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Making of the Modern World

Making of the Modern World. War, Violence and Modernity (2): Civil Violence Terror, Genocide and Massacre in the Twentieth Century. Schedule. 1. Introduction: State Terror 2. Nazi and Stalinist Terror 3. Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide 4. The Holocaust 5. Conclusion. Himmler

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Making of the Modern World

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  1. Making of the Modern World War, Violence and Modernity (2): Civil Violence Terror, Genocide and Massacre in the Twentieth Century

  2. Schedule 1. Introduction: State Terror 2. Nazi and Stalinist Terror 3. Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide 4. The Holocaust 5. Conclusion

  3. Himmler Reichsführer SS Chief of Police SS Ordnungspolizei (order police) Municipal police Sipo Security Police Heydrich SD Security Service Heydrich Kripo Criminal Police Gestapo Secret state police Foreign intelligence Domestic intelligence Nazi Germany

  4. Heinrich Himmler, 1900-1945 Reinhard Heydrich, 1904-1942

  5. Stalinist terror • Secret Police (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD) was a terror instrument to control society and to intimidate all potential enemies • Collectivisation and de-kulakisation forced upon peasantry by means of terror • Political purges from 1934 to 1938 were called the Great Terror • Show trials, with coerced confessions and summary executions, from 1936 to 1938. • During Stalin’s rule, one million direct killings & at least 12 million deaths in Soviet prisons & slave labour camps.

  6. Lavrenty Beria (1899-1953), Head of the NKVD/MVD (1938-1946) Nikolai Jezhov (1895-1940), Head of the NKVD (Soviet Ministry for Domestic Affairs and Police, 1936-1938).

  7. Some dates and figures on the Great Terror • 1108 of the 1966 deputies to the 17th Party Congress held in 1934 were later executed as ‘enemies of the people’ • In 1939 about 3.5 million people lived in Soviet concentration camps and forced labour camps • 1936-1937 there were 680,000 death sentences • 1936-1938 45% of the upper ranks and political commissars of the Red Army and the Red Fleet were executed or released, among them • 720 of the 827 commanding officers (from colonels to field marshalls)

  8. Forced Labour Camps in Stalinist Soviet Union

  9. Focused more on clearly identifiable groups (Communists, active enemies of the regime, homosexuals, persons considered to be ‘work shy’, gypsies, Jews) Social groups not specifically targeted Only a small part of the population affected by the terror Conformity could protect you from repression For Jews no escape possible Terror was omnipresent (active enemies of the regime, former members of different parties, old Bolsheviks, national groups, managers, former kulaks etc.) Targeted capitalists, wealthy peasants, all who might constitute a basis for the restitution of capitalism A large part of the population was affected Conformity could not protect you from terror Everyone could become a victim Nazi and Stalinist Terror

  10. Schedule 1. Introduction: State Terror 2. Nazi and Stalinist Terror 3. Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide 4. The Holocaust 5. Conclusion

  11. Ethnic Cleansing From the Serbo-Croatian: etničko čišćenje Ethnic cleansing is “the expulsion of an ‘undesirable’ population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these” Andrew Bell-Fialkoff

  12. Bosnia- Herzegovina

  13. Examples in the 20th c. • “National operations“ in the Soviet Union 1936-1939: resettlement of so called “Diaspora nations” in Soviet Union 1936-1940 • German policy in parts of Eastern Europe 1939-1945 (expulsion of Poles from Western Poland, resettlement of “Volksdeutsche” (ethnic Germans living outside the borders of the German Empire) in those territories • Wolhynian massacres (mass killing of Poles by Ukrainian nationalist partisans) in Western Ukraine – expulsion of Poles 1943/44 • Population exchange between Poland and the Soviet Union 1945-1947 • Expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia 1944-1946 • Resettlement of Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingushetians after 1945 in Soviet Union • 1992- 1995: Bosnia-Herzegovina: “Ethnic cleansing” by Serbian nationalists of territory inhabited by Bosnian Muslims - 200,000 deaths

  14. Genocide Geno- cide Genos – Greek, birth, race, family, tribe Occidere – Latin, to fall, die

  15. UN definition of genocide • Article II • In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as: • (a) Killing members of the group; • (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; • (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; • (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; • (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. United Nations Convention on Genocide, approved by the General Assembly on December 3, 1948

  16. Examples for 20th Century genocide or massacres • 1915-1916 Armenians in the Ottoman Empire – 1,500,000 deaths • 1938- 1945: Holocaust – 6,000,000 deaths • 1941-1945: Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia – 500,000 - 1,000,000 deaths • 1937-1945 Chinese after Japan invaded mainland China – 20,000,000 - 30,000,000 deaths; 200,000 - 250,000 in Nanking massacre alone • 1994: Rwanda – 800,000 deaths

  17. The Armenian Genocide

  18. Schedule 1. State Terror 2. Nazi and Stalinist Terror 3. Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide 4. The Holocaust 5. Conclusion

  19. Prelude to the Final Solution • April 1933 Boycott of Jewish shops • April 1933 Removal of Jews from civil service • September 1935 Nuremberg laws: racial discrimination, loss of German citizenship • 1933-1938 Aryanisation of Jewish property, exclusion from most professions • Since 1939 plans for large-scale emigration and resettlement of Jews (for example in Madagascar)

  20. The War and the ‘Final Solution’ • Autumn/Winter 1939 Mass executions of Polish Jews • 1939/40 Deportation of Jews in ghettos in Poland • 1941/42 Mass execution of Jews in Occupied Territory of the Soviet Union by Einsatzgruppen, inspiring local pogroms, • 21/1/1942 Conference in Wannsee (Berlin) on the “Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe” • 1942-1944 Deportation of Jews from all occupied European countries to *Camps in Eastern Europe

  21. Wannsee Conference Women, children, the old & the sick should be killed first (unproductive) Exploitation of young and fit through forced labour, undernourished - ‘destruction through work’ Shooting not effective enough, psychological consequences for perpetrators Jews in ghettos and in camps had to undergo ‘selection.’ Final Solution All Jews were brought to ghettos in Eastern Europe, and isolated Extermination camps Jews in ghettos – cheap labour force. Seeking the participation of Jews in their own destruction – Jewish Councils, Jewish Auxiliary Police in ghettos

  22. Mass murder by Einsatzgruppen 1941/42 A Jewish man wearing the yellow star walks along a street in Germany

  23. Extermination Camps The work of the Einsatzgruppen

  24. Jewish families from the Warsaw Ghetto before they were sent to be gassed at Treblinka extermination camp.

  25. Entrance to the Concentration Camp in Auschwitz Entrance to Auschwitz - Birkenau

  26. The Gas Chambers

  27. Survivors in Mauthausen open one of the crematoria ovens for American troops who are inspecting the camp.

  28. SS Guards at Belzec death camp

  29. Interpretations • Implementation of Hitler’s plans and intentions – Holocaust as his central goal (traditional view, for example Joachim C. Fest) • No systematic plan, result of a spiral of inevitable radicalisation (cumulative radicalisation) (Hans Mommsen) • Not a barbaric regression but connected with modernity (Zygmunt Baumann) • Ordinary Germans participated: reflection of eliminationist German anti-Semitism (Daniel Goldhagen) or due to specific extraordinary situation (war, group pressure, indoctrination) in which those people found themselves (Christopher Browning)

  30. Schedule 1. State Terror 2. Nazi and Stalinist Terror 3. Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide 4. The Holocaust 5. Conclusion

  31. Conclusion • Terror is used as a tool by many dictatorial and revolutionary regimes • Ethnic cleansing is a widespread phenomenon in 20thc. history and can be implemented by a state or by a nationalist movement • The differences between ethnic cleansing and genocide are fluid • While genocides are not uncommon in history, Nazi crimes are unique because of the goal of universal annihilation and the modern methods used: the factory-like destruction of lives and the bureaucratisation of destruction

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