The Limits of Genocide

Question 1

Is Genocide a 20th Century phenomenon? + e.g.

Answer 1

No - genocide as old as time

e. g.1 biblical - Israelite destruction of Jericoh
e. g.2 Roman annihilation of Carthage

Age of Empires also an age of atrocities
- annihilation of indigenous species because they blocked ‘progress’

e.g. American Indians
1492 5m –> 1892 500k
- Deliberately used disease to kill e.g. diseased blankets - ‘microbe shock’

Question 2

What was the ideology behind atrocities in the age of empires?

Answer 2

Destroy all in the path of progress

Intellectual root with the ‘crafting of the other’

• a process of racially distancing practiced since the 12thC
• institutions such as slavery justified such behaviour

Racialised thinking gathered pace with a scientific explanation rooted in biology:
- the idea that whites were inherently the most superior –> solidified in 18th and 19thC with more exposure to indigenous

Question 3

What was Weitz’s quote?

Answer 3

‘race locked Africans into a position of eternal inferiority’

Question 4

Who contributed to the racist scientific debate?

Answer 4

Johann Blumenbach
Knox
Van Couvier
Charles Darwin

Question 5

what did Blumenbach contribute?

Answer 5

He wrote about the natural variety of mankind:

• man united as a species BUT not all equal
• Believed there were doomed races who were on a path to their own destruction

Question 6

what is Salisbury’s quote on nations? what year?

Answer 6

1898 - ‘one can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying’

Question 7

What were Knox’s thoughts on race?

Answer 7

He argued that certain races are so riddled with vice that there was nothing to be done to stop degradation

Argued there were physical and psychological inferiority in dark races

Saw survival as innate and in the genetics

Question 8

What example did Knox use to prove innate superiority of whites?

Answer 8

Knox looked to the animal and plant kingdom:
- European plants and animals could easily be transferred to the colonies but not the other way around –> Europeans were more flexible and superior than the backward and rigid inferior areas

Hence, the destruction of races was not a bad thing because it was simply accelerating the unavoidable –> Thus, using these races was not a problem either because a path to progress

Question 9

What did Van Couvier find that contributed to the race debate?

Answer 9

A french zoologist

He showed conclusively at the turn of the 19thC that European elephants once lived but now are gone –> supported the theory that human races can, will and should die out

With other large mammals found to have gone extinct this was now a part of how the world worked

Question 10

How did Darwin contribute towards the race debate?

Answer 10

Darwin divided humans into species based on the level of civilisation.

He goes further with evolution - ‘survival of the fittest’ –> Those not evolved enough for the world will die

IMP: This combined with imperial thought that the weak will make way for the strong

Question 11

How did the rise of the nation state exacerbate thought on race?

Answer 11

Nation states intensified the homogenization of groups in certain territories
e.g. documents like the declaration of independence

By beginning of 19thC notions of nationhood are entrenched + entwined in countries

—>

Nationalist movements developing:

• Call for own space
• national myths to solidify roots

Language, literature and blood bound people together –> ‘us’ and ‘them’
- Combined with racial thinking –> world divided into hierarchy

When combine genocidal atrocities become a way of life.

Question 12

What did the historian Todorov argue?

Answer 12

European massacres were ‘inextricably linked’ to colonial wars, waged far from metropolis. The more DISTANT and ALIAN the massacre victims, the better

Creation of other –> different and distant

Question 13

In the 19th C genocide was perceived as an inevitable by-product of progress. Do you agree?

Answer 13

Can you use the word genocide when discussing perception - is that anachronistic?

Depends on your definition of genocide - Lemkin, Convention, Theorists

Already mentioned the perceived scientific inevitability therefore suggesting bi-product

It was a bi-product but it wasn’t perceived as genocide it was simply part of the path to progress - killing inferior people (does sound like Nazi’s…)

in 19thC a sense that conversion and submission to Western ways would suffice vs 20thC where extermination only

Question 14

How connected is genocide before the 20th Century?

Answer 14

Total war involving civilians is new – involved in industrial mobilization and targeted by armies

• Age of nationalism
• Tech developments – like mass production of arms + gas + radio etc brought more violence to civilians

20th C did not invent mass extermination of peoples

• Earlier in history not as systematic or state controlled but equally catastrophic
• E.g. Colombia pop 1519 12m –> 1600 1m

Language of extermination was already common by the nineteenth century

Not always purposeful genocide

• Irish famine British simply did not help therefore starvation deaths
• Working survivors of European diseases to death in Africa
• e.g. The Congo’s population fell by half, according to estimates – 10 million died from 1885 to 1920

Question 15

What happened to the Herero people? What were the 6 steps

Answer 15

The Herero people revolted for a number of reasons - including white pressure on native lands.

General Lothar von Trotha ( June 1904–November 1905), announced in October 1904 his intention to achieve a final solution in SWA, in which mass death to the point of extermination was an acceptable outcome.

6 steps:

DESTRUCTION

Ideally one big annihilating sweeping battle – extreme offensive
- surround at desert

REJECTION OF NEGOTISTIONS
- could have recognised Herero but didn’t - would have showed weakness by recognising equality

PURSUIT

• One proper skirmish resembled a battle
• Rest were Germans shooting running Africans
• Many died of thirst during pursuit

PRACTICES CONDUCIVE TO MASS KILLING
- Scholars have noted that suffering, frustrated troops are more likely to engage in retaliatory atrocities
o troops in SWA suffered and became frustrated were circumstantial, but there were also structural-institutional reasons
 inadequate provisions, 2/3 rations –> malnutrition + scurvy

• Lack of logistical planning
  o The gap between Germany’s military and colonial ambitions and its actual power to achieve them (exacerbated by bad infrastructure in colonies)
• unorthodox tactics from Herero (uniforms, homemade weapons, mutilation, no international law)
• No limits (Conrad) most lethal aspect of imperialism

Evidence that soldiers received official encouragement to kill beyond the normal bounds of war

• Evidence Trotha ordered killing of all males no matter what
• Eyewitnesses on bot sides confirm killing of wounded, children and women at Waterberg – probably continued in pursuit

Question 16

What was Trotha’s October Proclamation? and in private to German soldiers

Answer 16

The Herero people must leave this land. If it does not, I will force it to do so by using the great gun [artillery]. Within the German border every male Herero, armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot to death. I will no longer receive women or children, but will drive them back to their people or have them shot at. These are my words to the Herero people.

To the German troops he explained what he meant: “I assume absolutely that this proclamation will result in taking no more male prisoners, but will not degenerate into atrocities against women and children.

Question 17

What were the prison conditions of the Herero?

Answer 17

Concentration camps to frustrate guerrilla warfare by re- moving the civilian population and thus exposing the remaining fighters to easier and clearer conditions of battle.

Death rates high because military don’t know how to master complex logistics required to maintain women, children, the aged and ill in hastily built, quasi-permanent locations

Low standard for German soldier –> even lower for enemy
Racism – natives require less food or didn’t bother noticing what Africans could digest
- Received 1/5 of the most punitive meat ration from Britain in Boer

The picture in SWA is similar to that which Christian Streit found in his study of the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war in Nazi hands: a lethal mixture of conviction and administrative indifference.

Question 18

How does Hull explain the link between the genocide of the Herero in 1906 in German Africa and the ‘final solution to the Jewish question, the Holocaust?

Answer 18

What I have argued here is that the tendency for the German military to gravitate toward “final solutions” was built into its military culture, under- stood as part of its habitual practices and the (largely unexamined) basic assumptions embedded in its doctrines and administration.
- The already pernicious assumptions borne of race thinking developed into genuine racism under the shock of imperial practices.

• International law inapplicable - non-econ people there

Tendancy to favor final solutions when lesser operations failed, as they often did in the colonies. Thus Germany’s military culture and its imperial dilemmas were more alike than different from those of its neighbors.

• Germany differed was in its political culture and institutions.
• shielded the military from civilian oversight
• The structure of government and the resulting political culture were not surprisingly less capable than, for example, comparative British or French institutions in subsequently curbing the military’s tendencies to go to extremes.
• German political institutions were thus less able to cut short the development toward “final solutions,” a failure that therefore encouraged the institutionalization of this tendency inside the military

Hull argued that the practice of extermination was already operating in the military, not motivated by ideology but developing instead from habits and basic assumptions embedded in military culture.
- the military’s institutional preference for solving political problems with total, unlimited force.

• Continued into WW1 - unlimited total war
• World War I took the Wilhelminians’ unintentional ground- work and transformed it into a political juggernaut. The war created the believable, existential, national emergency that brought together the practical military propensity for the total solution of force and the paranoid world view of the Pan-Germans
• Especially after 1916, the twinning of total military practice with an ideology of racism directed against Europeans seemed to many people a reasonable response to the crises caused by global war.

PRACTICE AND IDEOLOGY CAME TOGETHER

institutional and organization-cultural foundations unintentionally laid in the Wilhelminian military were necessary before National Socialism could exist in the first place.

Question 19

Hull in short?

Answer 19

The simultaneous failure of Germany’s official imperial policy and the desire, expressed in countless, nationalist agitation groups, to retain all of imperialism’s most destructive qualities, permanently radicalized and transformed the German right wing from government loyalists to vehement critics.

In short, Germany’s imperial experience transformed both right-wing ideology, laying solid foundations for later National Socialism, and the domestic political spectrum

The genocide in German West Africa reveals a pattern of military culture that played a critical role in predisposing later decision makers and institutions beyond the military to conceive of, tolerate, and/or attempt final solutions to political problems

Question 20

3. To what extent, and how, can we view the German extermination of Herero in South West Africa(Namibia) as the rehearsal for the Nazi/German extermination plans in WWII on the Eastern front?

Answer 20

Use for labour

Mass murder

Use of advanced military technology

Concentration camps with terrible conditions

• Drechsler has suggested that out of an original population of 80k Herero, about 15k may have survived the war, an estimate which includes those Herero
• who survived the German concentration camps.


Dehumanisation
Some contributions to this debate were characterised by a racist terminology that makes the comparison with statements tempting.
- Suggestions that the Herero were so backward they were useless to the further development of the colony
- Their dead bodies could be used for science
- ‘beast’ rhetoric

Question 21

Is the extermination of the Herero people a genocide?

Answer 21

Some scholars have rejected the use of the term ‘genocide’ with regard to the Herero, because of its connotations with the Holocaust.

others have adopted it for this very reason, emphasizing the Herero war as a milestone on an authoritarian and inhumane ‘special path’ in German history that extended from Bismarck to Hitler.

Some authors, therefore, have suggested that the Germans experimented with a ‘totalitarian’ type of social engineering that anticipated aspects of national socialism.
X - However recent research suggests that the control exerted by the Germans over Africans in the aftermath of the war was less efficient than previously has been assumed.

In South West Africa as in the Soviet Union the Germans ‘too often behaved as if the alleged barbarism of their opponents justified barbaric behaviour

Question 22

Do we see a connection between the extermination of the Herero and the extermination of the Jews?

Answer 22

SIMILAR

• Concentration camps (work, labour, death) – continuation
• Othering – ways different but still othered
• Intention to kill en mass and completely destroy
• Hull – Lurid German tales of Herero killing everyone
  o Similar propaganda bending truth
• Strong vs weak
• Both final solutions to a perceived problem
• Inferiority
• Scientific experiments

DIFFERENT
- Not systematic
- No explicit order from above
- No civilian involvement
- Jews didn’t revolt
o Violence more inherent in an uprising/revolt
- Jews were ideological
o Herero is more practical – >However more complicated
- Not necessarily centralized so maybe Trotha of his time