“Who ever remembers the Armenians?” (source 3)
The next major genocide of the twentieth century was the Nazi murder of the Jews and the Gypsy peoples. This happened due to the rise to power of Adolf Hitler (source 16) and the successful implementation of his ideals in Nazi Germany. He believed that the Germans were racially superior and also felt the Jews and the Gypsies were ‘biologically handicapped’ and were a threat to the German (Aryan) race, also referred to by Hitler as the master race. Such that these impure people would “dilute” and weaken the strength of the natural Germans.
The Gypsies were a group of people living in Europe since the fifteenth century, bound together by a common language and culture, and (until the twentieth century) by a nomadic way of life. The Gypsies, also called Rom, were among the groups singled out by the Nazi regime for persecution, eventually ending in massacres.
While there are differences of opinion regarding their early history, it seems fairly clear that the Gypsies originated in India and were in Iran by the fourteenth century. The general consensus is that the gypsies spread East from India eventually spreading out and finishing their journey spread all over Europe, after picking up all aspects of different cultures and ways of life from their travels. By 1438, they had reached Hungary, and had entered Serbia and other Balkan countries. The Gypsies then spread into Poland and Russia, and by the sixteenth century had reached Sweden and England. In Spain they settled in fairly large numbers at the same time. While some Gypsies became Muslims (in Bosnia, and elsewhere) or Orthodox (in Serbia) most European Gypsies became Roman Catholics, but kept many of their pre-Christian beliefs alongside their new religion, which caused many fractions of the church to react differently to the Gypsies as they produced difficulty, which partially ended up in animosity to the Gypsy people. Split into many dialects, their language is only now becoming a written language, as it has been passed down by mouth for hundreds of years, even though Romany publications appeared in the Soviet Union in the early years of the Communist regime.
Prejudice and animosity toward Gypsies were then and still are widespread across where hte Gypsies are present and have settled. The Gypsies were normally seen as old fashioned folk who could not keep up with the modern times with their traditional ways (sources 35 + 36). Their professions were usually chosen by their wandering way of life; as they were unable to hold down normal settled jobs, and they were usually not allowed to obtain land in their chosen countries. Generally, they bought and sold horses and other animals, engaged in petty trade, and practised arts such as silver work, gold work, and music in order to earn money. Fortune-telling, for which they gained a wide reputation and are often mistakenly known for, was usually only a sideline work. Gypsies were frequently accused of stealing and dishonesty, largely because of their living habits and language, and it was much easier to blame other people and strangers than your own people. Aggression was diverted towards them as they were simply not the natives in the areas in which they settled, this was similar to that which was applied to the Jews. On occasion, this animosity revolved into murderous policies. Thus the Prussian king, Frederick William I, decreed in 1725 that all Gypsies over eighteen were subject to killing, as they were seen as a waste of human people, and were slated to be exterminated. At the same time however, their music and their poetry were the inspiration of famous artists, for example Franz Liszt, this rooted their culture into their surrounding area. Although this was for different historical reasons, in many ways they shared with the Jews the unfortunate honour of being the fundamental strangers in an overwhelmingly Christian Europe.
The Gypsies occupied a special place in Nazi racist theories, as they were so different to all over peoples which the Nazis had to deal with. According to a report submitted to Heinrich Himmler in 1941, there were some thirty nine thousand Gypsies in their empire, twenty eight thousand Gypsies in Germany, and an additional eleven thousand in Austria. Most of these belonged to the Sinti and Lalleri tribes, which were the most widely spread of the Gypsy tribes. The basic attitude of the Nazi regime was extremely hostile towards the Gypsies; old prejudices and animosities were added to an ideal of a "pure" Nordic society that emphasised peasant life and sedentary habits, when life was a lot simpler. This stood in clear contradiction to the Gypsy’s way of life, as they comprised of many different roots and hermitages and were not ready to completely settle down. In the eyes of the regime, the Gypsies were "asocials" who did not fit into the new society that was to be built, so as a result were a bad influence on the regime.. While you could not doubt the Aryan parentage of the Gypsy families, they were also clearly seen to be "people of different blood" (Andersblutige).
According to Dr. Ritter and his co-workers, an examination of some twenty thousand Rom showed that over 90 percent were to be considered not of mixed blood (Mischilinge). This solved the problem of having to deal with an Aryan minority; the Nazis simply denied that the Gypsies were Aryans, and they were not argued against. Ritter’s proposals to keep the Gypsy people suppressed were to prevent Gypsies from mixing with people of “German blood”, and to perform sterilisation on them, whilst keeping them in forced-labour camps. Both "pure" and Mischilinge Gypsies were considered asocial, and were treated the same way. Eventually however the Gypsies ended up in the concentration and extermination camps of the Second World War (sources 33 + 34), during the holocaust.
According to Himmler’s decree of December 14, 1937, "preventive" arrests could be made of persons who, while not guilty of any criminal act, "endangered the communality by their asocial behaviour.", this free phasing of regulations gave the Nazis room to maneuvre and enabled them to get away with many different crimes against the Gypsies. Regulations implementing this decree, which were issued on April 4, 1938, specified that it was directed against "beggars, vagabonds (Gypsies) and prostitutes without a permanent residence."
As the Nazi’s racial policies became more radical, the murder of Gypsies increased dramatically. While a few pure and mischilinge gypsies were reintroduced into Gypsy society, many ended up in concentration camps. While most of the gypsies were gassed to death, a few had atrocious medical experiments performed on them, there were no limitations to the humiliations which the Gypsies suffered from the Nazis.
Eventually, approximately 200,000 gypsies were killed during the holocaust. But once again this atrocious example of genocide has been overshadowed by the killing of the Jews in the Holocaust, even though the crimes were committed by the same people. This example of genocide stands to show that the Nazis were attempting to refine their people through the removal of unfit cultures from the gene pool, and were not just out to eradicate the Jewish people.
The main target of Nazi hatred was the Jews, and this is the most famous example of genocide during the twentieth century, if not ever, as it received such enormous amounts of documentation on it and from this the Holocaust is now incredibly well known.
The Jews were originally treated as a scapegoat for Germany’s loss in World War 1 and for the economic depression set in 1923, the Jewish people were given the blame by the Nazi regime for the countries main problem, and as they were the minority, the Jews were unable to stand up for themselves.
‘The idea of the racial enemy is as essential to National Socialism as the class enemy is to communism’
T. Heuss -1932 (source 4)
Hitler (source 16) himself made his feelings towards the Jews clear when he gave speeches and talked about Nazi ideals. Below are examples of what Hitler said on the subject of the Jewish problem,
‘Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.’ (source 5)
‘Now for the first time they will not bleed other people to death, but for the first time the old Jewish law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, will be applied.’ (source 6)
‘In the event of war, the result will not be the bolshevism of the earth, and thus victory for Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’ (source 7)
‘…and we say that the war will not end as the Jews imagine it, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews.’ (source 8)
As soon as Hitler came to power he started making laws to hinder the Jew’s social status with the aim to eventually suppress the Jewish people heavily enough to enforce genocide, in 1933 laws were passed that forced Jews to give up their civil service jobs, university and law courts. In the same year a boycott of Jewish businesses was established. This was the beginning of the bad treatment of the Jews, and once this step had been taken, each following step of unfair action towards the Jews became easier and easier to make, as the Jews were given more and more bad positions in society (source 17).
Then in 1935, the Nuremburg laws were passed. These laws brought about the loss of citizenship for all Jews in Germany, which essentially made German Jews outsiders in their own country. The Jews were no longer defined as a race themselves but by the blood of their grandparents. From 1937 to 1939 more laws were passed that meant that Jewish children could not go to public schools, Jews could not go to theatres, cinemas, or vacation resorts. Even where a Jew wanted to live was restricted and they were not permitted to walk in certain areas of cities. Jews were forced out of economic life in this time as well, as all Jewish businesses had severe sanctions put on them, eventually, the Nazis seized businesses and properties or forced them to sell their business at a very low price. There was also the mass anti-Jew Propaganda in which posters and cartoons were used in order to make the German people support the Nazi’s actions which were taken against the Jews and to slowly make the people less and less bothered about the unfair treatment of the Jews, as they blamed the Jews for their problems and supported the ideas of the Nazis.
By 1938 this abuse of the Jew’s rights developed into physical abuse, the first example being ‘the night of the broken glass.’
On that night, which has become infamously known as Kristallnacht, more than 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, and many murdered. 191 synagogues throughout Germany were set on fire, and 76 were completely destroyed; 815 Jewish-owned shops were demolished, 29 warehouses and 171 homes were set on fire or likewise destroyed. The Jews were being physically attacked with war efforts in their own country, only because of their grandparents blood. This was a huge step made by the Nazis as it was the first time in which the Jews were not sanctioned, but actually attacked.
Kristallnacht was a general riot planned and executed by the Nazi government and was an attack on Jews and Jewish businesses wherever they were found.
The program to eventually exterminate the Jews became far more serious during the Second World War, as the Nazis were able to get away with more atrocities as surrounding countries were much else able to intervene with what they were doing. Conquered cities like Warsaw and Lodz were converted into Jewish ghettos, many Jews died there due to the awful conditions in which the Jews had to live in, whilst this occurred concentration camps (source 18) were being set up in Poland and conquered regions of the Soviet Union. Jews were killed in all of this places in varying ways, including gassing, and mass shootings (source 11). Jewish leaders and other opposition figureheads were rounded up and executed systematically to further suppress the people.
Many concentration camps were set up in Poland. Notorious examples were Auschwitz-Birkenau (sources 12 + 13) and Chelmno (this was the first camp where mass executions were carried out.) Prisoners at camps such as these were executed in mobile gas vans into which gas was pumped. The most infamous camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Here, roughly 1,250,000 people were killed. About 9 out of 10 of these people were Jews.
The Jews will always be remembered due to the awful atrocities which they had to suffer due to the Nazi regime. As they were the most widespread foreign people in Germany they were attacked perhaps the most heavily by the regime being the most obvious target, and it shows that they were the largest example of genocide in the twentieth century.
The tradition of animosity in Europe in the Twentieth Century between different racial groups has evolved across the century, largely due to the actual examples of genocide which occurred in the Twentieth Century in Europe. At the start of the century many people where intolerant of others and it was difficult for countries to intervene in other countries business in order to uphold the international law.
Genocide was only possible as it was introduced in such gradual steps that people were unable to draw the line as to what should not happen, and that it was difficult for people to object against small actions. The Turks enforced their regime so heavily that their people were unable to fight against what was happening to the Armenians, and other countries were unable due to the distractions of war, this allowed the Turks to commit these grievous crimes and the tradition of unfair acts was able to escalate to the levels of genocide, with the attitude between different races remaining the same at the time to all previous times.
The events in Nazi Germany occurred through one man’s vision and his ability to sell his ideas to large amounts of people, his ideals were imposed on and accepted by his people and once he had support he was able to convince people that what he believed was right and that all people should support him and his actions, this was also because the Nazi regime suppressed all other viewpoints. The Holocaust was largely kept secret at the time and this allowed Hitler to get away with his actions, along with partially persuading the people that other blood was wrong and they must purify the Aryan race. The Second World War’s attempts at bringing down the Nazi regime were partially fuelled by the crimes which the Nazis committed against the Jews and Gypsies, but as their enemies were trying to stop him Hitler was still able to attempt to exterminate these races.
In both cases the situation at the time allowed the countries to do what they really wanted to do, even though it was and still is immoral, and wrong and would have been prevented by other countries if not by their own people.
After these events occurred the tradition of animosity changed in countries involved so that all forms of racism and unfairness to different people and no longer tolerated, and in the more civilised countries of Europe today genocide would simply not occur as it is known to be wrong and it would be almost impossible for a regime to take events to such extremes which the Nazi regime reached. All forms of bad treatment and individualism if different people are now frowned upon and people are constantly fighting for fairness. In other countries however, were regime are enforced genocide can still happen even thought most countries will try to prevent this, this is fought against by the offending country, and genocide can still occur in many places.
This evidence shows that the tradition of animosity has changed very little over the Twentieth Century and most countries could still get away with forms of discrimination and unfair treatment. Many people still feel personal resentment against races and we do not live in a perfectly balanced and fair world. Racial groups can still fight today and many people are still just as ignorant and intolerant of other people as to not let them be accepted, so aggression between different racial groups still occurs. The tradition of animosity is that it can still occur in all places all be it at different levels and varying amounts, and the problems of racial tensions have not been solved.
Objective 2:
To what extent does the genocide in the Balkans in the last decade of the Twentieth Century suggest a failure to solve racial divisions?
The Balkans are a small number of countries in Europe which are found to the south of Austria and Hungary, and to the North of Greece, with the Mediterranean sea to the West. These countries are comprised of many different ethnic groups (source 21), the main (at least the main ones which are involved) groups were the Serbs, the Croats, and the Muslims. The events in the 1990’s finally led to conflict between these three ethnic groups, and eventually genocide committed by the Serbs against the Muslims in Bosnia.
The Balkans is comprised of many split and reformed countries (largest example being the collapse of Yugoslavia leading to new countries in the Balkans) along with many different peoples living in the same area. This compression of different types of people into one area can be very volatile as not everybody would get along perfectly, the Balkans are seen as such a dangerous area that some historians refer to the area as “The Balkan Powder keg”. One of the largest causes of this separation is that after the Second World War the Allies formed most of the Balkans into one country, Yugoslavia, which later collapsed and was split up into separate countries once more (source 20). This turbulence in the area in the past fifty years was at the root of it all caused by intolerance of other peoples, and this is why such awful acts eventually occurred there.
Bosnia is one of the several countries which was formed from the break-up of Yugoslavia, Bosnia is very small and due to the mixed races in the area was very multicultural, much akin to how Yugoslavia was. The religious groups which made up the population of Yugoslavia and eventually Bosnia and other countries had historically been great rivals, almost bitter enemies, the main groups which fought were the Serbs (who were Orthodox Christians), the Croats (who were Catholic Christians) and ethnic Albanians (who were the Muslims in the area).
During World War Two, Nazi Germany was successfully able to invade Yugoslavia, and because of this the country was partitioned. The population of Yugoslavia largely opposed this, and due to unfair treatment a fierce resistance appeared in Yugoslavia which was led by a man named Josip Tito (source 27). After Germany had been defeated in the war, Tito managed to bring Yugoslavia back to their previous strength under the slogan of “Brotherhood and Unity,” Yugoslavia was formed out of the merging of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, also two self-governing provinces were included in this list, these countries were Vojvodina and Kosovo.
Tito turned out to be a successful leader for the newly formed Yugoslavia, and he was able to maintain ties with both the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. Tito was able to play the two superpowers against one another and eventually receiving financial assistance along with other aid from both of these powers. After Tito had died in 1980, Yugoslavia, lacking the strong leadership which Tito had supplied, quickly fell into both political and economical distress.
Yugoslavia suffered for the early 1980s as they had to attempt to repair their countries economical climate and return to full strength. By the 1980s a new leader arose, a Serbian named Slobodan Milosevic (source 26), he was a former communist who had eventually turned to nationalism and religious hatred to sway political advantages to him and to gain power. He began this process by igniting long lasting tensions between the Serbs and Muslims inside the independent province of Kosovo. Serbs in Kosovo who were Orthodox Christians were at the time in the minority, and because of this they claimed they were being mistreated by the majority, who were Albanian Muslims. Political unrest was backed by the Serbs and Kosovo eventually lost its status as an independent state and fell into domination by Milosevic.
As always with large political unrest, a degree of propaganda leaked out to try to affect the opinion’s of the public and to say what is going on, this happens often in times of turmoil and is usually a reaction to important events occurring (source 29).
In June of 1991, both Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from Yugoslavia which soon resulted in civil war in these countries. The Yugoslavian national army, who were now comprised of Serbs under the power of Milosevic, advanced into Slovenia but were unable to subdue the separatists, quickly withdrawing after only ten days of fighting.
Slobodan Milosevic lost interest in Slovenia quite quickly, as it was a country which had no Serbs. However, he turned his attention towards Croatia, which was a Catholic country where Orthodox Serbs took up roughly twelve percent of the population.
Whilst World War Two had raged, Croatia had been a pro-Nazi state which was led by Ante Pavelic (source 28) alongside his fascist Ustasha Party. Serbs who were living in Croatia along with Jews were the victims of widespread Ustasha massacres. In one particular concentration camp, at Jasenovac, the massacres of people had reached numbers of tens of thousands murdered.
In 1991 a new Croat government came into power, led by Franjo Tudjmann, they seemed to be reviving fascism, even daring to use the old Ustasha flag and symbol, they also enacted discriminatory laws which were targeted at Orthodox Serbs.
Helped by Serbian guerrillas inside Croatia, Milosevic’s forces invade in July 1991 in order to “protect” the Serbian minority housed there. In the city of Vukovar, they bombed the heavily outgunned Croats for eighty-six consecutive days, after which the city was reduced to merely rubble. After Vukovar had fallen, the Serbs for the first time began the mass executions of the conflict, killing hundreds of Croat mean and disposing of them in mass graves.
The international community only responded to this with very little force. The United States under the presidency of George Bush decided not to get involved with the military, however they did recognise that Croatia and Slovenia were now independent countries. An arms embargo was imposed for all of the former Yugoslavia by the United Nations. However, the Serbs under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic were already the most highly armed force in the area and so they did not lose such a large military advantage. At the end of 1991, a US sponsored cease-fire agreement was brokered between the Serbs and Croats who were fighting in Croatia.
In April 1992, the independence of Bosnia was officially recognised by the European Community and the US. Bosnia had a Muslim majority whilst the Serbs made up thirty two percent of the population. Milosevic replied to Bosnia’s declaration of independence by attacking Bosnia’s capital city, Sarajevo, which was most widely known for hosting the 1984 Winter Olympics eight years previously. Soon, Sarajevo was renowned for being the city where Serb snipers continually shot at helpless civilians in the streets, eventually killing over three and a half thousand children.
The Bosnian Muslims were hopelessly outgunned, and as the Serbs gained ground, they began to systematically round up local Muslims who could no longer fight. These scenes were held eerie comparisons to scenes which had occurred under the Nazi Regime, including confinement for men and boys in concentration camps, the forced repopulation of towns, and even mass shootings. The Serbs also terrified Muslim families into running from their villages as all women and girls that they came across were brutally raped. The actions which the Serbs took became known as “ethnic cleansing” and the term has stuck in the media.
Even though the media was able to report about the secret camps, mass killings, alongside the destruction of Muslim mosques and historic architecture in Bosnia, the international community still did very little to interfere and to stop these events from transpiring. The UN made small effects on the situation by imposing economic sanctions on Serbia and also deployed its troops to look after the distribution of aid to dispossessed Muslims. However, the UN strictly prohibited its own troops from making military interference's against the Serbs, so they remained neutral no matter how bad the situation became.
Because of these weak interference's from the international community, Slobodan Milosevic gained more confidence in what he could get away with against the Muslims. Throughout 1993, in the knowledge that other countries would not response, Serbs in Bosnia committed genocide totally and freely against the Muslims. These Serbs operated under the local leadership of Radovan Karadzic (source 22), who was the president of the illegitimate Bosnian Serb Republic. He once told a group of journalists that:
“Serbs and Muslims are like cats and dogs. They cannot live together in peace. It is impossible.” (source 9)
After Karadzic was confronted by journalists about the current affairs he simply denied any involvement of his own forces in the situation.
On the sixth of February, 1994, the world turned its attention completely to Bosnia as a Serb mortar shell struck a Bosnian marketplace in Sarajevo, killing 68 people and wounding almost 200 more. The sights and sounds of this bloody event were shown all over the world by the media and soon people were calling for military intervention against the Serbs.
The US had now come under the presidency of Bill Clinton, who as part of his election campaign had promised an end to the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, he then issued an ultimatum through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) demanding that the Serbs would withdraw their artillery away from Sarajevo. Feeling threatened the Serbs quickly complied and a NATO-imposed cease-fire in Sarajevo was declared.
The US subsequently launched efforts through diplomacy to attempt to unify the Bosnian Muslims and the Croats together to fight the Serbs, unfortunately this new alliance failed to stop the Serbs from attacking Muslim towns all over Bosnia which had been declared by the UN to be Safe Havens. In all, six Muslim towns by 1993 had become Safe Havens under the supervision of UN peace keepers. Bosnian Serbs however not only attacked the Serb Havens but also attacked the UN peace keepers (source 24) also who were put there to protect the Safe Havens. NATO replied to this aggression by launching air strikes against Serbian ground positions. The Serbs then retaliated by taking hundreds of UN peace keepers as hostages and surrounding their own potential targets with them, thereby using them as human shields.
Some of the worst of the genocidal activities in this four years occurred at this point. In Srebrenica, one of the UN Safe Havens, UN peacekeeping forces had to stand by helplessly as the Serbs under the command of General Ratko Mladic (source 25) systematically selected and slaughtered almost 8,000 men and boys between the ages of twelve and sixty - this was the worst mass murder in Europe since the events in World War Two. In addition to this, the Serbs continued to rape Muslim females en masse.
Finally on August 30, 1995, military intervention began as the US led a massive NATO bombing campaign in reply to the murdering at Serbrenica, targeting Serbian artillery positions throughout Bosnia. The bombardment carried on into October. Serbian forces also were losing ground to Bosnian Muslims who had received new arms shipments from the Islamic world, due to this half of Bosnia was eventually reclaimed by Muslim-Croat troops.
Faced with the strong retaliation against his actions, Milosevic was now prepared to discuss peace. On November 1, 1995, leaders of all the warring factions travelled to the US for peace talks at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Chicago. A peace accord was declared after three weeks of negotiations. The main terms of the agreement were that Bosnia would now be partitioned into the Bosnian Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation, along with calling for democratic elections and stipulated that was criminals would be handed over in order to be prosecuted. NATO deployed 60,000 soldiers (source 24) to preserve the new cease-fire.
By now, the genocide of the Muslims had reached a figure over 200,000 deaths, with another 20,000 missing and feared dead, and a further 2,000,000 people becoming refugees. According to US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke (source 23) , it was:
“the greatest failure of the West since the 1930s.” (source 10)
The example of the genocide in the Balkans shows that the attempts to solve racial divisions throughout the Twentieth Century have been almost entirely unsuccessful. It has shown that when different types of people are forced together they almost always end up in conflict, and it seems that the only alliances between people come through necessity (e.g., Muslim-Croat coalition) and not through voluntary actions. What occurred in the Balkans in the 1990s holds many similarities to the Holocaust, depicting the reluctancy of other countries to stop these crimes against humanity, and this shows that ideas have not developed enough for countries to police one another, but also that countries understand that if a different country tries to interfere in another’s business, then it could be creating yet more racial divisions.
The genocide in the Balkans suggests a failure to solve racial divisions clearly and simply, as all countries involved where also part of the Second World War and new what occurred in the Holocaust, and they could have learned the lessons of what had occurred, the racial divisions which caused the killings were present even at those times, so if they caused genocide in the 1990s, then it is clearly a failure in solving racial divisions in the Balkans and all over Europe.
