About the Genocide Forum

A Platform for post-Holocaust Commentary

  1. Comments on Forgotten Genocide
  2. Shrinking Hitler
  3. From Kristallnacht to Rwanda's: Night of the Long Knives
  4. Kissinger's Misunderstanding of the Holocaust
  5. What Good are Monuments?
  6. When Books are Fake: Who is Responsible?

March 1999
Year 5, No. 4

Bonnie Falchuk: Managing Editor
Carol Rittner: Associate Editor
Henry R. Huttenbach: Founder- Editor
Sandrine Dikambi: Assistant Editor

Comments on Forgotten Genocide

In his 1981 book on genocide Leo Kuper described the Armenian genocide in Turkey as "the 'forgotten genocide' of the twentieth century" (p. 105). It is suggested here that the Armenian genocide is no longer forgotten, while the phrase could be applied more appropriately to the Ustasha genocide of Serbs, Jews and Romani in the fascist "Independent State of Croatia" (1941-45). Considering that Kuper published his treatise on genocide seventeen years ago, and taking into account numerous scholarly works that have since been published on the Armenian genocide, we can only conclude that this prototype of modern, ideologically motivated genocide is now far from forgotten. This is particularly so in view of active Armenian communities in North America and Europe which systematically maintain the memories of their ancestors' tragedy.

It is not suggested here that one genocide is more important, more horrifying than another. Rather, we are simply considering the facts which reflect a striking discrepancy in the number of publications on Armenian and on Serbian victimizations. Considering that the Ustasha genocide was the second largest after the Holocaust at the time of World War II, it is puzzling, and perhaps inconceivable, that the leading collected readings on genocide (widely used for university courses) do not include an article on this particular case in recent European history.1 For purposes of illustration we cite the best and most popular volumes, such as Wallimann, Isidor and Michael N. Dobkowski (eds.), Genocide and the Modern Age, New York, Greenwood Press, 1987; Chalk, Frank and Kurt Jonassohn: The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990; and Totten, Samuel, William S. Parsons, and Israel Charny W. (eds.), Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views, New York and London, Gerland Publishing Inc., 1997.  To this should be added that Helen Fein in her major work on genocide devoted a section on the genocide of Serbs in Croatia (Accounting for Genocide, 1979, pp. 102-105), using the expression "Holocaust of the Orthodox Serbs of Croatia." In contrast, Kuper wrote one paragraph in his book (p.89), compared to a whole chapter on the Armenian genocide.

On the other hand there are the recent volumes by Michael Berenbaum (ed.), A Mosaic of Victims (1990) that contains Manachem Shelah's short article "Genocide in Satellite Croatia..." (pp. 74-79), and Locke, Hubert G. and Marcia Sachs Littell (eds.), Holocaust and Church Struggle (1996) that includes this writer's article, "Victims and Perpetrators in the Yugoslav Genocide, 1941-1945." However, these are not widely used as readers.

It is therefore necessary to raise the question how and why it is possible that the genocide — for which Fein used the term "holocaust", and Sava Bosnitch, voicing the view of the Serbs, said that "To Serbs the Ustasha genocide was what the Holocaust was to Jews across Europe" (The South Slav Journal, No. 1-2, 1997, pp. 109-110) — is largely neglected by genocide scholars?

One can only speculate why: it is undeniably a clear case of genocide (it was aimed at the physical extermination of an ethnic group) but has been passed over in silence, ignored by genocide scholars almost to the point of denial. One possible answer is a lack of interest in the history of the Balkans.  But this is not a convincing explanation. Another factor is a lack of knowledge of history, culture and language of the Yugoslav peoples in general. This is a more plausible answer. Another one is that it is not politically correct to dwell on the genocide of the Serbs in Croatia, especially at this time when Serbs are widely demonized, and Croatia might be needed as an important strategic Balkan foothold in the future: after all, Croatia controls much of the eastern Adriatic coast.

Another dimension to the problem of Ustasha genocide as a forgotten genocide was added by Robert M. Hayden, who pointed to two things when comparing the 1990s attrocites (perpetrated by the Serb nationalists) with those of the Germans in the 1940s. 1) It helps to absolve international media and political leaders in the West of their responsibility for provoking the Yugoslav disaster; and 2) it facilitates forgetting the Serbian victims of the Ustasha genocide.2  Hayden concludes that, precisely because of the 1991-92 Serbian atrocities (against Croats and Muslims), the Serb victims of the 1940s, "once honored dead, will be forgotten" (p. 182). Moreover, the Serb victims of the 1940s have now been officially forgotten, says Hayden, by the U.S. government's invitation to Croatian President Franjo Tudjman to attend the opening of the United States/Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1993. (Ibid.). Not incidentally, Tudjman has acquired the reputation of persistently downplaying the significance of both the Holocaust and the Ustasha genocide.

Damir Mirkovic (Brandon University)

  1. Although the precise number of victims of the Ustasha genocide is not known, the most authoritative sources give an estimate of a half million for all victimized groups (Serbs, Jews, Romani), while Serb losses are in the neighborhood of 400,000. Since this figure includes all casualties in the Ustasha Croatia, the number of genocide victims is undoubtedly smaller. This estimate has just recently been corroborated by Dr. Bogoljub Kocovic, a Serbian author of the 1985 statistical study Casualties of the Second World War in Yugoslavia (London, 1985 - in Serbian), who gave an interview to Croatian press National, May 20, 1998, pp. 23-25). Relying on Kocovic's study in my article in HGS, No. 3, 1993, I have arrived at the same approximate totals.
  2. See more on this point in Robert M. Hayden: "Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovering and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia" in Rubie S. Watson (ed.): Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism, Santa Fe, New Mexico, School of American Research Press, 1994, pp. 167-201.

 

Shrinking Hitler

Certainly in twentieth century European history, Hitler ranks with the top two or three political leaders as the most puzzling and daunting to understand and explain; the others are Mao Tse-tung and Joseph Stalin.  All were responsible for causing millions of deaths in the name of a radical ideology and unlimited political ambition.  Were these acts of genius or OF madmen?

Already before his death, Hitler had caused one to wonder as to his mental balance.  In the middle of World War II the United States Government's Office of Strategic Service commissioned a study of Hitler in the hopes of uncovering a psychological flaw with which to overthrow the Führer of the Third Reich.  Since then, numerous posthumous attempts have been made to unravel the mystery of Hitler's psyche.  The problem rested on the false but understandable premise that someone who can perpetrate so much suffering on countless inncoent people must himself be suffering some form of mental, or at least physical, disorder.  Few were willing to acknowledge the disturbing  counter premise that Hitler — the man who left Europe in ruins, the practitioner of genocide — need not necessarily be afflicted by diseases, whether emotional or physiological.

This has led to a considerable literature investigating Hitler's "dark side."  The search for the origin's of Hitler's pathologies — that is, his unprecedented wielding of destructive, near-absolute power — led to many unsatisfactory answers, most of them highly speculative.  The most recent attempt is by Fritz Redlich; professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurology, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (Oxford University Press).  The study is a sober approach to problems posed by one in quest of the sources of Hitler's behavior.  Refreshingly, Redlich concludes that despite of what is known of Hitler's mental and physical condition, the man's immensely cruel actions cannot be simply and simplistically ascribed to his many serious physical ailments and stultifying emotional condition.  On the contrary, Redlich finds Hitler very much accountable for his actions, laying to rest a whole corpus of Hitler "shrinking," including Hitler the drug addict, the sexually dysfunctional, the obsessed antisemite to the point of blinding rage, and Hitler fixated on his imagined father's Jewish connections.  In fact, Redlich decides, there is not nearly enough evidence to support the primacy of any or all these factors, allowing us to return to more secure ground — the extant record — that Hitler was essentially an evil man who consciosuly and willfully did evil things, an evil that is by now all too well known.  To find Hitler not in possession of his moral faculties is to encourage exculpative excuses for his crimes, thereby rendering him less responsible.  That would be a major step towards Holocaust revisionism.  A truly mad Hitler would be unaccountable for his crimes.

Psycho-vocabulary is a temptation.  Throughout the 70s and 80s it was very much in vogue but has since declined as a useful tool to shed light on historical personalities.  At a recent conference in Brussels, I raised the question of abandoning this terminology for it largely served as a deus ex machina, a convenient way out of a difficulty.  Surprisingly there were still a few vocal proponents of the school favoring continuation of what to most historian now sounds more like psycho-babble than bona fide analytic discourse about the character make up of the perpetrators of genocide in the Third Reich.  Naturally we all want satisfactory answers to our central questions; at the same time we must be prepared to accept the fact that all queries cannot be completely answered despite our insistence.  The temptation to revert to simplistic explanations must be kept under constant control or else one must pay the consequences, deformed history, history deformed by irresponsible speculation then raised to "respectable" theories worthy of repetition despite their uncorroborated "factualness."  It tells us much more about the Holocaust to focus in massive detail on what Hitler did than on why he did it based on slim, indirect, and unreliable information.  Hitler will continue to fascinate many generations to come.  However, we must be sure to leave them a solid base upon which to base their educated opinions.  Redlich successfully contributed towards that end.

For further edification on this disturbing subject, the reader is urged to read Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler (Random House, NY, 1998).

Henry R. Huttennbach

From Kristallnacht to Rwanda's Night of the Long Knives

In the night of November 9-10, 1938, the National Socialist government of Germany unleashed a state-condoned and planned assault on the country's Jewish population and its property.  One of the prime purposes of the violence was to give the impression that it was a grass-roots movements, a spontaneous expression of wide, popular consensus.  Though it failed, the architects of the Final Solution always tried to convey the impression that their then program of mass expulsion (if not extermination) had the full backing (if not active participation) of most Germans, even though the actual killings were carried out in the strictest secrecy.

Nearly sixty years later, far from Germany, in the heart of the African continent, what the Nazis failed to attain came about.  In Rwanda, the Hutu dominated government was not only able to plan an extermination of the Tutsi minority but gain the active cooperation in the killings from a large cross-section of Rwandan society, from academics, priests, and mayors to ordinary folks.

If one is determined on pinning the soubriquet "unique" onto each genocidal instance, then Rwanda's plan to annihilate its Tutsi citizens earns its stripes for the extraordinary, indeed unprecedented, willingness on the part of the Hutu majority enthusiastically to join their government in the mass slaughter of an ethnic minority.  Throughout the weeks of the massacre, thousands of machete-armed Hutu civilian volunteers joined in murdering their Tutsi neighbors and their Hutu sympathizers.  This is the first significant insight that comes out of the on-going post-genocide investigations and trials.  It is also a major theme in Philip Gourevitch's book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow we will be Killed (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

What Daniel Goldhagen wanted — against the evidence — to prove for the Holocaust, namely to implicate most Germans for playing an overt role in the Final Solution, came true in Rwanda.  Here indeed, beneath the veneer of calm everyday life, lurked a lethal, grass-roots ethno-hatred that the Rwandan leadership was skillfully able to unleash and direct far beyond its expectations.  Here indeed is an example of true collective culpability for carrying out a genocidal crime.  Here, unambiguously, is an opportunity for scholars to probe the phenomenon of zealous citizen participation in a state-initiated genocide.  Witnesses, the accused, and the indicted are available for in-depth interviews.  Court records are open for examination.  How long will it take the community of scholars to seize this opportunity to solve the puzzle of this frightening phenomenon of mass citizen collaboration in genocide?

It is not just a matter of answering an academic question.  It is an issue of coming to grips with the future.  There can be little doubt that there will be future Rwanda's.  One can be equally certain that, under certain circumstances, the rise of large-scale citizen "fighters" for the cause of monoethnicism will repeat itself unless some preventive steps are taken.  But first we need to understand the why and how of the Rwandan tragedy.  There was, of course, as Gourevitch points out, significant pressure from above on the Hutu citizens to join forces with the government's murderous campaign; nevertheless, there were all too many examples of killers self-motivated by long-harbored grievances, prejudices and racial stereotypes. 

The more we become aware of the mechanics of this sub-stratum of animosity, the closer we might come to understanding and anticipating this eruption of mass hatred.  One question is: when is there a critical degree of animus that leads to popular genocide?  After all, every society has its deep-seated prejudices; all groups nurture profound emotions against "the Other."  Does that mean all populations are potential collaborators in genocide?  Or only some?  If so, how do we distinguish ahead of time between the two?  Or are they indistinguishable prior to the event?

Henry R. Huttenbach

Kissinger's Misunderstanding of the Holocaust.

When Henry A. Kissinger, the one-time Secretary of State in the Nixon administration and former security advisor to the same president, speaks the media tend to listen, and millions are forced to pay attention.  Two decades after Kissinger left government his is still an influential voice in matters international.  No one questions his extraordinary insights into world affairs, especially diplomacy.  His books, both the autobiographical/apologetic and the more-or-less academic/historical are testimony to his shrewd understanding of global complexities of wielding power in an ever shifting world.

Nevertheless, Kissinger has no monopoly of analysis, especially about the past: he is not a flawless historian and ought not to abuse his stature by making off-the-cuff pronouncements about matters of importance he has not seriously studied, as was the case recently in Berlin on November 12.

The occasion was the opening of the American Academy, an institution designed to further German-American relations in the post-cold war era.  Ever aware of the diplomatic import of his speeches, Kissinger relegated the Third Reich outside the normal flow of events.  Instead, Kissinger categorized it and its primary act — the Final Solution — as an "aberration."  That is to say, the twelve year 1000 Year Reich stands outside of "normal" German history.  In other words, the "natural" evolution of Germany — its society, culture andpolitics — conveniently leapfrogs over 1933 and resumes in 1945 as if it had been brutally interrupted by an exceptional "abnormality" — the rule of the National Socialist Party.  This implies that Nazism had few German roots but was, rather, an alien insertion into the German body politic.  Neither the German past nor its future are, from this point of view, intimately related to the criminal tragedy that was the Holocaust.

In a few sentences, Kissinger played into the hands of those wishing to "normalize" Germany, by putting the Holocaust in its "proper" place and allowing the younger and next generations to function with no sense of guilt and/or continuing responsibility for preserving the memory of darker days.  Kissinger — himself a refugee from Nazi Germany — thereby hands over the formula for "disengagement," letting the recent past conveniently slip into the distant past, as if to echoe the call for "enough is enoguh" so prevalent in some German quarters.  For bestowing this generous gesture, Kissinger has neither the imprimatur, authority, nor expertise.  No one has given him permission to make such a pronouncement in public; nor has he the status of someone who may assume the role of spokesman to speak on anyone's behalf; nor, indeed, does Kissinger have the academic qualifications as a Holocaust and German expert to come to the conclusion he so cavalierly announced before a distinguished and influential audience.  His claim of "aberration" was made, seemingly, ex cathedra; there was no room for debate or discussion.  It was said in a hortatory manner suggestive of an unquestionable truth.

Fortunately, the days of the claim of "aberration" are long gone, buried under hundreds of scholarly investigations to the contrary.  Had Kissinger taken the trouble to consult the academic literature he would have known the overwhelming negative opinion about this long discredited contention that Nazi Germany came from nowhere specific, forgetting the old adage, ex nihilo nihil.  Yet the Nazi anti-democratic, racist doctrine did come from somewhere, specifically from within Germany's past: reams of articles and bookshelves of monographs have demonstrated this well beyond reasonable intellectual doubt.  To go against this stream of academic consensus is tantamount to the phenomenon of Holocaust Denial, the unsubstantiated rejection of the Holocaust as history.  Irresponsibly and indiscriminately to divorce Nazi Germany from the rest of German social, cultural and political history as Kissinger does locates him — despite his supposed good intentions — into the orbit of those who deliberately mutilate the demonstrable past.

Henry Huttenbach

What Good Are Monuments?

One segment of humanity seeks to forget, the other to remember.  And why or why not is not necessarily clear.  On the one hand there is a human reflex that seeks to commemorate triumphs — victories, heroes, accomplishments; on the other there is an equally powerful drive to memorialize defeat — to remind one of oppression, humiliation and martyrs.  While the English still celebrate the 1815 Battle of Waterloo which vanquished Emperor Napoleon, so do they remember a far older military loss — the Battle of Hastings — marking William the Conqueror's invasion and occupation in 1066; not to mention Serbian's annual mourning of their defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks at the battle of Kosovo in 1389. The landscape of Europe and, increasingly of the United States, is pock-marked with a plague of plaques, statuary and abstract monuments in the name of both villains and heroes, presumably at the service of memory.  But do they fulfill that function, of rescuing the past from a forgetful future?

There is here an interesting dynamic at work.  Once an event has been given commemorative form, the urgency to remember seems to diminish, as if one expected the plaque and its names or the memorial with its symbolism will lighten the burden of those charged with the responsibility of remembrance.  That may not be entirely true with the contemporary generation that erects the structures, but it certainly is so for the generations that follow.  It cannot be otherwise.  Replicas and symbols do not necessarily speak to all, let alone to all subsequent generations, unless their memories are jarred by something other than plaques and monuments.  Eventually, people pass them by, unseeing and unmoved by these mute testaments to a past once thought deserving of remembrance.

In that respect there is no substitute for ritual and education to rekindle memory, but these, too, pose their own dangers.  Ritual can quickly descend into empty formalism while remembrance unavoidably falls victim to sterile repetition which ultimately numbs the memory of that which ritual is supposed to quicken.  Similarly, structured, obligatory learning has a way of alienating the young mind.  What we are force-fed or "encouraged" to learn tends to be the first that the young mind ejects and looks upon with skepticism and even suspicion.

So what is the answer to the problem of keeping alive the memory of a genocide?  Should one preserve "key" sites associated with the tragedy, as a permanent reminder to all visitors?  Should one erect commemorative structures on those places to underscore their significance?  Should regular visitations (by schools) be encouraged and should "special" days be written into the calendar to reinforce collective memory?  Should a quasi-religious liturgy be adopted to add spirituality to the act of remembrance?

There are no definitive answers to these questions, for they are less questions to a problem than a poignant plea by those who fear loss — the loss of memory — as time irrevocably pushes genocide into the past.  The challenge is to weave the thread of a past genocide into the tapestry of history and assure it its proper place before it is lost beyond retrieval.  Those who mourn today need consolation; plaques and monuments are an integral part of that process of collective mourning and remembering.  History, however, may not be well served by these acts of respect for the tragedy and for its victims; but the needs of the present are, however imperfectly.  In the end, the monumentalia of genocide is a greater comfort to the gnawing suffering of the living, of those who survived saddled with the pain of memory, than it is a solace to the dead victims who remain mute and can only speak through the living, the survivors and non-survivors alike.  [Readers might find it useful to read James E. Young's The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (Yale University Press, 1993.]

And then there is always the danger of Kitsch.  The latest owner of the famed Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, in order to attract new clients, plans to include multi-media programs.  For the friends and relatives of Holocaust survivors buried in the cemetery, for example, there will be a computer designed presentation to help set the "right" mood of the mourning visitors.  On a more massive scale there is the German plan for a gargantuan Holocaust monument in the center of Berlin in the form of a multi-acred field with huge stone tablets symbolizing a giant cemetery.  Talk about bludgeoning the visitors to REMEMBER or else!

Henry R. Huttenbach

When Books are Fake: Who is Responsible?

A few years back, the scandal over Hitler's "Diaries" hit the international press.  Much money was involved and a prominent English historian lost much of his credibility when he declared the forgeries to be genuine.  Luckily, not much serious damage was done, and the whole affair, if recollected, now brings on embarrassed smiles and snickers, little more.  And yet it does remain a serious incident, a warning to all to be extra cautious, especially when dealing with things Holocaust and genocide in general.

In early November 1998 it was reported that the childhood account of one Benjamin Wilkormirski was under severe suspicion.  It turns out the Fragments recalled by Wilkormirski of his incarceration did not square with documents on his early years.  In itself, though disappointing and irritating, there is nothing new here: publishers have occasionally had to contend with one or two of their authors' veracity; it comes with the territory.  Healthy skepticism should be the operating motto.  But there is another issue here, namely, accountability.

Most troubling is that Wilkormirski and his book were loudly praised and generously awarded honors, forcing one to ask: how was this possible?  Did noone at the Jewish Book Council and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum express any doubt and raise a warning signal?  Attempts to obtain an answer and/or an explanation are deftly fended off and/or ignored.  But that is not good enough.

Is noone to be held accountable?  Who made the decisions to hold this book up for all to see (and buy!)  The Memorial Museum sent the author on a fund-raising safari to half a dozen cities; the book was enthusiastically hailed and awarded the English Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize, the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah in France, and the US based National Jewish Book Award.  How qualified were the members on the selection committees?  How aggressively did they investigate?  What criteria for authenticity did they apply?

Since in these pages the focus has occasionally been on the D.C. Museum, this is an invitation to someone there to answer publicly these and related questions (not charges).  The Genocide Forum will be glad to open its pages to a reasonable accounting.  After all, readers have a right to more than silence and "no comment".  This is not just a matter of an innocent error but of an egregious professional lapse.  Those who seek to protect the integrity of the Holocaust deserve an accounting, not blood-letting, but a forthright explanation by those responsible in the matter of Wilkormirski.  To hide behind institutional anonymity merely compounds the error and feeds the wolves in the ranks of the Revisionists and Deniers.

 

 

 

Announcement: A New Publication
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The Journal of Genocide Research

Editor in chief: Henry R. Huttenbach
Publisher: Carfax Publishing Co., (UK)
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Genocide Research's editorial policy seeks to further a deepening understanding of annihilationist events by promoting three paths of investigation:

  1. Theory
  2. Methodology
  3. Comparative Case Studies


Genocide Research will appear three times a year, beginning with Vol.I, No.1, in Spring 1999.

Genocide Research's Editorial Board is presently in formation and will be composed of an interdisciplinary, international group of scholars.

Genocide Research is a peer-review academic journal.

___________________________

Call for Papers:

Scholars are urged to submit their manuscripts to:

Professor Henry R. Huttenbach
   History Department
   The City College of New York
   Convent Ave. at 138th Street.
   New York, NY 10031
Fax (718) 624 - 0450
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For further information about Genocide Research — subscriptions, book reviews, etc. — contact Professor Huttenbach at the above address.

 

About The Genocide Forum

 The Forum is a publication of the Center for the Study of Ethnonationalism located on the campus of the City College of New York.  The founder and editor of The Genocide Forum is Professor Henry R. Huttenbach.

 The Genocide Forum, which appears bi-monthly, is intended to serve as a convenient vehicle of exchange to discuss critical issues of common interest to students of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  The Forum is designed to accommodate experts in the field to share their concerns via concise (1,500 words) analytic essays.

 Contributors are invited to submit their essay on a 3.5" disk (Macintosh/MicroSoft Word) with one double-spaced print-out to Professor Henry R. Huttenbach, History Department, The City College of New York, Convent Avenue at 138th St., New York, NY 10031. Tel: (212) 650-7384; Fax (718) 624-0450.

 Back Issues of The Genocide Forum are available on request as long as supplies last.  Complete sets of back issues are available on 3.5" diskette (Macintosh/Microsoft) for $25.

 Quotations may be made as long as proper credit is given.  Duplication of long passages or entire articles require the written permission of the editor.

  The Genocide Forum is made possible through the partial support of the Division of Humanities of the City College of New York. 

  Nota Bene: Views expressed by authors are not necessarily those of the editor.

Henry R. Huttenbach
c/o History Department
City College of New York
Convent Ave. at 138th Street
New York, NY 10031
 

A Publication of The Center for The Study of Ethnonationalism
The City College of The City University of New York