics. New York , 1992
- Hovannisian, Richard G. (Ed.): The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. New Brunswick ; London , 1991
- Kerr, Stanley E.: The Lions of Marash: Personal Experience with American Near East Relief, 1919-1922. Albany, 1973
- Kieser, Hans-Lukas (Hg.): Die armenische Frage und die Schweiz (1896-1923); La question armenienne et la Suisse (1896-1923). Zurich: Chronos, 1999. 380 p.
- Kieser, Hans-Lukas; Schaller, Dominik J. (Hrsg.): Der Volkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah - The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah. Zurich: Chronos, 2002. 655 p.
- Kunzler, Jakob: Dein Volk ist mein Volk. Basel; Leipzig, 1939
- Kunzler, Jakob: Im Lande des Blutes und der Tranen. Erlebnisse in Mesopotamien wahrend des Weltkrieges. Potsdam, 1921 (Neuaufl. Zurich: Chronos, 1999)
- Kunzler, Jakob: Dreisig Jahre Dienst im Orient. Basel, 1930
- Lepsius, Johannes: Armenien und Europa. 4. u. 5. Aufl. Westend, Berlin 1897
- Lepsius, Johannes: Bericht uber die Lage des armenischen Volkes in der Turkei. Potsdam 1916 (weitere Auflagen unter dem Titel ?Der Todesgang des armenischen Volkes in der Turkei wahrend des Weltkrieges)
- Lepsius, Johannes (Hg.): Deutschland und Armenien 1914-1918:Sammlung diplomatischer Aktenstucke. Hrsg. u. eingel. von Johannes Lepsius. Potsdam, 1919 (Neuausgabe mit einem Vorw. von Tessa Hofmann und einem Nachw. von M. Rainer Lepsius; Bremen: Donat & Temmen, 1986)
- Melson, Robert F.: Revolution and Genocide. On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Chicago : University of Chicago Presse, 1992
- Miller, Donald E.; Touryan Miller, Lorna: Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide. Berkeley , Los Angeles , London 1993
- Morgenthau, Henry: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1919
- Ohandjanian, Artem: Armenien: Der verschwiegene Volkermord. Wien; Koln; Graz 1989
- Ohandjanian, Artem (Hg.).: Osterreich - Armenien 1872-1936. Faksimilesammlung diplomatischer Aktenstucke, 12. Bde. Wien 1995 (3. Aufl. 1998)
- Sakayan, Dora (Ed.): Garabed Hatcherian: My Smyrna Ordeal of 1922; An Armenian Doctor in Turkey . Montreal : Arod Books, 1997
- Der Prozes Talaat Pascha: Stenographischer Bericht uber die Verhandlungen gegen den des Mordes an Talaat Pascha angeklagten armenischen Studenten Salomon Teilirian vor dem Schwurgericht des Landgerichts III zu Berlin. Mit e. Vorw. von Armin T. Wegner u. einem Anhang. Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft fur Politik, 1921 (Neuausg. u.d.T.: Der Volkermord an den Armeniern vor Gericht: Der Prozes Talaat Pascha. Hrsg. u. eingel. von Tessa Hofmann. Gottingen; Wien: Gesellschaft fur bedrohte Volker, 1980; Dritte, erganzte u. uberarb. Aufl. 1985). 136 p.
- Ternon, Yves: Tabu Armenien: Geschichte eines Volkermords. Frankfurt/Main; Berlin: Ullstein, 1981. 281 p.
- Toriguian, Shavarsh: The Armenian Question and the International Law. Beirut , 1973
- Toynbee, Arnold J.: Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation. London ; New York ; Toronto , 1915
- Trumpener, Ulrich: Germany and the Ottoman Empire . New Jersey, 1968
- Vierbucher, Heinrich: Armenien 1915: Was die kaiserliche Regierung den deutschen Untertanen verschwiegen hat: Die Abschlachtung eines Kulturvolkes durch die Turken. Hamburg-Bergedorf: Fackelreiter, 1930 (Neuausg. mit e. Vorw. von Walter Fabian u. e. Nachw. von Helmut Donat, Bremen, 1985; Dritte, erw. Aufl. 1987) (Schriftenreihe das andere Deutschland. Nr. 5) 104 p.
- Werfel, Franz: Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh. Roman. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997. 989 p. (Erstausgabe 1933)
■Lecture at the symposium: "The Vanguard of Comparative Genocide Research"
Dr. Susanne Heim
(Not to be cited or quoted without permission of the auther)
For a long time the assassination of the European Jews was regarded as synonymous with irrationality and Zivilisationsbruch, a rupture with civilisation; organised systematically like a factory all right, but still the expression of blind racial delusion. As one survivor stated in the Eichmann trial, Auschwitz was “'another planet', a universe where conventional rules and habits of human civilization did not apply.”[1] Lawrence Langer [2] demonstrated that it is exactly this rupture between the normal world and the universe of extermination, which caused the nightmares many of the survivors, suffered from since their liberation and still do so till the end of their lives. Many of them changed so much through the persecution that they didn't recognize themselves again. Not just physically: the permanent death threat and the determination to survive frequently forced them into modes of behaviour, which contradicted the standards of both their own and the environmental values ? be it “just” the numbing towards the sufferings of others vital for self-preservation, even if “others” meant good friends or family. For years to come it was exactly this inconsistency, which afflicted the survivors, made their experiences not conveyable and explained their ruptured relationship with the world. For all the systematics in organising and all the rationality in executing the Holocaust ? the determinative experience for the victims consisted in arbitrariness and unpredictability. The utter lack of any kind of utilitarian rationality was and still is regarded as the characteristic that distinguished the Holocaust from other genocides. As Hannah Arendt already noted, it was not the Holocaust's amount of victims, but the complete lack of consideration for utility and interest on part of the murderers that was unique.
Recent genocide research starts from the point that the Holocaust is comparable to other mass assassination but nevertheless unique, namely for the subsequent reasons: Divergent from other victims of mass crimes, Jews were labelled as Untermenschen, sub-humans, who had to be entirely exterminated, in order to save the Aryan race from degeneration and descend.[3] Furthermore the assassination of the European Jews had come from "one of the most scientifically and industrially advanced countries of Europe".[4]
And finally it was its modern bureaucratic organisation that distinguished the Holocaust from other mass assassinations in history: The registration and denotation of the victims, the skilful propaganda handling, the centralisation of Jews in ghettos and camps, the use of "highly specialized mobile killing squads", of death camps and gas chambers, the mobilisation of all occupational groups of German society as well as the incorporation of other states in the policy of the extermination of the Jews.
Focal point of my subsequent expositions is the reflection, that the Holocaust was a modern “crime” not just in regard to its execution techniques but also in regard to the long-term targets pursued by the perpetrators and their concepts of social redesign. Thus it is not just a question of naming perpetrators and duplicating the dynamics of the crimes, but to analyse the structures of the perpetrators' society (Tatergesellschaft)”.[5] In the following I'd like to consider both subjects ? the social transformational process in the context of the Holocaust as well as the constitution of the “perpetrators' society” in detail, so as to contribute to the discussion about similarities and differences between the three mass exterminations that are the subject of this symposium.
At this I am going to focus on the following aspects: 1) model concepts for a New Europe under German rule, 2) the scientific foundation of these ideas and 3) the material basis for the concurrence of all sectors of German society in the persecution and assassination of the Jews.
Overpopulation, Resettlement and Selection
To this date historians are debating which was the month in 1941, when the decision for the assassination of the European Jews was made - or else that maybe the one decision did not exist after all, but just a long process of trial and error, radicalising increasingly of its own accord. There is no doubt, however, that the course for it was set by the expansion war in the East. ?The imperial drive to the East, accompanied by mass murder on a colossal scale, was as much a race war as a military campaign, and its genocidal logic was inherent in the ideology that underpinned the attack on the Soviet Union in the first place. By the time the United States entered the war and the latter became a World War, the extermination of all the Jews of Europe had become a central goal. Hence the war also became a war against the Jews, one that had been forecast as such by Hitler already in January 1939."[6] The invasion first of Poland and later of the Soviet Union increased the number of Jews on German dominated territory by far. Now this was no longer a question of approx. 500,000 German Jews, many of them identifying themselves rather as Germans than as Jews, but of millions of so-called “Ostjuden”, Eastern Jews. During WWI German soldiers regarded them as the quintessence of poverty, underdevelopment and primitiveness. Only a few weeks after the military occupation, the Germans began to experiment in Poland with what they called the "New Order." They wanted to impose new economic and social structures not only on the newly occupied neighbouring state, but also on the entire Eastern half of Europe, in order to turn the supposedly "backward" agricultural states in this part of the continent into a productive part of the "Greater Europe"- the alleged "Living space" of the German people.
In the eyes not only of German economic planners but also of their colleagues in various Western European countries and in the United States, Poland, as well as most countries in Eastern Europe, was underdeveloped, its economy both badly organised and starved of capital. Above all, however, too many people derived their livelihoods from the land. A third of the population--in certain districts even more--would be deemed surplus, should mo-dern means of cultivation be adopted. Thus in the agricultural sector, which made up most of the economy, capital was neither accumulated to any significant degree, nor did farmers possess the necessary purchasing power to pay for industrial products. The economists calculated that in South eastern Europe, whose overpopulation would also have to be regulated, there were between twelve and fifteen million workers on the land who would have to be "set in motion;" if their families were included, about fifty million people would have to be pushed out of their domestic subsistence lifestyle if the German industrial economy was to benefit. The "unexploited labour power" of these people could be used to build up the infrastructure, building roads, straightening rivers, or draining marshes. Or they could be transported to Germany for forced labour.
Without a forcible intervention from outside, poverty and overpopulation would deteriorate and labour productivity sink continuously. Aside from these economic considerations, in the opinion of German experts on Eastern Europe, the "growing impoverishment of the population" threatened the country's political stability. German experts on Eastern Europe shared this view with their colleagues in the West. However, German scientists developed a specific "therapy," as they called it, against overpopulation. They regarded the ?de-Judaization“ as a first step towards the stabilization of the economic and social structure in Poland. The minister for economic affairs of occupied Poland sketched his concept of a future economic policy like this: "The prerequisite for thriving economic activity" was "a fundamental change in the whole structure of the economy", involving first of all "a significant rationalization of the Jewish sector". "By compressing the Jewish sector opportunities would be created for the Polish sector to catch up (...) Naturally this commercial migration had to be properly organized, so that it didn't take place in an anarchic, undisciplined way." In the locally confined Jewish business community, made up of small and very small businesses, he saw an obstacle to the economy. The "commercial migration" envisaged by him, on the other hand, was intended to open up the markets of the East. The new, artificially created Polish "medium-sized businesses" would be easier to monitor and control. Prerequisite for these plans were large-scale resettlements, the "transplantation of entire ethnic contingents" as Himmler put it. Thinking in ethnic terms, as I will point out later, was inseparably linked to a categorization of the population into groups of different, hierarchically graduated “value”. The lowest level in this hierarchy had the Jews.
Five weeks after the outbreak of war, on 6 October 1939, Hitler proclaimed his intention to 'create a new ethnographic order' in Europe. This he proposed to achieve through "a resettlement of nationalities". The outcome of this process was to be "the emergence of clearer dividing lines". At the same time Hitler announced that "efforts (would be made) to clarify and settle the Jewish problem". The very next day Hitler made Himmler responsible for organizing the logistical side of this violent expulsion of whole nations. Himmler promptly styled himself "Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood", and set up an office of same name. Within a few months Himmler's small office had grown into a powerful, wide-ranging institution that set the tone of policy, underpinned by a whole network of banks, limited companies, planning groups, an "industry start-up and advisory agency" and regional planning staffs. All these bodies were armed with the authority to issue instructions to existing institutions. They employed SS men, social workers and community liaison staff, architects, auditors, administrators, agronomists, bookkeepers.... All these different skills and activities were harnessed to one single purpose: to organize resettlement policy in the annexed regions of western Poland. People were dispossessed and driven from their homes, others were drafted in to replace them. The Reich Commissioner reorganized entire villages and towns and set itself the task of "completely changing the face of the countryside".
The German resettlement experts combined racial, population and structural policy in a comprehensive and unified concept for ? as they called it - 'German reconstruction in the East". The simplest and cheapest "solution" was a population policy that was as deliberate as it was brutal. Founded on the racist norms of National socialist society, it developed these into a practical instrument of social engineering. The resettlement of whole population groups created freedom of movement for the realization of vast projects, allowed the necessary funding to be "released" and cleared the way for the attempted construction, by force and at the expense of other people, of a society that was to be a model of efficiency in its social and economic organization and infrastructure. So the work of the Reich Commissioner was centred on population policy, both positive and negative: its victims were discriminated against and "eliminated", its beneficiaries were privileged and promoted. The western regions of Poland were to be "Germanised" as quickly as possible and their economic systems adapted to the needs of the German Reich. Germans, who for previous decades had been living as minorities in various Eastern European countries, were now to be settled in the conquered Polish territories.
To that end the planners at the Reich Commissioner proposed to expel the Jewish population and a portion of the native Polish population from these territories and to deport them further to the east. The houses, farms, shops and workshops of the deportees were either closed down, demolished or allocated to ethnic Germans "repatriated" from the Baltic states, from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland and later from Romania.
The expulsion of Polish and Jewish people formed a unity with the settlement of the ethnic Germans and rested institutionally in the hands of the very same person: Heinrich Himmler. On his behalf acted as well Reinhard Heydrich, equally responsible for both the evacuation of the Poles and Jews and settlement of the ethnic Germans. The resettlement of the Germans was always linked to economic rationalization. For one German family, often two or three, sometimes up to five members of dependent minority races (“Fremdvolkische”) ? so the Nazi term ? families had to be displaced or repatriated. Based on various reference figures and "target profiles", the regional planners calculated the optimum "population structure". Depending on the quality of land and soil, they laid down the number of persons per square kilometre who were to be employed in agriculture. This in turn allowed them to calculate the optimum number of "non-agricultural workers". Similar calculations were made for the individual occupational groups. Then usually several ? according to the requirements - Polish farms and craftsmen businesses were combined so as to assign them subsequently to a German farmer or craftsman. Thus the German bakers, shoemakers or farmer were to be endowed with - as it was said ? “healthy” enterprises. As a result the number of forced repatriates was always markedly higher than the one of the newly settled Germans.
Within the course of these settling measures not only Polish and Jewish people were selected and classified, but the ethnic Germans as well. They were divided into various categories depending on their home communities abroad, their social structure, their property status, their "political complexion" and their state of health, and were redistributed accordingly. The criteria to effect such categorizations were to be established on scientific grounds.
In the summer of 1942 Herbert Backe, undersecretary in th Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, recommended the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS) to set up an institute for matters of race biology and settlement. At that time Backe himself was vice president of the KWS, an institution for the Advancement of Science with a likewise high international standing. Due to his influential position in the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Backe was the key figure for the financing of all the Society's institutes dedicated to agricultural research in the widest sense. In the new Institute future settlers for the “Eastern territories” were to be chosen according to race biological aspects. “A particularly important question would be”, it states in the relevant memo, “ if one were to set the individual tribes in certain regions in closed or mixed settlements. Everything would depend upon the settlers biological aptitude for certain climate and soil conditions.” So far neither the Ministry of Food and Agriculture nor the Reichsfuhrer SS disposed of scientific material concerning these issues, which now should be established in the hence to be founded institute, it said.[7]
In the summer of 1942 scientific occupation with settlement in the East was by no means only just beginning. Equally professionals of a variety of disciplines were participating in the selection of settlers for the occupied Eastern territories ? however not in accordance with the criterion demanded by Backe. Come to that, his ? not to be realised - proposal is an example for how the new tasks confronting Nazi politics in the captured East, led to an increasingly differentiation of the scientific statement of problems.
The Role of Science
The settlement policy linked sociological with biological models of a social rearrangement. As made particularly plain in this example, Nazi politics based to a high degree upon scientific political advice. That not only applied to the social sciences, as shown by the plethora of regional planners, sociologists, population scientists, etc., but as well to the natural sciences and primarily to biology. With the rise of the eugenic paradigm in humanities at the fin du siecle, biology increasingly claimed interpretational sovereignty on social phenomena. Within the context of this development eugenics, racial and population science experienced an enormous increase of meaning. “The style of eugenic-scientific thought fell in line in answer to a crisis or predicament widely perceived at that time among the bourgeoisie, that is the presumption of a general social and cultural decline owing to the effects of the “social issue” ? marked by an established increase of poverty, delinquency, asociality, dissemination, prostitution and alcoholism. A predicament, which (…) on the other hand had also been fortified by the eugenic scientific approach ? that is its specific interpretation and rearrangement of reality ? and in part really brought about at all.[8] Eugenics' ascend to a key science supported the perception of these social phenomena as being genetic, which in return made the investigation of the genetic base of all kinds of “peculiarities” appear all the more urgent.
Eugenic research was adjusted to the utopia of a “deviance-free” society. This required the scientific definition and precise registration of all hereditary factors defined as “sick” or “inferior” with the end to be able to exclude them from reproduction. “The biological collective of the national body (Volkskorper) was the highest normative authority in the eugenic way of thinking, where the value of the individual was compared with the destination of his individual hereditary factors. That induced the claim of the genetic inequality of all people." [9]
The boom of eugenics and racial hygiene was neither a specific National Socialist nor exclusively German phenomenon. Similar developments could be registered in other countries as well. Specific to the development in National Socialism however, is the close relation between science and practice and the rapid transformation of scientific recommendations in the fields of eugenics and racial science into political decisions. As well scientists of the already mentioned KWS placed their expertise at the service of the National Socialist racial policy and acted as political advisers on the numerous newly founded boards and committees. Leading scientists of the KWI for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics provided contributions for exploring the “Jewish question” or conferred on professional meetings on the “comprehensive solution of the Jewish question.” Several of their colleagues prepared racial or parentage testimonies, providing the basis to classify people as “full-“,”half-“ or “quarterly-“Jewish persons and to discriminate them progressively. Others performed a “racial biological investigation of the Eastern nations.”[10] Almost all disciplines participated in the submission and long-term transformation of occupied Eastern Europe.
Scientists provided the data concerning population ratio, socio-economic situation, food provisions and raw material resources in the countries, which were already occupied or to be conquered soon. Statisticians registered Jews and Gypsies separately in censuses ? or used three different testimonies to calculate the possibility to deport the European Jews as a whole to Madagascar.[11] Economists determined the delivery quota und thus the hunger of the population in the occupied territories.[12] Nutrition physiologist regarded the Leningrad blockade as an experiment to find out, how long it would take to starve the population of a big city.[13] Social scientists developed proposals for the "Bereinigung der Volkstumsgrenzen" (adjustment of the ethnic limits) or “de-Judaization of small market towns.”[14] Physicians recognized the ghettos as dangerous sources of epidemics and demanded to cut them off rigidly or even better, to dissolve them by means of deportation.
Usually the scientific experts in question, participating as political advisers in the definition of national socialist control plans belonged to a very young intellectual elite. After experiencing the “Versailles Disgrace” and the threat of unemployment during the world depression they owed unexpected opportunities for promotion to the Nazi state: for many academics the expulsion of Jewish and socialist scientists since 1933, the expansion of national functions (into fields like regional order/Raumordnung, hereditary hygiene, military technology and substitute material production) and finally the territorial expansion since 1938 meant new professional challenges. The war opened new scope of duties to them and freed science from its ethical boundaries.[15] The German academic elite regarded justice and ethics as categories alien to science, which they perceived as obstructive and felt that could ignored under the new political conditions.
The conviction, prevailing especially in the occupied Eastern countries, that there was no need to show consideration neither for the people living there nor the organic structures fortified the atmosphere of departure and the planning of things for the sake of planning. “In the East,” as a German economist working in occupied Poland phrased it, “the economic planner is confronted by a totally new set of circumstances. It is not a matter of where to site an individual industrial plant of how to develop the best transport infrastructure for a country when other economic factors are known quantity. In economic terms what one has here is pretty much a tabula rasa situation."[16]
The scientists placed their qualifications at the service of the national socialist system, be it for political convictions, for career interests or for devotion to science. But the relationship between science and Nazi rule was a mutual one. Hence the talk about the “misuse of science” or its mobilization for a criminal policy is misleading. In their cooperation with the National Socialism scientists recompensed own projects and were rewarded for their commitment. They were given extremely favourable research conditions and the possibility to continue their professional career even during the war and, last but not least, material compensations. That not only applies to the politics-close social scientists but as well to natural scientists, who according to their self-image were especially bound to scientific objectivity.
After German troops invaded the Soviet Union, German scientists grasped the opportunity to visit the famous Soviet institutes and take over many of them. Such explorations were particularly attractive for scientists of those disciplines, where soviet researchers occupied leading positions, like for instance in the field of plant breeding. Above all German botanists and biologists were in a rush to visit the world-famous Soviet plant breeding stations, because valuable resources otherwise could be destroyed during the war but also because official Soviet science under Stalin disproved the allegedly ?bourgeois“ genetics and therefore perhaps might destroy or at least abandon the genetic institutes. For German scientists this was a unique opportunity to take over the world leading position of Soviet genetics by usurpation of the Soviet scientific resources. An outspoken run to the Soviet institutes started among German scientists who competed each other in getting access to the famous plant collections of their Soviet colleagues.
There was a special institution, the ?Zentrale fur Ostforschung“ (Central Office for Eastern Research), which coordinated the seizure of the Soviet research institutes and organized research in the occupied territories and got hold of Russian scientists willing to collaborate with the German occupiers. The ?Zentrale“ which was subordinated to the Reich ministry of Occupied Eastern territories employed several scientists from Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institutes, who thus advanced from a subordinate position as head of a department in a German institute to the rank of a science manager in the occupied Eastern territories. The Zentrale“ also organized the removal of scientific collections and research equipment when the Wehrmacht had to retreat from the East. According to the notorious ?scorched earth“ policy the Germans destroyed everything they could not carry away well aware that in the case of seed collections this would mean starvation to the remaining population.
In his study on the extermination of the European Jews Raul Hilberg wrote that the efiiciency of the extermination process was fortified by a climate, which promoted self-starting qualities on all levels.[17] Not only in regard to the bureaucracy Hilberg refers to, but also to science. Career chances in the occupied territories and research material from ransacked science institutions built the material basis for the committed participation in the policy of conquest and established an interest coalition between the political leadership and the scientific community. This kind of loyalty-causing benefiting though especially pronounced in science, was however in no way confined to it.
The widespread idea across all strata of the German population consisted of Germany being a poor country, robbed of all its colonies, with an insufficient resource basis for its numerous population thus justifying the war in the East with need to provide food and raw materials.[18] Apart from that a broad anti-Semitic consensus existed in the German population that not only labelled “Eastern Jews” to “Untermenschen,” sub-humans, but facilitated the exclusion of Jews from society within a couple of years following the National Socialist seizure of power
In this talk I can't go into detail regarding the individual steps leading from initial hesitation and scepticism of the non-Jewish Germans towards the national socialist anti-Jewish policy to their participation if not even enthusiastic consent.
In this context I am most of all interested in the part the confiscated Jewish property played here. Similar to the usurped research resources in the case of scientists, in the case of the German majority society the possessions of the Jews served the purpose of instigating consensus and loyalty for the Nazi policy. On very different levels non-Jewish Germans gained from robbing the Jews.
They bought furniture, jewellery and other valuables from Jewish emigrants far below their market value, and took favourably possession of attractive flats - after Jews had been forced by law to live together in extremely cramped conditions in special “Jew-houses” ? and they bought shops and craftsmen businesses at ridiculously low prices. The private benefiting was one variety of the “redistribution” that secured the consent of a vast majority for the Nazi government. In this way Nazi state could satisfy the expectations of the “little people” - without having expenses. In addition to the private Jewish municipal property as well changed its owner, Jewish hospitals were turned into military hospitals, old people's homes appointed for the accommodation of “Aryan” children and thus the social security benefits for non-Jews were maintained on a much higher level than otherwise possible during the war.
“Aim of the public sales (of Jewish property) was to “spread the goods at reasonable prices involving as many people as possible among the population.'”[19] From Hamburg's - particularly well documented - “Aryanisation” benefited above all former employees and junior merchants, planning to become self-employed, and branch newcomers, driven by the prospect of lucrative deals as well as members and officials of the NSDAP.
Other countries as well used the Jewish property with the purpose of gaining public consent for the deportation of the Jews through personal benefits. This is especially true for real estate. Whereas cultural assets and mobile valuables could as easily be transported to Germany, estates and houses remained in the country and were usually offered at bargain prices to the native, non-Jewish population.[20]
Christian Gerlach has worked out the analogy in the confiscation of the property of the Armenians and the Hungarian Jews. He states: “In both cases predatory thinking added essentially to the readiness to violence. In both cases the state tried to get hold of the robbed property as intact as possible and to redistribute it in order to diminish/absorb the burdens of war for the population. However, the two administrations were completely different in their means and measure in the design of politics. In the case of Hungary during WWII (as well as other European countries either occupied or allied with Germany) the confiscation of Jewish property served several purposes: First, it could soften the lack of consumer goods owing to war, diminish black market activities and discontent; second, the sale absorbed the surplus spending power and third, the proceeds went immediately into the national budget and helped to stabilize it. In Hungary even the distribution of clothing, shoes, household effects from Jewish possessions were often organised by the state; valuables and real estate could almost completely be monopolized by the national budget and were in part used for social measures with the purpose of fortifying the war readiness. In 1915, however, the personal articles from Armenian property were mainly looted by the local population; valuables were many times privately pocketed and real estate was " quite similar to the German settlement policy in the annexed Polish territories used for the otherwise impossible financing of the settlement of hundreds of thousands of refugees.[21]
The calculated use of Jewish property in the sense of the outlined "redistribution" fits into the picture of National Socialism as a kind of rule of instrumental behaviour freed from moral constraints (Peukert). The Jewish property, given to interested or needy Germans at bargain prices, served the purpose of prompting consensus in German society in the same way as the captured materiel from the occupied territories. In the case of the scientific elites it was not so much the material advantage than rather the expanded research and planning horizon that founded the cooperation with the state power. And the fact, that they and their expertise were in demand, the way from a bold plan to its practical realisation apparently short. (Regarding the utopias of a rearranged Europe the murderous part was realised, not so, however, the fantasies concerning an unlimited rule of the German master race on the whole continent. And finally the system remained trapped in the self-made contradictions.) Just as important this instrumental, harsh and amoral pragmatism may be for the explanation of the perpetrators' society, as little can it “explain” the Holocaust. The rift remains, that yawns between the utilitarian calculation of the perpetrators and the victims' experience of incalculability and impotence. Unlike the idea, that the Holocaust was a more or less archaic crime of violence, beyond human civilisation. It's one of its possibilities.
[1] Bartov, Widerschein, S. 67; Vgl. Rousset, David, L'univers concentrationnaire , Paris 1993
[2] Langer, Lawrence, Holocaust Testimonies. The ruin of memory , New Haven 1991.
[3] Chalk, Jonassohn, p. 323.
[4] Chalk, Jonassohn, p. 324.
[5] Dabag, S. 16.
[6] Aron Rodrigue, The Mass Destruction of Armenians and Jews in the 20th Century in Historical Perspective, in: Hans-Lukas Kieser, Dominik J. Schaller (Hg.), Der Volkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoa. The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah, Zurich 2002, S. 303-316, hier: 313 .
[7] Aktennotiz Telschow vom 29.7.1942, MPG-Archiv, Abt. I, Rep 1A, 971.
[8] Doris Kaufmann, Eugenische Utopie und wissenschaftliche Praxis im Nationalsozialismus, in: Wolfgang Hardtwig (Hg.), Utopie und politische Herrschaft im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit, S. 309-325, hier: S. 311.
[9] Kaufmann, Eugenische Utopie, S. 312.
[10] Vgl. Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Rasse, Rassenforsschung, Rassenpolitik. Annaherungen an das Thema, in: Ders., (Hg.) Rassenforschung an Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten vor und nach 1933, Gottingen 2003, S. 7-37.
[11] See Aly, Heim, Vordenker, p. 263f, Magnus Brechtken, "Madagaskar fur die Juden". Antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1885-1945, (=Studien zur Zeitgeschichte Bd. 53), pp 254ff].
[12] Vgl. Aly, Heim, Vordenker, p. 366ff.
[13] Vgl. Ales Adamowitsch, Danil Granin, Das Blockadebuch, 1. Teil, Berlin 1987, S. 49f.
[14] Werner Conze, Die landliche Uberbevolkerung in Polen, in: Arbeiten des XIV. Internationalen Soziologen-Kongresses Bucuresti, Mitteilungen, Abteilung B - Das Dorf, I. Bd. (=D. Gusti (Hg.), Schriften zur Soziologie, Ethik und Politik. Studien und Forschung, Bukarest, 1940, p. 40.
[15] Dies gilt nicht nur fur die wissenschaftlichen Experimente an "Euthanasie"-Opfern, KZ-Haftlingen und Kriegsgefangenen, sondern auch fur den Einsatz von Zwangsarbeitern in der Forschung und den Raub wissenschaftlicher Ressourcen in den besetzten Landern.
[16] Helmut Meinhold, Rezension von August Losch: Die raumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft (Jena 1940), in: Die Burg 3(1942), Heft 3, p. 360.
[17] Hilberg, S.1071
[18] Saul Padover, Lugendetektor. Vernehmungen im besiegten Deutschland 1944/45, Frankfurt/M. 1999, S. 67, 75, 119, 124f., 209.
[19] Bajohr, S. 332.
[20] Vgl. Aalders.
[21] Gerlach, Nationsbildung im Krieg, in: Kieser, Schaller (Hg.), 347-422, hier: 396.
■The scope of comparative genocide research
Yuji Ishida (University of Tokyo)
Introduction
So far, four researchers have presented their findings concerning three major incidents of genocide in the first half of the twentieth century. Today, I have twenty minutes to discuss these, so I will begin by adding some supplementary notes to Teresa Hoffmann's presentation on the Herero/Nama massacres, and will then proceed to consider this along with the previously considered three incidents, to find some points of consistency and contrast.
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Namibia 1904 (The Herero/Nama massacres)
In the greetings this morning I mentioned that this year (2004) marks ten years since the Tutsi massacres in Rwanda , but in fact, it is also one hundred years since Africa witnessed another massacre; that the Herero/Nama people in present-day Namibia . In January, 1904, just before the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, an incident occurred in what was at the time German controlled South West Africa (present-day Namibia), in which the indigenous Herero people revolted, reclaimed their land and their livestock, and killed German settlers. There did exist, under the locally based German Governor-General, the “Schutztruppe”, or “Protection Troops”, but they struggled to contain the uprising due to a combination of factors, including their poor number , the supervisor military tactics and local knowledge of the Herero, and the spread of typhus amongst the German troops. Eventually, the Imperial Government in Berlin dispatched a force of some 15,000 troops, under the leadership of General von Trotha, who had distinguished himself by suppressing the Boxer Rebellion. It took them three years to subdue this uprising.
This war became extremely brutal. Originally, the German government's management of their colonies was a relatively temperate one, based on that of the United Kingdom , with a fundamental basis in the division of authority and co-operation with tribal chiefs, but von Trotha arrived with a very different attitude. In order to confuse the German army, who were armed with modern weaponry, the Herero escaped to the high veldt (Waterberg), and for a while sought for a peaceful resolution, but von Trotha ignored these moves, surrounding the Herero and moving in to eliminate them. In October, he issued an ‘eradication order' to the effect that all Herero people found in German territory were to be indiscriminately shot on sight. Those Herero who survived were left nowhere to flee to but the drought-ridden Kalahari Desert . Many tens of thousands perished there of hunger and thirst.
Just as these massacres reached a peak in December 1904, von Trotha received a directive from the Imperial Chancellor von B u low to construct “holding camps (Konzentrationslager) for the temporary holding of the remaining Herero”. This may be taken as an effort by a government embarrassed at von Trotha's brutality and fearful of the creation thereby of a negative image for the Empire, to prevent the total elimination of the Herero, but the result was no different. Approximately 15,000 Herero were held in two camps and were forced to work on such projects as the construction of a railway, but the terrible food and hygiene conditions in the camp meant that the vast majority died.
The Nama people, who rebelled slightly later than the Herero, suffered the same fate. Those who survived were initially placed in holding camps, but were then sent to a small island in the Atlantic Ocean , where again the vast majority perished. Before the uprisings, the two tribes had a combined population of approximately 100,000, which eventually dipped to around 20,000.
In Germany , the suppression of the Herero and the Nama was welcomed, and was received as a part of the glorious history of the Empire. The German Social Democratic Party (SDP), which objected to the excessive cost of this difficult act of suppression, did succeed in defeating a budget proposed in the Imperial Parliament, but paid for this act by suffering a crushing defeat in the 1907 elections (“Hottentot elections”).
The Herero/Nama massacres were the first incidence of genocide in modern German history, and were typical examples of genocide committed by the Western European powers in their colonies during the imperial era. Like the massacres of the Native Americans which accompanied the pioneering trail into the West of the USA , these massacres were justified by being carried out “in God's name”, that is, in the name of Christianity. It can also be said that this was a genocide driven by an imperialist drive to expand and secure land (“territorial expansion type genocide”).
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Genocide in Turkey , Croatia and Germany : Searching for common features
The reason that genocide in Turkey , Croatia and Germany were chosen as topics for today's symposium, was because it was considered relatively easy to perceive common themes through the three separate incidents. Summarized below are four or five of the common features.
The first point worthy of note is that in a certain sense they were all triggered through the process of the creation or re-establishment of a modern nation-state (nation-state type genocide).
In Turkey's case, the Young Turkish Party (CUP), who held power in the final phases of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, rejected the previous tolerance of religious and ethnic differences, and sought to create a more homogeneous, united, “ethnic nation state of Turkey”. In this process, they deliberately highlighted previously unproblematic religious and ethnic differences, and sought to eliminate those elements of society which did not share their own characteristics (that is, the Armenians).
In the case of Croatia , also, a multi-ethnic state dissolved (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia , which broke into Serbia , Croatia and the Kingdom of Slovenia ) and, with the protection and assistance of Nazi Germany, Croatia emerged as an “independent” state. However, the fact that “foreign elements”, notably Serbs, still existed in their territory, led to a movement to eliminate these elements and create a “pure” Croatian state.
In Germany , the systematic structure of the nation state was already in place but under the Treaty of Versailles Germany had lost its “own” land, and was not permitted ethnic self-determinism. Resistance against these moves was strong, and calls were heard from certain right-wing extremist groups to strip Jews of their citizenship rights. Hitler reconfigured and modified a Germany responsive to his ideas along the new lines of “race”, and at the same time sought territorial expansion. Those who did not fit the racial criteria were designated as foreign elements and eliminated.
The second point is that all of these cases of genocide were carried out in conjunction with forced migration of certain ethnic groups. While it is not possible to claim that in all three cases forced migration led directly to genocide, it is not an exaggeration to posit that forced migration as a means of attempting to create or reconfigure a nation state, reinforced by what was in a sense a “rational analysis” of the situation, helped to create an environment conducive to genocide.
In Turkey , for example, the Ministry of the Interior Talaat Pasha, who was heavily involved in the execution of genocide, was also responsible for the “ethnic relocation committee”. Under his direction, not only Armenians, but also Assyrian Christians and Greeks were forced to migrate. In Croatia , too, under an agreement with Nazi Germany, the government was allowed to expel Serbs into German-controlled Serbia , in exchange for accepting a certain number of Slovenians. In Germany , in the stage before genocide itself took place, plans to return “ethnic Germans” (“Volksdeutsche”) from Soviet regions were in place, as part of a secret agreement in the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.
I will now explain the third point, of “total war”, and the fourth, “political dictatorships”. In short, all three cases of genocide took place in conditions of total war, and under dictatorships. In the case of Turkey , the beginning of World War One not only contributed to the establishment of the CUP dictatorship, but also allowed Armenians to be portrayed as a still more dangerous element, that is, a force which could destroy Turkey from within by joining forces with the enemy Russia .
In Croatia , the Ustase, whose power base was weak, whipped up a latent anti-Serbian sentiment and linked it with Croatian ethnic nationalism, hereby seeking to unify and solidify the “Croatian” people. It is needless to say that come wartime, the Serbs were presented as enemy elements.
As for Germany , since the Nazi dictatorship regime was already well established by the start of the war and all opposition factions had been forcibly eliminated, there were practically no forces remaining to criticize or prevent the illegal actions of the state. With the beginning of the war itself, the streamlining of society became still more desirable and those who were considered unnecessary to the war effort were eliminated. “Operation Euthanasia” (“Operation T4”), a political policy whereby physically and mentally disabled people and those with “terminal” illnesses were systematically killed, began with the war. Further, while many Jews had already left the country by the start of the war, those who remained were subject to segregation. One of the reasons for this was that Jews were considered to be dangerous as they liaised with the enemy.
I have thus summarized the four common factors in these three incidences of genocide: the concept of the nation state, forced ethnic migration, total war and dictatorships. There may be those who claim that there are many more similarities; these may include fanatical ideologies and enthusiastic participation by the masses.
Sometime ago, the American political scientist Daniel Goldhagen sparked a major controversy by asserting that “the massacres of the Jews by the Nazis was the realization of a long held German ‘national project'”. Like most historians, I reject this assertion. The reason for this is that when one looks back upon the history of the relationship between Jews and Christians in Germany , it is not only a history of prejudice and persecution, but also a history of long periods of harmonious co-existence. While it is true that equality for Jews in terms of civil rights was not achieved in Germany until 1871, many years after France , the vast majority of Jews in Germany considered Germany to be their homeland. (On this matter, Viktor Klemperer's diary from the Nazi era, I Will Bear Witness , Japanese version published by Otsuki Publishing, is a valuable reference tool.)The same is generally true of the relationships between Muslims and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and Croatians and Serbs in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia .
What must be noted here, however, is the spread of “temperate” enmity and prejudice in these societies; that is, the existence of a certain “lukewarm” anti-Semitism, anti- Armenianism and anti-Serbianism. Because such prejudices were so lukewarm, they have generally gone unnoticed, but under incitement from above or due to external factors such as war, these lukewarm prejudices often became activated.
Another noteworthy issue is the fact that entirely unrelated to the hostility felt towards these “foreign elements”, there were people at all levels of society who benefited from their elimination. In both Germany and Turkey , a certain group of scientists benefited substantially from the genocide perpetrated in their countries. Amongst ordinary citizens also, there were many who received assets and property which had been stripped from the persecuted. Incited from above by the CUP, Muslims contributed directly and indirectly to the carrying out of genocide, often profiting through personal improvement in the looting.
In fact, there were probably only double figures, maybe a few hundred and at most a few thousand from the leadership group involved in the actual conceptualization and planning of these three incidences of genocide. However, added to this number were many scientists and scholars who completed a system for the execution of genocide. This is the fifth common factor.
Until now I have stressed the common features of these three incidences of genocide, but I would like to briefly touch upon one distinctive feature of the Nazi genocides: that is, that Nazi Germany was a major invading force. While both Croatia and Turkey did nurse territorial ambitions ( Turkey in particular was pressing for the return of land that had been taken by Russia ), these ambitions were not on the scale of Nazi Germany's. The Nazi leadership put into practice, in its most radical form, the concept of Lebensraum , or a nation's “living space”, which had been conceived as far back as the imperialist era. Through this, they aimed at the realization of an ideal nation state in the “new territories” of eastern Europe and Russia .
In terms of the seizure of land and the expansion of a country's sphere of influence, there are similarities between this and the genocide in Namibia . The invasion and thorough exploitation of the human and material resources of foreign countries in a quest for new territory, combined with a national reconfiguration plan, in a racist sense, was what led to the Nazi genocides.
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Genocide in Namibia , Turkey , Croatia and Germany : Searching for historical connections
Next, I would like to include the case of Namibia , and consider all four incidences of genocide together. I will make three points.
The first issue is that of the internment camps which were established after the battles with the Herero and Nama tribes. Internment camps form a major element of twentieth century genocide. Their origin is said to be from around 1830, when the United States Army constructed camps to hold the Native American Cherokees, so that they could later force them to migrate. In the latter nineteenth century, Spain erected camps in Cuba during the Cuban War of Independence, and Britain did likewise in their Cape Colony during the Boer War. The camps constructed in South West Africa by Germany were based on these British camps. There were also many camps built in Turkey and Croatia , but it was Germany under Hitler which first organized and unified, functional camp system, involving camps of many different uses, such as labour camps, forced internment camps, and extermination camps. Thus, concentration camps, which began as European inventions set up outside of Europe, appeared in the very centre of Europe in the 1930s. Of course, it is a well-known fact that by this point, camps had been constructed in the Soviet Union of the Stalinist regime and to imprison those of Japanese descent in Canada .
The second issue concerns eugenics and epidemiology. The Herero uprising and their powerful resistance had a profound effect upon Germany 's subsequent management of its colonies. In Namibia , the division between whites and the native inhabitants grew more marked, and a political policy was adopted that would foreshadow the later policy of “apartheid” in South Africa .
At the same time, the powerful resistance and excellent military ability displayed by the native inhabitants in the uprising, aroused the interest of German scientists, and led to the flourishing of mixed-race research and racial anthropology. Eugene Fischer, who travelled to Namibia after the uprisings had been suppressed, developed an interest in the strength of the Herero people, and posted a theory that this was due to their genetic mixing with white people. Later, Fischer continued his anthropological research, and fostered the development of many scientists in the disciplines of anthropology, genetic biology and racial hygiene from his position as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Some of those whom he supervised would later be responsible for the Nazi racial policies.
Further, the outbreak of typhoid which caused such problems for the Schutztruppe created an opportunity for the development of strategies to counter such epidemics in the future.
Among German epidemiologists, Robert Koch is widely known of the discoverer of the cholera bacterium, but the eradication of epidemics was one of the greatest areas of concern for the German Empire at the time. Since the establishment of the imperial government in 1871, quarantine examinations were routinely carried out on arrivals from overseas in harbour towns such as Bremen and Hamburg , but the outbreak of cholera in Germany in 1892 threw the government into a state of panic. Later, several quarantine centres would be established along the border with Russia , as part of a comprehensive “epidemic prevention system” for the protection of the German people. At this time, the influx of immigrants from the east, and from the Russian Empire in particular, was increasing rapidly, and this tendency was linked to the outbreak of epidemics. In other words, it was thought that refugees from eastern Europe were bringing deadly bacteria with them. Under this line of reasoning, the “Ostjuden”, or Jews and Romany (Gypsies) living to the east of Germany , were considered to pose the greatest threat.
Epidemics were terribly feared in the military also. Already, during the Balkan Wars, Germany and Austria had dispatched a number of experts to assist the army of their ally Bulgaria in countering epidemics. The dispatch of German military doctors and hygienists to Turkey during World War One was likewise part of a counter-epidemic effort. Counter-epidemic centres were established in Constantinople, Aleppo , Adrianople and Smyrna ; the number of antiseptic facilities was increased; and while the “depth of moral virtue of the Muslims, who refused to kill even a louse”, was surprising to the Germans, they also overcame this reluctance.
The poverty and lack of hygiene in urban Turkey during World War One was terrible, and it was apparently a common sight to see beggars infested with lice being rounded up by officials, and disinfected under the direction of German hygienists. These efforts, however, had little effect, and disease was of almost epidemic proportions. This situation was used, by the Turkish government, which had begun to talk of such notions as “public hygiene”, as an excuse to attack the Armenians. The Armenians, in other words, were portrayed as the carriers of disease. Once the massacres began, there were also cases in which Armenians held in Turkish hospitals were injected with deadly bacteria in the name of science. It is said that the German doctors frowned upon this practice, but among their number were those who believed that “the Armenians were ruining Turkey 's efforts at public sanitation”, and that “the poor Armenians in the cities are bringing in the typhus bacterium”. These doctors, therefore, pressed for the expulsion of the Armenians. One of these doctors was Peter Meulens, who at the same time, along with Rodenwalt, Zeiss and others, who had been sent to Turkey, was beginning along the path to becoming one of the “Nazi genocide scientists” involved in the use of Zyklon-B in Auschwitz.
The third issue is one which has already been discussed: the theory of “modernization” and its use for the justification of forced migration.
The ideology of the leaders of the CUP, who carried out the massacres against the Armenian people, was extremely modern and scientific, and in that respect were quite western European. Most of their number had studied in France or Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, and had become attached to the concepts of racism and eugenics which were popular at that time. Indeed, the military medical school which served as the home of the CUP was often visited by such German scientists as the aforementioned Meulens.
The elite of the CUP, led by Reshid, set about devising forced migration plans for groups they believed had no part in the new nation state. These decisions were based upon a previously conducted dynamic population survey of the Ottoman Empire . In order to make the under-developed nation of Turkey into a modern nation state in one swift process, the CUP leadership tried to adopt methods that could not have been easily adopted in countries of western Europe. This policy was continued after World War One by Kemal Atat u rk. The massacre of the Armenians was a barbaric tactic adopted by individuals who, influenced by western European ideas, aimed at the modernization of Turkey , all the time under pressure from the western European powers eating away at the Ottoman Empire from all sides.
In recent years, European and American historians have tended to focus on the “advancement” realized by the CUP elite. Concepts of social engineering, popular at the time, which suggested that the fabric of society could be redesigned at will with the aid of technology, were prevalent in Turkey at this time. In the past, the German historian, Ernst Nolte (who led one side of a famous intellectual battle between two groups of historians), in an essay which sought to relativize the Holocaust, claimed that the Armenian massacres were “conducted with Asian methods, completely alien to European civilization”. Further, he argued that Hitler himself was “a latent victim of this Asian-style barbarism”, and that this later led him to indulge in such “Asian-style barbarism” himself.
I disagree with this point of view. Aside form instinctively disliking Nolte's use of the word “Asian” in this context, I also believe that rather than being a manifestation of “Asian barbarism”, the Armenian genocide was an act triggered by European modernism, and by a Turkish elite obsessed with this modernism. If I were to be so bold as to go further, hopefully not at the risk of being misunderstood, I would even venture to say that although it was conducted in a non-European region, this was in fact a very “European-style genocide”.
In conclusion
During the course of this symposium we have dealt with three to four incidences of twentieth century genocide, but these are merely a few of the many cases of genocide which will be considered throughout this project. To list but a few, the genocides in Rwanda, Guatemala and East Timor, the mass slaughters which took place in the Soviet Union under Stalin's socialist rule, massacres during China's “Cultural Revolution”, genocide under the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and the slaughter of Koreans and Chinese after the Great Kanto Earthquake, will all be examined.
In closing, I will like to quote a passage from the “Preface to the Japanese Edition” of a book recently translated into Japanese called ???? (Japanese edition published by Kashiwa Press) by a man I respect deeply, German Holocaust researcher Wolfgang Benz.
“Holocaust research will, one day, become part of comparative genocide research. This field will cover everything from the massacres of the Herero to the massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, including in its scope the genocides in Cambodia , Rwanda , the Sudan and as yet uncovered tragedies in other countries in the twentieth century. It will take as its central theme state-sponsored terrorism against ordinary citizens, such as that which occurred in the Stalinist Soviet Union, and will naturally and necessarily arrive at a new definition of genocide and terrorism. This definition will not, however, result in the ranking, relativization or marginalization of any of the historical crimes perpetrated at all levels during the Holocaust.”
