Is the Holocaust Unique?: Lessons from its Etiology for the Case of Sudan*
by
Manus I. Midlarsky
Department of Political Science
Rutgers University
89 George Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1411
TEL: 732-932-7106
FAX: 732-932-7170
[email protected]
Elizabeth R. Midlarsky
Department of Counseling and Clinical
Psychology
Teachers College, Columbia University
525 West 120th Street
New York, NY 10027
TEL: 212-678-3124
[email protected]
*Prepared for presentation at the 9th biennial conference of the International Association of
Genocide Scholars, Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 19-22, 2011
1
Abstract
Confronting the potential uniqueness of the Holocaust, this paper uses the theory of the
ephemeral gain as an approach to the etiology of genocide and its processual unfolding. An
ephemeral gain exists when a severe loss or the threat of its imminent occurrence (territory,
population), typically perceived as a catastrophe, is preceded by a period of societal gain, which
in turn was preceded by a period of subordination. A consequence of this ephemerality can be
the threat and consequent fear of reversion to a subordinate condition, which can lead to mass
violence. The enormous magnitude of the gain for perpetrators in their taking on the pseudoidentity of “Aryan” übermenschen, poised now for a precipitous fall to subordination towards the
end of the war, is used to explain the increased murder rate of Jews not in extermination camps
and even the metastasization of the Holocaust to non-Jews at its end.
The genocidal behavior of the Khartoum government in Sudan is suggested to be cognate
to the Holocaust. The subordination of blacks to Arabized Sudanese even to the point of
routinely using the word abd (slave or servant) to describe them has little parallel elsewhere in
the Muslim world. And just as Germany was about to become subordinate to the Allies at the end
of the war, a massively truncated Sudan would be ripe for subordination to Egypt, as it had been
for centuries prior to Sudanese independence. Mass violence directed at Sudanese blacks as
agents of defeat for a united Sudan is then “justified.” A combined two-level explanation—the
personal and territorial/national—is offered.
2
Is the Holocaust Unique?: Lessons from its Etiology for the Case of Sudan
Some years ago, an edited volume was published with the title, “Is the Holocaust Unique?:
Perspectives on Comparative Genocide.”1 In it, genocide scholars reflected on the extent to
which comparative research on genocide can yield robust findings, or is even appropriate, given
unique historical elements. Since that time, comparative research has proceeded apace, yielding
findings that are significant statistically across a mixed set of genocides ranging from several
thousand to several million dead.2 Of course, the Holocaust with its six million dead would
stand as an outlier in most, if not all, comparative studies of killing magnitude,3 with the vast
majority (over 90%) of Jews who had not fled the German invasions murdered within the
territorial confines of the Nazi empire. But this horrific fact does not necessarily indicate that the
etiologies of various genocides differ, or even that a genocide was processually unique as it
unfolded. There simply were more Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe than say, Tutsi in Rwanda or
Armenians in Anatolia.
Yet, there is one element in the Holocaust that distinguishes it from other genocides, even
of high magnitude. This is the increased murder rate of Jews not in extermination camps still
alive in the closing stages of World War II. Not only Jews, but gentile European civilians and
American soldiers at Malmedy in Belgium were subject to levels of mass murder substantially
exceeding those of earlier war periods.
In a review of a recent work on the death marches at the end of WWII,4 Christopher
Browning concludes that:
The death marches differed in two fundamental ways from the Final Solution and other
genocidal programmes of the Nazis. First, the death march killing was decentralized and
without the clear orders and administrative supervision that characterized earlier Nazi
3
genocide. Second, the victim group was not an identifiable national, ethnic, or racial
entity (Jews, Gypsies, or Slavs) but rather a “mélange of ethnic, national, and racial
groups” that were perceived as a “collective” that was both “other” and “inferior” on the
one hand, and a “demonic and essentially fantastic threat” on the other. Against this
“virtual” group, a murderous ideological consensus formed, binding German society with
party and SS functionaries in the regime’s death throes, and resulting in a “unique case of
genocidal massacre” that was “related” but not identical to the Holocaust.5
How do we explain this unique characteristic of the Holocaust’s end, extended now to “Aryan”
groups? Clearly, the decision making apparatus at this point was ineffective, if it even existed in
any coherent form. Hence the analysis must center on the relationship between prisoners and
guards as the death marches proceeded.
To do this, we need to examine the Holocaust’s dimensions, beginning with the death
marches as the end of the war approached. I will then present a common etiology for many (but
not all) instances of mass violence,6 followed by evidence of the unique characteristics of
prisoner-guard relationships demonstrated experimentally in the now famous Stanford Prison
Experiment.7 Findings from this experiment in tandem with the common etiology will be used to
reflect on the career trajectories of an extermination camp commander and a Waffen SS leader.
These individuals represent the two basic types of Nazi war criminal – the concentration camp
guard and the SS battlefield commander. The analysis concludes that although not unique in its
etiology, there is a major processual element that distinguishes the Holocaust from other
genocides. Yet, it is not a difference in kind, but massively in scale. And it turns out that
another genocide with a similar characteristic, and one with a strong possibility of being
repeated, took place in Sudan. The paper concludes with a discussion of this similarity.
4
The Increased Murder Rate
A signal component of Daniel Goldhagen’s8 understanding of German “eliminationist antiSemitism” is the occurrence of the death marches of 1945. As the Soviet armies marched
inexorably westward, concentration camp and labor camp prisoners were forced into debilitating
marches in which many died. In Goldhagen’s view, only a virulent sanguinary anti-Semitism
could yield such brutality, even as it was clear that Nazi Germany was about to lose the war.
Whatever the merits of the notion of “eliminationism,” Goldhagen nevertheless is a
serious scholar of the death marches. Accordingly, “It was possible, with the war lost and with
their own capture imminent, that the Germans would realize that their political cultural norms no
longer applied, that all prisoners would finally become equal in the Germans’ eyes. But they did
not. This is one of the remarkable aspects of the death marches, including the Helmbrechts death
march [of both Jewish and non-Jewish female concentration camp prisoners.]”9 Prior to the
march, unused clothing and some rations were distributed to non-Jewish prisoners but not to the
Jews, contributing to the higher death rate of Jews. Elsewhere, Goldhagen also points out that on
the death marches, “killing and brutalizing Jews actually imperiled their captors”10 presumably
because of the inability to escape the onrushing Allies quickly and decisively.
While the extraordinarily intense Nazi racism did yield the anti-Semitic persecutions of
the 1930s and much less certainly, the Holocaust of the early 1940s,11 it does not provide a
satisfactorily complete explanation of the increased death rate not only of Jews but also of East
European laborers and others forced onto these marches.
In his comprehensive and detailed examination of this problem, Richard Bessel indicates
that, “Of the prisoners in the camps in January, somewhere between 200,000 and 350,000 died
5
during the winter and early spring of 1945: Martin Broszat estimated in the 1960s that ‘at least a
third of the over 700,000 prisoners registered in January 1945 died on the exhausting evacuation
marches, in the transport trains which wandered about for weeks, and (above all) in the
completely overcrowded reception camps during the months and weeks immediately before the
end of the war’; more recently, Yehuda Bauer has estimated that as many as half the prisoners
may have died.”12 As specific illustrations, Bessel amplifies that:
In Mauthausen (near Linz, in Upper Austria), which was the first concentration camp to
have been established outside the borders of the ‘old Reich’ and which also received
evacuees from Auschwitz and Groß Rosen in early 1945, the highest monthly death rates
of the camp’s entire existence were recorded from January to April 1945 – some four
times the mortality rates over the preceding nine months; roughly 45,000 prisoners died
there between the onset of winter 1944-5 and the beginning of the following summer.
Particularly horrific were conditions in the Mittelbau-Dora camp complex near
Nordhausen in Thuringia, where prisoners had been forced to work in vast underground
tunnels assembling, among other things, V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets.13
Evidence also exists elsewhere. In Vichy France, for example, the killing rate of Jews rose
precipitously toward the end of the war. A survivor, Isaac Levendel, winner of the Prix FrancoEuropéen for his memoir, observed: in early 1944 “as the situation became tougher for the
Germans at the front, there were rumors of Jewish arrests closer to home. Soon they were
happening all around us.”14
By way of explanation, Bessel agrees with Ian Kershaw that this latter period exemplifies
the “assault on the roots of civilization,”15 characteristic of Nazi governance (or allies). Always
prone to violence, the Nazis simply ramped up their efforts to destroy as much as possible as the
war drew to a close. But this “violence begets more violence” explanation begs the question
because it does not directly explain the vastly increased killing rates in this last period.
6
Bessel approaches the contours of a fundamental explanation when he asserts that, “The
horrors of the death marches and the terrible conditions in vastly overcrowded concentration and
transit camps during early 1945, as well as the terror meted out to German soldiers and civilians
and to foreign labourers during the last months of the Reich, were consequences of a willingness,
when the opportunity arose, to exercise almost unlimited power over others together with a
fundamental disrespect for basic human values.”16 Yet, the “almost unlimited power over
others” existed during the earlier pre-Holocaust period of September 1939-June 1941 (or January
1942 when the Holocaust was established beyond the Eastern front), and widespread massacre
did not occur within Nazi-occupied Europe during this nearly two year period. Certainly,
Goldhagen’s “eliminationist anti-Semitism” also existed during this pre-Holocaust period.
What is seldom, if ever, taken into account is the prospective change in the life
trajectories of the individual perpetrators within the contexts of their earlier pre-Holocaust lives.
From their almost unlimited power over others, their futures at best entailed a return to the
modest beginnings experienced by many before the war, and at worst, death or lengthy
imprisonment at the hands of the victorious Allies. In other words, an ephemeral gain existed,
that I earlier identified as a major source of extremist behavior. Humiliation-shame and anger
are potential consequences of this ephemerality, which abundantly found in the closing months
of the war, can yield mass violence. Territorial issues also are important, as we shall see.17
But despite the presence of an ephemeral gain in many other instances of extremism and
mass violence (e.g., the Armenians, the Tutsi, Soviet communism, Italian, Hungarian, and
Romanian fascism, rampaging militarism, radical Islamism, and extreme nationalism in the
Balkans and Poland after Auschwitz),18 the presence of an ideology claiming Aryan racial
supremacy for Germany intensified the violence. Not only did it provide a justification for
7
extraordinary brutality towards the presumed untermensch, it highlighted the enormous contrast
between the immeasurable gain in status for “Aryans” vis-à-vis putative enemies, and its soon to
be irremediable loss.19
The Ephemeral Gain
An ephemeral gain exists when a severe loss or the threat of its imminent occurrence (territory,
population), typically perceived as a catastrophe, is preceded by a period of societal gain, which
in turn was preceded by a period of subordination. Ephemeral gains are reinforced when they
occur in successive time periods. In turn, perceptions of injustice, anger, feelings of humiliationshame, and fear of reversion to an earlier subordinate condition can follow from the ephemeral
gain.
Emotional reactions to a sudden loss or the threat of imminent loss can yield extreme
consequences. A diachronic model here is based on a loss in authority space (often territorial
and almost always surprising) that is preceded by a gain, which followed a still earlier period of
subordination. Authority space is understood as the portion of society over which governmental
influence legitimately extends. Territorially-based authority spaces are frequently encountered,
as in the distance from a central (capital) city that its authority extends.
A stark contrast and surprise at the sudden change in fortune is important because of a
consequence in the form of vividness. Both emotional pain and satisfaction can be multiplied
substantially by the experience of surprise.20 Or, as George Loewenstein and Jennifer Lerner
suggest, “people respond with greater emotional intensity to outcomes that are surprising—that
is, unexpected.”21 The emotional intensity associated with surprise therefore can lead to vivid
information—that which is most likely to be acted upon rapidly.22
8
Figure 1 maps the changes in authority space, both increase and decrease, over time.
Most spectacular were the contractions of authority space occurring after World War I when the
Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated, imperial Germany was truncated, and the Soviet Union
came into existence without Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, and large portions of the Ukraine
and Byelorussia.
Equally telling in its ultimate impact is the period prior to the increase in authority space.
This period is not frequently considered, but is nevertheless important. If the period before the
increase consists of a long decline or remains at a consistently small or nonexistent national
authority space, then reversion to that condition may be a major fear. The subsequent ascendant
portion of the trajectory can then be seen to be an exceptional blip in national history, if in turn,
followed by the downturn. Note that the figure here is not a smooth one, in order to signify that
the increases or decreases in authority space typically take place abruptly at a war’s end, and not
as the result of a continuous process of change. The solid line represents a constant period of
subordination that can have the same consequence as a steady decline. The figure does not show
small changes in authority space that indeed can occur, but are dwarfed by the changes in
authority space resulting from expansions or contractions of territorial domains, or changes in
sovereignty.
-----------------------Figure 1 about here
------------------------
Finally, an important buttressing of the diachronic model emerges from prospect theory.
This theory tells us that losses are more highly valued than gains, or put another way, that the
9
lost entity is psychologically more valued than an entirely identical entity that is gained.23
Experimental evidence has consistently demonstrated the asymmetry between losses and gains,
even to the extent that, in contrast to gains, losses can generate extreme responses. Losses as the
result of a shrinking spatial environment, therefore, may have a magnified role in human
consciousness, out of all proportion to their real-world consequences.24 When we add this
asymmetry between gains and losses originating in prospect theory alone to the surprise,
vividness, and emotional intensity stemming from the contrast between earlier gains and later
losses, then these losses can be deeply consequential. Losses also can yield risky behavior, often
associated with extremist movements.
Anger has been found to be associated with loss.25 People in a state of anger are “more
apt to blame others for mishaps that occurred.”26 Further, persons of an ethnicity different from
one’s own are more likely to be targeted.27 Fear also can be accompanied by humiliation and
shame at the loss, and threatened or actual reversion to a subordinate condition, frequently
unexpected.
Members of extremist movements such as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; Nazi Party) that had much of its early inchoate ideology formed within
the ranks of the military during the latter stages of World War I, were struck by the enormous
contrast between the gains of World War I and losses at its end. Even typically realistic German
generals were inordinately influenced by the earlier victories. “German victory in the east,
marked by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the enthralling vision of a vast eastern empire had
turned the heads of usually rational military leaders. General Hans von Seeckt talked in May
1918 of the ambition to take Tiflis and oil-rich Baku, the cotton-fields of Turkestan, and then
‘knock on the gates of India.’ At the end of August 1918 Lieutenant-General Wilhelm Groener,
10
who was soon to succeed Erich Ludendorff as quartermaster-general, stated in a speech to
officers in occupied Kiev: ‘Ukraine is at present nothing other than an extended German
economic region,’ and demanded the early conquest of Baku and Turkestan.”28
By November 1918 and certainly by 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles, all of these
territories and more had been lost. The momentous losses of World War I that influenced the
early membership of the NSDAP would now towards the end of World War II be replicated in
the lives of camp guards and those waging war on the battlefield such as the Waffen SS. A
return to the humdrum normality of civilian life, or imprisonment and possibly death were the
only realistic alternatives for these perpetrators. Gone would be the God-like ascendancy over
others that would now revert to a subordinate condition, whatever its particular dimensions.
Figure 2 illustrates the now extended national/personal life trajectories of the perpetrators.
-----------------------Figure 2 about here
------------------------
Two illustrations – one of the concentration camp commander and the other of a Waffen
SS leader – will be offered as emblematic perpetrators of war crimes confronted by the
ephemeral. But before that, experimental evidence will be offered from the Stanford Prison
Experiment that Zygmunt Bauman29 discussed to telling effect in his treatment of the Holocaust.
Temporality, not seriously considered in the authors’ s interpretation of the Prison Experiment
experience, will be introduced as an explanatory variable.
11
The Stanford Prison Experiment
Under the direction of the principal investigator, Philip Zimbardo, in 1971 a group of relatively
homogenous male student paid volunteers in the Stanford area were randomly assigned to two
groups, prison guards and prisoners. The entire group of potential subjects was tested
extensively to detect any significant psychological abnormalities. None was found in the final
selected cohort. A simulated prison setting was constructed on the Stanford campus and the two
groups given fairly general and not very limiting instructions (excepting the forbidden use of
physical violence by the guards) as to their future behavior. Although the experiment was
scheduled to take two weeks, it was cancelled after six days because of the extreme emotional
reactions of many of the prisoners to the degrading and dehumanizing behavior of the guards.
The prisoners were systematically searched and stripped naked. They were then
deloused, despite no apparent need for such a procedure for this middle class American cohort.
Humiliating uniforms were required for the prisoners and their feet were chained. Striking was
the increasingly sadistic behavior of the guards as the experiment proceeded. “Over time, from
day to day, guards were observed to generally escalate their harassment of the prisoners,” and
“video-taped analyses of total guard aggression showed a daily escalation even after most
prisoners had ceased resisting and prisoner deterioration had become visibly obvious to them.”30
In addition to verbal abuse and strip searching humiliation, pushups were required by the guards
as punishment for any infraction of the rules established by them. One of the guards even
stepped on prisoners’ backs during the pushups, or required other prisoners to sit or step on the
backs of the punished prisoners as they did the pushups. Nazi concentration camps guards
frequently used this form of punishment.31 Some of the worst behavior occurred out of the range
of the monitoring equipment and was only revealed in post-experimental interviews.
12
Increasingly, “practically all prisoner’s rights (even such things as the time and
conditions of sleeping and eating) came to be redefined by the guards as ‘privileges’ which were
to be earned for obedient behavior. Constructive activities such as watching movies or reading
(previously planned and suggested by the experimenters) were arbitrarily cancelled until further
notice by the guards – and were subsequently never allowed. ‘Reward’, then became granting
approval for prisoners to eat, sleep, go to the toilet, talk, smoke a cigarette, wear glasses or the
temporary diminution of harassment.”32
All of the guards came to work on time for their shifts; on several occasions guards
actually volunteered for overtime, without any additional pay for participating in the experiment.
As one would expect, then, excerpts from the post-experiment interviews of the guards revealed
that “Acting authoritatively can be fun. Power can be a great pleasure,” and “looking back, I am
impressed by how little I felt for them.” One former prisoner stated that, “I learned that people
can easily forget that others are human.”33
Significantly for the arguments of this paper, “most of the guards seemed to be distressed
by the decision to stop the experiment and it appeared to us that [they] had become sufficiently
involved in their roles so that they now enjoyed the extreme control and power which they
exercised and were reluctant to give it up.”34 In the online presentation of the Stanford Prison
Experiment, the word “upset” was used to describe the guards’ common reaction to the early
cessation of the experiment.35 This, despite the obvious emotional distress that many of the
prisoners were experiencing that required an early termination.
The “distress” or “upset” of the guards and a likely consequent anger at this unexpected
event could easily have been vented on the prisoners as readily available targets, had they been
available in the post-experimental setting. Indeed, the social psychological research findings
13
cited above indicate that this would very likely have been the case. Awareness of a time
limitation (initially two weeks) on their exalted status after which they would return to their
former middle class existence can help explain the otherwise somewhat inexplicable increase of
abuse over time, despite the absence of any threat or resistance by prisoners.
In the real world of World War II at its end, a return to the humdrum insignificance of a
bank employee, or worker in an automotive setting would appear intolerable to those who had
maximum control over the lives of others. We now turn to the two cases of actual perpetrators
from the concentration camp universe and the SS battlefield.
The Crisis of Authenticity and an Extermination Camp Adjutant
Loss establishes a crisis of authenticity. While the pre-World War I “authentic” German can
take satisfaction in his/her diplomatic and military domination of the European continent, even
holding sway socially and economically in Eastern European countries not governed by
Germany (e.g., German landowners in the Baltic provinces of tsarist Russia), after World War I
this would no longer be the case. In his novel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Gregor von Rezzori,
himself a native of Bukovina, describes the transition of the main character, also called Gregor
originating in Bukovina. Note the setting of Bukovina, formerly a part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire that after World War I experienced an extraordinary contraction of authority space.
Jonathan Beckman summarizes,
Gregor suffers from the frustration of German masculinity that followed defeat in the
First World War. He feels it especially acutely as a colonial settler in Eastern Europe, cut
adrift by the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Unable to fulfill his
swaggering Germany destiny, seeing himself as a spiritual descendant of Charlemagne
and his paladins, Gregor feels uncomfortably divided. Taking a job as a window-dresser
for a cosmetics company “made the final schism within my soul…anything connected
14
with selling in a store was beyond social acceptance. This was the privilege of the Jews”.
The two social postures available to the Jews tormented his divided Germanic self. If
they remained aloof, they were prone to “the abrupt change from immeasurable
arrogance to shamefaced self-debasement”. Yet, through the history of their oppression,
the Jews had developed an ironic equanimity towards this parlous state that unnerved
Germans like Gregor. Alternatively, Jews could assimilate but attempts to do so exposed
the Germans’ own inauthenticity. As Gregor sits in a Bucharest tavern with his Jewish
mistress, he becomes violently angry because she is “too ‘elegant’ for her own good.”36
Unwilling to compromise and suffer the discomfort of this diminished status appropriate “only
for Jews,” emphasis on the superiority of “Aryans” is a simpler and a more comfortable
alternative. The results, of course, would be disastrous. If the “inauthentic” German would have
to be bound by the typical moral restraints of the quotidian, then the “authentic” German in
Aryan garb could dispense with such niceties. Put another way, without the moral norms that
constrain the salesman or other typical societal member dependent on the goodwill of both
customer and employment supervisor, the path is now open for extremist behavior by the Aryan
übermensch, including mass murder.
In his autobiography, Eric Voegelin, a staunch conservative, but fiercely anti-Nazi
political philosopher suggested this identity change. “A further reason for my hatred of National
Socialism (other than its fraudulence) and other ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an
aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time,
but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some
light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one’s
power, optimally by killing somebody – a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the
human self that has been lost.”37 Michael Burleigh calls this the “one powerful moral
15
consideration that drove” Voegelin’s thought.38 Short of killing, one can make a similar
statement about the pseudo-identity of the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment.
The career path of Karl Hoecker, an adjutant to Richard Baer, a later Auschwitz
commandant is instructive. The son of a bricklayer who died in World War I, Hoecker’s family
including six children was impoverished. After working as a bank teller, he lost his job and was
unemployed for two and a half years before joining the SS in 1933. In 1940, he worked at the
Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamberg followed by a transfer to Majdanek where
approximately 300,000 Polish Jews were murdered. Hoecker was adjutant at the time of the
“Harvest Festival” of November 1943 when 42,000 Jews from three camps in the area were
assembled and killed in two days.39 He arrived in Auschwitz on May 25, 1944 in time for most
of the mass murder of approximately 440,000 Hungarian Jews between May 15 and July 8,
1944.40
The job of the adjutant was to provide detailed information to the commandant
concerning all events taking place in the camp. In this, he had to be complicit in virtually all of
the crimes committed there.
From a childhood of impoverishment without his working class father, Karl Hoecker
could rise to high-level supervisory status, but only in his new identity as an authentic Aryan
übermensch.
One photograph shows him standing, cane in hand, on a selection ramp for
incoming prisoners.41 The cane was used to point inmates either in the direction of the gas
chambers, or to other, less immediately lethal locations.42 Without that identity change leading
to virtually god-like power over life and death, he would have remained at his nondescript job in
a bank to which he returned after the war, and again after his parole from a several year sentence
in a German prison for war crimes. In this fashion, the personal loss of his father in World War I
reinforced the sentiments associated with national loss in that war, and inspired the adoption of a
16
new identity, remediating that loss. This time, the victory of 1871 would not prove to be
ephemeral as it became in 1919, and Germans in Aryan garb, armed with their new identity,
would march to the permanent ascendancy of the Thousand Year Reich. But the intimations of
the politically finite would yield the anger, shame, and humiliation that increased the violence
immeasurably.
A Waffen SS Hero
In the second of our two illustrations, a Waffen SS officer, Joachim (Jochen) Peiper, is deeply
implicated in the mass murder of 84 American prisoners of war, as well as Belgian civilians in
the closing stages of World War II. Although not born of a working class father like Karl
Hoecker – Jochen’s father was Hauptman (Captain) Waldemar Peiper serving during World War
I and seriously wounded – Jochen Peiper himself did not achieve the Abitur that would have
allowed him to attend a university or technical college.43
In 1933 at the age of 18, he joined an SS cavalry company, but within two years was
admitted to the Junkerschule Braunschweig, a training facility for SS officers. Upon graduating,
he was posted to the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (an archaic description of Hitler’s SS
bodyguard unit). It is more than likely that the young Peiper absorbed from his father much of
the racist thinking then affecting the veterans of World War I, especially since Waldemar had
served in the African colonial campaign during World War I. Significant too, is the fact that like
Hoecker, the young Peiper could not return to a post-World War II life in Germany of any
distinction, because of the absence of educational opportunities for him. Indeed, having been
convicted of war crimes, after his release from prison in 1956 and then losing his jobs at Porsche
17
and Volkswagen because of his notoriety, he left Germany entirely. Settling in eastern France,
his house was firebombed, killing him in 1976.
Peiper’s distinction during the war would occur on the battlefield as a combat leader of
Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. But before that, in July 1938, Peiper was transferred to the
personal staff of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. On one trip with Himmler, Peiper appeared to
express strong support for Nazi extremist policies.44 As adjutant, Peiper frequently accompanied
Himmler, actually witnessing an experimental fatal gassing of living human beings. Peiper
returned to his Leibstandarte post, but throughout the war, Himmler retained at Hitler’s
headquarters a “liberated” French automobile for Peiper’s personal use. During the war he rose
in rank and was decorated for an action on the Russian front in December 1943 in which an
entire village, Pekartschina, was “annihilated” as an after-action report put it. Significantly, the
same descriptor “annihilation” was used in an after-action report by Peiper on the massacre at the
Baugnez crossroads – the Malmedy massacre.45 Two days after the annihilation of Pekartschina,
Peiper’s unit claimed 2500 Russian troops killed, but only 3 prisoners taken. Later still in Italy,
after 2 of his men were captured by communist guerillas, Peiper attacked the Piedmontese town
where the action took place, killing 33 civilian inhabitants.46
All of these atrocities took place after the clear possibility of ultimate defeat was
recognized upon the German losses at Stalingrad (February 1943), Kursk (July 1943), and Sicily
(August 1943).
By the time of the German Ardennes offensive, or the Battle of the Bulge, Peiper had
risen to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and commander of the Leibstandarte’s First SS Panzer
regiment. This unit was to lead the dash to the Meuse River and ultimately Antwerp, splitting
the American and British armies. But as the result of stiff American resistance, matters had not
18
gone as smoothly as Peiper had expected, and with the capture of over 100 American prisoners,
the massacre at the Baugnez crossroads near the town of Malmedy yielded the deaths of 84
Americans, memorialized on a monument in Belgium. There are some conflicting accounts as to
how the massacre began, but in the end, German troops were seen walking among the dead and
wounded Americans, shooting again the fallen prisoners who showed any signs of life.
Statements by former SS troops indicated that this was not the only massacre of
American prisoners by Kampfgruppe Peiper. “It seemed that parcels of American POWs had
been shot at many points along the Kampfgruppe’s line of march with, perhaps, as many as two
hundred having been killed at La Gleize.”47 It was also at La Gleize that Peiper realized finally
that his offensive march was doomed to failure, and he began his retreat. Earlier, at the Baugnez
crossroads, he had experienced his first intimations of this possibility. According to Weingartner,
“Not only had American prisoners of war fallen victim to the guns of Kampfgruppe Peiper but
also, according to the sworn statements of the SS prisoners, a substantial number of Belgian
civilians.”48 As many as 93 Belgian civilians, including young children, may have been killed in
the Stavelot region alone.49
As early as September 16, 1944, Hitler himself had voiced his desire for an Ardennes
offensive focused on the Malmedy region.
Planning for this offensive took place despite
strategic advice by Hitler’s confidantes to counterattack against the Soviets, although they were
not yet on German soil, nor would be for a foreseeable period.50 In contrast, it was obvious that
the Allied eastward advance would soon incorporate formerly German territory in the Malmedy
region, which it did.
As the planning proceeded, “Hitler had issued orders that every inch of German soil
should be defended by the most radical means; that nothing of value should be allowed to fall
19
into enemy hands.”51 If German territory was sacrosanct to Hitler, then how much more
important would be German territory held for over a century (1815-1919), lost to Belgium
(1919-1940), regained, and lost again in the fall of 1944, but soon to be recouped (see Figure 3)?
The statistics for 1920 (both Belgian and German) showed 60,000 residents of the region, only
10,000 of whom were French speakers. Most of this francophone population was found in and
around the city of Malmedy.52
The threat and fear of reversion to a subordinate condition affecting the concentration
camp guards and Waffen SS commanders is mirrored in the finding that Malmedy and AlsaceLorraine, both having reverted at least once to Allied rule (Alsace-Lorraine during the interwar
period) and Malmedy twice (see above and Figure 3), together had the highest proportion of war
criminals born in those provinces relative to all other significant sized German populations. That
proportion was 3.35 standard deviations above the mean for all of the German regions.53
-----------------------Figure 3 about here
------------------------
With Sepp Dietrich, Hitler’s former personal bodyguard and continuing personal friend in
command of Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, and Peiper as a Himmer favorite in command of the
lead panzer unit, Hitler’s sentiments could easily have been conveyed to both commanders.
Peiper himself in a sworn statement prior to his trial at the hands of Americans in Dachau
averred that there was an order that “expressly stated that prisoners of war must be shot where
the local conditions should so require it. This order was incorporated into the Regimental Order,
20
which was drawn up on my command.”54 A sworn statement of an SS officer indicated that as
early as November 1944, before the order for the Ardennes offensive had been received, Peiper
mentioned the possible necessity of abandoning the standards of battlefield conduct then in
existence in the West. Further, in a regimental order read by this officer, after describing the
envisioned battlefield tactics, it stated: “Therefore, the situation can arise when prisoners of war
have to be shot…”55 All officers reading this order were pledged to secrecy. A former SSUnterstürmfuhrer, Hans Hennecke, indicated that his company commander instructed his troops
“to give no quarter and to take no prisoners.”56
A Competing Explanation
An alternate possible explanation for the Malmedy massacre is that the shooting of prisoners was
required for the quick dash to the Meuse River. A large number of prisoners, in excess of 100, if
taken along by Kampfgruppe Peiper, clearly could have slowed an advance that already was
behind schedule at the time of the massacre. Yet, this particular group of prisoners consisted of
newly arrived recruits, not heavily armed, and docile at the time of their surrender. They had put
up little if any fight when confronted with elements of the heavily armed Kampfgruppe. Only a
few well-armed infantry would have been required to guard the prisoners until back-up units
arrived to escort the prisoners to the rear. Further, the continued shooting of fallen prisoners who
likely had been severely wounded, therefore of little danger to the Germans, suggests a level of
brutality beyond the rational calculus of the need for haste in a bold offensive. And as we saw,
the massacre at Malmedy was only one of many along the road to La Gleize, although perhaps
the largest single incident.
The wanton killing of civilians also suggests a level of brutality beyond the rational needs
of the battlefield. Although many sworn declarations of SS prisoners affirm the statement of one
21
who declared, “There is an order not to take prisoners of war; also, civilians who show
themselves on the streets or at the windows will be shot without mercy,”57 this order does not
explain the entirety of the brutality against civilians. For example, “Achille Andre and Henri
Delcourt related a horrific story of having been rounded up along with nineteen other men in
Stavelot and packed into a tiny 8 foot by 12 foot shed. A machine gun was set up in front of the
shed and two belts of ammunition fired into the tightly packed human mass, following which
several troops entered, firing pistols to finish off those who showed signs of life. Straw was then
piled on the bodies and set alight. Amazingly, eight persons, including the witness, survived and
managed to escape.”58 Or consider the testimony of Madame Regina Gregoire of Stavelot:
On December 19, she, her two children, and twenty-six other townspeople had sought
refuge from the combat raging around them in the basement of a house on the outskirts of
town. Shortly before 9:00 p.m., two grenades were thrown into the crowded basement,
which, amazingly, killed no one. Germans then ordered the civilians out of the basement.
Madame Gregoire, who spoke German, attempted to reason with a soldier who insisted
that he and his comrades had been shot at from the same basement, an accusation that
Gregoire vigorously denied. Her efforts unavailing, two SS troops then opened fire on
the civilians, although Gregoire and her children were spared, perhaps because of her
command of German.59
Noteworthy here are two elements. First, the activities of the maquis, or Belgian resistance,
could not be linked to any of these incidents. Second, Madame Gregoire and her children
survived likely because of her fluent command of German in a francophone region largely
targeted by the SS as the enemy. Thus, although an element in understanding the brutality of
Kampfgruppe Peiper, the demands of the battlefield or urban warfare did not require this level of
observed brutality.
22
A Combined Two-Level Explanation
The threat and fear of reversion to a subordinate condition can operate at two levels – the
personal, and the territorial/national dominated by political leaders at the highest levels.
Findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Helmbrechts prison guards, and the Karl
Hoecker illustration suggest that the threat and fear of reversion to an earlier personal
subordinate condition explain much of the anger and brutality above and beyond that which may
be required in a war setting. Even Peiper, not implicated in death marches, could be classified as
one who feared this reversion, for not only did he not achieve the Abitur that would have enabled
a future university or technical college education, but he deeply valued his “connections” with
Nazi leaders that soon would be worthless in the event of a German military collapse. Prior to
Peiper’s admission to the Junkerschule Braunschwig, German Army psychiatrists noted “his
chronic efforts to impress others with his ‘connections.’”60 Consequently, his tenure on Hitler’s
personal staff as well as Hitler’s military headquarters must have been deeply satisfying to him.
He also must have been exceedingly loathe to relinquish these “connections.”
But the territorial threat and fear of reversion is important as well. Given the Jundenrein
condition of the territory of the “old Reich,” having Jews once again on that territory as a result
of the marches, would have been anathema to concentration camp guards. Should the Jews die
in the process, that would be a most satisfactory outcome to these guards.
In the instance of Kampfgruppe Peiper, territory was even more important, for Hitler
emphasized the sacrosanct nature of German territory to be reconquered by any means. The
killing of Belgian civilians and American prisoners of war therefore could be amply justified by
Sepp Dietrich and Jochen Peiper in their respective instructions to subordinates. Yet, even at the
local level, territorial considerations must have applied directly in the form of extreme hostility
23
to francophone Belgian populations and anglophone Americans who simply did not “belong” in
the “sacred” Germanic sphere bounded by the frontiers of Eupen-Malmédy, as the Germans
called it prior to annexation by Belgium after World War I. Under wartime conditions, these
ausländeren could easily be murdered, if circumstances “required” it.
A Singularity of the Holocaust and a Cognate Genocide
The Holocaust is unique therefore, not in its etiology, but in the magnitude of the personal and
territorial gains experienced by perpetrators after the rise to power of the Nazis. Although not all
of the perpetrators came from subordinate backgrounds like Karl Hoecker, Jochen Peiper (in his
prognostications about the future), and even Sepp Dietrich (born a peasant), it would have been
rare if not impossible for any of the perpetrators to expect a future remotely like their exalted
present. The threat and fear of reversion to a subordinate condition directly preceded other
instances of mass killing (e.g., Armenians and Tutsi), but despite claims of indigeneity
(Rwanda)61 and confessional exclusivity (the Ottoman Empire)62, seldom elsewhere was the
claim made of such an inherent and intractable racial superiority (Voegelin’s “pseudo-identity”
similar to that of the Stanford Prison guards) justifying brutality on an extraordinary scale.
Although thus far, no cardinal metric has been assigned to the gain within the body of the
theory, it is clear that the Nazi perception of gain during the Reich’s existence was inordinately
high, from which any fall would appear precipitous indeed, yielding anger and humiliationshame, and a paroxysm of violence at the Holocaust’s end. This claim of ideological perception
conditioning genocidal behavior, of course, is not new. But here it is given ordinal dimension
within a theoretical framework and wide-ranging evidentiary base,63 not typically considered in
24
studies of the Holocaust, especially as it metastasized toward non-Jewish victims, while entering
its concluding phase.
Sudan
What does this analysis portend for other instances of mass violence, especially genocide? Why,
for example, is Sudan the only predominantly Muslim country to have experienced a high
magnitude genocide numbering in the millions in the post-World War II period,64 and its
president, Omar al-Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court? Other Islamic countries
have tended, on the whole, to abide by the prohibitions against wanton mass killing demanded by
Shari’a.65 An answer is to be found in the magnitude of the gain achieved by the Arabized
Khartoum elite over black African populations at independence from Great Britain and Egypt.
While the Southern black populations had representation in the legislative assembly prior to
independence, at independence, decisions were taken by the Arabized Khartoum government
without consultation with Southern representatives.
The rule of the Sudanese government over the black populations in both the South and
Darfur (predominantly Muslim) is categorized by a sense of massive superiority. The Arabic
word for slave or servant – abd – is routinely used by the Khartoum elite to describe people
from the South or Darfur, and in the South, Christian as well as animist. Enslavement and
ultimately killing those unwilling to be governed by this elite therefore is justified, despite the
Qur’anic injunction against such wanton killings. These injunctions in fact, even for moderate
Islamists, prevent the mass violence that characterized Sudan over the past several decades. But
“as the war in Chad spilled over into Darfur, it sharpened the divide between ‘Arabs’ and
‘Blacks’ (Zuruq), with the Sudanese Islamist parties now equating Islam with Arabism.”66
25
Gradually in the post-independence period, increasing numbers of ethnoreligious groups,
whether Muslim or not, were excluded from the Khartoum government’s universe of moral
concern. Or, as Douglas Johnson puts it, “‘Government’, which towards the end of the
Condominium period [Anglo-Egyptian rule prior to independence] acquired widespread
acceptance across the country and enforced mediation within a moral community while
remaining outside of it, has abdicated its own moral authority.”67
It was precisely the emergence of Nazism and its rampant racism from a pre-JudeoChristian past and the Arabized Sudanese subjugation of black populations stemming from a preIslamic past that distinguishes the two genocidal experiences from others. The word abd
emerges from an ancient Semitic linguistic root that is common to other Semitic languages well
before the rise of Islam.68
According to Johnson, “during the Turkiyya [period of Ottoman domination] the slave
population in the North was drawn very largely from the southern Sudan, and in the popular
mind slaves and ‘blacks’ were synonymous. Even southern Sudanese who became Muslim or
exercised some power in the colonial society – as those in the army certainly did – were
stigmatized by their slave status or slave origins.”69 Enslavement of black populations actually
has increased since the 1980s.70 The doctrinal prohibition of mass killing common to both
Christianity (abhorred by the Nazis) and Islam, is largely disregarded in this relic of ancient
slavery still alive and thriving in Sudan. Therefore, the condition of being a Jew in Nazi
Germany regardless of the Jew’s actual confessional status or a black African in Sudan, whether
Muslim or not, became an intractable, hence insurmountable barrier.
The gain provided by unlimited power over Jews or blacks in these circumstances is a
gain not easily relinquished. When combined with potential territorial secession, the possible
26
imminent loss of this massive superiority can yield atrocities such as those now occurring in the
Nuba Mountains within the state of South Kordofan. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement that
led to the July 9 secession of South Sudan also provided for “popular consultations” in 2011 to
decide the future constitutional status of this territory bordering the new state, but still within
Sudan’s borders. During the long civil war leading to South Sudanese independence, the black
Africans of the Nuba Mountains typically sided with the Southern rebels. Starting in June, heavy
troop movements into South Kordofan accompanied by tanks and artillery were witnessed by
observers.71 Violence was directed principally at the mostly Christian Nuba, leading to the deaths
of many and to material losses in the form of bombed Christian churches. An air war has been
visited upon the Nuba people.72 That many of the Africans are Muslim appears to make no
difference to the Arabized Khartoum government. Herein lies a basic similarity with the
atrocities in Darfur.73 Race trumps religion in this atavistic emphasis on historic status relations.
As the promised referendum yielded independence for the South, and possibly in the
future, independence for Darfur as well (made more likely by the Southern success), a massively
truncated Sudan would be ripe for subordination to Egypt as it was prior to independence. As
Francis Deng presciently remarked, “Since then [independence], Egypt has resumed its historic
importance as the gateway to the world beyond and has remained pivotal in the perspective of
the Sudanese. For some this has been for reasons of love, for others for reasons of hate, and for
most for reasons of dependence or fear.”74 In order to avoid that subordinate status, the mass
killing of black “inferiors” required to quell rebellions in both South Kordofan and Darfur may
yet again be “necessary.” The ephemeral gain for the Khartoum government is shown in Figure
4.
27
-----------------------Figure 4 about here
------------------------
In addition to perpetrators perceiving an inherent gross inferiority of the victims, another
direct parallel exists between Khartoum’s perception of the role of Sudanese blacks as agents of
defeat for a united Sudan and the Nazi understanding of Jews as responsible for the German
defeat in WWI, which could have been repeated in WWII if not for the Holocaust.75 Here too, as
in the case of the Holocaust, with Germany about to become subordinate to the Allies as a
consequence of repeated territorial losses, territoriality and personal (or at least intergroup) status
relationships combine in an overall explanation of mass violence.
Clearly, there are other sources of a possible renewal of hostilities in Sudan, such as oil in
the South. But this problem may not be as significant as it first appeared.76 Yet when perceived
inferiors take up arms against their overlords (or are poised to return to equal status with the
persecutors or indeed as superior victors, as at the Holocaust’s end), mass violence is far more
likely to occur.
Finally, the analysis here emphasizes identity77 as an important ingredient in
understanding the onset and protraction of mass violence. And it is identity not only in the selfdefinition of the perpetrator, but also in his/her perception of the potential victim’s identity that is
crucial for the understanding of genocide and other forms of mass killing. Historic status
relationships, reinforced now by perceptions both of the perpetrator’s own identity and that of
the victim, can have deadly consequences.
28
Gain
Authority
Space
Decline to
subordination
Subordination
Loss
Time
Figure 1. Changes in authority space over time.
29
Unification
and WWI
1871-6/1918
WWII
1939-42
German
Authority
Space
German
Principalities
Versailles
1919
Time
Figure 2. Changes in German authority space over time.*
*not to scale
30
Defeat
1945
Prusso-German
rule 1815-1919
German rule
1940-1944
German
Authority
Space:
Malmedy
Belgian
rule 19191940
French rule until 1813
Allied rule 1944
Time
Figure 3. Changes in German authority space over time: Malmedy*
*not to scale
31
Independence
1956
Sudanese (Khartoum
government)
Authority Space
South Sudanese
independence 2011
Anglo-Egyptian rule
Time
Figure 4. Changes in Sudanese (Khartoum government) authority space over time.*
*not to scale
32
Notes
1
Ron Rosenbaum, ed. Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide.
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998)
2
See, for example, Matthew Krain, “State-Sponsored Mass Murder: The Onset and Severity of
Genocides and Politicides,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41 no. 3 (1997): 331–360; his
“International Intervention and the Severity of Genocides and Politicides,” International
Studies Quarterly 49, no. 3 (2005): 363-387; and Manus I. Midlarsky, “Genocide Studies:
Large N, Small N, and Policy Specificity,” in Handbook of War Studies III: The Intrastate
Dimension, ed. Manus I. Midlarsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 280300. The Holocaust was not included in any of these studies because the State Failure Task
Force (now the Political Instability Task Force) data set used in these studies begins in 1955.
The first genuinely comparative empirical analysis of genocide is Robert Melson’s Revolution
and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
3
For issues in comparative research on genocide, see Scott Straus, “Second-Generation
Comparative Research on Genocide,” World Politics 59, no. 3 (2007): 476-501.
4
Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches: the Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).
5
Christopher R. Browning, “Hunting the Zebras,” Times Literary Supplement, 5644 (June 3,
2011): 8 (7-8).
6
Manus I. Midlarsky, Origins of Political Extremism: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century
and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
33
7
Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated
Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1, (February 1973): 69-97; Philip
Zimbardo, The Stanford Prison Experiment: a Simulation Study of the Psychology of
Imprisonment Conducted at Stanford University, Retrieved from http://www.prisonexp.org/
(1999-2009); and Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
(New York: Random House, 2007).
8
Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York: Knopf, 1996).
9
Ibid. 345.
10
Ibid. 465.
11
Other explanations pertaining directly to the war are found in Christian Gerlach, “The
Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s Decision in Principle to
Exterminate all European Jews,” Journal of Modern History 70, (December 1998):759-812;
Jürgen Matthäus, “Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust, June-December
1941,” in Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi
Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1941 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, and Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Saul Friedländer, The
Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper Collins,
2007).
12
Richard Bessel, “Murder Amidst Collapse: Explaining the Violence of the Last Months of the
Third Reich,” in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the
Future of Holocaust Studies, ed. Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (London: Continuum, 2010),
34
258. This edited collection recently received a favorable review by the distinguished Columbia
historian, Mark Mazower. See his “God’s Grief,” Times Literary Supplement, 5607
(September 17, 2010): 7-8.
13
Bessel, “Murder Amidst Collapse,” 258-59.
14
Isaac Levendel, Not the Germans Alone: A Son’s Search for the Truth of Vichy (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1999), 89.
15
Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 1998), xxx.
16
Bessel, “Murder Amidst Collapse,” 264.
17
Paul K. Huth, Standing Your Ground: Territorial Disputes and International Conflict (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Paul F. Diehl, ed. The Road Map to War:
Territorial Dimensions of International Conflict (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press,
1999); Monica D. Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the
Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and John A.
Vasquez, The War Puzzle Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
18
Midlarsky, Origins of Political Extremism.
19
The relationship between perpetrator and victim as a human interaction is treated in Johannes
Lang, “Questioning Dehumanization: Intersubjective Dimensions of Violence in the Nazi
Concentration and Death Camps,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 2 (2010): 225-46.
20
Jon Elster, “Emotion and Action,” in Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on
Emotions, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 160.
21
George Loewenstein and Jennifer S. Lerner, “The Role of Affect in Decision Making,” in
Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. Richard J. Davidson, Klause R. Scherer, and H. Hill
Goldsmith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 624.
35
22
Alfred R. Mele, “Emotion and Desire in Self-Deception,” in Philosophy and the Emotions, ed.
Anthony Hatzimoysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 165.
23
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under
Risk,” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979):263-92; and Kahneman and Tversky, eds. Choices,
Values, and Frames, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
24
See for example Manus I. Midlarsky, “The Demographics of Genocide: Refugees and
Territorial Loss in the Mass Murder of European Jewry,” Journal of Peace Research (special
issue on the demography of conflict and violence) 42, no. 4 (2005): 375-91; and “Territoriality
and the Onset of Mass Violence: The Political Extremism of Joseph Stalin,” Journal of
Genocide Research (special issue on Soviet mass violence) 11, no. 2-3 (2009): 265-83.
25
Nancy Stein, Tom Trabasso and Maria Liwag, “The Representation and Organization of
Emotional Experience: Unfolding the Emotion Episode,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed.
Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993), 279-300.
26
Leonard Berkowitz, “Affect, Aggression, and Antisocial Behavior,” in Handbook of Affective
Sciences, ed. Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, and H. Hill Goldsmith (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 816.
27
Galen V. Bodenhausen, Lori A. Sheppard, and Geoffrey P. Kramer, “Negative Affect and
Social Judgment: The Differential Impact of Anger and Sadness,” European Journal of Social
Psychology 24, no. 1 (1994): 45-62; David N. DeSteno, Nilanjana Dasgupta, Monica Y.
Bartlett, and Aida Cajdric, “Prejudice from Thin Air: The Effect of Emotion on Automatic
Intergroup Attitudes,” Psychological Science 15, no. 5 (2004): 319-24.
36
28
Alan Kramer, “Mass Killing and Genocide from 1914 to 1945: Attempting a Comparative
Analysis,” in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future
of Holocaust Studies, ed. Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (London: Continuum, 2010), 222.
29
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1989),
167-68.
30
Haney, Banks and Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” 85, 92.
31
Zimbardo, The Stanford Prison Experiment.
32
Haney, Banks and Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” 94.
33
Ibid. 88.
34
Ibid. 81; emphasis added.
35
Zimbardo, The Stanford Prison Experiment.
36
Jonathan Beckman, “Otherness Anguish,” Times Literary Supplement, 5471 (February 8,
2008): 20.
37
Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to
the War on Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 119; emphasis added.
38
Ibid.
39
Alec Wilkinson, “Picturing Auschwitz,” The New Yorker (March 17, 2008): 52.
40
Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1981), 1143.
41
Despite confirmation by precise visual tests of similarity to other photographs, some doubt still
exists as to whether this is actually Hoecker because of the insignia on his uniform.
42
Wilkinson, “Picturing Auschwitz,” 50.
37
43
Joseph Weingartner, Crossroads of Death: The Story of the Malmédy Massacre and Trial
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 31.
44
Richard Breitman describes this journey: “During the trip Himmler’s young adjutant Jochen
Peiper told Schaefer [Himmler’s Tibet expert] that Hitler had entrusted Himmler with the
extermination of the Polish intelligentsia, and that Himmler had even taken part in one
execution. Afterward, Peiper claimed, Himmler had not spoken for several days. Peiper also
talked of the incident in which Ludolf von Alvensleben had executed his own relatives; they
would all look at the potatoes from underneath, Peiper commented gaily.” See Richard
Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (Hanover, NH:
Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 1991), 95.
45
Weingartner, Crossroads of Death, 63.
46
Ibid. 24-25.
47
Ibid. 83.
48
Ibid. 87.
49
Ibid. 248.
50
Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to be Won: Fighting the Second World War
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 449.
51
Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000), 737.
52
Manfred J. Enssle Stresemann’s Territorial Revisionism: Germany, Belgium, and the EupenMalmédy Question, 1919-1929 (Wiesbaden, DE: Steiner, 1980), 20.
53
Midlarsky, Origins of Political Extremism, Chapter 14.
54
Weingartner, Crossroads of Death, 90.
55
Ibid.
38
56
Joseph Weingartner, A Peculiar Crusade: Willis M. Everett and the Malmedy Massacre (New
York: New York University Press, 2000), 58.
57
Weingartner, Crossroads of Death, 88.
58
Ibid. 113.
59
Weingartner, A Peculiar Crusade, 69-70.
60
Weingartner, Crossroads of Death, 23.
61
But not claims of an inherent racial superiority stemming from earlier periods of status
differential in favor of the perpetrator. For this and other reasons, it is difficult to imagine the
success, as in Rwanda, of a Gacaca-like process of reconciliation among the various Sudanese
belligerents. The theme of indigeneity was emphasized by the Hutu extremists’ threat and
practice of sending the Tutsis back to Northeast Africa from which they presumably
originated, as corpses floating in the Nyabarongo River. See Alison Des Forges, “Leave None
to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 85. For
sources of the Rwandan genocide, see Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and
War in Rwanda (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006).
62
Excepting the Jews, for historical reasons and the small size of their community. Here we
perhaps see the seeds of Turkish opposition to the charge of an Armenian genocide, because
with conversion to Islam allowed, even encouraged, the Young Turks could not be categorized
with the Nazis in the gross exaggeration of racial claims. See Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History
of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus
(Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1997).
63
See Note 16.
39
64
An estimate of two million dead is given for the South alone. See Richard Cockett, Sudan:
Darfur and the Failure of an African State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 1.
65
Other countries such as Pakistan in 1971 recently have been shown to have a far smaller
number dead than originally suggested, many of these deaths resulting more from guerilla
warfare between the putative Bengali victims and the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani military
than from genocidal activity by that army. See Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of
the 1971 Bangladesh War (London: C. Hurst, 2010).
66
Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2003), 140.
67
Ibid. 173.
68
Amir H. Idris, Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005). We know that the word abd has a Semitic cognate in the Biblical Hebrew eved (also
meaning slave or servant), which predates the rise of Islam by nearly 2 millennia. See also
Francis Deng, War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution., 1995); Peter Woodward, The Horn of Africa: State Politics and
International Relations (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996); G. Norman Anderson, Sudan in Crisis:
The Failure of Democracy (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999); and Edgar
O’Balance, Sudan, Civil War and Terrorism, 1956-99 (London: Macmillan, 2000).
69
Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars, 6.
70
“There is no question that slavery exists in the Sudan today and that it is fed by slave raiding
deployed as a tactic of war. There are slaves working alongside displaced labourers in the
commercial and private farms of Darfur and Kordofan.” See Johnson, The Root Causes of
Sudan’s Civil Wars, 158.
40
71
Neil MacFarquhar, “Sudan Strikes Could Be War Crimes, Report Says,” The New York Times
(July 15, 2011), A10.
72
Jeffrey Gettleman, “Sudanese Struggle to Survive Endless Bombings Aimed to Quell Rebels,”
The New York Times (July 4, 2011), A4.
73
Alan Boswell, “Darfur Redux: Is ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Ocurring in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains?”
TIME Magazine, retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2077376,
00.html (July 14, 2011).
74
See Francis Deng, War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan, 59.
75
Thus, as Heinrich Himmler stated in a speech to the officers of a newly formed Volksgrenadier
unit on July 26, 1944, “The war is precisely as surely to be won as the world war was in
November 1918, January 1919, if only we had had a firm leadership then, a loyalty pervading
the whole Volk up to the top, and good nerves.” Justifying the mass murder, Himmler
continues: “We are in the fortunate position that we have no more Jews within, so the scum of
all revolts has been eradicated in the mass of the people.” See Peter Padfield, Himmler:
Reichsführer-SS (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990), 519.
76
An arbitration panel in the Hague has already awarded the Khartoum government control of
virtually all major oil reserves in the disputed region of Abyei. Although grazing lands in that
region were awarded to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the northern
government declared the outcome a victory. According to Dirdeiry Mohamed Ahmed, the
head of the northern government delegation, “We welcome the fact that the oil fields are now
excluded from the Abyei area, particularly the Heglig oil field.” See Breaking News 24/7,
“International Arbitration Panel Awards Sudan Government Disputed Oil Field,” retrieved
41
from http://blog.taragana.com/n/international-arbitration-panel-awards-sudan-governmentdisputed-oil-field-117013/ (July 22, 2009).
77
Identity, of course, figures prominently in constructivist theory, but also in theories of political
violence. See for example, Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Stathis N. Kalyvas, “The Ontology of
‘Political Violence’: Action and Identity in Civil Wars,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3
(2003): 475-94.
42