• After 1913 the Ottoman state adopted a new policy of Turkish nationalism intended to shore up the crumbling imperial edifice

  • • The new nationalism stressed Turkish culture and traditions, which only aggravated tensions between Turkish rulers and non-Turkish subjects of the empire.

    • the state viewed Christian minorities as an obstacle to Turkism

• During the Great War, the Ottoman government branded Armenians as a traitorous internal enemy, who threatened the security of the state, and then unleashed a murderous campaign against them

• Forced mass evacuations, accompanied by starvation, dehydration, and exposure, led to the death of tens of thousands of Armenians.

• An equally deadly assault on the Armenians came by way of governmentorganized massacres that claimed victims through mass drowning, incineration, or assaults with blunt instruments

• Those wartime atrocities that took place principally between 1915 and 1917 have become known as Armenian genocide.

  • • Best estimates suggest that close to a million Armenians perished.

    • it is generally agreed that the Armenian genocide did occur, the Turkish government in particular rejects the label of genocide and claims that Armenian deaths resulted not from a state-sponsored plan of mass extermination but from communal warfare perpetrated by Christians and Muslims, disease, and famine

Timeline of the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot

1969 -- The US begins a secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese forces on Cambodian soil

1970-1975 -- Under the Marxist leader Pol Pot a civil war broke out: The Khmer Rouge used the United States’ actions to recruit followers and as an excuse for the brutal policies they exercised when in power.

1975 -- Cambodia Year Zero-All city dwellers are forcibly moved to the countryside to become agricultural workers. Money becomes worthless, basic freedoms are curtailed and religion is banned. The Khmer Rouge coin the phrase "Year Zero".

1975-1978 -- Hundreds of thousands of the educated middle-classes are tortured and executed in special centers. Others starve, or die from disease or exhaustion. The total death toll during the next three years is estimated to be at least 1.7 million out of a population of 7,890,000

• 21% of the population of Cambodia was killed

1979 (January) -- The Vietnamese take Phnom Penh. Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge forces flee to the border region with Thailand

Tutsi formed the traditional aristocratic minority in:

• Rwanda-about 9 percent of the population

• Burundi--about 14 percent of the population

  • 14th-15th century, Tutsi came to establish dominance and establish a feudal relationship with the Hutu (Tutsi brought cattle and more advanced military knowledge)

Hutu-Bantu culture and viewed as racially inferior by Belgium. Background Video

• Belgian colony from 1916-1961.

  • Tutsi’s favored by Europeans politically, economically, etc.

• 1972-unsuccessful Hutu rebellion in Burundi was suppressed by the government at a cost of 100,000 lives, most of them Hutu

• April-July 1994-in the midst of a military campaign by Tutsi exiles to retake Rwanda, the Hutu-dominated government there instigated genocidal massacres of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi.

  • 100 Days of slaughter--Est. 800,000 (mostly Tutsi) killed

• This did not prevent the Tutsi exiles’ army (Rwandese Patriotic Front) from overrunning the country soon afterward and ousting the Hutu regime.

  • The RPF victory created 2 million more refugees (mainly Hutus) from Rwanda

Holodomor: Forced Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933

• Holodomor​ (meaning, “hunger-extermination” in Ukrainian)

• Yale University historian Timothy Snyder estimates that 3.3 million people died as a result of the Holodomor

• By the end of 1933, nearly 25 percent of the population of the Ukraine, including three million children, had perished

• Stalin refused international aid offers from Britain, French and the United States

• official policy of the Soviet Union to deny the existence of a famine and thus to refuse any outside assistance

• The Soviets then sealed off the borders of the Ukraine, preventing any food from entering, in effect turning the country into a gigantic concentration camp

• Soviet police troops inside the Ukraine also went house to house seizing any stored up food, leaving farm families without a morsel.

• Soviet-controlled granaries were said to be bursting at the seams from huge stocks of 'reserve' grain, which had not yet been shipped out of the Ukraine

• spring of 1933, the height of the famine, an estimated 25,000 persons died every day in the Ukraine

• Stalin's view of the Ukraine

• With the collapse of the Czarist rule in March 1917 Ukrainians declared their country to be an independent People's Republic and re-established the ancient capital city of Kiev as the seat of government

• By 1921 Lenin's Red Army, and also against Russia's White Army (troops still loyal to the Czar) as well as other invading forces including the Germans and Poles defeated Ukrainian national troops

• western part of the Ukraine was divided-up among Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia

• Soviets immediately began shipping out huge amounts of grain to feed the hungry people of Moscow and other big Russian cities

• Under NEP

  • • Lenin relaxed his grip on the country, stopped taking out so much grain, and even encouraged a free-market exchange of goods.

    • This breath of fresh air renewed the people's interest in independence and resulted in a national revival movement

• Under Stalin

  • • 1929 -- over 5,000 Ukrainian scholars, scientists, cultural and religious leaders were arrested after being falsely accused of plotting an armed revolt. Those arrested were either shot without a trial or deported to prison camps in remote areas of Russia.

    • Stalin also imposed the Soviet system of land management known as collectivization

    • By mid 1932, nearly 75 percent of the farms in the Ukraine had been forcibly collectivized.

    • Stalin's orders, mandatory quotas of foodstuffs to be shipped out to the Soviet Union were drastically increased in August, October and again in January 1933, until there was simply no food remaining to feed the people of the Ukraine.

The Holocaust, the near destruction of European Jews by Germany, was a human disaster on a scale previously unknown.

• Nazi determination to destroy the Jewish population and Europeans’ passive acceptance of anti-Semitism laid the groundwork for genocide

• Initially, the regime encouraged Jewish emigration

  • • tens of thousands of Jews availed themselves of the opportunity to escape from Germany and Austria, many more were unable to do so

    • Most nations outside the Nazi orbit limited the migration of Jewish refugees, especially if the refugees were impoverished, as most of them were because Nazi authorities had previously appropriated their wealth

Post 1939 -- after the start of WWII

• Nazi “racial experts” toyed with the idea of deporting Jews to Nisko, a proposed reservation in eastern Poland, or to the island of Madagascar, near Africa

  • • The concentration of Jews in one area led to the dangerous possibility of the creation of a separate Jewish state

• SS Einsatzgruppen (“action squads”)

  • • When German armies invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Nazis also dispatched three thousand troops in mobile detachments known as SS Einsatzgruppen

    • purpose was to kill entire populations of Jews and Roma (or Gypsies) and many non-Jewish Slavs in the newly occupied territories.

      • • The action squads undertook mass shootings in ditches and ravines that became mass graves

    • By the spring of 1943, the special units had killed over one million Jews, and tens of thousands of Soviet citizens and Roma.

“final solution”

• Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, fifteen leading Nazi bureaucrats gathered to discuss and coordinate the implementation of the final solution of the Jewish question

• They agreed to:

  • • evacuate all Jews from Europe to camps in eastern Poland

    • where they would be worked to death or exterminated

• Jewish victims packed into these suffocating railway cars never knew their destinations

• camps such as Kulmhof (Chelmno), Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibòr, Treblinka, and Auschwitz, the final solution took on an organized and technologically sophisticated character

  • • Nazi's used gassing as the most efficient means for mass extermination

      • • The German commandant of Auschwitz explained proudly how his camp became the most efficient at killing Jews:

          • • by using the fast-acting crystallized prussic acid Zyklon B as the gassing agent

            • by enlarging the size of the gas chambers

            • and by lulling victims into thinking they were going through a delousing process.

    • other means of destruction were always retained, such as electrocution, phenol injections, flamethrowers, hand grenades, and machine guns

    • The largest of the camps was Auschwitz, where at least one million Jews perished.

• Nazi camp personnel subjected victims from all corners of Europe to industrial work, starvation, medical experiments, and outright extermination

• the Germans also constructed large crematories to incinerate the bodies of gassed Jews and hide the evidence of their crimes

This systematic murder of Jews constituted what war crime tribunals later termed a “crime against humanity”

• Approximately 5.7 million Jews perished in the Holocaust

Jewish Resistance

• The best-known uprising took place in the Warsaw ghetto in the spring of 1943

  • • Lacking adequate weapons, sixty thousand Jews who remained in the ghetto that had once held four hundred thousand rose against their tormentors.

    • It took German security forces using tanks and flamethrowers three weeks to crush the uprising

Other Notable Examples:

Comfort Girls/Women

The impetus behind the establishment of comfort houses for Japanese soldiers came from the horrors of Nanjing, where the mass rape of Chinese women had taken place.

• • • forced into brothels set up by the Japanese military during World War II

      • • women came from all over southeast Asia, but the majority were Korean or Chinese

        • Between 20,000 and 410,000 women had been enslaved in at least 125 brothels

        • Estimated that at the end of World War II, 90 percent of the “comfort women” had died

    • Women who had been forced into sexual slavery became societal outcasts. Many died of sexually transmitted infections or complications from their violent treatment at the hands of Japanese soldiers; others committed suicide.

      • • the “comfort women” catered to between twenty and thirty men each day

        • Stationed in war zones, the women often confronted the same risks as soldiers, and many became casualties of war

        • many were killed by Japanese soldiers, especially if they tried to escape or contracted venereal diseases

After the war

• • • At the end of the war, Japanese soldiers massacred large numbers of comfort women to cover up the operation

    • United States authorities allowed “comfort stations” to operate well past the end of the war and that tens of thousands of women in the brothels had sex with American men until Douglas MacArthur shut the system down in 1946

    • the practiced was continued by the Communists during the Chinese Civil War

    • Japan denied the practice existed until 1993

    • 2015-Japanese government announced it would give reparations to surviving Korean “comfort women”

Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904-1908)

Cause

• In January 1904, the Herero people – also called the Ovaherero – rebelled. More than a hundred German civilians were killed. The smaller Nama tribe joined the uprising the following year.

German Response

• German Colonial rulers responded without mercy. Tens of thousands of Herero were forced into the Kalahari desert, their wells poisoned and food supplies cut.

• Gen Lothar von Trotha, sent to quell the revolt, ordered his men to shoot “any Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle”

  • • “I do not accept women or children either: drive them back to their people or shoot them,” he told his troops

Results:

• Half of the total Nama population were also killed

• As many as 3,000 Herero skulls were sent to Berlin for German scientists to examine for signs that they were of racially inferior peoples

• Thousands of women were systematically raped, often taken as “wives” by settlers.

• Surviving Herero forced onto reservations

Rape of Nanjing

• December 1937 Nanjing had fallen to the Japanese

• residents of Nanjing became victims of Japanese troops inflamed by war passion and a sense of racial superiority

  • • Over the course of two months, Japanese soldiers raped seven thousand women

    • murdered hundreds of thousands of unarmed soldiers and civilians

    • burned one-third of the homes in Nanjing

• Four hundred thousand Chinese lost their lives as Japanese soldiers used them for bayonet practice and machine-gunned them into open pits

Jasenovac Death Camps

• estimated 800,000 deaths in Croatian death camps

• 1929: Pavelic formed Croatian nationalist Ustasha Party to destroy Yugoslavia and form independent Croatia: “Realm of God”—only Catholics had right to exist; 1934: Yugoslav King Alexander assassinated by Ustasha

• April 6, 1941: Kingdom of Yugoslavia dismembered between Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria

• April 10, 1941: Axis Powers (Germany/Italy) and Vatican created Independent State of Croatia (NDH) led by Pavelic/Cardinal Stepinac with 2 million Serbs living in that territory; within days NDH outlawed Serbian language and Cyrillic alphabet, began persecutions of Serbs, Jews, Roma

• Mass murders began immediately and continued for next four years

  • Policy of Racial Purity: Triple Genocide--Serbs to be eliminated by:

    • killing 1/3,

    • expelling 1/3,

    • converting to Catholicism 1/3

• Croatian genocide against Serbs committed by Ustasha, Catholic priests and Bosnian Muslims of ~700,000 mostly Serbs, Jews, Roma and dissident Croats; ~240,000 forced to convert

• Jasenovac complex: killing methods: revolver, machine guns, bombs, knives, axes, hatchets, wooden hammers, iron bars, iron hammers, hoes, trampling, hanging, burning, etc

• Leading role played by Catholic Church

• Post-war communist regime of Tito immured knowledge of Croatian Death camps; brotherhood and unity policy

• Artukovic, “Himler of the Balkans,” not extradited from California until 1986; Cardinal Manning: “a great and good man;” “I was guided by the Moral Principles of the Catholic Church”

• 1995: Elimination of Serbs from Croatia started by Pavelic/Stepinac was completed by Tudjman/Kuharic

• Operation Storm--During and after the offensive, 150,000–200,000 Serbs—or nearly the entire Serb Population of the area formerly held by the ARSK—fled and a variety of crimes were committed against the remaining civilians there

• Croatia’s chief backer was NATO