The Reasons

Discussions on the Holocaust and 20th Century War Crimes. Note that Holocaust denial is not allowed. Hosted by David Thompson.
michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

#16

Post by michael mills » 07 Nov 2002, 08:10

Roberto wrote:
A refutation of the “Jewish Bolshevism” propaganda is seen as “apologetic”.

That’s Michael Mills at his best.
Roberto seems not to understand the finely nuanced meanings of the word "apologetic".

My Oxford Dictionary defines "apologetic" as "a reasoned defence or vindication". That is what Zosia Szajkowski was attempting to do, and in which he succeeded to a large extent.

User avatar
Roberto
Member
Posts: 4505
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 16:35
Location: Lisbon, Portugal

#17

Post by Roberto » 07 Nov 2002, 12:35

michael mills wrote:Roberto wrote:
A refutation of the “Jewish Bolshevism” propaganda is seen as “apologetic”.

That’s Michael Mills at his best.
Roberto seems not to understand the finely nuanced meanings of the word "apologetic".
Mills seems to expect his readers to be so naïve as to consider him unaware of the negative connotation that the term has in current usage, whatever its Oxford definition is.


User avatar
witness
Member
Posts: 2279
Joined: 21 Sep 2002, 01:39
Location: North

#18

Post by witness » 07 Nov 2002, 22:14

Talking about the "ecumenical" character of the Holocaust.
The Nazi regime was the most genocidal the world has ever seen...During its short twelve years(overwhelmingly its last four) it killed
approximately twenty millions unarmed persons...Jews comprised only a third of the victims and their mass murder occured well into the sequence..
Slavs, defined as Untermenchen, were the most numerous victims-
- 3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citezens and 3,3 million Soviet POWs
(Michael Mann.)

So I don't really think that it is ethically right to limit the Holocaust only to the Jewish victims.
The killing methods applied to the Slavs were predominantly shootings and lethal privation as opposite to the gassings of the Jews.
But it doesn't make these methods any less mortal or more humane.

Erik
Member
Posts: 488
Joined: 03 May 2002, 17:49
Location: Sweden

#19

Post by Erik » 08 Nov 2002, 07:05

Talking about the "ecumenical" character of the Holocaust.
Quote:
The Nazi regime was the most genocidal the world has ever seen...During its short twelve years(overwhelmingly its last four) it killed
approximately twenty millions unarmed persons...Jews comprised only a third of the victims and their mass murder occured well into the sequence..
Slavs, defined as Untermenchen, were the most numerous victims-
- 3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citezens and 3,3 million Soviet POWs

(Michael Mann.)

So I don't really think that it is ethically right to limit the Holocaust only to the Jewish victims.
The killing methods applied to the Slavs were predominantly shootings and lethal privation as opposite to the gassings of the Jews.
But it doesn't make these methods any less mortal or more humane.


Witness has returned to the original problem (or one of them) of his “thread-start”:
If to put aside the obviously deliberate attempt to mix up the issues the question of the reasons of the Holocaust is really very interesting.
First of all could the Holocaust be considered as some uniquely Jewish
phenomena ?


If the “definition” of the Holocaust could be “re-defined”, “opened-up” from a “uniquely Jewish phenomena” to include all the victims of the Nazis, would something “ethically” be won? “Put right”?

Or should we heed the warning of Prof Israel W Charny concerning the phenomena of “Definitionalism”?
Definitionalism refers to a form of maddening resistance to acknowledging a known genocide that is common to academics who enter into definitional battles over whether or not a given event really fits the pure form of definition of genocide. So much energy goes into the definitional struggle, and so much emphasis is put on words that minimize the extent of the event, that first the significance of the event and its enormous human tragedy are written out of existence, and then the event itself becomes as if something else. A caveat may be appended that the subject should be considered, but in some other context like discussions of human rights, wars, or civilian disasters, but it is not to be reckoned with as a case of a government-ordered systematic destruction of a people. (See Charny, 1994a for an extensive discussion of this pattern of obfuscation and the epistemology of definition.)
http://www.ideajournal.com/charny-denials.html

Will the Holocaust lose some “purity” if it is “mixed up” with other forms of genocide? “…then the event itself becomes as if something else”?

If something is won “ethically” from it’s redefinition “ethnically”?

Prof Charny seems to think that the attention should be concentrated on the Denials of the Holocaust or Other Genocides, according to the title of his essay:
“The Psychological Satisfaction of Denials of the Holocaust or Other Genocides by Non-Extremists or Bigots, and Even by Known Scholars.”
The “ecumenicity” hinted at by him concerns the efforts to coordinate the fight against Denials from all the exterminated peoples of the World.

“Exterminated to the world, unite!”

“Deny the Deniers!”(?)

[Or perhaps: “Exterminate the exterminators!”? (À la : “expropriate the expropriators” from the Communist Manifesto).]

Nothing could be won by “definitionalisms” concerning different Genocides and their respective “uniqueness”, according to him – except by Deniers, who exert themselves to pit diverse exterminated populations against one another, and hope to find proselytes for “denial” by awakening envy among those who find themselves no less exterminated than others.

The danger of “exclusiveness” is therefore well understood.

But is there a danger of “inclusiveness”? Will it make exterminators of all of us?

And deniers?

On another thread there is wholesale denial going on by diverse Americans concerning the genocidal aspects of the Eisenhower camps after WW2 in Germany – the same Americans that fight “mindless deniers” on other threads, concerning the Holocaust!

Perhaps they are Non-extremists,and even scholars, according to the typology of Prof Charny – just a bunch of bigots?

Non the less, they are “denying”, using all the paraphernalia and appurtenances of the “mindlessnesses” they debunk on Holocaust Denial, for example.

It seems that if you are facing some Scylla or Charybdis problem here : either you are an exterminator, or a denier.

Is something won by this dilemma, “ethically”?

User avatar
Roberto
Member
Posts: 4505
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 16:35
Location: Lisbon, Portugal

#20

Post by Roberto » 08 Nov 2002, 13:13

witness wrote:Talking about the "ecumenical" character of the Holocaust.
The Nazi regime was the most genocidal the world has ever seen...During its short twelve years(overwhelmingly its last four) it killed
approximately twenty millions unarmed persons...Jews comprised only a third of the victims and their mass murder occured well into the sequence..
Slavs, defined as Untermenchen, were the most numerous victims-
- 3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citezens and 3,3 million Soviet POWs
(Michael Mann.)

So I don't really think that it is ethically right to limit the Holocaust only to the Jewish victims.
The killing methods applied to the Slavs were predominantly shootings and lethal privation as opposite to the gassings of the Jews.
But it doesn't make these methods any less mortal or more humane.
Mann is right in principle, though his figures are a little too high, in my opinion, in what concerns the number of non-Jewish Polish and Soviet civilians killed.

On the basis of several sources I consulted, I put together the following rough estimates on the number of people whose death the Nazis caused outside the scope of combat actions:

- 5 million Jews;
- 3 million Soviet prisoners of war;
- 1 million inhabitants of Leningrad who died of starvation in the winter of 1941/42, in the course of a siege the purpose of which was the eradication of the city and its population (the German troops had specific instructions not to accept a surrender of the city even if it were offered and to fire on everyone who might try to leave the city in the direction of the German lines);
- 1 million Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian civilians killed in the course of anti-partisan reprisals and "cleaning operations";
- ca. 4 million Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian civilians who died of starvation, exposure and disease in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union due to living conditions imposed by the occupiers, namely the plundering of foodstuffs for the troops and the population of the Reich, or perished due to the harsh conditions of forced labor;
- 2 million Polish civilians who were executed, perished in concentration camps or due to forced labor, or died of starvation, disease or exposure during the Nazi occupation;
- 500,000 citizens of Yugoslavia who died as prisoners of war or as civilians killed in the course of anti-partisan reprisals and "cleaning operations", not including Jews, Gypsies and those killed by Germany's allies, the Croatian "Ustasha" fascists;
- 100,000 civilians killed in the course of anti-partisan reprisals and "cleaning operations" in Checoslovaquia and Western Europe, including Italy and Greece;
- 200,000 Gypsies;
- 100,000 physically or mentally disabled people who fell victim to the "euthanasia" program;
- 100,000 German and Austrian citizens killed for political opposition to the system.

Altogether roughly 17 million victims of Nazi genocide and mass murder. Thereof 5 million Jews and 12 million non-Jews.

Regarding the sources of these estimates, I refer to a response once given to Viriato on the old forum:
Roberto wrote:
viriato wrote:Medorjurgen wrote:
Soviet civilians (other than Jews and Gypsies)
Shooting, hanging, burning, torture, etc.: 1,000,000
Starvation, disease, exposure, overwork, ill-treatment, etc.: 5,000,000
Could you give those numbers (approximative?) by ethnicty/republic of origin?
Polish civilians (other than Jews and Gypsies)
Shooting, hanging, burning, torture, etc.: 500,000
Starvation, disease, exposure, overwork, ill-treatment, etc.: 1,500,000
Does this number (that again I think is only approximative) includes only poles or does it also includes ukrainians, belorrussians, germans, lithuanians and others, living in the pre-1939 Poland?
Viriatus,

All figures are very rough estimates of mine based on various sources I’ve had a look at.

The upper figure for Soviet civilians is from Richard Overy, Russia’s War, page 151:
Hundreds of ruined villages and a death toll that passed an estimated one million bore terrible testimony to the price paid for Hitler’s ‘kind of terror’.
Overy’s source is Maslov, A.A. ‘Concerning the Role of Partisan Warfare in Soviet Military Doctrine in the 1920s and 1930s’ , Journal of Slavic Military History, 9 (1996). How the figure is broken down by the various Soviet Republics I don’t know. The figure for Belorussia, according to the recent study Kalkulierte Morde by German historian Christian Gerlach, is ca. 345,000. The figure of ca. one million victims of anti-partisan warfare in all occupied territories of the USSR is also mentioned in Alexander Werth's classic Russia at War.

For the deaths by starvation, etc. my sources are the following works referred to by R.J. Rummel in his book Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder, Transaction Publishers New Brunswick & London, 1992:

Inside the USSR:

Gil Elliot, Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, 1972 Allen Lane The Penguin Press, London, pages 54-58:
6,500,000 to 7,500,000 (“from famine disease, exposure; 0.5 million assumed to have died after the war and are not included”)

Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, translated by Colleen Taylor, 1972 Alfred A. Knopf, New York, page 140:
5,000,000 (“famine/disease; from Soviet demographer M. Maksudov")

It does not become clear from Rummel’s references if the figures include the victims of the siege of Leningrad, so I assumed that they do. Most estimates on the death toll of that siege are in the order of ca. 1,000,000 victims. See e.g. Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days. The Siege of Leningrad, Avon Books, New York, 1970, pages 590 and following:
Estimates of the Leningrad death toll as high as 2,000,000 have been made by some foreign students. These estimates are too high. A total for Leningrad and vicinity of something over 1,000,000 deaths attributable to hunger, and an overall total of deaths, civilian and military, on the order of 1,300,000 to 1,500,000 seems reasonable.

Forced labor deportees:

Mark R. Elliot, Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America’s Role in Their Repatriation, 1982 University of Illinois Press, page 23:
750,000 to 800,000 (“Eastern workers; context and reference to Dallin, 1957, pp. 451-2, imply these were Soviets”)

("Dallin" is Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 1957 Macmillan, New York. It was long considered the standard work on the topic, and I would be grateful to anyone who can tell me where I may find a copy.)

Nikolai Tolstoy, Stalin’s Secret War, 1981 Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, New York, page 282: 500,000 (“in Germany”)

Making an allowance for exaggerations and/or civilians who fell victim to the consequences of Stalin’s “scorched earth” policy during retreat in 1941/42, I assumed a total of ca. 5,000,000 victims of starvation, disease, exposure, overwork, ill-treatment among the Soviet population, including those of the siege of Leningrad. That this figure is by no means on the high side is shown by the following passage from an online article by German historian Wigbert Benz that I recently transcribed and translated on the thread

Operation Barbarossa
http://thirdreichforum.com/phpBB2/viewt ... 63a2c24a5a

of this forum:
Current research, for example Hans-Heinrich Nolte, Eastern Europe historian at Hannover University, estimate the Soviet human victims of "Operation Barbarossa", taking into account recent Russian research, at ca. 27 million - thereof seven million starvation dead behind the front line alone.
Source of original German text:

http://www.wk-2.de/unternehmen_barbarossa.html

A breakdown by ethnicity is harder to come by. I found the following in chapter 1 of Rummel’s Democide:
Besides Jews, the Germans murdered near 2,400,000 Poles, 3,000,000 Ukrainians, 1,593,000 Russians, and 1,400,000 Byelorussians, many of these among the best and brightest men and women. The Nazis killed in cold blood nearly one out of every six Polish or Soviet citizens, including Jews, under their rule
.

This chapter can be read online under the link:

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.CHAP1.HTM

The term “under their rule” suggests that Rummel’s figures do not include the victims of the siege of Leningrad, while it does not become clear from the text whether they include prisoners of war. A comparison with the above mentioned figures, however, suggests that the figures refer only to civilians in the occupied territories.

Soviet historian G. Kumanev, in his essay "The German Occupation Regime in Occupied Territory of the USSR (1941-1944)", published in the collection A Mosaic of Victims: Non Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, edited by Michael Berenbaum, 1990 New York University Press, pages 128-141, gave the following breakdown of occupation victims in the main Soviet republics:

Russia 1,700,000
Belorussia 2,500,000
Ukraine 4,000,000

So far for the USSR. As to Poland, the figure of two million non-Jewish dead is in line with the following information provided at my request by our fellow poster Hetman (then DPWES):
Some figures quoted by the Polish government in 1947

The total death toll was 6 028 000, or 22% of the pre-war population.

644 000 were killed as a direct result of the war.


http://www.holocaustforgotten.co...shgirl.jpg


3 577 000 died in death camps, executions and German army actions against civilians.

1 286 000 died in the camps as a result of epidemics and malnutrition.


http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/wojcik.jpg


521 000 died outside of the camps as a result of forced labor, beatings and torture.

590,000 people were disabled during the war.

200,000 Poles were forcibly shipped off to Germany to work there. Most survived.

During the Warsaw uprising, the Germans killed 23,000 Home Army soldiers and 180,000 civilians. 50,000 civilians died during the initial siege of Warsaw in 1939.

So just after the war it was thought that about 3,000,000 non-Jews died in Poland. But recently, that figure has been revised by Polish historians to about 2,000,000. (I don't have much info yet on why they did this, or how. See this link: fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holoca...MMPOL.HTM)

According to the 1947 Polish government figures, as a result of the German efforts to kill off the Polish intelligentsia, 43% lawyers (5610 people), 39% doctors(7500), 27% priests (2647), and 40% of university professors (700) were executed.
(Most of those who survived either emigrated or were sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan by the Russians. Some have since come back, others died, while some still remain.)

A website on the subject (Poland's Holocaust) says this: During the war, Poland lost 45% of her doctors, 57% of her attorneys, 40% of her professors, 30% of her technicians, more than 18% of her clergy, and most of her journalists. Poland's educated class was purposely targeted because the Nazis knew that this would make it easier to control the country.

http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/polen.jpg
See the thread

Polish casualties during WWII (for Roberto)
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fskalmanforumfr ... =196.topic

Hetman/DPWES also provided the following passage from the USHMM website:
In the past, many estimates of losses were based on a Polish report of 1947 requesting reparations from the Germans; this often cited document tallied population losses of 6 million for all Polish "nationals" (Poles, Jews, and other minorities). Subtracting 3 million Polish Jewish victims, the report claimed 3 million non-Jewish victims of the Nazi terror, including civilian and military casualties of war.

Documentation remains fragmentary, but today scholars of independent Poland believe that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) were victims of German Occupation policies and the war. This approximate total includes Poles killed in executions or who died in prisons, forced labor, and concentration camps. It also includes an estimated 225,000 civilian victims of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, more than 50,000 civilians who died during the 1939 invasion and siege of Warsaw, and a relatively small but unknown number of civilians killed during the Allies' military campaign of 1944—45 to liberate Poland.
http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource/poles/poles.pdf


Neither of these sources contains a breakdown by ethnicity, but it must be assumed that they refer to all civilians living on the territory of the former Polish Republic who were not Jewish. The difference between the figures first provided by Hetman/DPWES and those mentioned on the USHMM website may be due to the fact that the Soviets also killed a large number of Polish citizens during their occupation of the Eastern part of the country between 1939 and 1941.

I would like to give you more detailed figures, but it seems that research on many of these issues, long dormant behind the Iron Curtain, has not progressed much so far.

Regards,

Roberto
The ethically questionable nature of the "exclusivist" attitude of certain Jewish scholars, in regard not only to non-Jewish victims of Nazi genocide and mass murder but also to victims of similar mass killings by other regimes like the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey in 1915, Stalin's forced famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s and Pol Pot's massacres in Cambodia in the 1970s, has also been pointed out by Ward Churchill in his article

Assaults on Truth and Memory: Holocaust Denial in Context

http://www.zmag.org/Zmag/articles/cot96church.htm

User avatar
Scott Smith
Member
Posts: 5602
Joined: 10 Mar 2002, 22:17
Location: Arizona
Contact:

Ecumenical Holocaust...

#21

Post by Scott Smith » 08 Nov 2002, 15:24

Why do Victims of the Nazis carry special cachet?

We do not usually see German POWs listen as Victims of anything but war, not even those captured by the Soviets. Most Communist Victims were not in the context of War, but nearly all of the Nazis are. Curious.

Of course, gaschambers would tend to make the Victimology "unique," but that would tend to mitigate against an "ecumenical" Holocaust.
:)

User avatar
Roberto
Member
Posts: 4505
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 16:35
Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Re: Ecumenical Holocaust...

#22

Post by Roberto » 08 Nov 2002, 15:27

Scott Smith wrote:Why do Victims of the Nazis carry special cachet?

We do not usually see German POWs listen as Victims of anything but war, not even those captured by the Soviets. Most Communist Victims were not in the context of War, but nearly all of the Nazis are. Curious.
:)
Blah, blah, blah.

The "context of war" hardly makes a difference in the case of mass killings only remotely related or completely unrelated to anything that may be considered an act of war.

User avatar
Roberto
Member
Posts: 4505
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 16:35
Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Re: Ecumenical Holocaust...

#23

Post by Roberto » 08 Nov 2002, 15:29

Scott Smith wrote:Why do Victims of the Nazis carry special cachet?

We do not usually see German POWs listen as Victims of anything but war, not even those captured by the Soviets. Most Communist Victims were not in the context of War, but nearly all of the Nazis are. Curious.
:)
Blah, blah, blah.

The "context of war" hardly makes a difference in the case of mass killings only remotely related or completely unrelated to anything that may be considered an act of war.

User avatar
Scott Smith
Member
Posts: 5602
Joined: 10 Mar 2002, 22:17
Location: Arizona
Contact:

#24

Post by Scott Smith » 08 Nov 2002, 15:52

witness wrote:
Scott wrote:
witness wrote:The rebellion against the traditional burgeiois values . The Jews of course being the perceived representatives of these values
No, the Nazis were progressive in this area; they wanted to move beyond "bourgeois values," true.

But Jews would not be seen as the keepers of "Bourgeois values," which would be conservative, or Rightwing classical-liberalism.
Yes I agree that the Jews were not not the "keepers of bourgeois values"
but I disagree that they ''would not be seen as '' such. For many destitute Germans the Jewish supermarkets and numerous small businesses were exactly the representations of the bourgeous values.
I see your point but I'm not sure that "throwing out the moneychangers from the temple," as a metaphor the Nazis used, would be seen as being against "bourgeois values."

In other words, the Jews had the traditional reputation for being the moneychangers and the stateless, soulless internationalists because in the Middle Ages Christians were forbidden to practice usury and the Jews therefore became the first bankers, and international bankers at that.

So Jews would get credit for the problems of the Depression and the Hyperinflation before it, but I don't think this would necessarily be seen as "bourgeois values" except by Marxists. The German middle classes, i.e., the Bourgeoisie, were the hardest hit by the inflation, which destroyed the value of capital. So anti-Semitism (throwing out the Jewish moneychangers) might be an effective argument to persuade the German Bourgeoisie.

The Nazi Party, however, was a lower-middle class movement. These are well-educated professionals and clerks, or sometimes skilled laborers, and without a lot of property. They would be hit the hardest from the Depression, which destroyed job-security and forced educated people into the ranks of unskilled laborers. The lower-middle classes (or sometimes even the petit-bourgeoisie, or small shopkeepers) would tend to favor arguments against "bourgeois values," per se, which would not necessarily be anti-Semitic, although the internationalist nature of Finance Capital (and the consequent anti-Semitism) might be a persuasive patriotic-argument for them.
:)

michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

#25

Post by michael mills » 09 Nov 2002, 02:08

Calculation of the number of civilian casualties caused by German Government actions is difficult. The tendency has been to attribute all such casualties to the responsibility of the German Government, but the fact is that the German-Soviet war caused a break-down of normal state control that allowed all sorts of ethnic hatreds to come to the surface, resulting in wide-spread massacres.

For eample, in 1943, a Ukrainian nationalist organisation, the Ukrainska Povstanska Armia, opposed to both Soviet and German control, launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Polish minority in West Ukraine, particularly in the province of Volhynia. Polish eyewitness reports of this campaign relate how ethnic Poles fled to the German occupation authorities for protection from the marauding Ukrainian bands; the Germans, however, were spread too thinly and too preoccupied with the war against the Red Army to be able to do much.

Polish sources claim that the ethnic Polish minority in Volhynia was largely wiped out or expelled by the Ukrainian partisans. One wonders to what extent those civilian casualties have contributed to the widely varying estimates of Polish civilian victims of the German Government.

The same thing happened in Yugoslavia; the whole country degenerated into a chaos of inter-ethnic hatred, with wide-spread massacres on both sides. The German occupation forces generally restricted themselves to holding the major towns and lines of communication. They carried out some reprisals in Serbia in the summer and autumn of 1941, but the number of victims was small, and reprisals ceased when partisan activity in that area ceased, and shifted to Bosnia, which was under Croatian control. Almost all the civilian deaths in Yugoslavia resulted from inter-ethnic warfare, Croat and Muslim Ustase killing ethnic Serbs, Serb Cetniks killing ethnic Croats and Muslims, Communist partisans (mainly ethnic Serbs from Bosnia and Croatia, but with a largely ethnic Croat leadership) killing anyone who got in their way (but very few Germans).

User avatar
Roberto
Member
Posts: 4505
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 16:35
Location: Lisbon, Portugal

#26

Post by Roberto » 09 Nov 2002, 15:43

michael mills wrote:Calculation of the number of civilian casualties caused by German Government actions is difficult. The tendency has been to attribute all such casualties to the responsibility of the German Government, but the fact is that the German-Soviet war caused a break-down of normal state control that allowed all sorts of ethnic hatreds to come to the surface, resulting in wide-spread massacres.

For eample, in 1943, a Ukrainian nationalist organisation, the Ukrainska Povstanska Armia, opposed to both Soviet and German control, launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Polish minority in West Ukraine, particularly in the province of Volhynia. Polish eyewitness reports of this campaign relate how ethnic Poles fled to the German occupation authorities for protection from the marauding Ukrainian bands; the Germans, however, were spread too thinly and too preoccupied with the war against the Red Army to be able to do much.

Polish sources claim that the ethnic Polish minority in Volhynia was largely wiped out or expelled by the Ukrainian partisans. One wonders to what extent those civilian casualties have contributed to the widely varying estimates of Polish civilian victims of the German Government.
Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles fell victim to this genocide, according to Gunnar Heinsohn's Lexikon der Völkermorde, page 283. Heinsohn refers to the following sources:

V. Kosyk, "Le mouvement national ukranien de résistence 1941-1944", in Revue d'Histoire de Deuxième Guerre Mondial, volume 36, no. 141 (1986), pages 59 to 75);

W. Polisczuk, Legal and Political Assessment or the OUN and UPA, Toronto, 1997.
michael mills wrote:The same thing happened in Yugoslavia; the whole country degenerated into a chaos of inter-ethnic hatred, with wide-spread massacres on both sides. The German occupation forces generally restricted themselves to holding the major towns and lines of communication. They carried out some reprisals in Serbia in the summer and autumn of 1941, but the number of victims was small, and reprisals ceased when partisan activity in that area ceased, and shifted to Bosnia, which was under Croatian control. Almost all the civilian deaths in Yugoslavia resulted from inter-ethnic warfare, Croat and Muslim Ustase killing ethnic Serbs, Serb Cetniks killing ethnic Croats and Muslims, Communist partisans (mainly ethnic Serbs from Bosnia and Croatia, but with a largely ethnic Croat leadership) killing anyone who got in their way (but very few Germans).
In this respect,
Christopher R. Browning wrote:During World War II, roughly 1.5 million Yugoslavs - 10 percent of the population - lost their lives. The demographic catastrophe occurred in many forms, but three were most prominent: (1) the genocidal massacres of the Nazi-sponsored Ustash regime in Croatia, (2) the veritable civil war between various ethnic groups and political movements in Yugoslavia unleashed by the German dismemberment of the country, and (3) the occupation policies of the German military itself aimed at crushing partisan resistance. If the German occupiers were indirectly responsible for the first two forms of bloodletting, they were directly responsible for the third.
This essay will focus on the third factor, and in particular on the question of the emergence of Germany’s antipartisan policy in response to the uprising in Serbia in the summer and fall of 1941. I will argue that this response was not simply a programmatic deduction from Hitler’s racial ideology but was produced by a more complex combination of causes: (1) the negative stereotype of Serbs that permeated German society; (2) the political culture of the Nazi regime, which spread other racial stereotypes and set a premium on ruthlessness; and (3) the occupiers’ shifting perceptions of political expediency and military necessity.
[...]
Between September 23 and October 2, troops of the 342nd division cut a swath of destruction through the Sabac region, executind 1,126 suspected Communists, interning over 20,000 men, burning villages considered sympathetic to the partisans, and relenting from driving off the women and children only at the last moment when it became clear that no one would be left to take care of the cattle and harvest.
Rather than deter resistance, the expedition merely provoked counter-atrocities. The Germans knew that the partisans held more than 300 German prisoners, and military intelligence eagerly tracked their whereabouts in the hopes of rescue. On October 2, however, the partisans ambushed a communications unit near Topola and executed by machine-gun fire at close range the troops who had surrendered, killing a total of 21 men. Though this was a small fraction of what the Germans had just done at Sabac, Böhme immediately responded by escalating his terror policy another quantum leap. The head of the OKW, Wilhelm Keitel, had recently ordered that for every German soldier killed by insurgents in occupied territories, 50 to 100 “Communists” were to be executed in retaliation. He justified this order on the grounds that “a human life in these countries often counts for nothing and a deterrent effect can be achieved only through unusual harshness.” Keitel’s view struck a responsive chord among the Germans in Serbia, where it was considered axiomatic that “with the people of the Balkans, the life of others means nothing, one’s own life only very little.” Thus, Böhme immediately grasped the maximum ratio of 100:1, expanded the order to cover Jews as well as Communists, and let loose his firing squads on 2,100 “Communists and Jews” interned in camps at Belgrade and Sabac. At the latter camp these executions were particularly absurd and grotesque, in that predominantly Austrian troops gunned down central European Jewish refugees mostly from Vienna in retaliation for Serbian partisan attacks on the German army.
The 100:1 reprisal ratio was then established as standard operating procedure for all subsequent casualties. When the 717th Division of Major General Hoffmann, operating south of Belgrade, suffered losses in mid-October, it had no access to a convenient reprisal pool of interned Jews. Instead the Germans conducted roundups in Kraljevo and Kragujevac, shooting 1,755 people in the first city and 2,300 in the second. In Kragujevac the victims included the students of the local high school and the workers of an airplane factory producing for the German war effort, though the Germans had never suffered a single casualty within the city. This random roundup and massacre of over 4,000 Serbs in Kraljevo and Kragujevac between October 17 and 21 was criticized by various German occupation authorities, by Nedic, and even by the OKW, causing Böhme to reconsider his reprisal policy. “Arbitrary arrests and shootings of Serbs are driving to the insurgents circles of the population which up to now did not participate in the insurrection,” Böhme’s new order explained. “It must be … avoided, that precisely those elements of the population are seized and shot as hostages who, being non-participants in the insurrection, did not flee before the German punitive expedition.” Thus the Germans reverted to what might be called the proximity principle, and henceforth reprisal victims were to be taken from those found in the vicinity of partisan attacks or from villages considered focal points of the insurgency. If Serbs in the countryside were still at high risk, those living in urban areas that remained peaceful were relatively more secure.
While the Serbs received a partial reprieve from German terror, this was no help to the Jews and Gypsies. If the Germans could conceive that not all Serbs were Communists and that the random shooting of innocent Serbs would damage German interests, they had no doubt at all that Jews were anti-German and that the Gypsies were no different from the Jews. And if more care had to be exercised in selecting Serbian hostages, the pressure to find hostages elsewhere to meet the 100:1 quota was that much greater. The new German policy stated succintly: “As a matter of principle it must be said that Jews and Gypsies in general represent an element of insecurity and thus a danger to public order and safety … That is why it is a matter of principle in each case to put all Jewish men and all male Gypsies at the disposal of the troops as hostages.” The fate of the male Jews and Gypsies in Serbia was sealed, and their execution by army firing squad was completed by early November.
At the same time the tide of battle in Serbia turned in the Germans’ favor, and by December the partisans had retreated to the mountainous regions of Bosnia and Croatia beyond the Serbian border. They would continue their struggle against the Germans elsewhere but would not return in force to Serbia until 1944. With the first phase of the partisan war in Serbia at an end, the reprisal body count stood at about 15,000, of which some 4,500 – 5,000 were Jews and Gypsies. In contrast, on December 1, 1941, the Germans rescued 319 prisoners whom the partisans had held since September but not executed.
The Germans were convinced that the reprisal measures had made a major contribution to their success. The anti-partisan policies developed in Serbia – mass shootings as well as mass internment and deportation of the population in insurgent areas – would therefore be expanded upon elsewhere in Yugoslavia in the following years. Although the partisan war became increasingly vicious on both sides, this cannot alter the historical record that the deadly escalation was initiated by the Germans in Serbia in 1941. In doing so, the Germans were not reacting in kind to atrocities committed by savage partisans, as their postwar apologists would have it. Rather the Germans perceived the local population through a series of negative stereotypes and formulated policy in accordance with a political culture that exulted in violence and brutality. In doing so, they drowned their initial opposition in a sea of blood but ultimately provoked an unrelenting resistance that plagued them for the rest of the war.
Source of quote:

Christopher R. Browning, "Germans and Serbs: The Emergence of Nazi Antipartisan Policies in 1941", in: A Mosaic of Victims. Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis. Edited by Michael Berenbaum. New York University Press, 1990.

The collection also contains an article on the genocide perpetrated by the Croatian Ustase against ethnic Serbs that Browning mentions at the beginning of his article. I will provide a transcription thereof next week.

User avatar
Roberto
Member
Posts: 4505
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 16:35
Location: Lisbon, Portugal

#27

Post by Roberto » 12 Nov 2002, 14:49

Roberto wrote:The collection also contains an article on the genocide perpetrated by the Croatian Ustase against ethnic Serbs that Browning mentions at the beginning of his article. I will provide a transcription thereof next week.
Genocide in Satellite Croatia during the Second World War

Menachem Shelah

The state of Croatia, the subject of this essay, no longer exists. It was a short-lived German satellite, set up by the Germans and the Italians after the collapse of Yugoslavia in April 1941. It encompassed the former provinces of Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. The number of its inhabitants was approximately 6.5 million, of whom 3.3 million (51 percent) were Croats (Roman Catholics); 2 million (30 percent), Serbs (Pravoslavs); 0.7 million (11 percent), Moslems; 45,000 (0.7 percent), Jews; 27,000 (0.3 percent) Gypsies and other minorities, such as Germans, Hungarians, etc.
The leaders of the so-called Independent State of Croatia were members of the prewar Croatian ultranationalistic terror organization called “Ustasha.” The Ustasha movement, because of its uncompromising and violent attitude towards the Yugoslav state, had been outlawed. Many of its members found refuge in fascist Italy, which gave them some political and military backing, depending on the fluctuations of Italian Balkan policy.
A prominent intellectual and Ustaha ideologue, A. Seitz, proclaimed that “the bell tolls. The last hour of those foreign elements, the Serb and the Jew, has arrived. They shall vanish from Croatia. It shall be done by the army and the Ustasha movement.” Similarly, a Ustasha priest, the Reverend Dijonizije Jurichev, said:

In this country, no one can live except Croatians. We know very well how to deal with those that oppose conversion [to the Roman Catholic faith]. I personally have put an end to whole provinces, killing everyone – chicks and men alike. It gives me no remorse to kill a small child when he stands in the path of the Ustasha.

No wonder the local press coined the slogan (it rhymes in the original) “Serb, crawl or perish!” (Ili se pokloni ili ukloni).
There is usually a certain discrepancy between ideology and praxis, between words and deeds. But alas, it was not so in this case. The Ustasha acted brutally and shamelessly on their declarations. Genocide of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, was the first, foremost and most consistent item on their political agenda. Wholesale massacres of the Serbian population commenced in Croatia even before the consolidation of Ustasha power, and continued until its collapse in May 1945. It began in mixed regions such as Lika and Kordun. There the local Croatian inhabitants, led by Ustasha members, killed their Serb neighbors, pillaged Serb property, burned Serb houses, and raped Serb women. It is almost unbelievable that people of the same ethnic origin, speaking the same language, living together for generations, could turn on one another in such a terrible way. Despite the religious discord between the Serb Pravoslavs and the Croat Roman Catholics, and despite the pent-up political grievances from the Yugoslav period, the intensity and brutality are inexplicable in rational terms. As the French historian Jacques Sabille wrote:

The Ustasha bands spread terror throughout the countryside, directed against Serb Orthodox Christians and Jews. Whole families were murdered, towns were completely gutted, terrible acts of sadistic cruelty were perpetrated … The Ustasha chapter written in the summer of 1941 was one of the most gruesome in the history of the World War II, which is saying a lot.

Today there are Croat emigrant circles whose members claim such statements are sheer Communist propaganda intended to smear the Croat nation and hamper its fight for liberation. As a professional historian I can assure you that the account set forth in this essay is based on massive documentation and contemporary evidence, most of it from Nazi German, Fascist Italian, and Ustasha Croat sources.
It is very difficult to give the precise number of Serb men, women and children killed by the Croats. It depends very much on whom you include among the victims. Do you count only those killed outright in the murder orgy in the first months: those butchered by knife, thrown into deep ravines in the mountains, burned alive in Pravoslav churches and their homes? Or do you also include the thousands who died in the big expulsions, perished from hunger, exposure, and epidemics in the camps on their way into exile? By a rough calculation, the number of Serbs killed in Croatia reaches the 200,000 mark in the first year of Ustasha rule, about 10 percent of the Serb population in Croatia. During that period, special attention was given by the Ustasha to members of the Serbian elite. The percentage of murdered Serbian doctors, lawyers, teachers, priests and intellectuals was much higher than the average. In that manner the Ustasha tried to destroy potential Serbian leadership.
As a consequence of the widespread terror, in many parts of Croatia total anarchy prevailed. The Serbs, with whatever arms they had, tried to defend themselves and the country was plunged into a state of civil war. It was perfectly clear, at least to the Germans and the Italians stationed in Croatia, that continuation of the Ustasha rampage could jeopardize their rule and encourage the growing resistance movement.
Moreove, the Italians took advantage of the situation and helped the Serbs against the Ustasha to enlarge their territorial domain in Croatia. Hitler, in his meetings with Minister of War Slavko Kvaternik in July 1941, and with the Ustasha “Führer” Ante Pavelic in June 1941, encouraged him in their genocide of the Serbs and, of course, Jews. Hitler said that if Croatia wanted to exist, her policy in the next fifty years must be one of “national intolerance”.
The Germans stationed in Croatia were aware that the Ustasha rampage and anarchy could damage German interest in Croatia and push the harassed Serbs into the resistance movement. In their messages to Berlin the Germans emphasized the “unorganized” and “uncivilized” manner of the Ustasha killings while at the same time firing squads of the German Army stationed in Serbia executed thousands of Serbs and Jews in a much more “civilized” way.
After a few months of indiscriminate killings, even the Ustasha government realized that the so-called Serb question in Croatia could not be solved by total annihilation. They started to look for other ways and means, including legal harassment. In an avalanche of laws (many of them affecting Jews and Gypsies as well), the Ustasha tried to isolate, pauperize, and collectively outlaw the Serb minority. By prohibiting the Serbs from taking part in most economic enterprises, appointing Croat commissars in Serb factories and shops, imposing collective fines on the community, and so on, they denied the Serb minority their livelihood. Other laws prohibiting Serb residence in certain neighborhoods and imposing restriction on movement and curfews turned the Serbs into pariahs without any legal protection. But even then the Serbs did not vanish from Croatia. “Let the Serbian horde run to Serbia,” decided the Ustasha leadership. But the Ustasha couldn’t simply drive hundreds of thousands of people into territory governed by their German allies. The German military administration in Serbia vehemently opposed that plan on practical grounds, such as lack of food and accommodations. At last some sort of agreement was reached. The Croatians agreed to take in a few hundred thousand Slovenes from annexed Slovenia, and the Germans would accept the expelled Serbs. The eviction campaign commenced, and whole districts (mainly in northwestern Bosnia, near the Serb border) were made Serbrein.
These forced expulsions were carried out in an especially unpleasant manner. Thousands upon thousands of women, children and elderly people were cruelly herded into transit camps without proper arrangements for food or hygienic facilities. Epidemics such as typhus raged and killed thousands. The people were totally denuded of their belongings and, on arrival in Serbia, were left on their own. During the first year of Ustasha rule, around 200,000 Serbs were expelled from their homes and thrown into Serbia. Then in the beginning of 1942, the German authorities in Belgrade, for their own reasons, stopped this appalling exodus. Another solution to the Serbian question was blocked. And all that time, some of the Ustasha leaders and “intellectuals” had kept an ace up their sleeves. Mladen Lorkovitch, the Croat minister of foreign affairs, formulated it like this: “In Croatia, we can find few real Serbs. The majority of Pravoslavs are as a matter of fact Croats who were forced by foreign invaders to accept the infidel faith. Now it’s our duty to bring them back into the Roman Catholic fold.” In short, the Ustasha decided that whoever might fight them must be forced to join them. With tacit local (and Vatican) ecclesiastical approval, a most energetic and brutal conversion campaign began. Catholic priests, escorted by armed Ustashas, descended on Serb towns and villages and in a matter of hours converted hundreds of “lost” Pravoslav souls. Taking into account that the alternative was death or imprisonment, the outstanding success of the crusade is perfectly understandable. Those “dedicated” Catholic priests were ordered to deny the benefit of conversion to Serb intellectuals and community leaders and instead to hand them over to the proper authorities to be killed or incarcerated in concentration camps. In this manner about a quarter of a million Serbs were converted during 1941 and 1942.
As a result of the Ustasha genocide, the local Serbs tried both to defend themselves and to take revenge. The country was plunged into civil war. Partisans and bands of resistance armies roamed the woods and mountains. Thus, a very complex situation developed in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. The Ustasha Serbophobia was transformed in that context into “the fight for Croat national independence.” The atrocities perpetrated by almost everybody in 1942 were part of the fighting that was going on among all kinds of groupings. For instance, the terrible genocide of the Serb civil population of the Kozara District during the summer of 1942, in which the current Austrian President Kurt Waldheim took part, was a collective Ustasha-German enterprise that was part of an anti-partisan drive. The whole population of the district – about 60,000 persons – was driven on foot to the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp, where most of the men were killed outright, the women sent to Germany, and the children – 20,000 of them – killed or dispersed throughout Croat orphanages.
The Ustasha government of the Independent State of Croatia undoubtedly initiated, prompted, organized, implemented and carried out a policy of genocide against the Serb population of Croatia. It did so by wholesale killings, massive expulsions, forced conversions, and deliberate forcing of unlawful legislation, imprisonment and bodily and spiritual damage.
The Ustasha also took part in the extermination of a group whose terrible fate during the Nazi period has scarcely been mentioned in the history of this period. One reason is that the documentary and oral evidence is scarce. Only a few German and satellite documents specifically mention the murder of Gypsies; they are part of the whole picture, a nomadic, so-called asocial group that had no place in the New Order. In Croatia the fate of the Gypsies was particularly cruel. The local Ustasha didn’t need German help to do the job. They carried out the Gypsy killings on their own. By a rough estimate, out of 27,000 Croat Gypsies, more than 26,000 were murdered. Some of them tried to save their lives by cooperating with the Ustasha as grave diggers and helpers in the mass killings, but in the end they too were murdered.
As a historian I am obligated to certain standards of objectivity. But in this case my objectivity was jeopardized by the fact that I am a Croatian Jew, on of the very few Jews of that country who escaped the Ustasha killers. Can I possible present the case of genocide in that country without compromising the Croat side? It is for you to decide, but let me remind you that before me stood the modest maxim, “Facts are facts are facts.” And in my opinion the facts are true, their historical and moral impact is clear, and their contemporary importance is enormous. [...]
Published in: A Mosaic of Victims. Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, edited by Michael Berenbaum, 1990 New York University Press, pages 74-79.

viriato
Member
Posts: 717
Joined: 21 Apr 2002, 14:23
Location: Porto,Portugal

#28

Post by viriato » 12 Nov 2002, 16:40

Roberto quoted:
The state of Croatia, the subject of this essay, no longer exists. It was a short-lived German satellite, set up by the Germans and the Italians after the collapse of Yugoslavia in April 1941. It encompassed the former provinces of Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. The number of its inhabitants was approximately 6.5 million, of whom 3.3 million (51 percent) were Croats (Roman Catholics); 2 million (30 percent), Serbs (Pravoslavs); 0.7 million (11 percent), Moslems; 45,000 (0.7 percent), Jews; 27,000 (0.3 percent) Gypsies and other minorities, such as Germans, Hungarians, etc.
I wonder why the author gives the number of both Jews and Gypsies and dismiss both the Germans and Hungarians to the realm of "other minorites" more or less implying that their numbers were smaller than the others quoted. In fact the Germans amounted to 100000 and the Hungarians were some 60000 (from memory).

User avatar
Roberto
Member
Posts: 4505
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 16:35
Location: Lisbon, Portugal

#29

Post by Roberto » 12 Nov 2002, 17:15

viriato wrote:Roberto quoted:
The state of Croatia, the subject of this essay, no longer exists. It was a short-lived German satellite, set up by the Germans and the Italians after the collapse of Yugoslavia in April 1941. It encompassed the former provinces of Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. The number of its inhabitants was approximately 6.5 million, of whom 3.3 million (51 percent) were Croats (Roman Catholics); 2 million (30 percent), Serbs (Pravoslavs); 0.7 million (11 percent), Moslems; 45,000 (0.7 percent), Jews; 27,000 (0.3 percent) Gypsies and other minorities, such as Germans, Hungarians, etc.
I wonder why the author gives the number of both Jews and Gypsies and dismiss both the Germans and Hungarians to the realm of "other minorites" more or less implying that their numbers were smaller than the others quoted. In fact the Germans amounted to 100000 and the Hungarians were some 60000 (from memory).
I presume the reason is that Germans and Hungarians were not targeted by the Ustasha regime.

But then, neither were the Moslems, for all I know.

When I first read the passage, I thought the figure of 27,000 referred to the total of Gypsies and "other minorities". Later in the text it becomes clear that 27,000 is only the number of Gypsies, and that no figures at all are given for the other minorities.

Post Reply

Return to “Holocaust & 20th Century War Crimes”