Five to six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, probably about eight hundred thousand Armenians in Turkey, and between one and two million people died in Cambodia. The disappearances in Argentina cannot be compared in magnitude: between nine and thirty thousand people were killed. The Argentine victims were regarded as political enemies who endangered the state: communists, communist sympathizers, or left leaning.
There can be no exhaustive test of my conception of genocide, but I can provide significant confirmation by demonstrating substantial similarities in the psychological and cultural origins of these four disparate cases and the existence of extraordinary life problems.
The definitions of genocide and mass killing
The word genocide was introduced by the jurist Raphael Lemkin, who began a crusade in 1933 to create what was to become the Genocide Convention. In 1944, in a study of the Axis rule in occupied Europe, he proposed the term genocide to denote the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group, from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing).2 As a result of his efforts, on December 11, 1946, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) passed a resolution that said: “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.... Many instances of such crimes have occurred, when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part.”3
In subsequent work of UN committees on what became the Genocide Convention, passed on December 9, 1948, disagreements about content were substantial. The Soviet Union and other nations objected to the inclusion of political groups as victims of genocide, arguing that the etymology of the term should guide the definition: only racial and national groups could be objectively designated. Others argued that political groups are transient and unstable. Some objected that the inclusion of political groups in the convention “would expose nations to external intervention in their domestic concerns,”4 and political conflict within a country could become an international issue. Those who wanted to include political groups pointed out that the meanings of words evolve. They wanted genocide to refer to the destruction of any group.5 Even the inclusion of economic groups was suggested.
The Genocide Convention as finally adopted did not include political groups. It defined the crime of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, creating conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction, preventing births, or forcibly transferring children to another group.6
Killing groups of people for political reasons has become the primary form of genocide (and mass killing) in our time. There is no reason to believe that the types of psychological and cultural influences differ in political and other group murders. In this book genocide means an attempt to exterminate a racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, or political group, either directly through murder or indirectly by creating conditions that lead to the group’s destruction. Mass killing means killing members of a group without the intention to eliminate the whole group or killing large numbers of people without a precise definition of group membership. In a mass killing the number of people killed is usually smaller than in genocide.
For example, in Cambodia the scale of murder was genocidal, but the identification of who was to be killed somewhat imprecise, as it frequently is in political genocide. In Argentina the reasons were also political, but the number of victims was much smaller, and their identification even less precise – a mass killing rather than a genocide. The ideology that led to the killings in Cambodia demanded many more victims.7
Four mass killings/genocides
I will here briefly describe what happened in the Nazi Holocaust, in the genocide of the Armenians, in the autogenocide in Cambodia, and in the disappearances in Argentina.
The Holocaust
The word refers to the extermination of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from June 1941 to 1945. Another five million people were also killed: political opponents; mentally ill, retarded, and other “genetically inferior” Germans; Poles; and Russians. Gypsies, like Jews, were to be eliminated; more than 200,000 were killed, probably many more.
The extermination of Jews had several phases.8 After sporadic killings, a policy of extermination, the Final Solution, was created. The policy took shape in 1941; it was institutionalized in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. In 1941, Einsatzgruppen (literally, task forces; special mobile killing units) were established and sent to the eastern front. They lined up and shot groups of Jews at the edge of mass graves, which at times the victims were forced to dig. Later they filled trucks with Jews and drove them around until they died of the carbon monoxide that was routed back into the truck. About one and a half million people were killed in these ways.
More and more, the killing took place in specially constructed camps, most located in Poland. Some were strictly extermination camps. Jews were told they would be resettled and gathered from all over Europe; in territories not occupied by the Germans but allied with them, governments were asked to hand over their Jewish population. The Jews were herded into freight cars and transported to camps. After days on end without food, water, or medical care, some died on the way. On entering the camps they were told to undress for showers. Instead, they were gassed to death. Their bodies were removed by Jews assigned to special working units
