WEEK 1!
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• Raphael Lemkin, ‘Genocide as a crime under
international law’, The American Journal of
International Law, 41/1 (1947), 145-151.
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Is only like 7 pages of reading material, not worth the effort of summarizing.
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• D. Stone, ‘Raphael Lemkin on the Holocaust’, Journal of
Genocide Research, 7/4 (2005)
Genocide is effected through a synchronized attack on different aspects of life of the captive
peoples: in the political field, in the social field, in the cultural field, in the economic field, in the
biological field, in the field of physical existence, in the religious field, in the field of morality.
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Genocide has two phases: one, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the
other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.
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The destruction of human groups, the crime that came to be known as genocide, and the destruction
of cultural and artistic works of these groups, which came to be known as cultural genocide, were
originally termed by Lemkin the new crimes of barbarism and vandalism.
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Through his own substantial reading and working through the documents available to him, Lemkin
identified a number of key issues. These merit further examination, since they remain central to
debates on the nature of Nazism and the Holocaust.
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1. The first of these is what is now referred to as “political religion,”. It is intended to suggest
that what motivated followers of these ideologies was less to do with rational choice
and more to do with a kind of need for community and devotion in a modernized world
in which “traditional” forms of affiliation had broken down.
2. The notion of genocide as a “sacred purpose” does not necessarily imply that its perpetrators
act in a frenzy or out of bloodlust, but it still comes as something of a surprise when
Lemkin writes that “Almost the most frightening aspect of the Nazi mass murders is the
cold, scientific manner in which they were committed.”
3. But Lemkin also seems to foreshadow the “ordinary men” debate of the 1990s. This
combination of cold-blooded, scientifically-planned mass murder being carried out by
men who were in all respects thoroughly unremarkable (save, in a rather circular way,
that they were perpetrators of genocide) appears to sit uneasily with the view put
forward by Lemkin of Nazism as a radical racist ideology to which its followers
adhered as if it were a deeply-held faith.
,4. There are other instances where Lemkin anticipates later historiographical concerns. For
example, he devoted considerable space to discussing the role of the Wehrmacht. In the
1950s, when most western governments were busy finding reasons to exculpate
leading Wehrmacht generals leaving them fit to fight the Cold War against the common
communist enemy, these were brave words.
5. In another instance, Lemkin refers to a subject that has only very recently been investigated in
detail by historians: the plunder of Jewish property. Recently there have been studies
of Aryanization on a local level that reveal the extent of complicity of ordinary
citizens. Similarly, the continent-wide scale of the robbery of Jewish-owned art and
property has come under close scrutiny of late.
6. There are then several themes in Lemkin's work that connect with recent trends in the
historiography of the Holocaust: the “return of ideology”; the role of the Wehrmacht
and agencies other than the SS in the genocide; the theft of Jewish property across
Europe; Nazism as a “political religion”; the genocide of the Jews being only one
aspect of Nazi ambitions where “population policy” was concerned; the links between
Nazi genocide and other genocides. But it is the last two that mark Lemkin's real
achievement as a historian of the Holocaust. On population policy, the favour with
which Lemkin's work is currently viewed is soon explained. Lemkin set out quite
clearly that Nazi genocide was one of the most clear-cut examples of stated intention
that one could hope to find. But he understood what we know as the Holocaust only in
the broader context of Nazi demographic plans: “The Nazis were out to eliminate not
only groups of people like the Jews, but to destroy all the inhabitants of an area, along
with all their cultural manifestations, in order to create ‘space’ for their own people”.
The most significant aspect of his analysis of Nazi genocide is the fact that at every
turn Lemkin does not distinguish between the fate of the Jews (“the Holocaust”) and
that of other victims of Nazism; rather, he sees Nazi genocidal policy as a unitary
phenomenon, although he does distinguish between “racial genocide” such as
characterized the genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies, and “national genocide,” as
was committed with the aim of acquiring Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian territory.
Perhaps Lemkin's most original contribution, and one that is really only now being
appreciated, is thus his inclusion of the murder of the Jews in a wider unitary policy
for the demographic reshaping of Europe. Lemkin was of course quite correct to note
that the Nazi assault on the Jews was only one part of the occupation regime, albeit
“one of the main objects of German genocide policy” for they “are to be destroyed
completely.” Where Lemkin does not adumbrate contemporary concerns is in his
failure to see the attack on the Jews as driven by a radical ideology. Rather than seeing
racism as central to Nazism, he argued, in the manner of Franz Neumann, that “race
theory served the purpose of consolidating internally the German people”. Today
historians accept that the murder of the Jews was not the full extent of the Nazis'
ambitions, but they understand that there are good reasons why the Jews were targeted
first and most tenaciously, and equally that the Jews held a special place in the Nazi
Weltanschauung.
7. But it is vital to bear in mind that, just as he did not separate the fate of the Jews from that of
Nazism's other victims, so he did not single out the genocide of the Jews as falling into
a separate category (as some historians today distinguish “Holocaust” from
“genocide”). His comments on the Holocaust make sense only in the light of Lemkin's
, detailed studies of other genocides, from examples in antiquity to the annihilation of
the indigenous Tasmanians to Armenia. Indeed, these earlier genocides provided
Lemkin with a conceptual framework for understanding German actions: that of
colonialism. “Nazi Germany embarked upon a gigantic plan to colonize Europe, and
since there are no free spaces local populations had to be removed in order to make
room for Germans. Nazi Germany did not have a fleet to protect overseas colonial
possessions. Moreover Germany had never [sic] good experiences in the past with
overseas colonization. It was thus much simpler to colonize the European continent.”
Gerhard Jacoby's 1943 discussion of the occupation also relied heavily on a legal framework in
order to make sense of what was going on. Much of the book is taken up with a sophisticated
rendering of the gradual process of the appropriation of Jewish property and the deprivation of the
Jews' legal existence in Bohemia and Moravia, leading step by step to the “complete physical
extinction” of the Jews, “in full accord with the example of Germany itself.” Jacoby provides an in-
depth analysis of the decrees and various offices involved in this process and notes the “legal”
organization of a “racial state”. In 1943 this understanding of the centrality to Nazism of race and
law as intertwined principles was quite an original insight. Lemkin was not the only one to make it.
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Given the current historiographical trend that sees the Holocaust as on a continuum (albeit an
extreme variant) with earlier, especially colonial genocides, and given our understanding of the
Nazis' grand population policy plans, Lemkin's challenge—to view the genocide of the Jews not as
sui generis but as one, if unusually significant, part of Nazi genocide, and as one, albeit extreme
variant of genocide—remains to be satisfactorily addressed by historians of the Holocaust and by
comparative genocide scholars.
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WEEK 2!
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• Benjamin Madley, ‘Patterns of frontier genocide
1803-1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of
California, and the Herrero of Namibia’, Journal of
Genocide Research 6/2 (2004), 167-192.
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The analysis of the frontier genocides waged against the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of
California, and the Herero of Namibia reveals a surprisingly congruent pattern despite the fact that
the cases took place on different continents, under different regimes, and in different periods:
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The pattern divides into three phases.
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1. Colonists initiate the first by invasion. Economic and political
frictions then develop between the two groups as they struggle for limited
resources and political power. Unable to compete with the invaders’ technology,
arms, and wealth, the indigenous people find their economy fundamentally
threatened and basic political rights denied under the settler regime.
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2. Aboriginal people begin the second phase by attacking settlers and their
property in an attempt to regain access to economic resources, reclaim lost land,
protect political rights, or exact revenge. Settlers and their government then
retaliate, but cannot quickly defeat the indigenous peoples’ guerrilla insurgency.
Out of frustration and expediency, the invaders choose a “final solution” to the
military conflict.
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3. During and after the genocidal military campaign, the settlers’ government
initiates the final phase by incarcerating Aboriginal people in camps that bear
comparison with the Soviet gulag. In these reservations, settler governments
continue genocidal policy though a varying combination of malnutrition, insufficient
protection from the elements, inadequate medical care, overwork,
unsanitary conditions, and violence.
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Genocide in Tasmania, California, and Namibia began with a common lie: the
assertion that the land was “empty,” “unclaimed,” or should be “made empty.”
If white settlers saw no European-style agriculture or Western trappings of civilization, they often
deemed an area “empty” to rationalize conquest and settlement. The idea of “empty” or unclaimed
land provided the legal and intellectual framework for genocide by rationalizing dispossession and
by suggesting that native people were less worthy of land ownership and thus essentially less
human than white settlers. Victors write history, and, in the final phases of frontier genocide,
perpetrators created a myth of inevitability to excuse their crimes. By claiming that so-called
“primitive” peoples and cultures are fated to vanish when they come into contact with white settlers,
a deadly supposition emerges: the extinction of indigenous people is inevitable and thus killing
speeds destiny. The lie of empty land and the myth of inevitability helped perpetrators disguise,
accept, or rationalize genocide and transfer responsibility to impersonal forces, even when deaths
resulted from Aboriginal Tasmanians being “hunted down like wild beasts,” Yuki men, “… women
and children, [being] cruelly slaughtered by the whites” or the Herero being destroyed by General
Lothar von Trotha’s plan to “annihilate these masses”. In all three cases, profound racism informed
genocide. Ideological racism was not the primary motivation behind these frontier genocides.
However, it provided the context in which settlers and their advocates attempted to annihilate
indigenous people who rose up against them.
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The Tasmanian case, 1803–1847
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FASE 1
British settlers first arrived in Tasmania in 1803. During the next 75 years, British policies led to the
destruction of between 4,000 and 7,000 indigenous Tasmanians, the majority between 1803 and
1847.
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Conflict between indigenous people and settlers often revolves around two
interlocking economic issues: access to natural resources and control of territory.
Both groups need natural resources and land to achieve their definition of economic success, but
these requirements need not lead to war or genocide. However, when economic competition
becomes a zero-sum game in which settlers and their advocates threaten the foundations of an
indigenous economy, Aboriginal people often fight to protect their traditional modes of production.
