The Holocaust of the Second World War, in which the Nazis meticulously organized the extermination in specially built ‘death camps’ of two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, was the largest-scale genocide in history.
In addition to the murder of some 6 million Jews, the Nazis also killed nearly 400,000 Gypsies, plus large (but unknown) numbers of Slavs, disabled people, homosexuals and political opponents. Some 3 million Soviet prisoners of war also died of starvation, disease and neglect.
There had been genocides before, and there have been genocides since. But genocide – the large-scale extermination of populations on racial, ethnic, political, cultural or religious grounds – is particularly associated with the 20th century. In the ancient and medieval worlds, it was certainly not uncommon for the entire population of a besieged city to be put to the sword if the city failed to surrender. But the attempt to systematically eradicate an entire group of people, usually on ideological or racial grounds, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Examples include the Armenian massacres carried out by the Turks during the First World War; the mass killing in 1971 of Bengalis by West Pakistani forces in what was then East Pakistan as the latter strove for independence as Bangladesh; the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s; and the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which perhaps as many as a million of the minority Tutsi people were slaughtered by the majority Hutu.
In preparation for the Rwandan genocide, extremist Hutus began to refer to the Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’. This depiction of intended victims as vermin is a common phenomenon in genocides. For example, the Nazis frequently depicted Jews as rats, and all their victims as Üntermenschen (‘sub-humans’). It seems that people can only be persuaded to participate in, or at least condone, large-scale killings once they begin to think of the victims as completely alien and ‘other’, indeed that they are not even human.
‘Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities.’
- Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles (1765)