The Holocaust and Genocides in Europe

273 Pages·2013·4.347 MB·English

by  Benjamin Lieberman

The Holocaust

and Genocides
in Europe

The Holocaust

and Genocides
in Europe
Benjamin Lieberman
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
© Benjamin Lieberman, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
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Benjamin Lieberman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on
or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN: 978-1-4411-4655-7
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ConTEnTs

List of illustrations vi
Introduction: The Holocaust and the genocides in Europe 1
1 Origins of genocide and paths to genocide 9
2 Armenian Genocide 43
3 Mass killing in the Soviet Union 89
4 The Holocaust 111
5 Ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide in the former

Yugoslavia 163
Conclusion 201
Notes 235
Glossary 243
Bibliography 251
Index 259
LisT of iLLusTraTions

2.1 Family of deportees on the road (Taurus pass) 62
4.1 Arrival of Jews at the Westerbork transit camp.
The Netherlands, 1942 133
5.1 Srebrenica Genocide Memorial 182
Introduction: The Holocaust

and the genocides in Europe
Today Auschwitz Birkenau is a museum and memorial at the town
of Os´wie˛cim in southern Poland. During the Second World War
close to 1 million European Jews were murdered at Auschwitz, along
with tens of thousands of other victims, including Poles, Gypsies,
Soviet prisoners of war, and prisoners of many nationalities. Today,
visitors take guided tours to see the camp which housed prisoners
set to forced labor as well as sites where the camp stuff engaged in
murder and medical experiments and also the chief killing center. In
2011, the memorial recorded more than 1.4 million visitors.
The museum and memorial at the site of the former
Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp is only one of many similar sites that
commemorate the victims of acts of genocide and similar destruction
across much of Europe. In Germany, it is possible to visit memorials at
former camps including Dachau, the first of all the Nazi concentration
camps, as well as former camps at Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and
Sachsenhausen. Outside of Germany, there are memorials at former
camps at Mauthausen in Austria and at sites of former camps in
countries, including the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Serbia.
Along with the memorials and museums that commemorate the
Holocaust, other similar sites record the horrors of other European
genocides of the twentieth century. Far to the east a memorial to a
genocide that took place before the Holocaust stands along with a
museum on a hill on the edge of Yerevan, the capital of the Republic
of Armenia. A circle of slabs surrounds an eternal flame, and a
nearby museum houses exhibits on genocide. Unlike the memorials
at sites of the Holocaust, however, the genocide memorial and
museum at Yerevan lie at some distance from the sites of the killings
commemorated. Armenians fled during the First World War toward
areas that at the time lay within the Russian Empire, but the actual
genocide started mainly in Anatolia in territory that is now within
the Republic of Turkey. A visitor to Turkey, however, will look in
2 THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDES IN EUROPE
vain for any commemoration to this genocide because the Republic
of Turkey does not recognize the Armenian Genocide.
In Europe’s southeast, another memorial commemorates a
much more recent massacre and act of genocide. A memorial and
cemetery at Srebrenica-Potocˇari in the east of the small country
of Bosnia-Herzegovina serves as the resting place for the remains
of some of the approximately 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and
boys murdered in August 1995. The remains of victims are buried
after being identified through DNA testing at a forensics lab in the
Bosnian town of Tuzla.
From Armenia, to Poland, Germany, and Bosnia the many
memorials to genocide across Europe testify to the extraordinary
waves of violence that struck Europe in the twentieth century. With
its many memorials, the Holocaust stands at the center of this
history of genocide, but genocide had already taken place during
the First World War in the lands of the Ottoman Empire in what
is now Turkey as well as in adjacent regions. Moreover, genocide
recurred almost through the end of the twentieth century in Europe
as Srebrenica tragically demonstrated. From the start until the end
of the twentieth century, Europe suffered from repeated outbreaks
of genocide. European genocides destroyed and swept away entire
communities and gave rise to the very concept of genocide as well as
to the field of genocide studies. This book provides an introduction
to this history of modern European mass destruction.
Genocides do not amount to the sum of all Europe’s history, but
the record of genocide shapes our perception of the overall place
of Europe in history. Histories of the world often cast Europe as a
center of progress, of the renaissance, the scientific revolution, the
enlightenment, and social progress, but a history of the repeated
outbreaks of genocide casts Europe in a very different light.
Europe’s history cannot be reduced to genocide, but genocide has
left a permanent imprint on Europe’s history. Indeed, this record of
mass killing has even led to the use of the phrase Dark Continent to
describe Europe’s twentieth century.1
Definitions

During the midst of the Second World War, a legal scholar named
Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide. A Polish Jew, Lemkin
from a young age became interested in violence and the destruction
INTRODUCTION 3
of groups and looked into many historical cases. The destruction
of Armenians during the First World War troubled him. As a legal
scholar he called for new laws against what he termed “acts of
barbarity” and “acts of vandalism” before finally arriving at the term
genocide, which he described in his book Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe in 1944. Referring to the “destruction of a nation or of
an ethnic group” Lemkin described how he combined “the ancient
Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing). . . .”
Over the next several years the newly created United Nations
discussed genocide and placed the concept in international law. In
December 1946 the UN General Assembly declared genocide a crime
under international law. Lemkin then took part along with other
legal scholars in drawing up a draft convention on the prevention and
punishment of genocide. In 1948, the United Nations adopted the
final version of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide. The convention made clear that genocide
had already occurred, stating “that at all periods of history genocide
has inflicted great losses on humanity. . . .” It then defined genocide as
a series of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.” The list
of acts began with the most obvious method of genocide “Killing
ACTS OF GENOCIDE LISTED IN
THE UN CONVENTION ON THE
PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF
THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE
(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) I mposing measures intended to prevent births within the
group;
(e) F orcibly transferring children of the group to another group.