genocide Archives - Not Even Past

By Kelly Douma, Penn State University

Stefan Ihrig closes this book with a quote that encompasses his argument from Raphael Lemkin, the father of the word genocide: “Genocide is so easy to commit because people do not want to believe it until after it happens.” All the signs and symptoms of Nazi-perpetrated genocide existed throughout the decades leading up to the Holocaust, but were ignored by the greater public. Ihrig’s evidence takes the form of German reactions to the Armenian genocide. He argues that the pro-Ottoman nature of World War I Germany and the open genocide debate of Weimar Germany contributed to a “pragmatic” approach to “human rights, life, and liberty,” ultimately laying the groundwork for the virulent anti-Semitism of the Third Reich. Through extensive use of contemporary newspapers as well as court trials and military correspondence, Ihrig creates an image of German politics and culture beginning in the 1890s that makes the Holocaust seem – although still far from inevitable –a product of building tension rather than a sudden explosion of anti-Semitism.

Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, 1930 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ihrig begins his argument by elucidating an often overlooked connection in modern European history between the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. He does not attempt to compare their causes or results, but rather investigates Germany’s political involvement with the Ottoman Empire and Turkey both during the massacres of the 1890s and the genocide of the 1910s. From there he teases out an intricately woven political fabric connecting Germans and the Ottomans, resulting in a pro-Ottoman stance despite the rumors of anti-Armenian activity. He identifies several pro-Armenian Germans stationed in the Ottoman Empire whose correspondence stands against the bulk of material, which typically did not comment on genocidal activities. The most notable of these men was Max Erwin Scheubner-Richter, a German consul in Erzurum province. Scheubner’s correspondence, among others, helps Ihrig answer his question, “What could Germany have known about the Armenian genocide?” He finds that, in fact, the German military and government must have known nearly everything about the Armenian Genocide, although he does not go so far as to suggest that they were actively involved. He states that Germany knew what was happening, but was willing to “sacrifice the Armenians as the price of preserving Ottoman goodwill toward Germany.” This is a bold claim that has strong repercussions for the study of Germany in WWI and the interwar period.

After establishing German military and political knowledge of the Armenian Genocide, Ihrig tackles the much more difficult question: how much did the German public know of the Armenian Genocide and what was the cultural reaction to it? The second half of the book proves that Germans during the interwar period knew a great deal about the Armenian Genocide. Ihrig describes the emergence of a German cultural script that included pragmatic and extended debates on both the justification and the denial of the Armenian Genocide. Through intensive reading of German newspapers across the political spectrum during the interwar years, Ihrig defines what he calls “The Great Genocide Debate” of 1921-1923. His detailed analysis shows that pro-Armenian writers were consistently at odds with those who claimed the necessity of the Turkish reaction to the “Armenian problem” or reinterpreted the events to justify the genocide in terms of Armenian aggression. He also identifies two men, Franz Werfel and Armin Wegner, who wrote novels and open letters about the Armenian Genocide, but were ultimately too late to warn the German public about the genocidal capability of the Nazi party.

The German–Turkish Non-Aggression Pact was signed between Nazi Germany and Turkey in 1941 and lasted until 1945 (via Wikimedia Commons).

In the last section of his book, Ihrig finally answers the question that has been burning throughout his research: how did this cultural, political, and governmental response to the Armenian Genocide influence the events of the Holocaust? He could not be more clear in his answer. He states that the Nazis were inspired by the Armenian Genocide. He firmly critiques historians who argue that interwar Germany did not “come to terms” with the Armenian Genocide. Rather, he asserts, “Germany came to terms in a manner that we would perhaps not expect and cannot morally condone.” In his eyes, Germany recognized the events and, in a term he coined for this book, practiced a form of “justificantionalism,” or intellectual justification of the events of the genocide.

Deported Armenians leaving their town (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ihrig’s book is written for both experts of the field and general historical readers. The book leaves room for continuing research on the connections between Germany and the Armenian Genocide, such as why Germany was able to cross confessional lines to support the genocide of a Protestant Christian minority by a Muslim government. Ihrig also does not focus specifically on Hitler’s experience with the Armenian Genocide and instead assumes his knowledge of the events as a product of the developing cultural discourse and his position as an avid newspaper reader. This answer doubtless will not convince some readers of his connection and it could use further fleshing out. However, the work stands overall as a thorough treatment of to otherwise missed connection between the first and second acknowledged genocides of modern history.

You may also like:

The Tatars of Crimea: Ethnic Cleansing and Why History Matters.
Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman (1992).
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007).

by Travis Gray

Stalin’s Genocides provides an in-depth analysis of the horrendous atrocities — forced deportations, collectivization, the Ukrainian famine, and the Great Terror — perpetrated by Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical regime. Norman Naimark argues that these crimes should be considered genocide and that Joseph Stalin should therefore be labeled a “genocidaire.” He presents four major arguments to support this claim. First, the previous United Nations definition of genocide has recently been expanded to include murder on a social and political basis. Second, dekulakization—the arrest, deportation, and execution of kulaks or allegedly well-off peasants—was a form of genocide that dehumanized and eliminated an imagined social enemy. Third, during the Ukrainian famine in 1932-1933, victims were deliberately starved by the Soviet state. Fourth, The Great Terror was designed to eliminate potential enemies of the Soviet Union. Overall, Naimark’s arguments are persuasive, presenting a chilling portrait of Joseph Stalin as a sociopath bent on destroying his own people.

Naimark begins with a brief consideration of “genocide” as a legal term in international law. Although the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide does not apply to political or social groups, he shows—rather successfully—that the original UN definition of genocide had included these groups, but that the Soviet delegation had prevented this language from being adopted. This definition, however, has been challenged since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed, there have been recent cases in the Baltic states where individuals have been convicted of genocidal crimes for deporting and murdering social and political groups. Because these cases are bound by the precedents of international law, they provide historians with an opportunity to analyze Stalin’s crimes within a broadened definition of genocide that includes political and social groups.

Using this broader definition of genocide, Naimark proceeds to analyze instances of mass killing in the Soviet Union. His chapter on dekulakization is particularly persuasive as an instance of genocidal extermination both planned and implemented by the state to control its rural population. He makes the important distinction that although “the kulaks” were not a conventional social group, they “became an imagined social enemy” whose members experienced the same forms of violence and dehumanization faced by other ethnic and national groups (56). In this regard, dekulakization was similar in both form and function to internationally recognized instances of genocide in Germany, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia.

Naimark’s last two arguments regarding the Ukrainian famine and the Great Terror are less convincing. Although there is a lot of evidence to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants were directly responsible for generating both the famine and the terror, neither of these events seems to have been intentionally designed to eliminate a particular group. Repression during the Great Terror, for example, was often applied randomly throughout the Soviet Union with little consideration given to the victim’s political, social, national, or ethnic identity. Likewise, it can be argued that the famine was used as a weapon against Ukrainian nationalism, but Naimark offers no convincing evidence to suggest that Stalin used the famine as a way to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry.

In sum, this book provides the reader with deep insight into the nature of Stalin’s crimes. It helps characterize one of history’s greatest mass murderers in a new light—as a genocidaire whose crimes should be condemned in the harshest terms. Even though the term genocide may not be appropriate in all the examples cited by Naimark, the book prompts historians to discuss the issue of genocide outside the confines of the Holocaust—a topic that many scholars have been eager to avoid.

Photo Credits:

Ukrainians in Kharkiv pass by a starving man during Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine, 1932 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Mug shot of Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold after being arrested in 1939 amidst Stalin’s Great Purge of artists and intellectuals (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Joseph Stalin at the Congress of the Young Communist League with two “famous” collective farmers: Praskovya Angelina (left), founder of a female tractor team and Maria Demchenko (right), an innovative beet grower (Image courtesy of Russian International News Agency (RIA Novosti) / RIA Novosti archive, image #377427 / Shagin / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

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Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler, by Stefan Ihrig (2016)

Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

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