New Books In Genocide Studies

While reading about genocide and mass violence should always be be disturbing, a certain numbness sets in over time. Every once in a while, however, a book breaks through that numbness to remind the reader of the horror inherent in the subject. The new book Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide, edited by John Roth and Carol Rittner (Paragon House, 2012) is one of these books. While individuals have always committed or fell victim to sexual violence during conflicts, only recently have armies and states begun to use large-scale rape as a tactic to help them achieve their broader war aims. Rittner and Roth set out to explore why and how this is happening and to identify possible solutions to the problem. Some of the essays are academic, some personal, but they all contain horrifying reminders of the intensely personal experience of rape and sexual violence. Aimed at students as well as professionals, the book offers a broad survey of the state of research rather than overarching conclusions. In doing so, it sear

The question Lee Ann Fujii asks in her new book Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2009) is a traditional one in genocide studies. Her research builds on earlier scholars such as Christopher Browning, James Waller and Scott Strauss. Her eye for nuances and for the complexities of local relationships allows her to extend this earlier research in helping us to understand why neighbors killed neighbors in Rwanda. However. The metaphor she uses to help illuminate her explanations is both new and remarkably insightful. She argues that genocide must be viewed as a script. This script has directors and producers. but it also has actors. And the actors, far away from the directors, are able to interpret the script in ways that makes genocide make sense to their own lives and circumstances. sometimes this leads them to kill more people than they had been ordered to kill. But sometimes it leads individuals to ignore or save people who logically should have been targeted, sometimes

The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well studied and so it’s hard to say anything new about it. But Mary Fulbrook has done precisely that in A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012). In the book she examines the career of a single Nazi administrator in “the East”, Udo Klusa, in minute detail day by day, week by week, month by month while the Germans were improvising what became known as the “Holocaust.” Klausa was not a big wig; he was a functionary, a part of a (particularly awful) colonial machine. He believed in the Nazi mission to “Germanize” Poland, but he was by no means a “fanatical” Nazi. He followed orders (by our standards horrendous ones), but he did not do so mindlessly. He wanted to build a career, but he was not–apparently–willing to do anything to do so. Fullbro

On July 10, 1941, Poles in the town of Jedwabne together with some number of German functionaries herded nearly 500 Jews into a barn and burnt them alive. In 2000, the sociologist Jan Gross published a book about the subject that, very shortly thereafter, started a huge controversy about Polish participation in the Holocaust. In the furor that followed, many simply took it for granted that Gross’s interpretation of what happened–that radically anti-Semitic Poles murdered the Jews with little prompting from the Germans–was simply correct. But was it? This is the question Marek Jan Chodakiewicz tries to answer in The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After (Columbia University Press; East European Monographs, 2005). After an exhaustive and meticulous investigation of the sources (which are imperfect at best), Chodakiewicz concludes that we don’t and will never know exactly what happened on that horrible July day in Jedwabne, but it was certainly more complicated and my

What if genocide scholars have been approaching the field the wrong way? When I first opened Extremely Violent Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2010), I was immediately struck by the immense depth of research and learning. Christian Gerlach chooses his case studies from among the lesser studied cases of genocide and immersed himself in the literature. Moreover, he surveys the history and theory of counterinsurgency warfare in roughly 20 countries over the space of 50 years. His knowledge of the field is encyclopedic, and one must admire his tenacity, not to mention the persuasiveness clearly necessary to persuade the publisher to include such an extensive set of notes. More important, however, than the breadth and depth of research are the conclusions Gerlach reaches. For Gerlach’s book argues that people who study genocide need to approach the subject in a different way, one that is broader, is more grounded in primary research, and one that uses the categories of race a

Brendan C. Lindsay‘s impressive if deeply troubling new book centers on two concepts long considered anathema: democracy and genocide. One is an ideal of self-government, the other history’s most unspeakable crime. Yet as Lindsay deftly describes, Euro-American settlers in California harnessed democratic governance to expel, enslave and ultimately murder 90% of a population on their ancestral homelands in the mid-to-late 19th century. Murder State: California’s Native Genocide, 1846-1873 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is difficult but vital reading for residents of any state. Culling evidence from newspapers, public records, and personal narratives, Lindsay’s lays out an ironclad case that “genocide” is precisely the word to describe to the process faced by Native people in California, despite its rarified usage in academic and public discourse.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’m not sure what it would feel like to interview a leader of a genocidal regime. Asking why people decide it is right and necessary to kill many thousands is one of the standard questions in genocide studies. But it is one most of us face at a distance, in the classroom, while listening to a radio broadcast, or when present at a moment of remembrance personal or public. Gina Chon and Sambeth Thet, co-authors of Behind the Killing Fields: A Khmer Rouge Leader and one of his Victims (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), had the opportunity to ask that question in a much more personal way. Between them, the two spent hundreds of hours interviewing Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two in the Khmer Rouge. The result is a book that both reviews Nuon Chea’s life as a revolutionary and offers a glimpse into his attempts to wrestle with the past, both his own and his country’s. Alongside this story, Chon and Thet offer a brief narrative of Thet’s experience during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. The

Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as a far away land we know little about. He could have said it about any of the countries of east-central Europe. Yet, for the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany east-central Europe, was of prime importance in ways that would have horrible consequences for the people who made it their home, especially in the territories of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics and western Russia. Timothy Snyder calls these areas “the Bloodlands,” and with good reason. In Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010) he explores how two regimes with quite different perspectives ended up perpetrating mass murder on an unprecedented level in that region. Comparisons of Stalinism and Nazism are hardly new, but Snyder’s book is not a classical comparative study. Rather, it is an attempt to understand how the leaders of the USSR and Nazi Germany thought about the future of the region, and why their visions–despite being very different–both nece

It's safe to say that nobody but genocidaires likes genocide. It's also safe to say that everyone but genocidaires wants to halt on-going campaigns of mass murder and prevent future ones. The question, of course, is how to do this in practice. Keith Pomakoy's significant new book Helping Humanity: American Policy and Genocide Rescue (Lexington Books, 2011) explores exactly this question by analyzing American responses to mass murder over the past 125 years. The results are surprising. Contra Samantha Power, Pomakoy demonstrates that the United States has been anything but indifferent to the suffering of genocide victims abroad. The U.S. has taken measures to stop genocidal campaigns against Cubans, Armenians, Ukrainians, Jews, Cambodians, Bantus, Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians. These measures were not uniform: they were sometimes military (as in the case of Cuba), sometimes humanitarian (as in the case of the Armenians), and sometimes purely diplomatic (as in the case of the Ukrainians). Neither were

We should be skeptical of what is sometimes called “Jew counting” and all it implies. Yet it cannot be denied that Jews played a pivotal and (dare we say) disproportionate role in moving the West from a pre-modern to a modern condition. Take the media. Most people know that Jews, though hardly alone, built much of the film industry. Fewer people will know, however, that Jews–again, though hardly alone–were central to the birth of photojournalism. Robert Capa, arguably the most famous photojournalist of the last century, was, for example, born Endre Friedmann. In his fine book Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2010), historian David Shneer explores the ways in which Jews were instrumental in the creation of Soviet photojournalism and the ways in which their Jewishness–acknowledged or unacknowledged, accepted or completely rejected–affected the way they did their jobs and how they experienced what they saw and shot. The

It’s pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a “fascist.” Everyone knows, however, that this is just name-calling: supposed fascists are never really fascists–they are just people you don’t like very much. Not so in post-War West Germany. There, too, it was common to call people “fascists. But in the Federal Republic they may well have been fascists, that is, Nazis. Despite the efforts of the most thorough-going de-Nazifiers, post-war West German government, business and society was shot through with ex-Nazis. Young people, and especially university students in the BRD, were keenly aware of this fact, and they wondered how it could be that the so-called “Auschwitz generation” could have changed their tune so quickly. Under the influence of some rather clever left-leaning philosophers (those of the Frankfurt School), some of them came to the conclusion that they hadn’t and that, therefore, Germany was still a fascist state. This conclu

The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epstein’s remarkably detailed, thoroughly researched, and clearly presented Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford UP, 2010). Greiser was a totalitarian if ever there were one. He believed in the Nazi cause with his heart and soul. He wanted to create a new Germany, and indeed a new Europe dominated by Germans. As the Gauleiter of Wartheland (an area of Western Poland annexed to the Reich), he was given the opportunity to help realize the Nazi nightmare in the conquered Eastern territories. But, as Epstein shows, he was often hindered both by his own personality and the chaos that characterized Nazi occupation of the East. Grieser emerges from Epstein’s book as som

Absolutely no one doubts that Stalin murdered millions of people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. His ruthless campaign of “dekulakization,” his pitiless deportation of “unreliable” ethnic groups, his senseless starvation of Ukrainian peasants, his cruel attempt to “cleanse” the Communist Party of supposed “enemies of the people”–all of these actions resulted in mass death. In total, Stalin is responsible for the murder of roughly 10 million Soviet citizens. Again, this is well established. What is not well established is what to call Stalin’s crimes. As Norman Naimark points out in his thought-provoking Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton UP, 2010), historians and others have been peculiarly conflicted about this issue. Everyone agrees it’s mass murder. But is it “genocide,” with all that term entails? Etymologically, it doesn’t seem so: gens is Latin for “people who claim common descent,” that is, a clan, tribe, or

Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he directly order it and, if so, how and when? This is one of the many interesting questions posed by Hilary Earl in her outstanding new book The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge UP, 2009). The book is about the trial of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that, in 1941 and 1942, spearheaded the Nazi effort to eradicate the Jewish people. The Einsatzgruppen murdered something on the order of a million people using almost nothing but firearms. In 1947, their commanders were brought to justice in what might be called the “other” (forgotten) Nuremberg Trials. The trial left an enormous body of reasonably fresh-after-the-fact testimony for historians to work with in trying to understand this episode in the Holocaust. Hilary does a masterful job of mining this material. She also points out that the roots of our own understanding of the Holocaust ca

Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close to mass slaughter of their own kind. Why is this? There are two possible explanations for the difference. The first is this: chimps are not programmed, so to say, to commit mass slaughter, while humans are so programmed. The second is this: chimps do not make their own history and therefore cannot make the conditions conducive to genocide, while humans do, can, and repeatedly have. In the former case, human genocidal behavior is part of our evolved “nature”; in the latter case, it is a historical artifact. After reading Ben Kiernan’s sobering (Yale UP, 2007) I’ve come to believe that it is a bit of both. Much of what we know about the evolution of human psychology and the history of human genocide suggest that we have an ingrained, genetically-encoded, largely unalterable drive to want to kill one another in large numbers. That drive, however, seems to be triggered by particular historical circum

Scholars argue about whether the Holocaust was unprecedented. It’s a difficult question. On the one hand, slaughters litter the pages of history. On the other hand, none of them seem quite as calculated, systematic and horribly efficient as the Nazi murder of the Jews and other “Untermenchen.” One thing, however, is certain: the Holocaust is doubtless the best documented instance of mass murder in world history. The perpetrators were meticulous record keepers, and at the conclusion of the war many of their archives fell into Allied hands. The German record, however, is not the only record of the Holocaust. As Samuel Kassow shows in his moving Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana UP, 2007), the victims themselves made an concerted effort to document what was being done to them at the hands of the Nazis. Kassow tells the story of a group of Warsaw-based Jewish activists who built a secret organization–Oyneg Shabes–

It’s curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word “Nazi,” and immediately the Holocaust springs to mind. This reflexive association is probably a good thing, as it reminds us of the dangers of ethnic hatred in an era that knows it too well.  But in another way the Nazi = Holocaust equation obscures part of the story of Hitler’s insanity and that of all genocidal madness. For as Mark Mazower points out in his excellent new book Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Penguin, 2008), Hitler’s homicidal aims went well beyond the Holocaust. Of course the Jews would have to go. But that was hardly to be the end of it. The Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and other residents of the East would have to go too. They were all to be eliminated and replaced by “Aryan” settlers. That was the goal, anyway. That it went unrealized was not due to any lack of effort or nerve. As Mazower shows, the Nazi occupiers uprooted, enslaved, and murder