AP World History: 20th Century GenocidePeriod 6: 1900 – 2015 CE

First they came for the CommunistsAnd I did not speak outBecause I was not a CommunistThen they came for the SocialistsAnd I did not speak outBecause I was not a SocialistThen they came for the trade unionistsAnd I did not speak outBecause I was not a trade unionistThen they came for the JewsAnd I did not speak outBecause I was not a JewThen they came for meAnd there was no one leftTo speak out for me Pastor Martin Niemoller

I What is Genocide?

II The Armenian GenocideIn 1915, leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and massacre Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Though reports vary, most sources agree that there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre. By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations finally ended, some 1.5 million of Turkey’s Armenians were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country. Today, most historians call this event a genocide–a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people. However, the Turkish government does not acknowledge the enormity or scope of these events. Despite pressure from Armenians and social justice advocates throughout the world, it is still illegal in Turkey to talk about what happened to Armenians during this era. www.history.com

II The HolocaustA) The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah (Hebrew for “catastrophe”), was a genocide in which approximately six million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Some historians use a definition of the Holocaust that includes the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to approximately eleven million. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories. From 1941 to 1945, Jews were targeted and methodically murdered in a genocide, one of the largest in history, and part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazis. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the genocide, turning the Third Reich into "a genocidal state“. Non-Jewish victims of broader Nazi crimes include Gypsies, Poles, communists, homosexuals, Soviet POWs, and the mentally and physically disabled. In total, approximately 11 million people were killed, including approximately one million Jewish children. Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed. A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were used to concentrate, confine, and kill Jews and other victims. Between 100,000 and 500,000 people were direct participants in the planning and execution of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Continued…B) The Holocaust was carried out in stages. Initially the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, most prominently the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. A network of concentration camps was established starting in 1933 and ghettos were established following the outbreak of WWII in 1939. In 1941, as Germany conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen were used to murder around two million Jews and "partisans", often in mass shootings. By the end of 1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight train to specially built extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. The campaign of murder continued until the end of WWII in Europe in April–May 1945. C) Jewish armed resistance to the Nazis occurred throughout the Holocaust. One notable example was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, when thousands of poorly armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe. French Jews were also highly active in the French Resistance, which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities. In total, there were over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings.

The Nazis and EugenicsHitler and the Nazis victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called "Master Race” of Aryans. But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing. Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers… Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton…http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796#sthash.5JRU0vxg.dpuf

The Holocaust Continued…

Instructional chart issued to help bureaucrats distinguish Jews from Mischlinge (mixed race persons) and Aryans. The white figures are Aryans; the black figures Jews; and the shaded figures Mischlinge.

The Hitler YouthThe Hitler Youth was the youth organization of the Nazi Party in Germany. Its origins dated back to 1922. From 1933 until 1945, it was the sole official youth organization in Germany and was partially a paramilitary organization. The members of the Hitler Youth were viewed as future “Aryan supermen" and were indoctrinated into racism. One aim was to instill the motivation that would enable its members as soldiers, to fight faithfully for the Third Reich. Girls were taught that their purpose was to produce strong German boys to become Aryan soldiers.

Nazi Anti-Semitic Propaganda

“It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.” – Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister

The Holocaust Continued…

Dachau was the first concentration camp created by the Nazis. Opened in March, 1933, it held gypsies, homosexuals, a-socials, and repeat criminal offenders, as well as Jewish prisoners.

The Voyage of the St. Louis, 1939 On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba. On the voyage were 938 passengers, many who were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich. Most had applied for US visas and had planned to stay in Cuba only until they could enter the United States. When the St. Louis arrived in Havana harbor on May 27, the Cuban government admitted 28 passengers, but refused to admit the remaining passengers or to allow them to disembark from the ship. The St. Louis the sailed to Miami. A State Department telegram sent to a passenger stated that the passengers must "await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States." Quotas established in the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924 strictly limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted to the United States each year. In 1939, the annual combined German-Austrian immigration quota was 27,370 and was quickly filled. Following the US government's refusal to permit the passengers to disembark, the St. Louis sailed back to Europe on June 6, 1939. The passengers did not return to Germany, however. Jewish organizations (particularly the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) negotiated with four European governments to secure entry visas for the passengers: Great Britain took 288 passengers; the Netherlands admitted 181 passengers, Belgium took in 214 passengers; and 224 passengers found at least temporary refuge in France. Of the 288 passengers admitted by Great Britain, all survived World War II save one, who was killed during an air raid in 1940. Of the 620 passengers who returned to continent, 87 (14%) managed to emigrate before the German invasion of Western Europe in May 1940. 532 St. Louis passengers were trapped when Germany conquered Western Europe. Just over half, 278 survived the Holocaust. 254 died: 84 who had been in Belgium; 84 who had found refuge in Holland, and 86 who had been admitted to France. http://www.ushmm.org

Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) Anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland; 200 synagogues destroyed; 7,500 Jewish shops looted; 30,000 male Jews sent to concentration camps.

Auschwitz, Poland

Shoes Collected from Auschwitz

Hair Collected from Auschwitz

Warsaw Ghetto “... It was calculated that the officially supplied rations did not cover even 10 percent of the normal requirements. If one had wanted really to restrict oneself to the official rations then the entire population of the ghetto would have had to die of hunger in a very short time.... The German authorities did everything to seal off the ghetto hermetically and not to allow in a single gram of food. A wall was put up around the ghetto on all sides that did not leave a single millimeter of open space.... They fixed barbed wire and broken glass to the top of the wall...” Emanuel Ringelblum quoted in Yad Vashem Documents on the Holocaust

Birkenau Incinerators

The Holocaust Continued…The Wannsee Conference: On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to coordinate the implementation of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." In late September 1941, Hitler had authorized the Reich Railroads to transport German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to locations in German-occupied Poland and the German-occupied Soviet Union, where German authorities would kill the overwhelming majority of them. Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the "Final Solution.” *In 1938 - 1940 the Nazis had considered a forced emigration of European Jews to African island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. http://www.ushmm.org

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943

The Liberation of the Nazi Camps “As Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Nazi Germany, they began to encounter tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Many of these prisoners had survived forced marches into the interior of Germany from camps in occupied Poland. These prisoners were suffering from starvation and disease. Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp, reaching Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. Surprised by the rapid Soviet advance, the Germans attempted to hide the evidence of mass murder by demolishing the camp. Camp staff set fire to the large crematorium used to burn bodies of murdered prisoners, but in the hasty evacuation the gas chambers were left standing. In the summer of 1944, the Soviets also overran the sites of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The Germans had dismantled these camps in 1943, after most of the Jews of Poland had already been killed. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest killing center and concentration camp, in January 1945. The Nazis had forced the majority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward (in what would become known as "death marches"), and Soviet soldiers found only several thousand emaciated prisoners alive when they entered the camp. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses in the camp, but in the remaining ones the Soviets found personal belongings of the victims…

The Liberation of the Nazi Camps They discovered, for example, hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women's outfits, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair. In the following months, the Soviets liberated additional camps in the Baltic states and in Poland. US forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945, a few days after the Nazis began evacuating the camp. On the day of liberation, an underground prisoner resistance organization seized control of Buchenwald to prevent atrocities by the retreating camp guards. American forces liberated more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald. They also liberated Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen. British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Bergen-Belsen. They entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Celle, in mid-April 1945. Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were found alive. More than 10,000 of them died from the effects of malnutrition or disease within a few weeks of liberation. Liberators confronted unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps, where piles of corpses lay unburied. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. The small percentage of inmates who survived resembled skeletons because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, compounded by months and years of maltreatment. Many were so weak that they could hardly move. Disease remained an ever-present danger, and many of the camps had to be burned down to prevent the spread of epidemics. Survivors of the camps faced a long and difficult road to recovery.” http://www.ushmm.org

Liberation at Auschwitz “On January 27, 1945, my dream came true. For ten months, I had envisioned the day when my twin sister Miriam and I would walk through the gates of Auschwitz as free people… When we first arrived, Miriam and I were separated from our father, mother, and two older sisters. We were taken to a barrack with other twin girls to be used in medical experiments at the direction of Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele. I’ll never forget that first night in the rat-infested horse barn. We could not sleep, so we went to the latrine. There, on that filthy latrine floor, we saw the scattered corpses of three children. Right then, I made a silent pledge that I would do everything in my power to prevent Miriam and myself from ending up like those children. My dream to survive was born. In my childish naiveté during that time at Auschwitz, I thought the entire world had become a concentration camp. In the final days of the war, the Nazis fled the camp. I walked down to a nearby river in my tattered clothes and lice-infested hair to get a drink. I bent down and when I looked up I saw a girl on the other side of the river. She was wearing a nice dress, and had ribbons in her hair. Most importantly to me, she was carrying school books. That was the first time I realized that not everyone was living in a concentration camp — that while we were fighting to survive, other people were carrying on with their normal lives. Many times since we were liberated, I have wondered why nobody came to save us — why nobody stopped the Nazis from taking us to Auschwitz in the first place. It was not an inevitability that my family would be murdered or that Miriam and I would have to endure horrible medical experiments.” By Eva Kor, 2012

Dr. Josef Mengele (1911 – 1979) “In 1943, he was named SS garrison physician of Auschwitz. He was responsible for the differentiation and selection of those fit to work and those destined for gassing. Mengele also carried out human experiments on camp inmates, especially twins. During the 1930s, twin research was seen as an ideal tool in weighing the variant factors of human heredity and environment. Mengele, with his mentor, had performed a number of legitimate research protocols using twins as test subjects throughout the 1930s. Now, at Auschwitz, with full license to maim or kill his subjects, Mengele performed a broad range of agonizing and often lethal experiments with Jewish and Roma (“Gypsy”) twins, most of them children. Throughout his stay in Auschwitz, Mengele collected the eyes of his murdered victims... He himself also conducted several experiments in an attempt to unlock the secret of artificially changing eye color. Many of his “test subjects” died as a result of the experimentation or were murdered in order to facilitate post-mortem examination.” http://www.ushmm.org

The Nuremburg TrialsHeld for the purpose of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, the Nuremberg trials were a series of 13 trials carried out in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949. The defendants, who included Nazi Party officials and high-ranking military officers along with German industrialists, lawyers and doctors, were indicted on such charges as crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) committed suicide and was never brought to trial. Although the legal justifications for the trials and their procedural innovations were controversial at the time, the Nuremberg trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the establishment of a permanent international court, and an important precedent for dealing with later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity.

HOWEVER…

The US and Ex-Nazis During the Cold War“It has been revealed through recently disclosed government documents and interviews that at least 1,000 ex-Nazis were recruited by the American military, FBI and CIA to become Cold War spies and informants, the New York Times reports. Not only did they hire former Third Reich members suspected of carrying out war crimes, they went so far as to help their spies immigrate to the U.S. and cover up their involvement in the war in an attempt to protect them from the U.S. Justice Department's own Nazi hunters. And that estimate is considered conservative by the historians who were tasked by the government to declassify the war-crime records…” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2810258/AT-1-000-ex-Nazis-hired-U-S-spies-Cold-War-CIA-helped-America.html#ixzz3YbttYg8y

IV The Rape of Nanking (1937)A) During the Sino-Japanese War, Nanking, the capital of China, fell to Japanese forces. To break the spirit of Chinese resistance, Japanese General Matsui Iwane ordered that the city of Nanking be destroyed. In what became known as the "Rape of Nanking," the Japanese butchered an estimated 150,000 male "war prisoners," massacred an additional 50,000 male civilians, and raped at least 20,000 women and girls of all ages, many of whom were mutilated or killed in the process. Shortly after the end of World War II, Matsui was found guilty of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and executed.

The Rape of Nanking Continued…

I had a big room with a double bed. I got two simple meals a day … I was forced to have sex with ten to twenty men a day. Sex was excruciating. Oh, you have no idea how painful it was. If I didn’t perform well, I would get beaten. Some of the men would be drunk and beat me anyway. [Anonymous, quoted in George Hicks, The Comfort Women, New York, W. W. Norton & Co, 1995, 13.]

The Rape of Nanking Continued…B) In 1942 approximately 70,000 U.S. and Filipino prisoners are marched more than 60 miles with little food or water. Prisoners of war were beaten randomly and denied food and water for several days. Those who fell behind were executed through various means: shot, beheaded or bayonetted.5,000 to 11,000 died. Historians estimate between 20 and 30 million Chinese deaths at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army. (This is known as the Bataan Death March)- The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

V The Rwandan GenocideA) In 1994, Rwanda’s population of seven million was composed of three ethnic groups: Hutu (approximately 85%), Tutsi (14%) and Twa (1%). In the early 1990s, Hutu extremists within Rwanda’s political elite blamed the entire Tutsi minority population for the country’s increasing social, economic, and political pressures. Tutsi civilians were also accused of supporting a Tutsi-dominated rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Through the use of propaganda and constant political maneuvering, Habyarimana, who was the president at the time, and his group increased divisions between Hutu and Tutsi by the end of 1992. The Hutu remembered past years of oppressive Tutsi rule, and many of them not only resented but also feared the minority. *The Tutsis had been favored by the imperialistic Belgians due to their lighter skin prior to Rwanda’s independence.

The Rwandan Genocide Continued…B) On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down. Violence began almost immediately after that. Under the cover of war, Hutu extremists launched their plans to destroy the entire Tutsi civilian population. Political leaders who might have been able to take charge of the situation and other high profile opponents of the Hutu extremist plans were killed immediately. Tutsi and people suspected of being Tutsi were killed in their homes and as they tried to flee at roadblocks set up across the country during the genocide. Entire families were killed at a time. Women were systematically and brutally raped. It is estimated that some 200,000 people participated in the perpetration of the Rwandan genocide. In the weeks after April 6, 1994, 800,000 men, women, and children perished in the Rwandan genocide, perhaps as many as three quarters of the Tutsi population. At the same time, thousands of Hutu were murdered because they opposed the killing campaign and the forces directing it.

The Rwandan Genocide Continued… The Rwandan genocide resulted from the conscious choice of the elite to promote hatred and fear to keep itself in power. This small, privileged group first set the majority against the minority to counter a growing political opposition within Rwanda. Then, faced with RPF success on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, these few power holders transformed the strategy of ethnic division into genocide. They believed that the extermination campaign would reinstate the solidarity of the Hutu under their leadership and help them win the war, or at least improve their chances of negotiating a favorable peace. They seized control of the state and used its authority to carry out the massacre.The civil war and genocide only ended when the Tutsi-dominated rebel group, the RPF, defeated the Hutu perpetrator regime and President Paul Kagame took control.Although the Rwandans are fully responsible for the organization and execution of the genocide, governments and peoples elsewhere all share in the shame of the crime because they failed to prevent and stop this killing campaign.

The Rwandan Genocide Continued…C) Policymakers in France, Belgium, and the United States and at the United Nations were aware of the preparations for massive slaughter and failed to take the steps needed to prevent it. Aware from the start that Tutsi were being targeted for elimination, the leading foreign actors refused to acknowledge the genocide. Not only did international leaders reject what was going on, but they also declined for weeks to use their political and moral authority to challenge the legitimacy of the genocidal government. They refused to declare that a government guilty of exterminating its citizens would never receive international assistance. They did nothing to silence the radio that televised calls for slaughter. Even after it had become indisputable that what was going on in Rwanda was a genocide, American officials had shunned the g-word, fearing that it would cause demands for intervention.When international leaders finally voiced disapproval, the genocidal authorities listened well enough to change their tactics although not their ultimate goal. Far from cause for satisfaction, this small success only highlights the tragedy: if weak protests produced this result in late April, imagine what might have been the result if in mid-April the entire world had spoken out. http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/genocide/genocide_in_rwanda.htm

The Rwandan Genocide Continued…“The diplomat who was president of the U.N. Security Council in April 1994 apologized Wednesday for the council’s refusal to recognize that genocide was taking place in Rwanda and for doing nothing to halt the slaughter of more than 1 million people. Former New Zealand Ambassador Colin Keating issued the rare apology during a council meeting to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the genocide … Keating recalled that New Zealand, Nigeria, the Czech Republic and Spain, supported by Argentina and Djibouti, urged condemnation of the Rwanda genocide in April 1994, the month it started, and called for reinforcement of the U.N. mission in the country, but “most” veto-wielding permanent members objected. The United States and France were among those opposed. U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power acknowledged that the United States supported extracting U.N. troops rather than reinforcing them… “Too often, we have done too little, waited too long, or been caught unprepared by events that should not have surprised us. Moving forward, we have to do a better job of confronting and defeating the practitioners of hate.”… Rwanda’s U.N. Ambassador Eugene-Richard Gasana said “the systematic slaughter of men, women and children was perpetrated in full view of the international community.” “The genocide against the Tutsi highlighted the extent to which the U.N. methods of prevention utterly failed,” he said….” The Japan Times U.N. official apologizes for failure to recognize Rwanda genocide, April 2014

HW Questions1. Fill in your period 6 Chart for Genocides (Holocaust, Rape of

Nanking, Armenian Genocide, Rwanda)2. What was the American connection to the Nazis? (In addition to this

PPT, go back to the WWII PPT to reread “Who funded the Nazis?”. Are you surprised? Why or why not?

3. Go to https://sfi.usc.edu/ (the Shoah project). Choose any video from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor. Briefly describe the survivor’s story as well as your reaction to it.

4. Is there an explanation for past and present genocides? Is there a way to prevent future genocides? Explain your answer.

Key VocabularyEugenicsBataan Death MarchKristalnaughtNuremburg TrialsNuremburg LawsDeath CampsConcentration CampsFinal SolutionDachauSt. LouisMischlingeHitler YouthAuschwitzWarsaw Ghetto UprisingDr. Joseph MengeleGoebelsHolocaustShoahArmenian GenocideRape of NankingRwandan GenocideHutus Tutsis