Background essay for Lecture 2 · PHIL 210 World Religions · Steven Austin
"Why is a man punished when he kills another man? Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?" (Raphael Lemkin)1
MAIN LECTURE
1. A crime without a name
1.1 A trial in Berlin
On the morning of March 15, 1921, on Hardenbergstraße in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, Germany, a twenty-four-year-old Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian walked up behind a man out for a stroll and shot him once in the head. The dead man was Mehmed Talaat Pasha. As interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, and later its grand vizier, Talaat had directed the destruction of the empire's Armenians in 1915. An Ottoman court-martial had sentenced him to death in absentia in July 1919, but he had fled to Germany and was living in Berlin under a false name. Tehlirian had lost his mother and most of his family in the deportations. At his trial in June 1921 a German jury heard his testimony and the testimony of witnesses to the massacres, and on June 3 it acquitted him.2
In Lwów, Poland (today Lviv, Ukraine), a young Polish Jew studying linguistics, Raphael Lemkin, followed the case in the newspapers. He asked one of his professors why the Armenians had not had Talaat arrested for the massacres. The professor answered that there was no law under which he could be arrested. Lemkin wrote down the question that would govern the rest of his life: "Why is a man punished when he kills another man? Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?"1
1.2 Lemkin and the word
Lemkin became a lawyer and spent the next twenty-five years trying to answer that question. In 1933 he submitted a proposal to an international legal conference in Madrid, Spain, to make the destruction of a people a crime in international law. Nobody acted. In September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Lemkin fled through Lithuania and Sweden and reached the United States in 1941. His parents stayed behind. He later counted forty-nine relatives, his mother and father among them, murdered in the Holocaust.3
In August 1941, while German shooting squads were murdering Jews by the tens of thousands in the occupied Soviet Union, Winston Churchill told a radio audience: "We are in the presence of a crime without a name."4 Lemkin gave it one. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) he joined the Greek genos (people, tribe) to the Latin -cide (killing): "By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group."5 [POP-UP: genocide] In a 1949 CBS television interview he was asked how he had come to the subject. He answered: "I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians, and after the Armenians, Hitler took action."6
1.3 The Convention
On December 9, 1948, meeting in Paris, France, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, one day before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [POP-UP: the Genocide Convention] Its Article II is still the legal definition:
"genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."7
Two features of that definition matter for everything that follows. First, genocide is defined by intent, the aim to destroy a group "as such," and not by the number of dead. Second, the list of protected groups is short. Political groups and social classes are not on it. Early drafts included them; the Soviet delegation and several others objected, and they were dropped.8 The law therefore has a hole exactly where the Soviet and Cambodian killing of "class enemies" falls. Lawyers call mass murder outside the definition crimes against humanity, a category the Nuremberg tribunal had already used in 1945–1946. [POP-UP: genocide vs. crimes against humanity] The moral question is the same under either name: a crime against humanity is not a lesser evil, only a different legal description.
2. Armenia, 1915: the case that drove Lemkin
The Armenian Genocide was the destruction of the Ottoman Empire's Armenian Christians by their own government in 1915 and 1916, during World War I. Armenian men were rounded up and killed; women, children, and the elderly were driven on foot through the mountains toward the Syrian desert, where hundreds of thousands died of massacre, starvation, thirst, and exhaustion.9
2.6 Who did this, and why
The Ottoman Empire was a Muslim empire with large Christian minorities. Armenians, an ancient Christian people, had lived on the Anatolian plateau for more than two thousand years, and some 1.5 to 2 million lived in the empire before 1914. In 1908 a nationalist revolutionary movement, the Committee of Union and Progress, known in Europe as the Young Turks, took power. [POP-UP: the Young Turks] By 1913 three men ran it: Talaat, a former telegraph clerk; the war minister, Enver Pasha; and the naval minister, Cemal Pasha. In November 1914 the empire entered World War I on Germany's side. After a catastrophic defeat by Russia at Sarıkamış in eastern Anatolia in the winter of 1914–1915, the leadership blamed the Armenians as a disloyal "internal enemy" who might side with Russia, and decided to remove them from Anatolia altogether.18
2.1 April 24, 1915
On the night of April 24, 1915, Ottoman police in Constantinople (Istanbul, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire, today in Turkey) arrested some 235 to 270 Armenian community leaders: writers, editors, physicians, lawyers, members of parliament, and clergy. Most were deported to the interior and murdered in the following months.10 Armenians remember April 24 as the beginning of the genocide.
2.2 How it was done
The men first. Armenian men had been drafted into the Ottoman army. Early in 1915 they were disarmed and put into labor battalions, then killed in batches. In towns and villages the able-bodied men were rounded up, marched out of town, and shot or cut down.11
Then the deportations. Women, children, and the elderly were ordered to leave on a few days' notice, officially for "relocation" to the Syrian desert. The columns were marched for weeks and months through the mountains toward Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor (today in Syria). They were denied food and water, robbed by guards and local bands, and attacked again and again. Women and girls were raped, abducted, or sold; children were taken into Muslim households and converted. Many massacres were carried out by the Special Organization (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa), irregular killing squads that included convicts released from prison for the purpose. [POP-UP: the Special Organization] In 1916 a second wave of killing destroyed most of those who had survived the marches to the camps around Deir ez-Zor.9
Burnings, drownings, doctors. On the plain of Muş in eastern Anatolia, in the summer of 1915, villagers were herded into barns and stables and burned alive. At Trebizond (Trabzon) on the Black Sea coast, witnesses at the postwar Ottoman courts-martial testified that Armenian women and children were loaded onto boats, taken out to sea, and thrown overboard. Physicians took part. Dr. Mehmed Reşid, governor of the province of Diyarbekir, was a doctor by training and one of the most savage organizers of killing in the empire; Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir, also a physician, directed the Special Organization in the eastern provinces. At the 1919 Trebizond trial, witnesses accused medical officials of poisoning Armenian children.12
Telegraph, railway, bureaucracy, and the soothing word "relocation": a modern state had found the means to make an entire people disappear.
2.3 Witnesses
A German army medic named Armin T. Wegner, serving with German forces in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and 1916, disobeyed orders and photographed the deportation camps: starving children, the dead by the roadside. He smuggled the pictures out. Many of the surviving images of the deportations come from his collection and from other eyewitness records. Eighteen years later, in April 1933, Wegner wrote an open letter to Adolf Hitler protesting the persecution of Germany's Jews. He was arrested by the Gestapo and held in concentration camps. In 1967 Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations.13
The American ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau Sr., wrote: "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact."14
2.4 The silence
The organizers were tried in absentia in Constantinople in 1919–1920. But the British released the suspects they were holding on Malta, the courts-martial were abandoned, and almost no one was punished. Talaat died on a Berlin pavement at the hands of a survivor, not before a court. Turkey still rejects the word genocide.15
Whether Hitler drew the lesson is uncertain. One version of a speech he gave to his commanders at Obersalzberg, Germany, on August 22, 1939, a week before the invasion of Poland, contains the line: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" That version was not admitted as evidence at Nuremberg, and historians still debate whether he said it.16 Lemkin's lesson is not in doubt. The man who named genocide began with the Armenians, and the Holocaust killed his family.
2.5 The toll
The death toll most often cited is 1.5 million, the figure used by Armenians and by many scholars and governments. Estimates in the scholarly literature run from about 600,000 to 1.5 million, and many historians place the number at a million or somewhat more for 1915–1916 alone. The spread comes from uncertain prewar population figures and from whether later killings, through 1923, are counted. On any count, the Armenian presence in Anatolia, more than two thousand years old, was effectively destroyed.17
3. The Holodomor, Ukraine, 1932–1933
Ukrainians call the famine of 1932–1933 the Holodomor, "death by hunger." In those years Joseph Stalin's government seized the grain, and then the other food, of the villages of Soviet Ukraine and sealed the republic's borders so that starving peasants could not leave to look for bread. Millions died.19
3.1 The Soviet setting
Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in November 1917 and set out to build a society without classes. Their enemies were defined not by nation or religion but by class: the nobility, the clergy, the "bourgeoisie," and in the countryside the kulak, supposedly a rich peasant; in practice the label could be pinned on anyone who resisted. [POP-UP: kulak] What followed came in this order: the Red Terror (1918–1922); the Gulag, which ran beneath everything after it; the Ukrainian famine (1932–1933); the Great Terror and Great Purge (1936–1938); the Soviet total; Cambodia; and the total for all communist regimes.
In late 1929 Stalin ordered the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture: peasant farms were merged into state-controlled collective farms, and their grain delivered to the state. [POP-UP: collectivization] He announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class."20 In 1930–1931 about 1.8 million peasants labeled kulaks were deported with their families to "special settlements" in Siberia, the Urals, and Kazakhstan, and hundreds of thousands died there. Peasants slaughtered their livestock rather than hand it over.21
3.2 Hunger as a weapon
The result was famine across the Soviet grain regions in 1931–1933, killing an estimated 5.7 to 8.7 million people in the USSR as a whole, including more than a third of the Kazakh people. But Soviet Ukraine was singled out. [POP-UP: Holodomor] In 1932 the state set grain quotas the Ukrainian republic could not possibly meet. A law of August 7, 1932, made theft of collective property punishable by death or ten years in the camps. Peasants called it the "law of five ears," because a hungry mother could be sentenced for gleaning a handful of grain stalks from a harvested field. Villages that fell short were put on "blacklists": their shops were closed and all their food, not just grain, could be confiscated. Brigades searched homes and took the hidden potatoes, the beans, the seed. Then, on January 22, 1933, Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov ordered that peasants be stopped from leaving Ukraine and the Kuban region of the North Caucasus to look for bread. People were sealed in with their hunger.19
A young Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, once an aide to the former British prime minister David Lloyd George, slipped away from the official tour in March 1933 and walked alone through villages in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine. In Berlin on March 29 he told the press what he had seen: "Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying.'"22 Two days later, the New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, dismissed the reports under the headline "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving." Jones was discredited. In 1935 he was killed by bandits in Inner Mongolia, China, the day before his thirtieth birthday.23
The famine was hidden so well that few photographs of it exist. The most important are those taken secretly on the streets of Kharkiv in 1933 by Alexander Wienerberger, an Austrian chemical engineer working at a Soviet factory: starving peasants who had come into the city looking for bread, and bodies lying on the pavement as passers-by walked around them. Many other images that circulate as "Holodomor photographs" are not. In 1935 the Hearst newspapers in the United States ran a campaign on the Soviet famine under headlines such as "Six Million Perish in Soviet Famine"; several of its pictures came from the earlier Volga famine of 1921–1922, and Soviet apologists used the mislabeling for decades to claim the 1932–1933 famine had been invented. Honest captions protect the victims' memory as well as the historian's credibility.
3.3 The toll
The figure of 3.9 million deaths in Ukraine is the best current demographic estimate, published in 2015 by Omelian Rudnytskyi, Nataliia Levchuk, Oleh Wolowyna, and colleagues; some estimates run higher.24
4. The Gulag and Pavel Florensky
The Gulag was the Soviet Union's system of forced-labor camps. From 1918 until after Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet state sent millions of people, common criminals and political prisoners alike, to camps across the country, where they felled timber, dug canals, and mined gold and coal under brutal conditions, and where many of them died.25
4.1 A priest at the institute
In the 1920s a Russian Orthodox priest went to work at a Soviet scientific institute, dressed in his cassock. His name was Pavel Florensky. He was also a mathematician, physicist, engineer, and philosopher; admirers called him the "Russian Leonardo." Born in 1882 in Yevlakh (today in Azerbaijan), he studied mathematics at Moscow University and was ordained a priest in 1911. His The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914) became one of the major works of modern Orthodox theology; its title echoes 1 Timothy 3:15, which calls the church "the pillar and bulwark of the truth" (NRSV). After the revolution he put his science at the service of the new state and worked on the electrification of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile the same state was closing churches and arresting clergy. On February 26, 1933, Florensky was arrested on an invented charge of counterrevolutionary conspiracy and sentenced to ten years in the camps.26
4.2 The islands of the monastery
The Bolsheviks opened their first concentration camps in 1918. In 1923 they turned an ancient Orthodox monastery on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, Russia, into a prison camp, Solovki, the "mother of the Gulag." Monks had prayed there since the fifteenth century; now the monastery's cells and churches held prisoners. In 1930, under Joseph Stalin, the camps were placed under one administration, the Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei (Main Camp Administration), abbreviated GULAG. [POP-UP: Gulag] The word came to mean the whole system: hundreds of camp complexes from the White Sea to Kolyma in the far northeast, where prisoners dug canals, felled timber, and mined gold and coal for the Five-Year Plans. The historian Anne Applebaum estimates that about 18 million people passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953, and some six million more were sent into exile.25
4.3 The camps
The prisoners were of every kind: thieves and murderers, peasants, workers, engineers, priests, poets, and Communist Party members who had fallen from favor. Many of the "politicals" were sentenced under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code, which punished "counterrevolutionary" crimes and could be stretched to cover almost anything. At the peak, around 1950, roughly two and a half million people were held in the camps and labor colonies at one time.27
The first great Gulag project was the White Sea–Baltic Canal in Karelia, Russia, dug between 1931 and 1933 by tens of thousands of prisoners working largely with hand tools: picks, shovels, wheelbarrows. Thousands died building it. When it was finished, a group of Soviet writers led by Maxim Gorky toured the canal and produced a book praising it as a triumph of "reforging" criminals into new Soviet people through labor. The canal proved too shallow for many of the ships it was meant to carry.28 Farther east, in Kolyma, in the far northeast of the Soviet Union (today Russia), prisoners mined gold in the permafrost.
4.4 Letters from Solovki
Florensky was sent first to a camp in the Soviet Far East, where he studied permafrost, and in 1934 to Solovki, where he worked on extracting iodine from seaweed. From the camps he wrote long letters to his wife and five children, full of lessons in science and art and counsel on how to live. In November 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, he was sentenced again, this time to death, and on December 8, 1937, three years after he reached Solovki, he was shot. Where he is buried is unknown. His family was given a false date of death and learned the truth only decades later.26
4.5 After Stalin
Stalin died on March 5, 1953. Within weeks an amnesty freed about 1.2 million prisoners, most of them serving short sentences for non-political crimes. Political prisoners came home more slowly, above all after Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes in a secret speech to the Communist Party congress in February 1956. The Gulag administration was abolished in 1960, though camps for political prisoners continued to operate into the 1980s. In November 1962, with Khrushchev's approval, the literary magazine Novyi mir published Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the story of a single day in a camp, and Soviet readers could read about the Gulag in print for the first time.29
4.6 The toll
Prisoners worked twelve or fourteen hours a day in temperatures far below zero, on rations tied to how much they produced. The weak got less food, grew weaker, and died. Soviet archival records count about 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in the camps between 1930 and 1953; recent research shows the true figure was higher, because camps released dying prisoners so that their deaths would not appear in the statistics.30
5. Imperial Japanese atrocities: Nanjing, China, 1937–1938
The Nanjing Massacre, also called the Rape of Nanking, was the mass killing and mass rape carried out by the Japanese army after it captured Nanjing, then the capital of China, on December 13, 1937. For some six weeks Japanese soldiers murdered prisoners of war and civilians and raped tens of thousands of women and girls.31
In the 1930s Japan was governed by a militarist, ultranationalist regime that many historians describe as fascist or fascist-like. [POP-UP: was imperial Japan fascist?] In 1931 its army seized Manchuria, in northeast China, and set up a puppet state called Manchukuo. In July 1937 Japan began a full-scale war on China, and in 1940 it formally allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the Tripartite Pact. Japan's leaders expected the war in China to be short. Instead the battle for Shanghai, China, lasted three months, from August to November 1937, in street fighting that cost both sides heavily. The Japanese armies then raced up the Yangtze River toward the Chinese capital, Nanjing (Nanking).
5.1 The fall of the city
The Chinese commanders were ordered to defend the city at all costs; then, on December 12, 1937, the order was reversed, and the retreat collapsed into a rout. Soldiers threw off their uniforms and tried to hide among civilians. Nanjing fell on December 13.31
For six to seven weeks Japanese troops hunted for anyone who might have been a soldier, which meant almost any young Chinese man. They killed them in mass shootings along the Yangtze, with machine guns and bayonets, by burning, and by beheading. Officers used prisoners for sword and bayonet practice. Two Japanese second lieutenants, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, were celebrated in a Tokyo newspaper, the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, for a "contest" to see which of them could be first to kill a hundred Chinese with a sword; the paper printed the running score as they advanced on the city. After the war both were tried in Nanjing and executed in January 1948.32 Bodies lay so thick along the river that the water ran red. The house-to-house search for soldiers became a search for women.
The rapes numbered in the tens of thousands. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) in Tokyo, Japan, found that about 20,000 cases occurred within the city in the first month; other estimates run as high as 80,000. Girls and old women were not spared, and many victims were killed afterward.33
Some foreigners stayed. About two dozen Westerners, missionaries, doctors, professors, and businessmen, set up the Nanking Safety Zone, a few square kilometers of the city where some 200,000 to 250,000 Chinese crowded in for shelter. [POP-UP: the Nanking Safety Zone] Its chairman was John Rabe, the local manager for the German firm Siemens and a member of the Nazi Party. He used his swastika armband and a Nazi flag to face down Japanese soldiers, and he sheltered hundreds of refugees in his own garden. Back in Germany he sent Hitler a report on the massacre and was briefly detained by the Gestapo for it. Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary educator from Secor, Illinois, who headed Ginling College, turned its campus into a refuge for as many as 10,000 women and children and stood at the gate night after night to turn soldiers away. Worn out and broken by what she had seen, she took her own life in 1941.34
After the war the Tokyo tribunal convicted the commanding general, Matsui Iwane, of failing to prevent the atrocities, and he was hanged on December 23, 1948.35
5.2 The toll
How many were killed? The figure most often given is 200,000 to 300,000. The Tokyo tribunal found that more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners were killed in the first six weeks; the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal (1947) put the number at more than 300,000, the figure the government of China uses today. Many Japanese and Western historians estimate about 100,000 to 200,000 or more; Japanese nationalist writers argue for far lower numbers or deny the massacre outright. The differences come largely from how the area, the period, and the line between soldiers killed in battle and prisoners and civilians murdered are drawn.36
6. Cambodia, 1975–1979
From April 1975 to January 1979 the Khmer Rouge, a communist movement led by Pol Pot, ruled Cambodia. To build a classless agrarian society it emptied the cities, drove the whole population into forced labor in the countryside, and executed those it counted as enemies; it also singled out the Cham Muslims and the ethnic Vietnamese.37
6.1 Year Zero
On April 17, 1975, young soldiers of the Khmer Rouge ("Red Khmers," the Communist Party of Kampuchea), dressed in black, marched into Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. [POP-UP: Khmer Rouge] People cheered; the civil war was over. Within hours the soldiers ordered the whole city, some two million people, into the countryside. The Americans were going to bomb it, they said; everyone could return in three days. No one returned. Hospital patients were pushed out in their beds. The sick, the very old, and the newborn died along the roads.37
The party's leader, Saloth Sar, who called himself Pol Pot, meant to build a pure agrarian communist society from nothing. Money, markets, schools, religion, and private property were abolished, and families were broken up into work units. The party called itself simply Angkar, "the Organization." [POP-UP: Angkar] The population was divided into "base people," peasants from the zones the Khmer Rouge had held, and "new people": city dwellers, the educated, anyone who wore glasses or spoke a foreign language. New people got the hardest work and the least food. A slogan repeated to them summed up the regime's view of a human being: "To keep you is no gain, to lose you is no loss."38 Buddhist monks were defrocked or killed.
6.2 S-21
In a former high school in Phnom Penh the Khmer Rouge set up a secret prison called S-21 (today the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum). [POP-UP: S-21] Every prisoner was photographed and numbered. Each was tortured until he or she wrote a confession of spying for the CIA or Vietnam and named others, who were then arrested in turn. Nearly all were then trucked to an orchard at Choeung Ek outside the city and killed, often with blows from hoes or iron bars to save bullets. Babies were killed by being swung against a tree that still stands there. The UN-backed tribunal found that at least 12,273 people were held at S-21. Very few came out alive.39
One who did was Vann Nath, a painter. He was brought to S-21 in January 1978, and he lived because the commandant learned he could paint and set him to making portraits of Pol Pot. For the rest of his life he painted what he had seen there, and in 2009 he testified against the commandant before the tribunal. He died in 2011. The commandant, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, had been a mathematics teacher. He was convicted of crimes against humanity in 2010 and sentenced on appeal to life in prison.40
6.3 The Cham and the Vietnamese
Some victims were chosen for who they were, not for their class. The Cham, a Muslim people who had lived in Cambodia for centuries, were forbidden their language, their dress, and their religion; Qur'ans were burned, mosques destroyed, and Cham villagers forced to eat pork. When Cham villages such as Koh Phal and Svay Khleang rose in protest in the autumn of 1975, the Khmer Rouge crushed them and scattered the survivors. The historian Ben Kiernan estimates that about 90,000 of some 250,000 Cham died, more than a third, roughly twice the death rate of the Khmer majority; other scholars give lower and higher figures. Of 113 imams, only 21 are reported to have survived. Cambodia's ethnic Vietnamese fared worse. Some 150,000 were expelled to Vietnam in 1975; of the roughly 20,000 who remained, most of them married to Khmer, nearly all were hunted down and killed in 1977 and 1978 as the regime went to war with Vietnam.41
6.4 The toll
The toll most often given is 2 million, about 20 percent of the population. Demographic studies estimate 1.5 to 2.2 million deaths from execution, starvation, overwork, and untreated disease, out of a population of about 7.8 million in 1975: roughly one Cambodian in four or five.42 The regime fell when Vietnam invaded; Phnom Penh was taken on January 7, 1979. Pol Pot died in 1998 without facing trial.
7. Rwanda, 1994: the world watched
The Rwandan genocide was the attempt by Hutu extremists who controlled the government of Rwanda to exterminate the country's Tutsi minority between April and July 1994. Soldiers, militiamen, and ordinary civilians, directed by officials and urged on by the radio, murdered Tutsi and the Hutu who opposed the killing.43
7.1 One hundred days
On the evening of April 6, 1994, the plane carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda. Within hours, Hutu extremists in the army and presidential guard and the militias called Interahamwe ("those who attack together") began killing Tutsi and moderate Hutu, working from lists prepared in advance. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) broadcast names and hiding places and called Tutsi inyenzi, "cockroaches." Neighbors killed neighbors, mostly with machetes and clubs.43
7.2 The warning
The world had been warned. On January 11, 1994, the Canadian commander of the small UN peacekeeping force, General Roméo Dallaire, cabled UN headquarters that an informant had described plans to register and exterminate Tutsi. He asked permission to seize the militias' weapons caches and was told not to. On April 21, two weeks into the killing, the UN Security Council voted to cut his force to 270.44 One survivor, Immaculée Ilibagiza, spent ninety-one days hidden with seven other women in a small bathroom in a Hutu pastor's house while killers searched outside. Most of her family was murdered.45
7.3 The mayor of Taba
Jean-Paul Akayesu had been a schoolteacher and school inspector before he became mayor of the commune of Taba. For the first days of the killing he kept the militias out of Taba and protected its Tutsi; after a meeting with leaders of the interim government on April 18, 1994, he changed sides and began urging his neighbors to kill.46 On September 2, 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, convicted him of genocide. It was the first conviction for genocide by an international court, fifty years after the Convention, and the first judgment to hold that rape could be an act of genocide.47
7.4 The toll
In about a hundred days, from April to July, an estimated 500,000 to 800,000 people were murdered; a later Rwandan government census counted more than a million victims.43
8. Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1995
The Srebrenica genocide was the murder of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces after they captured the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, in July 1995. The women, children, and elderly were expelled by bus; the men and boys were taken prisoner and shot at execution sites across the region over a few days in mid-July.48
8.1 The safe area
Yugoslavia, a federation of six republics in southeastern Europe, broke apart in 1991 and 1992. When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992, Bosnian Serb forces, with support from Serbia, set out to seize territory and drive out its Bosniak and Croat inhabitants, a policy the world came to call "ethnic cleansing." In the Drina valley of eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosniaks driven from their villages crowded into the town of Srebrenica, an enclave held by Bosnian government forces and surrounded by Bosnian Serb territory. In April 1993 the UN Security Council declared Srebrenica and its surroundings a "safe area," to be left free from attack. A battalion of lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers was stationed there.49
8.2 The fall of the enclave
On July 6, 1995, the Bosnian Serb army attacked. On July 11 its forces, under General Ratko Mladić, overran the town. Some 20,000 to 25,000 people, most of them women, children, and the elderly, fled to the Dutch base at nearby Potočari; several thousand pressed inside the compound, and the rest crowded into the factories and fields around it. That night some 10,000 to 15,000 men, soldiers and civilians together, set out on foot through the forests to try to reach Bosnian government territory around Tuzla. On July 12 and 13 the women, children, and elderly at Potočari were loaded onto buses and trucks and driven to Bosnian government lines. The men and boys were separated from their families and held apart. Thousands more from the column in the forest were captured or surrendered along the roads.48
Hasan Nuhanović was a young interpreter for the Dutch battalion. He was allowed to stay on the base. His father, Ibro, his mother, Nasiha, and his younger brother, Muhamed, were sent out through the gate, and all three were killed.50
8.3 The killing
The mass executions began on July 13. That afternoon about 1,000 to 1,500 prisoners were crowded into a warehouse at Kravica and killed with rifle fire and grenades. Over the next days prisoners were bused north to schools and other holding sites and then to execution sites at Orahovac, the Petkovci dam, the Branjevo military farm, Kozluk, and elsewhere, where they were shot, many with their hands tied or their eyes blindfolded.48 They bulldozed the bodies into mass graves, and later dug them up and scattered them to hide the evidence.51
8.4 Judgment
Nuhanović spent the next eighteen years in the Dutch courts. In September 2013 the Supreme Court of the Netherlands held the Dutch state responsible for the deaths of his father and brother.50 Eleven years earlier, in April 2002, after a government-commissioned report by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation on the fall of Srebrenica, the Dutch cabinet of Prime Minister Wim Kok had resigned, accepting political responsibility for the failure.52
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in The Hague, Netherlands, convicted the Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstić of genocide at Srebrenica in 2001; on appeal in 2004 his conviction was reduced to aiding and abetting genocide, but the tribunal confirmed that what happened at Srebrenica was genocide. The Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadžić, was convicted of genocide in 2016 and sentenced on appeal in 2019 to life in prison.53 The International Court of Justice agreed in 2007 that genocide had been committed at Srebrenica, and Mladić, arrested in Serbia in 2011 after sixteen years on the run, was convicted of genocide in 2017 and sentenced to life in prison.54
8.5 The toll
In all, Bosnian Serb forces murdered about 8,000 men and boys.51 Because the remains were torn apart and moved, the bones of a single victim are often found in three or four different graves, many kilometers apart. Since 2001 the International Commission on Missing Persons has identified about 7,000 of the dead by matching DNA from the remains with blood samples given by surviving relatives. Each year on July 11, newly identified victims are buried at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery.55
9. Who were these people?
Look again at the faces. Talaat had been a telegraph clerk. Duch had been a mathematics teacher. Akayesu had been a schoolteacher, and for eleven days he protected his town before he joined the killers. Mukai and Noda were junior officers whose killing contest a newspaper cheered like a sporting event. On the other side, Armin Wegner was a German soldier who defied first the Ottomans and then Hitler. John Rabe was a member of the Nazi Party, and he saved thousands. Minnie Vautrin, a teacher from a small town in Illinois, stood at a college gate night after night. Roméo Dallaire sent his warning and was told not to act.
The perpetrators were not a different species. They were human beings, most of them unremarkable, who had been handed an idea in whose name another person became a "kulak," a "new person," a "cockroach." The rescuers were not a different species either. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the Gulag, drew this conclusion: "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts."56
What, then, is it in human nature that makes this possible, and what is it in us that resists?
PIERIAN SPRING (required): Crimes Against Humanity
Lemkin's line is drawn around groups destroyed "as such." Most of the mass killing of the twentieth century fell on the other side of it: people killed as "class enemies," as prisoners, as "enemies of the people," as subjects of an empire at war. The law calls these crimes against humanity and war crimes. Each section ends with a review question.
10. The Red Terror, 1918–1922
On the night of July 16–17, 1918, in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia, a Bolshevik firing squad shot the deposed tsar Nicholas II; his wife, Alexandra; their daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, aged twenty-two down to seventeen; their thirteen-year-old son, Alexei; and four servants who had stayed with them. Bullets glanced off the jewels the girls had sewn into their clothing, and the guards finished them with bayonets.57 To the men who killed them they were not a family. They were a class to be erased.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd, Russia, in November 1917 (October by the old Russian calendar). Within weeks they created a political police, the Cheka, under Felix Dzerzhinsky. [POP-UP: the Cheka] Lenin did not hide his methods. On August 11, 1918, he telegraphed the Bolsheviks of Penza, Russia, where peasants had risen against grain seizures: "You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers." He added: "P.S. Use your toughest people for this."58
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Kaplan shot and wounded Lenin, and on the same day the head of the Petrograd Cheka was assassinated. On September 5 the Soviet government issued its decree "On the Red Terror," which ordered "class enemies" isolated in concentration camps and anyone connected with White Guard organizations, conspiracies, and uprisings shot.59 Hostages were taken and shot in batches. Prisoners were killed in prison cellars and courtyards, usually with a single shot to the back of the head, or trucked out of town, bound and gagged, to be shot beside pits they were sometimes made to dig. Anti-Bolshevik investigators and émigré writers, such as Sergei Melgunov in The Red Terror in Russia (1924), recorded torture as well: people beaten, burned, scalped, and buried alive. Those sources were partisan, but the Cheka's cruelty is abundantly documented in Soviet records too.60
How many died? The Cheka's own published count of executions for 1918–1920 was under 13,000, a figure no historian accepts. Modern estimates of executions by the Cheka and revolutionary tribunals in 1918–1922 run from about 50,000 to about 140,000, and to 200,000 or more when the crushing of peasant revolts is included.61
11. The Great Terror and the Soviet total
On July 30, 1937, the head of the secret police (by then the NKVD), Nikolai Yezhov, signed Order No. 00447. It gave each region of the Soviet Union a quota: so many people to be shot, so many to be sent to the camps. Local chiefs asked for their quotas to be raised, and Moscow raised them. [POP-UP: the Great Terror] NKVD records count 681,692 people shot in 1937–1938, almost a thousand a day for two years, among about 1.5 million arrested.62 Old Bolsheviks confessed to absurd crimes at show trials. The Red Army lost most of its senior commanders. The poet Osip Mandelstam, who in 1933 had written a short poem mocking Stalin and read it to a few friends, was arrested in 1934 and again in 1938; he died that December in a transit camp near Vladivostok, Russia.63 At least one NKVD officer in the Moscow region, Isai Berg, used a truck that piped its exhaust into a sealed compartment to kill prisoners on the way to execution, an echo of the gas vans the Germans would use in 1941.64
A total often given for deaths in the USSR is 20 million. That is the figure of the historian Robert Conquest, also used in The Black Book of Communism (1997). Scholarly estimates depend on what is counted. Deliberate killing (executions, deaths in the camps and in deportation, and the famines) yields figures from about 6 to 10 million; counting the wider excess mortality caused by Soviet policy brings totals to 15 or 20 million. Nicolas Werth, who wrote the Black Book's Soviet chapter, preferred about 15 million.65 On any count, the dead number in the millions. [POP-UP: How many died in the USSR? Estimates range from about 6 million (deliberate killing) to 20 million (all excess deaths from Soviet policy).]
12. All communist regimes
A death toll often given for the communist regimes of the twentieth century, from Lenin and Stalin to Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, is 100 million. The figure comes from Stéphane Courtois's introduction to The Black Book of Communism, which totaled the dead at "approaching 100 million," including 65 million in China. Two of the book's own authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, objected publicly that the total was too high. Serious estimates for all communist regimes range from about 60 to 100 million. The largest variable is China, above all the famine caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward (1959–1961), estimated at 15 to 45 million deaths.66 On any of those estimates, it is the largest toll of political violence in history. [POP-UP: How many died under communist regimes? Estimates range from about 60 to 100 million; China's Great Leap famine is the largest variable.]
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the camps, explained in The Gulag Archipelago why the numbers ran so high: "Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions."67
13. Imperial Japanese atrocities: the "comfort women"
On August 14, 1991, a sixty-seven-year-old woman named Kim Hak-sun called a press conference in Seoul, South Korea. In 1941, she said, when she was seventeen, Japanese soldiers had seized her in China and forced her into a military brothel, where she was raped by soldier after soldier, day after day, until she escaped. She was the first survivor to speak publicly under her own name. Hundreds of women across Asia followed her: from Korea, China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. A Dutch woman, Jan Ruff-O'Herne, taken from an internment camp on Java (then the Dutch East Indies, today Indonesia) at twenty-one, testified in Tokyo in December 1992.68
The Japanese military set up its system of so-called "comfort stations" in the early 1930s and spread it across the empire after Nanjing, partly in the hope that controlled brothels would prevent mass rapes like Nanjing's from stirring local resistance. [POP-UP: "comfort women"] Women and girls were recruited by deception, bought, or simply seized. Estimates of their number range from about 20,000 to 200,000; many did not survive the war. In 1992 the Japanese historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki published military documents showing the army's direct role, and in 1993 the Japanese government's Kōno Statement acknowledged it.69 Since 2018 South Korea has marked August 14 as a national day of remembrance. Kim Hak-sun died in 1997.
14. Imperial Japanese atrocities: Unit 731
At Pingfang, outside Harbin in Manchukuo, the Japanese army built a vast walled compound, officially an "epidemic prevention and water purification" unit, under the army doctor Ishii Shirō. [POP-UP: Unit 731] Unit 731 was the center of Japan's biological-warfare program. Its scientists infected prisoners, Chinese, Koreans, Mongols, and Russians, with plague, anthrax, cholera, and other diseases, then cut them open, often alive and without anesthesia, to watch the disease at work. They froze prisoners' limbs to study frostbite. In the unit's language the prisoners were maruta, "logs." An estimated 3,000 people were killed in experiments at Pingfang alone, and none of the prisoners there survived. Outside the compound, Unit 731 and related units dropped plague-infected fleas on Chinese cities, among them Ningbo in 1940 and Changde in 1941, killing thousands more; total deaths from these field attacks are unknown and disputed.70
Some of the people who did this were very young. Shinozuka Yoshio joined Unit 731's youth corps in 1939, at about sixteen. He later testified that he had helped prepare a prisoner infected with plague for vivisection, scrubbing the man's body before the surgeons cut into him. After years in Chinese detention he came home to Japan and spent much of the rest of his life speaking publicly about what he had done.71
Ishii and his senior scientists were never tried. In 1947–1948 American authorities granted them immunity in exchange for their data. At Nuremberg, in 1946–1947, the Americans tried Nazi doctors for human experiments; the doctors of Unit 731 walked free, and several went on to prominent careers in medicine and industry. The Soviet Union tried twelve members of the unit at Khabarovsk, USSR, in December 1949, and all had been sent home to Japan by 1956.72
15. Counting the dead: why the numbers differ
Every figure in this lecture is an estimate, and students will meet very different numbers elsewhere. The reasons are worth knowing.
Records were destroyed or never kept. Perpetrators hide their crimes. The Khmer Rouge kept meticulous files at S-21 but almost none in the countryside. Ottoman deportation records are incomplete. The Japanese army burned documents in August 1945.
Documents versus demography. Historians count either documented killings, which undercounts, or the gap between the population before and after, adjusted for births and normal deaths, which depends on uncertain census data. The Holodomor figure of 3.9 million is a demographic estimate; the 681,692 executions of 1937–1938 is a documentary count.
Definitions. Does a famine death count as a killing? A soldier shot after surrendering? A deportee who dies in exile years later? The figures of 20 million Soviet dead and 100 million for all communist regimes depend heavily on such choices.
Politics. Death tolls are weapons in present-day arguments. Turkey minimizes the Armenian figures; Chinese official history fixes Nanjing at 300,000; Japanese nationalists deny it; communist totals have been both inflated and minimized. An honest account gives a range and says where it comes from.
16. Naming and denying
Every case in this lecture has its deniers. Turkey rejects the word genocide for the Armenians. Soviet officials denied the famine while it was happening, and Russian official history still resists the Ukrainian interpretation. Japanese nationalist writers deny Nanjing or shrink it to a few thousand deaths; Chinese official history fixes it at exactly 300,000. Bosnian Serb leaders still dispute Srebrenica. Denial, the genocide scholar Gregory Stanton argues, is the final stage of genocide, because it continues the attack on the victims' memory.73 Behind several of these disputes lies the drafting of 1948: the definition was narrowed to exclude political groups, partly at Soviet insistence, and the crimes of communist regimes fell largely outside it.
17. Justice and its failures
Compare the endings. Nuremberg tried the surviving Nazi leaders in 1945–1946 and the Nazi doctors in 1946–1947. Talaat was never tried by a court that could hold him; a survivor killed him. The doctors of Unit 731 received immunity from the United States. No Soviet official ever stood trial for the Gulag, the famine, or the Great Terror, and in Russia the human-rights organization Memorial, which spent three decades recovering the names of the victims, was dissolved by court order in 2021–2022. Cambodia's tribunal convicted three men, three decades after the crimes. The tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia convicted many more and gave the Convention its first teeth, but only after the killing was over.74 Lemkin's question, why the killing of a million should be a lesser crime than the killing of one, has been answered in law. In fact, mostly, it has not.
Appendix: Where Is the Line?
The main lecture tells what happened. This appendix measures each case against the Genocide Convention's definition (§1.3).
The opening: Lemkin's definition and the Holocaust
The Holocaust is the clearest case the definition was written for. The Nazi state set out to murder every Jew it could reach, in every country it controlled, for no reason except that they were Jews: the destruction of a people "as such," pursued to the last child.75 Measured against that case, the twentieth century, "the century of genocide," keeps asking the same question: where does genocide end and other mass murder begin? A people marched into the desert; a nation starved; a country that killed a quarter of itself, mostly for what people were said to think or be as a class; a hundred days of machetes; six weeks of slaughter in a captured capital. Every one of them tests where Lemkin's line falls. Lemkin's own starting point was the Armenians.
Armenia, 1915
Here the line is not hard to find. The victims were chosen because they were Armenians, a national and religious group; the men were killed first so the group could not resist or continue; the women and children were driven toward a desert where, as Morgenthau saw, few could survive, which is the Convention's "conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction"; and children were taken and converted, which is the Convention's "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." Among historians outside Turkey there is broad agreement that this was genocide. Turkey's position is that the deaths resulted from wartime deportation, disease, and intercommunal fighting. The United States formally recognized the Armenian Genocide by resolutions of both houses of Congress in 2019 and by presidential statement in 2021.76 Lemkin built his definition with this case in front of him.
The Holodomor, 1932–1933: Lemkin said genocide; historians still argue
Lemkin himself had no doubt. Speaking in New York in 1953, he said: "This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation."77 In his view the famine was one blow in a wider assault on Ukraine as a nation, alongside the destruction of its intellectuals and its church. Historians agree that Stalin's policies caused the famine, that Ukraine was treated more harshly than other regions, and that the regime knew people were starving and stopped them from fleeing. They disagree about intent. Robert Conquest, Andrea Graziosi, Timothy Snyder, and many Ukrainian historians argue that Stalin used hunger deliberately to break the Ukrainian peasantry and Ukrainian national life, which meets the Convention's "conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction." R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft argue that the famine came from brutal, reckless policy pursued for the sake of industrialization, not from a plan to destroy Ukrainians as such. Anne Applebaum concludes that it fits Lemkin's broader idea of genocide, the destruction of a nation, even where specific legal intent is harder to prove.78 Ukraine recognized the Holodomor as genocide in 2006, the U.S. Senate by resolution in 2018, and Germany's Bundestag and the European Parliament in 2022.79 The case shows how much rests on one word in the definition: intent. Nobody disputes the corpses. The argument is over what was in Stalin's mind.
Nanjing, 1937–1938
Most scholars do not class Nanjing as genocide. The Japanese army did not set out to destroy the Chinese people "as such"; it murdered prisoners, raped and slaughtered civilians, and terrorized a captured capital to break China's will to fight. Those are war crimes and crimes against humanity, and that is how the Tokyo tribunal judged them: it convicted the commanding general, Matsui Iwane, of failing to prevent the atrocities, and he was hanged on December 23, 1948.35 Iris Chang's best-selling book called Nanjing "the forgotten holocaust"; most historians prefer other words, not because the dead matter less, but because words are tools for understanding. "Not genocide" does not mean "less evil." A girl raped and bayoneted in Nanjing suffered no less than a girl murdered for her ethnicity in Rwanda. The difference is in the intent of the killers, not in the worth of the victims.
Cambodia, 1975–1979: the political-groups gap
Most of the Khmer Rouge's victims were Khmer killed by Khmer: "new people," "class enemies," supposed traitors. That killing falls into the hole left in 1948, when political groups and social classes were dropped from the Convention; some scholars call it "autogenocide." The UN-backed tribunal therefore drew the line exactly where the law draws it. On November 16, 2018, it convicted the surviving leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan of genocide against the Vietnamese, and Nuon Chea also of genocide against the Cham, and of crimes against humanity, including extermination and persecution, for the rest. Nuon Chea died in 2019 while his appeal was pending; Khieu Samphan's conviction was upheld in 2022.80 A Cham grandmother and her Khmer neighbor might die in the same ditch; in law, one was a victim of genocide and the other of a crime against humanity.
Rwanda, 1994: the textbook case
Rwanda is the case the Convention was written for, after the Holocaust. The killers said what they meant: the radio urged Hutu listeners to kill the "cockroaches," and the victims were selected by the ethnic label on their identity cards. Intent was not hidden. Yet in Washington and at the UN, officials avoided the word "genocide" for weeks, because to name it might create an obligation to act.44 The law came afterward. On September 2, 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of the commune of Taba, of genocide. It was the first conviction for genocide by an international court, fifty years after the Convention, and the first judgment to hold that rape could be an act of genocide.47 Akayesu had been a schoolteacher and school inspector before he became mayor. For the first days of the killing he kept the militias out of Taba and protected its Tutsi; after a meeting with leaders of the interim government on April 18, 1994, he changed sides and began urging his neighbors to kill.46
Notes
1. Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, ed. Donna-Lee Frieze (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), chap. 1, which also recounts the professor's answer. [back]
2. Ronald Grigor Suny, "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), epilogue; Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), chaps. 8–9. [back]
3. USHMM, "Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin," Holocaust Encyclopedia; Philippe Sands, East West Street (New York: Knopf, 2016). [back]
4. Winston Churchill, BBC broadcast, August 24, 1941. [back]
5. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), chap. 9, "Genocide," 79. [back]
6. Raphael Lemkin, interview by Quincy Howe, CBS, 1949; transcription as quoted in "Questions and Answers About the Armenian Genocide," New York Times, April 14, 2015. [back]
7. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, UN General Assembly Resolution 260 (III) A, December 9, 1948; entered into force January 12, 1951; Art. II. [back]
8. Beth Van Schaack, "The Crime of Political Genocide: Repairing the Genocide Convention's Blind Spot," Yale Law Journal 106 (1997): 2259–91; William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chap. 3. [back]
9. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011) (deportation routes and the Deir ez-Zor massacres of 1916); USHMM, "The Armenian Genocide (1915–16): In Depth," Holocaust Encyclopedia. [back]
10. Suny, They Can Live in the Desert; Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide. [back]
11. Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide; Suny, They Can Live in the Desert. [back]
12. Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1995); Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York: Berghahn, 2011) (Trebizond trial testimony); Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat Pasha (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018) (Reşid and Şakir). [back]
13. Yad Vashem, "Armin T. Wegner," Righteous Among the Nations (recognized May 23, 1967); USHMM Photo Archives, Armin T. Wegner collection. [back]
14. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1918), chap. 24. [back]
15. Dadrian and Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul; Akçam, A Shameful Act, chap. 9. [back]
16. Nuremberg document L-3; Kevork B. Bardakjian, Hitler and the Armenian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute, 1985); Heath W. Lowry, "The U.S. Congress and Adolf Hitler on the Armenians," Political Communication and Persuasion 3, no. 2 (1985) (the skeptical case). [back]
17. USHMM, "The Armenian Genocide (1915–16): Overview," Holocaust Encyclopedia; Fuat Dündar, Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2010); Suny, They Can Live in the Desert. [back]
18. Suny, They Can Live in the Desert; Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). [back]
19. Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (New York: Doubleday, 2017); Andrea Graziosi, "The Soviet 1931–1933 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a New Interpretation Possible, and What Would Its Consequences Be?" Harvard Ukrainian Studies 27 (2004–5); Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). [back]
20. J. V. Stalin, speech to the Conference of Marxist Agrarians, December 27, 1929, in Works, vol. 12. [back]
21. Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). [back]
22. Gareth Jones, press release, Berlin, March 29, 1933, printed in the New York Evening Post and other papers; text at garethjones.org. [back]
23. Walter Duranty, "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving," New York Times, March 31, 1933; Ray Gamache, Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor (Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2013). [back]
24. Omelian Rudnytskyi, Nataliia Levchuk, Oleh Wolowyna, Pavlo Shevchuk, and Alla Kovbasiuk, "Demography of a Man-Made Human Catastrophe: The Case of Massive Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933," Canadian Studies in Population 42, nos. 1–2 (2015): 53–80. [back]
25. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), introduction and appendix. [back]
26. Avril Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius (New York: Continuum, 2010); Pavel Florensky, Sochineniia, vol. 4, Pis'ma s Dal'nego Vostoka i Solovkov [Letters from the Far East and Solovki] (Moscow: Mysl', 1998). [back]
27. Applebaum, Gulag, appendix; Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). [back]
28. Maxim Gorky, L. Auerbach, and S. G. Firin, eds., Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1935); Applebaum, Gulag. [back]
29. Applebaum, Gulag; Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, first published in Novyi mir, November 1962. [back]
30. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); Mikhail Nakonechnyi, "The Gulag's 'Dead Souls': Mortality of Individuals Released from the Camps, 1930–55," Kritika 23, no. 4 (2022). [back]
31. Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking (New York: Basic Books, 1997). [back]
32. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, "The Nanking 100-Man Killing Contest Debate: War Guilt amid Fabricated Illusions, 1971–75," Journal of Japanese Studies 26, no. 2 (2000): 307–40. [back]
33. International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Judgment (1948), chap. 8; Chang, Rape of Nanking. [back]
34. John Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, ed. Erwin Wickert (New York: Knopf, 1998); Hua-ling Hu, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); Timothy Brook, ed., Documents on the Rape of Nanking (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). [back]
35. Timothy Brook, "The Tokyo Judgment and the Rape of Nanking," Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 3 (2001): 673–700 (Matsui convicted on Count 55 alone); Chang, The Rape of Nanking, subtitle The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. [back]
36. IMTFE Judgment; Daqing Yang, "Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing," American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 842–65; Kasahara Tokushi, Nankin jiken (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997). [back]
37. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986). [back]
38. Henri Locard, Pol Pot's Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2004). [back]
39. Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), Case 001, Kaing Guek Eav, Trial Judgment, July 26, 2010, and Appeal Judgment, February 3, 2012; David Chandler, Voices from S-21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Documentation Center of Cambodia, "Fact Sheet on S-21." [back]
40. Vann Nath, A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21 (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1998); ECCC, "Vann Nath," witness profile; ECCC, Case 001 judgments; Nic Dunlop, The Lost Executioner (London: Bloomsbury, 2005). [back]
41. Ben Kiernan, "Orphans of Genocide: The Cham Muslims of Kampuchea under Pol Pot," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 20, no. 4 (1988): 2–33; Heinrich Böll Stiftung Cambodia, Living on the Margins: Minorities and Borderlines in Cambodia and Southeast Asia (Phnom Penh), summarizing Kiernan and Osman (imams); Kiernan, "The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia," Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2003) (about 90,000 of 250,000 Cham; Michael Vickery's lower and Ysa Osman's higher estimates discussed there); Ysa Osman, Oukoubah: Justice for the Cham Muslims under the Democratic Kampuchea Regime (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2002) (religious leaders); Ben Kiernan, "The Pol Pot Regime's Simultaneous War against Vietnam and Genocide of Cambodia's Ethnic Vietnamese Minority," Critical Asian Studies 53, no. 3 (2021). [back]
42. Patrick Heuveline, "The Boundaries of Genocide: Quantifying the Uncertainty of the Death Toll during the Pol Pot Regime (1975–1979)," Population Studies 69, no. 2 (2015): 201–18; Ben Kiernan, "The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia," Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2003). [back]
43. Alison Des Forges, "Leave None to Tell the Story": Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999); Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998); Republic of Rwanda, Ministry of Local Government, census of genocide victims (2002). [back]
44. Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003); UN Security Council Resolution 912, April 21, 1994; Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chap. 10. [back]
45. Immaculée Ilibagiza with Steve Erwin, Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2006). [back]
46. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, ICTR-96-4-T, Judgment, September 2, 1998, paras. 3, 12; USHMM, "Rwanda: The First Conviction for Genocide," Holocaust Encyclopedia. [back]
47. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, ICTR-96-4-T, Judgment, September 2, 1998. [back]
48. ICTY, Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić, IT-98-33-T, Trial Judgment, August 2, 2001 (the crowd at Potočari, the column, and the execution sites). [back]
49. UN Security Council Resolution 819, April 16, 1993; Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35, The Fall of Srebrenica, UN Doc. A/54/549, November 15, 1999; David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). [back]
50. Supreme Court of the Netherlands, The State of the Netherlands v. Hasan Nuhanović, ECLI:NL:HR:2013:BZ9225, September 6, 2013. [back]
51. ICTY, Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić, Appeals Judgment, April 19, 2004; International Commission on Missing Persons, Srebrenica reports; David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). [back]
52. Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), Srebrenica, a "Safe" Area: Reconstruction, Background, Consequences and Analyses of the Fall of a Safe Area (Amsterdam, 2002); "Dutch Government Quits over Srebrenica," BBC News, April 16, 2002. [back]
53. Krstić Trial Judgment (2001) and Appeals Judgment (2004); ICTY, Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić, IT-95-5/18-T, Trial Judgment, March 24, 2016; International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić, MICT-13-55-A, Appeal Judgment, March 20, 2019. [back]
54. Krstić Appeals Judgment (2004); International Court of Justice, Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro, Judgment, February 26, 2007; ICTY, Prosecutor v. Ratko Mladić, Trial Judgment, November 22, 2017 (affirmed on appeal, June 8, 2021). [back]
55. International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP and the Srebrenica Genocide (2023), and ICMP Srebrenica identification fact sheets. [back]
56. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, part 4, chap. 1, "The Ascent"; text as given by the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center, "Notable Quotations." [back]
57. Helen Rappaport, The Last Days of the Romanovs (New York: St. Martin's, 2009); Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv, The Fall of the Romanovs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). [back]
58. V. I. Lenin, telegram to Penza, August 11, 1918, RGASPI f. 2, op. 1, d. 6898; translation from Library of Congress, Revelations from the Russian Archives. Another translation in Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 50. [back]
59. Sovnarkom decree "On the Red Terror," September 5, 1918; W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). [back]
60. S. P. Melgounov, The Red Terror in Russia (London: Dent, 1925); George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Nicolas Werth, "A State against Its People," in Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). [back]
61. Leggett, The Cheka; James Ryan, Lenin's Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence (London: Routledge, 2012); Werth, "A State against Its People." [back]
62. NKVD Operational Order No. 00447, July 30, 1937; J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). [back]
63. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970). [back]
64. Yevgenia Albats, The State within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia—Past, Present, and Future (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994). The case rests on Berg's 1938–39 NKVD file. [back]
65. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Michael Ellman, "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments," Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 7 (2002): 1151–72; Werth, "A State against Its People." [back]
66. Stéphane Courtois, "Introduction: The Crimes of Communism," in The Black Book of Communism, 4; statements by Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, Le Monde, November 1997; Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine (New York: Walker, 2010); Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012). [back]
67. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, part 1, chap. 4, "The Bluecaps," trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); text as given by the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center, "Notable Quotations." [back]
68. C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Jan Ruff-O'Herne, Fifty Years of Silence (Sydney: Tom Thompson, 1994). [back]
69. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II, trans. Suzanne O'Brien (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yōhei Kōno, August 4, 1993; Hata Ikuhiko, Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2018) (lower estimate). [back]
70. Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover-Up, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002); Hal Gold, Unit 731 Testimony (Tokyo: Yenbooks, 1996). [back]
71. Jonathan Watts, "Japanese Veteran Apologises for Germ Warfare," The Guardian, July 31, 2002; Gold, Unit 731 Testimony. [back]
72. Harris, Factories of Death; Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950). [back]
73. Gregory H. Stanton, "The Ten Stages of Genocide," Genocide Watch (first presented as "The Eight Stages of Genocide," 1996). [back]
74. Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, ruling of December 28, 2021 (upheld February 28, 2022), on Memorial; ECCC Case 001 and 002 judgments; UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, case records for the ICTR and ICTY. [back]
75. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); USHMM, "Introduction to the Holocaust," Holocaust Encyclopedia. [back]
76. H. Res. 296 (116th Congress), October 29, 2019; S. Res. 150 (116th Congress), December 12, 2019; Statement by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Armenian Remembrance Day, April 24, 2021. [back]
77. Raphael Lemkin, "Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine," address, New York, 1953; text in Lubomyr Y. Luciuk, ed., Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston, ON: Kashtan Press, 2008). [back]
78. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Graziosi, "The Soviet 1931–1933 Famines"; Snyder, Bloodlands, chap. 1; Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger; Applebaum, Red Famine. [back]
79. Law of Ukraine "On the Holodomor of 1932–33 in Ukraine," November 28, 2006; U.S. Senate Resolution 435 (115th Congress), 2018; German Bundestag resolution, November 30, 2022; European Parliament resolution, December 15, 2022. [back]
80. ECCC, Case 002/02, Trial Judgment, November 16, 2018; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime. [back]