The Genocide Forum
Table of Contents
- Year Four! A Year of Transition?
- And then there were None: A Requiem for the Hutu Refugees
- Allianz's First Trial
- A Reply by Steven Katz and a short Response by Henry Huttenbach
- The Word "Holocaust": A Short Exploration of Usage
Year Four! A Year of Transition?
We begin Year four with high hopes. Year three brought with it gratifying success. As readers of the first Genocide Forum may recall, our original task was to encourage a merging of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, claiming that their continued separation would lead to parochial thinking and truncated research. This goal was not immediately welcomed nor shared, but over the years became increasingly accepted as a valid suggestion worthy of some consideration. Then, in response to the "J'accuse!" article (TGF 3/8), a breakthrough was achieved. Organizers of future conferences from Seattle (in 1998) to Oxford (in 2000) have indicated their commitment to the principles raised and goals promoted in "J'accuse!" A spate of correspondence to our office confirmed approval from Japan to Ukraine, with promises to cooperate in the intellectual endeavors of The Genocide Forum.
Crowning the past year's achievements was an inquiry by a leading publisher of academic journals as to whether there was interest in "upgrading" The Genocide Forum into a bona fide scholarly journal. Plans are presently afoot to explore that idea. Several advisory committees have been set up to assist in the process. Colleagues have generously agreed to lend their experience and expertise in coming to a decision regarding the future of The Genocide Forum. Some strongly feel it should continue essentially in its present format; others feel equally strongly that the opportunity and challenge should be taken up. (Those wishing to participate formally or informally in this debate should get in touch with the editor.)
What is not in doubt is that The Genocide Forum has matured and gained respect with close to 1000 recipients. Hundreds of potential readers unfortunately cannot be included in the present mailing list for one reason only: present resources money, labor and time are insufficient. One advantage of becoming a regular journal is that such limitations can be overcome. So watch this space for further information within the next months on the future of The Genocide Forum.
Henry R. Huttenbach
And then there were None: A Requiem for the Hutu Refugees
Yom HaShoah has come and gone; sufferings past of yesteryear's victims were duly acknowledged and reverently observed. Prayers for the dead were chanted a hundred fold on both sides of the Atlantic: in Israel the nation stood still, out of respect, for two minutes, though not a second more, before hastening to a myriad of quotidian appointments; in the United States "distinguished" speakers repeated worn-out Holocaust litanies and profundities. And watching them all from afar, speakers and their audiences, were the hollow eyes of the dying and dead Hutu refugees rotting away in east Zaire's jungles.As the annual Holocaust Day came and went (now a predictable routine), the vivid images of emaciated Hutu refugees passed before us unnoticed by the throngs of Holocaust Day participants, unmentionned by "concerned" guest speakers. The faces of the deliberately starved Hutus, the maimed bodies hacked by machetes are there for us to see and...? To ignore? To forget? To push aside? To do what? Something? Nothing? To mention piously in passing? To place on the back burner? Why not the front burner? Why not howl in anguish? Why not heed the only message of the Six Million: "Do Something!" "Help them!" "Do not abandon them as we were!"
Two years ago, as the tide of the Hutu-driven genocidal civil war against the Tutsis in Rwanda turned, close to a million Rwandan Hutu civilians (as well as armed Hutu genocidists) sought refuge from Tutsi revenge in the dense forests of east Zaire. Over the course of more than twenty-four months, these hostage-refugees became the victims of a Kafkaesque tragedy, in full view of the international community, of non-Jews and Jews.
First and foremost, the hundreds of thousands of Hutu old,and young women with their children served as a shield for tens of thousands of armed Hutu men, most of whom were implicated in the killing of Tutsis. For months, they ruled over the refugee camps and allocated most of the humanitarian supplies to themselves at the expense of the powerless civilian majority. Their brutal rule led to countless deaths and continued to the very recent past when they were forced to sever their connections with the surviving refugees who were about to be flown back home to Rwanda, where the Tutsi authorities are ready to arrest and try them for genocidal crimes.
Secondly, the Hutu refugees became the targets of the pro-Tutsi rebels fighting to overthrow the government of President Mobutu Sese Seko. The pro-Tutsi rebel forces relentlessly attacked the Hutu refugee camps around Kisangani, determinably forcing the Hutus westward, deeper into the jungle and further from their homes in Rwanda. The intention was to place them beyond the reach of humanitarian help. In most cases, the non-governmental agencies were unable to locate the Hutu refugees hiding in the dense forests. The overall strategy (seemingly backed by the rebel leader Laurent Kabila) was to distance them from Rwanda, so that their return was virtually impossible and survival in the equatorial forests equally so.
Thirdly, when the struggling survivors, fewer than a hundred thousand, reached the Congo river, they found themselves in a no-mans' land, trapped between undisciplined, looting Zairian government forces and killer rebel troops. Those that managed to cross the wide river were forced to give up their weapons and leave behind all possessions. Across the river, the newly-installed rebel regime forced the surviving Hutus into open spaces, referred to as "camps," where clean water was non-existent and food less than sufficient. Non-governmental-organizations were overtly obstructed, often by force. Meanwhile, the Hutu refugees were dying at a rate of one hundred each day. Their only "crime": being Hutu.
More recently (May 1997), corroborated reports have uncovered indiscriminate slaughter of the Hutu refugees by soldiers of the rebel army, whose leadership has refused to condemn these murderous acts. Finally, a decision was made to repatriate the remaining survivors now less than 70,000 to Rwanda. Their condition was such that another half was expected to die from disease and malnutrition, for little sustenance awaits them in Rwanda, only a hostile, vengeful Tutsi-controlled regime. The first shipment, in freight cars, led to 91 deaths before arriving at the airport in Zaire.
And so to the numbers: let us assume it was somewhat less than a million Hutus who originally escaped Rwanda let us say conservatively 750,000; there were, by May 1997 only around 70,000 still alive, a 90% attrition rate, about the same percentage as that suffered by Polish Jewry in twice the time. Notice: no gas chambers, no machine-guns: "just" machetes, rifles and artificial starvation. Let us keep in mind: the entire via dolorosa of the Hutus through Zaire's forests was reported on a daily basis and photographically recorded by the mass media, day after day. As were the raw statistics which could be plotted like a falling chart of stock prices. All who cared to know were aware of the shrinking numbers as the Hutu refugees fell victim to a multi-pronged war of extirpation, of merciless annihilation, denied by no one, not even by the killers themselves. No cover-up here! although the new ruler of Zaire (now Republic of Congo) has so far resolutely refused any international investigation of the deaths of the Hutus.
So what were the Holocaust and other-genocide scholars waiting for? For consummation of this genocidal incident? Was the goal to wait until there were none alive, until the deed was done and the Hutu tragedy became history? When it could be subjected to rigorous scholarly investigation, analysis, and, of course, reproach? What is at work here? Why are the screams of the mute images not being heard? Where is an Elie Wiesel, one more concerned with Bitburg cemeteries, with crosses in Auschwitz, and with interviewing Jesse Jackson on Public Television?
It is even too late to send a team of Steven Spielberg's interviewers to record the experiences of hundreds of repatriated Hutu refugees, to record their brush with ethnogenocide which failed to shake the conscience of the world in time. When, in early May, the US representative to the UN finally visited a Hutu refugee "camp" in east Zaire, all he could say was "horrible" when he touched a baby that literally died before his eyes. Yes, "horrible"; but the words came post-facto, post-mortem! And now there are virtually no survivors, only the dead, of interest only to historians of genocide, who, no doubt will devotedly write about this genocidal episode, even as another unfolds, not to be stopped, but watched till it, too, enters history.
A final comment: In May 1997, three years after 1994, when the tragic odyssey of the Hutu refugees began, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum finally invited the UN High Commissioner of Refugees S. Oguta to speak. What took the venerable institution's bureaucrats three years to react?
Henry R. Huttenbach
Allianz's First Trial
In a sense it's ironic that the Munich-based Allianz A.G. insurance group has been included among companies targeted in a lawsuit filed last April in Manhattan's United States District Court by families of Holocaust victims. Not that Allianz denies it wrote policies on the lives of victims or that the Nazi regime did not expropriate proceeds. But an Allianz senior executive among very few big business leaders in the Third Reich to do so opposed the regime' s leaders on a basic issue of integrity involving Jews, in 1938.
On November 7 of that year, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Jewish youth, mortally wounded German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, in Paris. The incident provided Berlin with an excuse to launch a countrywide pogrom on November 11 that came to be known as the Crystal Night, owing to thousands of smashed windows whose shards littered sidewalks and streets.
Within hours, Hermann Goering presided at a conference of Nazi leaders, including Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich, to which Eduard Hilgard, on the Vorstand (Board) of Allianz since 1921, had also been invited. Goering reported receiving a letter "written on the Führer's instructions," from Martin Bormann, "asking that the Jewish question should now be coordinated and settled once and for all, one way or another. Yesterday, in a telephone call, the Führer reiterated that I was to coordinate the decisive steps."
The more immediate issue, however, was how to save insurance companies from having to pay an estimated RM1 billion in damage claims to Jews whose property had been vandalized during the Crystal Night. Hilgard was to present the insurance industry's views. As with all of Goering's meetings a stenographer took notes, which became Nuremburg War Crimes Document PS-1816.
Goering explained to Hilgard that the "legitimate rage" of Germans had caused "a certain amount of damage throughout the Reich." Hilgard promptly upset Goering and the others with news that RM 14 million in replacement glass, manufactured in Belgium, would have to be paid for with foreign exchange. When he added that Jews could rightly claim losses, he staggered the assembled group.
Pressing his position, Hilgard asked how one could speak of "legitimate rage," given open looting of domiciles and businesses. For example, thanks to a blanket policy, a Jewish jeweler on the Unter den Linden had applied for RM 1 7 million in damages. His enterprise had been completely wrecked.
Shocked on hearing of the extent of thefts and vandalism, Goering called for an "enormous roundup" to find loot. Kurt Daluege, chief of the Ordnungspolizei (Order police), advised that he had already issued orders to check Aryans "around the clock." Heydrich offered that there had been some 800 confirmed cases of theft and lamented that in Berlin, on the Friedrichstrasse, "crowds naturally (sic) rushed to pick up mink and skunk furs, and so on."
Hilgard warned that if insurance companies did not pay on claims by Jews, non-Jews might lose confidence that their claims would be paid. To reassure him, Goering responded that the Reich would confiscate recovered property. But Hilgard stood fast. He had come to the conference, in part, to represent "honorable Jewish businessmen." How could it be that those who had regularly paid premiums might not recover anything?
Furthermore, he asked, of what use would it be to insurance companies if the Reich confiscated stolen property? In the end, not only would companies still have to make good on claims, all chance of profits for the year would be wiped out. "That is so, and it stays so," insisted Hilgard, "Nobody can tell me different." "Then you should see to it that fewer windows get smashed," Goering shot back.
Dismissing Hilgard, Goering asked, "Do you think, gentlemen, that I can announce today that the Jews will have to pay a billion-mark fine [for the Crystal Night damage]?" Receiving a unanimous and affirmative response, Goering advised that he would issue a decree announcing that "German Jews are to be fined one billion marks for their nefarious crime."
Today, Hollywood celebrates Oskar Schindler, an opportunist whose motives for saving Jews will always be suspect. But few have brought to public attention Germans such as Hilgard, who, in a room full of Nazis that included some of the worst war criminals in history, made statements at risk of possible arrest by the Gestapo.
True, Hilgard could not, or did not, prevent the regime from ultimately using his company to confiscate victims' death benefits. But it should be recognized that opposition to evil also occurs when someone simply puts principle ahead of greed. Must such opposition always be expressed in grandiose terms of "Righteous Persons" who may not have been so righteous, after all?
Milton Goldin
A Reply
Dear Editor:
Having read Henry Huttenbach's comments on my The Holocaust in Historical Context (Oxford U. P., 1997) one must conclude that the comments he makes and the arguments he attributes to me have no relation to the book I wrote.
Space forbids to elaborate a reply so I will briefly respond point by point.
1) Huttenbach suggests I present the historical cases discussed by me as "if [I] had uncovered them [my]self." This is an absurd charge given the lengthy annotations he also complains about. In every case I acknowledge all the work done on these cases by prior Holocaust and other scholars. For example, in my discussion of the links between Christian and Nazi antisemitism I have an 8 page section on "The Scholarly State of the Question," pp. 227-235 in which I discuss the most important prior work on this issue mentioning in the main text by name Poliakov, Reitlinger, Dawidowicz, Bauer, Levin, Maccoby and Hilberg, and many others in the accompanying footnotes. In the notes to other chapters (which Huttenbach describes as "overly annotated") I do much the same for every subject discussed. I challenge Huttenbach to cite one major scholarly work on any of the cases I deal with that I do not mention. To misrepresent my treatment of the work of other scholars as Huttenbach does in the face of the incontrovertible evidence is a remarkable thing.
2) The logical fallacy Huttenbach attributes to me is totally his creation. He cites no text of mine to make his argument. I challenge him to do so. The fact is he is just fabricating here.
3) As a note of historical interest: I did not begin my research with "a belief in the 'uniqueness' of the Holocaust even before [I] began [my] research." In fact the reverse. The work started as a lecture at Notre Dame in the early 1 980s as an effort to show that the Holocaust was not unique. The evidence I discovered in the course of my research forced me to change my view.
4) Huttenbach has not read my book. He writes: "The inherent lack of logic stems from the concept 'unique': uniqueness lacks specific criteria. Hence, anything can be dubbed unique." (p. 2). But I wrote 5 specific and detailed pages presenting a view exactly opposite to that Huttenbach attributes to me on exactly how I use the term "uniqueness": In the section headed "A Definition of Phenomenological Uniqueness" (THHC, p. 58)1 began my analysis as follows:
Is the Shoah unique? To answer this question we have, of necessity, to specify in what particular sense we are using the notions "unique" and "uniqueness". That is, we have to delineate the conditions of "unique" and "uniqueness" Ø is unique in respect of conditions A, B, C,...X. As already indicated my individuating criteria conditions A, B, C,...X will not include moral or transcendental criteria. (THHC, p. 58)
I then went on to deal with various possible uses of the term "unique" and concluded by arguing that insofar as I was using the term I intended to individuate the concept of uniqueness by relating it to the concept of "intentionality." I wrote: "The Holocaust is phenomenologically unique by virtue of the fact that never before has a state set out, as a matter of principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman and child belonging to a specific people...the Holocaust would not be the Holocaust if the property of 'intentionally pursuing the physical annihilation of a people without remainder' were not present." (THHC, p. 58).
The view that Huttenbach has attributed to me is simply ignorant as regards my position.
This is a clear and shameful dishonest case of criticizing a book without having paid attention to what it explicitly says. If anyone holds a priori views in this context it is Huttenbach. Moreover, ch. 2 of my work is taken up with showing how the Holocaust is not unique in many ways.
5) The criticism of my view in the paragraph of Huttenbach's that reads:
Philosophically, the idea of uniqueness is a technical term employed only by art historians, critics, and occasional art connoisseurs. For them, uniqueness is an attribute of aesthetics, signifying primarily originality, namely, creative innovation. Applied to historic events, however, the appellation "unique" means little unless used, incorrectly, as a substitute for "unprecedented," a temporary status valid only until a aufficiently similar event occurs, somewhat like a world sport's record that waits to be surpassed
again shows he did not read my book. For I wrote:
Alternatively, when I identify the Holocaust as unique I do not intend to suggest that it is, in principle, unrepeatable. Aside from the philosophical issues arising from premise 6 as to the changing spatio-temporal context of events, it is certainly possible that a Nazi-like terror could be repeated. An uncompromising, biologically defined, genocidal assault against a new victimpeople or victimgroup, even against the Jewish people (in a nightmarish repetition) is neither difficult nor impossible to envision. Having happened, it can happen again. Here I am in full agreement with Yehuda Bauer's apposite remark, "Events happen because they are possible. If they are possible once, they are possible again. In that sense the Holocaust is not unique, but a warning for the future." (THHC, pp. 5455)
6) Rather than "squeezing the Holocaust out of history" and treating the Holocaust as a "meta-historic" event, my work, if Huttenbach had only read it, does the very opposite. Moreover, I forcefully criticize those who would "squeeze the Holocaust out of history" (See THHC, pp. 4251). What I argue for on pp. 2526 is this:
Before concluding these introductory comments, it will prove valuable to consider briefly but directly the plea for the "historicization of the holocaust" made by Martin Broszat and others. Like Broszat I accept the sensible argument that the Holocaust must be open to historical investigation. However, contra the conventional wisdom on this subject (i.e., in opposition to the false dichotomy championed by Broszat and others between historicization and uniqueness), it is my intention to establish the uniqueness of the Shoah precisely by historicizing it. This, in fact, is the cardinal objective of the extensive comparative historical exploration undertaken in volumes 1 and 2 of this study.
And having announced this program the remainder of the volume is taken up with historical details. (Not one of which Huttenbach mentions. He appears to agree that I am correct and that none of the cases regularly cited in this discussion are cases of genocide!!)
In sum, Huttenbach has indulged his fantasies without regard to acceptable moral or academic norms of behavior, by publishing a totally inaccurate criticism of my work in his own vanity press. In contradistinction to his ad hominem argument, "Katz is not trained as a historian," Huttenbach offers not one single historical bit of evidence to disprove my argument. What he does provide is unsubstantiated, undocumented, misrepresentations and falsehoods as documented page by page above all in the cause of his a priori prejudice on the issue of uniqueness. This I suppose is what he means when he refers to himself as someone "sensitive to rigorous methodology." What a sad joke Huttenbach's misguided comments are. In a publication entitled the Genocide Forum one would expect precision, accuracy, care for details and a passion for truth. None of these are present in Huttenbach's comments. He would have made a good editor of Der Stürmer.
Sincerely,
Steven T. Katz
Boston University
Huttenbach responds:
Angered authors among them now Professor Steven Katz are what reviewers must learn to suffer, especially if the dialogue becomes personal. Half a dozen ad hominems aside (including the intemperate final sentence)*, Professor Katz's reply relies heavily on a common tactic resorted to by bruised authors whose books have been subjected to serious criticism, namely, the convenient accusation that the reviewer "has not read my book." To which this reviewer responds that he stands by his original assessment and calls on readers to read his book and arrive at their own conclusions. What is surprising is that the review in question is not out of step with several reviews, which, however, did not incur the same level of displeasure and wrath.
With some puzzlement we take umbrage at Professor Katz's depiction of The Genocide Forum as a "vanity press." The publication of his entire ** article should put that to rest, a publication he originally admiringly asked to have sent to him (presumably for its merits). We can only hope he will remain a reader and occasionally contribute to the exchanges of views on difficult issues for which this publication seeks to be an open forum.
* It is doubtful the editor of Der Stürmer would have granted Professor Katz equal time.
** It has been editorial policy to omit any derogatory statements of a personal nature. However, upon the insistence of Professor Katz, and repeated reminders from his secretary and wife, it was his wish that the entire text be printed. We therefore honored that request, though not without some second thoughts.
Henry R. Huttenbach
The Word "Holocaust": A Short Exploration of Usage
A widespread assumption within Holocaust Studies is that the word "holocaust" became part of the English language as a referent for mass killing only after World War II, and further that "holocaust" originally referred only to the organized German mass murder of Jews. (A writer in The Genocide Forum recently stated that the "term" was "coined by Elie Wiesel." )
Well before World War II, "holocaust" meant, along with other meanings, "a mass killing". For example, "Louis VII ... once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church." (L. Richie in 1833, Oxford Unabridged Dictionary). And Henry Morgenthau in a letter to his son in 1915 referred to the mass killings of Armenians as a "holocaust". (Private communication from Hilary Earl who cited the Gaer File; Father to Son Letters, 1887-1915, The Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Collection, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY )
By the end of 1942 "holocaust" in the sense of "a mass killing" was being used to refer to German mass murder of civilians both Jews and non-Jews. The British Ministry of Information in 1942 referred to a "holocaust of Catholics." (Walter Laqueur, "Hitler's Holocaust" in Encounter, July 1980, Vol LV, No 1, p. 20.) And Chaim Weizmann wrote: "... perhaps a better day will come for those who will survive this holocaust." (C. Weizmann, Dec 24, 1942. Letter #360 in Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann. I quote from A. Berman, Nazism, the Jews ... p. 103.) In September 1944 Morris Cohen wrote: "Millions of surviving victims of the Nazi holocaust, Jews and non-Jews, will stand before us ..." (Morris R. Cohen in S. Goldschmidt's Legal Claims against Germany, p. vi.)
Since the end of World War II the word "holocaust" has been used primarily to refer to German killings of non-combatants during the war period killings "informed" by a plan to radically reorder the "races" of Europe. Generally when referring to the German killings, the word in current usage is capitalized. Some use the word to refer exclusively to the Shoah. Others use the word "holocaust" "in describing the annihilation of other [Gentile] groups of people in World War II" (Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 681). And still others use the word to refer to both the German genocide of Jews and to the German mass killings / genocides of non-Jews. Precedents for all three uses predate 1945.
Jonathan Petrie
God After the Holocaust
Charles Fishman
is not dead, as we were taught, but
disconnected: a phone placed securely
on its hook, and the hook the phone
itself melting back to absence, the outline
of the machine dimly lingering in the dark.
The dark is the end of history that will not
leave us, will not even cease speaking
to us its full quota of loss...
They did not go as sheep but as vulnerable
men and women, as children, as babies yet
to be born: all their dazed love for each other
worked inexorably against them. They did not go
as sheep, for the sheperd himself had wandered
into a dark into a dark so deep no light, no light,
could save him.