Mass Violence in 20th century

Raphael Lemkin, 1900-1958Axis Rule in Occupied Europe

Lemkin’s definition of genocide

Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:• (a) Killing members of the group;• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the

group;• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life

calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Extremely violent societies (2010)

Christian Gerlach views mass violence as an expansive, multilayered phenomenon emerging in the midst of profound socioeconomic change and involving both state and civilian actors, past and present social relations, numerous victim groups, gradations of perpetrators and victims, and diverse methods of violence

• German South-West Africa (1904)• German East Africa and Maji-Maji revolt• Armenian genocide (1915)

Armenia, 1915

A century of silence, Raffi Khatchadourian, New Yorker, January 5, 2015 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/century-silence

Zygmunt Bauman: “state as a gardener”

The Gulag archipelago

Gulag Historiography

• Gulag is actually an abbreviation, Glavnoe upravlenie ‘ispravidelno-trudovikh lagerei (Main administration of corrective labor camps) – Pre-1991 obsession with numbers– Based heavily on memoirs (Solzhenitsyn)

• Recent directions– Everyday life– Economics– Interaction between gulag and society

Origins and Formation of the Gulag

• Imperial Russia: Katorga (forced labor camps)• 1918: Cheka creates Solovki Special Purpose Camp (SLON)

– Prisoners mostly political– Corrective labor– Endorsed by Gorkii in 1929

• Mass expansion from early 1930s• Organized under OGPU in 1930• Included:

– Jails, special settlements, prisons, labor colonies• Our Gulag: Corrective labor camps

– 1940: 53 camps, 1.3 million people

Population by Offense

Counterrev

olutionary ac

ts

Dange

rous c

rimes/

banditr

y

Specu

lation an

d hooligan

ism

Economic c

rimes

Crimes

again

st pers

ons

Crimes

again

st pro

perty

Theft

of public

propert

y

"Socia

lly harm

ful and dan

gero

us elem

ents"

Violation of in

ternal

passport

law

Military

offenses

Other0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

193419361940

Mortality Rate

Deaths in Camps

1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 19390

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

70000

80000

90000

100000

Deaths in Camps

Deaths in Camps

Nazi Germany

• Removal and reeducation of political opponents

• Building the folk community• Brutalization of warfare and decisiontaking for

the annihilation of the Jews• Murder of 2 mio Soviet POWs• Rational or ideological?

Indonesia

Murder of over half a million of Indonesian Communists (KPI) in 1965

Sukarto’s regime killed other groups beforeFamily descendants often disadvantaged until today

Conclusions

• The violent 20th century?• When and how does extreme violence

emerge?• Factors: ethnicity and class, but more

importantly: interplay factors and historical set-up

• Importance sexual violence• How to write about extreme violence?