The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana who was a Hutu, and the leaders of the political opposition were murdered when the plane they were in got shot down abut Kigali airport on the 6th of April 1994. The news got out almost immediately and the slaughter of the Tutsis began. Within hours soldiers were going street by street killing people and destroying their houses although the early organizers included military officials, politicians and businessmen and women, but soon many others began to join in. Exactly who killed the president and his companions on the plane has not been established.
Although, the Jewish Holocaust was built up over a number of years, since Hitler came into power things hadn’t gone very well for the Jews. Hitler was very aggressive and the Holocaust was the final solution to killing the Jews. At first the concentration camps were put into order but Hitler decided that it wasn’t killing the Jews fast enough so they decided to make special ways to kill them more quickly. The method which was used was after segregating the Jews and placing them in concentration camps they would gas them. This worked better and didn’t take very long to put into action.
The Victims of the Rwandan genocide were Tutsis; however most of the people killed were names which the Hutus had got from other Hutus. When the slaughtering begun the Hutus killed anyone who got in their way, even if the people they execute were people in their own ethnic group. Over 800,000 Rwandans were killed and many fled to neighboring countries like Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. This was different to the Jewish Holocaust although something that is the same is that they had to wear things that made them stand out from the other ethnic group, in this case the National Flag, another reason why the victims were chosen was that the people who had disease wore a necklace saying that they had AIDS.
Although, the Nazis went for a specific group of people, those people were chosen because they had the Star of David on their arms this made them stand out and they could get tracked easily. Also the fact that they were Jews condemned them from escaping.
A larger more powerful group attacked a smaller weaker group in both of these situations but both had different ways of dealing with their victims. In Rwanda the Hutus blamed the Tutsis for their problems in Rwanda, which was just like the Nazis blamed the Jews for the problems in Germany. The Tutsis and Jews were kept in big numbers which made the murder easier for the Hutus and Germans to make the statistics for death higher. However, the different ways they killed people are very different, the Hutus killed the Tutsis by torturing them and raping them then murdering them where as the Germans just left the Jews to starve or gassing them.
An estimated two million Hutus fled to Zaire (which is no the Democratic Republic of Congo and about 500 people have been sentenced to death and another 100 000 are still in prison. Although with the Germans and Jews no one was punished for their actions.
