(Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, 1993)
The special opportunity offered by the Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture is an appropriate occasion to reflect on the fate, and the meaning of the fate, of European Jewry under the Third Reich. Emerging out of the conflict and confusion of the Weimar years, Hitler came to power first in Germany and then in almost all of western and central Europe, creating in turn the Nuremberg racial laws to dis-emancipate the German Jews, ghettos in which to incarcerate the Polish and Baltic Jews, Einsatzgruppen to murder the Russian Jews, and in the end, death camps to exterminate all the remaining Jews of Europe. East and west, north and south, male and female, young and old, six million out of nine-and-a-half million European Jews were consumed, with active designs existing for the annihilation of the remainder of world Jewry, beginning with the Jews of Britain, the Sephardic communities of North Africa, and the growing community of the yishuv (the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel).
This is what we know as the Holocaust. The ideologically driven plan to make the world Judenrein. But it is not only as a Jewish phenomenon that this event has entered into the contemporary consciousness. Given its uncompromising project of genocidal elimination coupled with its technological-bureaucratic characters, directed by a capacious racial-Manichean dogmatic, the Shoah has become one of the defining symbols of our age. And as such, given its iconic status, an intense debate has emerged regarding its singularity. This is not least because to the degree that it has become the symbol of evil in our time, it has been co-opted as the standard, the model, by which, through which, and over against which, the writing of other histories of persecution and mass death now take place.1 In consequence, the historiographical placement of this event cannot be avoided. Or, to put the question very simply and directly: to what degree is the destruction of European Jewry a unique historical event?
In trying to answer this vexing and by now much discussed question I would begin with three hermeneutic principles.2 (1) The Shoah can and must be historicized, i.e., it must be held to be a subject open to historical investigation free of a priori theological and metaphysical judgments that would “mystify” it by definition. (2) The Shoah is not individuated as a historical happening by the number of Jewish victims, either as regards the absolute number of dead or the percentage of loss these deaths represent. As to the aggregate, at least four cases surpass Jewish losses during World War II, namely, New World Indian deaths in the sixteenth century, the depopulation of the USSR under Stalin, Chinese casualties during the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s, and the long series of bloody occasions in China in the twentieth century that, according to at least one recent estimate, has claimed a total of one hundred million persons.3 As to the percentage of decline – a loss of 40 percent of world Jewry and 60 percent of European Jewry – these figures are matched or exceeded by, for example: the Native American catastrophe following conquest that claimed up to 96 percent of the total indigenous population within a century; by the Armenian massacres of World War I that were in the range of 40 percent (higher on many projections, though I disagree with these higher figures); and by the decimation of the Australian aborigines following European contact. And other examples could be provided. (3) When making historical comparisons and distinctions of the kind I will offer in my analysis this evening I am not making moral comparisons. Nor again, in defending uniqueness, am I simultaneously endorsing the injudicious claim that the Holocaust is more evil than alternative occurrences of extensive and systematic persecution, organized violence, and mass death. The character of the uniqueness that I am prepared to champion is not tied to a scale or a hierarchy of evil (i.e., of event X being more or less malevolent than another event Y, or all previous events E1 to E11).
I have elsewhere described why it is that the comparison regularly made between the Holocaust and medieval forms of persecution, including medieval antisemitism, are in fact incorrect.4 Here let me only summarize this complex issue by saying that in no case of medieval persecution – not the Church’s persecution of the Jews, nor of witches, nor again in the Crusade against Albigensians and Cathars, and finally against sodomites – was it the intention of the Church or Christian State to carry out a policy of physical (not cultural) genocide. In every instance theological doctrines and practical necessities intervened to constrain the form of the persecutory campaign tool. Those who regularly, if confusedly, see medieval anti-Jewish bigots as Nazis, who misunderstand the attempt to destroy heresy as the equivalent of racial immolation, who mistake the violence against women incarnate in the witch craze for physical genocide, and lastly, those who liken the rhetoric again homosexual acts with the actuality of gas chambers, are both constructing fictions and manipulating the symbol of the Holocaust in ways that are unwarranted by the historical evidence.
The reality is that most Jews survived the outbursts of medieval anti-Judaism. For example, the Crusades, for all their real and terrible violence, probably claimed only 3,000 to 4,000 Jewish lives; relatively few Jews were killed by the Flagellants in 1348–49; and the Inquisition murdered only a very small number of conversos, certainly only a small percentage of the converso population in a statistical sense. It should also be clearly understood that most women in the medieval era survived the misogynistic clerics who pursued witches – on my figures 99.9+ percent of women so survived. Likewise, the overwhelming majority of Christian heretics were able to successfully abjure and re-enter the Catholic Church after the destruction of the heretical centers of southern France. The same social and theological logic prevailed in the case of the hundreds of thousands of Huguenots who preferred to remain in France rather than go into exile after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Finally, very few sodomites were killed for their sexual deviance, though a small number were put to death in sixteenth-century Spain and Italy. Thus, the likening of the Holocaust to these medieval precedents, given their actuality, has produced very little by way of substantive historical insight.
As regards the modern period the situation is more complex not least because of the occurrence of a number of instances in which there has been large-scale loss of life. Here one immediately thinks of at least seven relevant cases: the massive losses experienced in the sixteenth century by the native peoples of North and South America (counted as two); the millions of blacks who died in the enterprise of slavery; the large Armenian losses during World War I; the millions consumed by the Gulag; the tens of millions who lost their lives in the Chinese Civil War and the so-called Cultural Revolution; and more recently, the one million or so Cambodians murdered by their own government in the bizarre episode that went by the name of Kampuchea. Each of these events has, with some good reason, been called a Holocaust and likened to the destruction of European Jewry. And this inventory could easily be extended to include the Nigerian Civil War, the tribal conflicts in Burundi and Rwanda, the decimation of Indonesian Communists, the Civil War in Pakistan/Bangladesh, and, for some – though incorrectly – Yugoslavia today (in 1993), and this brief list by no means exhausts the catalogue of possible candidates.
However, I would like to make a bold historical and phenomenological counterclaim: none of these events is, at least on what I will call the genocidal criteria, comparable to the Holocaust; efforts by historians and others to make the contrary case are in error. Here I would introduce two elements that will help individuate the phenomenological character of the Shoah: (1) the intention of the victimizers including, in particular, the complete physical extermination of the targeted victim population; and (2) the multi-layered category of mediation present in other cases but not in the Holocaust, as I shall explain as I proceed.
As regards the former, note that in none of the modern cases mentioned as putative parallels do we find comparable genocidal intent, that is, the intention to totally extirpate the victim community. Though we have several cases where the losses experienced in these other historic tragedies exceed the rate of loss – as well as the absolute number – of Jewish victims during the Shoah, in no case other than the Holocaust do we have evidence that the killer was single-minded about murdering all the members of the victim group. The Conquistadors needed native slaves and did not seek to murder the indigenous population of the New World. Blind pathogenic forces did this work against the will of the European conquerors. Europeans involved in the black slave trade, which came about because of the unintended death of the indigenous population, participated in this vile traffic in order to make a profit: dead slaves brought no profit. The Gulag was a vast slave empire created in large part to finance the modernization of Russia. Stalin needed his Gulag population if only so that he could exploit them – he did not set out purposely to murder them. The Khmer Rouge hated the old Cambodia and its bourgeois elements, but it aimed at creating a new Kampuchea in which seven-eighths of the pre-revolutionary population would continue to live, if now in dramatically altered circumstances. This is to say, the intent to murder an entire people, even amidst the vast slaughters that have marked the modern historical epoch, is an historical exception.
I would support this repercussive claim by considering in some detail what many consider the closest historical parallel to the Shoah – the destruction of the Armenian community of Turkey during World War I. There are many good reasons to argue for this comparison but, ultimately, it is incorrect. While intending no diminution to the Armenian tragedy, and in no way denying the enormous proportions of the Armenian massacres, I would contend that the intentionality of the two victimizers – and hence, the character of the two historic events – was, in fact, fundamentally dissimilar and does not provide grounds for an argument as to the convergence of the Armenian and Jewish circumstance. Despite the intense, almost millenarian, talk of “total liquidation” and “total extermination of all non-Turkish elements” to be found in the diverse Turkish materials of the 1915–1916 period, the actual, systematic nature of the savage Turkish assault reflects a distinctive policy determination that was significantly different from that operative in the German context. The controlling ambition, the collective civic agenda, behind Turkish inhumanity was primarily nationalist in character and, in practice, limited in scope and purpose. The Armenian massacres were an indecent, radicalized, manifestation of a most primitive jingoism activated by the exigencies of war without and the revolutionary collapse of the Ottoman Empire from within. Turkish nationalism, the extreme nationalist elites in control of the Turkish state, now under the violent cover of war, envisioned and pursued the elimination (not the murder) of all non-Turkish elements – and most especially and specifically the eradication of the Armenian community – from the national context. The anti-Armenian crusade was, as a result, for all its lethal extravagance, a delimited political crusade. Of course, mixed into the noxious brew that represented itself as national destiny were other obsessions: a loathing of Christians if not all non-Muslims, xenophobia, greed, jealousy, fear, desire, and the like. But, above all else, the “war against the Armenians” was a vulgar and desperate manifestation of raw nationalist politics.
As a direct and immediate consequence, anti-Armenianism is not expressed in the baroque language of metaphysical evil, not does it require – paraphrasing Himmler’s asserting that “all Jews without exception must die” – the complete annihilation of every Armenian man, woman, and child. It does not represent a racial collision as that term came to be understood in the ornate ontological schema of Nazism. There is no assertion of primordial reciprocity between power and being, between intra-human aggression and meta-historic causations, between biological contingencies and noumenological principles. Rather, the elemental rational almost universally cited by the Turks in defense of their actions is political: the Armenians are secessionists, Russian spies, fifth-columnists, divisive nationalists, who would subvert the Turkish people’s revolution and destroy Turkish national and political integrity. For example, this explanatory tack, this nationalist warrant, is already determinative in the pre-war Turkish interpretation of the Armenian massacres at Adana in April 1909 and it reappears in full force in the explanation of the events of 1915–16. Repeated Turkish reference to the Armenian Revolution at Van in 1915 is perhaps the outstanding example of this “legitimating” mode of moral-political reasoning.
Operating within the confines of this dominant political logic, the invocation of communal “self-defense” against Armenian sedition, actual and possible, explains nearly all that needs to be explained about Turkish behavior during this critical moment of potential national dissolution.
What was here intended was a particular political goal. Certainly, the Armenians had long been despised as religious outsiders and feared as economic rivals, but as Lord Bryce told the House of Lords on October 6, 1915:
There was no Moslem passion against the Armenian Christians. All was done by the will of the Government, and done not from any religious fanaticism, but simply because they wished, for reasons purely political, to get rid of a non-Moslem element which impaired the homogeneity of the Empire and constituted an element that might not always submit to oppression.5
Though I am conscious that I am here telescoping a great deal of complex religious, social, cultural, and historical material into the “political” – as Bryce and others before me – there is no real evidence that anything but a ferociously nationalist political dogmatic was responsible for the evils of 1915–18 (and up to and including the events of 1922). As Winston Churchill observed in 1929: “There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons.”6
In this context it is important to remember that the Young Turks were, in the main, atheists who cynically manipulated Islamic loyalists for their own doctrinal purposes. Accordingly, they employed the rhetoric of theological confrontation and ancient tribal and religious antipathies for purposes other than the narrowly denominational. For the Young Turks, World War I presented an “historic” opportunity, “justified” by Armenian disloyalty, to definitively settle a long-standing struggle over sovereignty with the Armenians – a geopolitical issue that has no parallel in the Nazi-Jewish context – and, as part of the same process, to put an end to largely self-serving foreign intervention in Turkish affairs by the Great Powers on behalf of the oppressed Armenian minority. As Cemal Pasha, a leading member of the Ittihadist regime, noted in his memoirs: “Our sole objective [in our Campaign against the Armenians] was to free ourselves from all the governmental measures [imposed on us] in this war [by the Great Powers] and which constituted a blow to our internal independence.”7 For the Young Turks it was the restitution of Turkish national honor and the protection of Turkey’s geographical integrity that were at the center of this brutish campaign.
If the Young Turks were ardent nationalists, the Armenians were perceived, not without cause, as being intensely concerned to purpose their own separatist national agenda in the now to be dismembered Ottoman territory. In the heated circumstance that prevailed after Turkey’s entry into World War I there was sufficient anti-Turkish Armenian military and political activity to lend credibility – especially for those predisposed to believe it – to this root anxiety. Thus, while such early Armenian sympathizers as Johannes Lepsius, Herbert Gibbons, and Bertha Papazian sought to justify the wartime relations between the Armenian community and the Russian government and to defend against charges of Armenian disloyalty during the war, Richard Hovannisian has felt obligated to conclude his more recent appraisal of Armenian behavior with the telling admission that:
Although most Armenians maintained a correct attitude vis-à-vis the Ottoman government, it can be asserted with some substantiation that the manifestations of loyalty were insincere, for the sympathy of most Armenians throughout the war was with the Entente, not with the Central Powers. By autumn 1914 several prominent Ottoman Armenians, including a former member of parliament, had slipped away to the Caucasus to collaborate with Russian military officials.8
To this manifest disloyalty should be added, as causes for Ottoman concern, the zealous anti-Turkish war enthusiasm of the Armenian population in Russia; the anti-Turkish activity of Armenian factions and supporters in Western Europe and America; Turkish Armenian relations with the Entente powers aimed at the partition of Turkey and the establishment of an independent Armenian state; the diverse pro-Russian activity of the Armenian populace residing in Turkish territory; the 1914 Dashnak rejection of a request for assistance against Russia on the grounds of neutrality; and the fact that the “Russian Imperial Army with Armenian volunteer units from the Caucasus (totaling 150,000 Armenians in all) had occupied most of the eastern provinces of Van, Bitlis, Erzerum, and Trebizond in 1916.”9 Moreover, these invading forces had carried out atrocities against the local Turkish population in retaliation for earlier Turkish crimes.
In addition, and consequential, the Turks had suffered a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Sarikamish (that began on December 25, 1914) to a Russian force comprised in some identifiable measure of Armenian volunteer units. During this crucial campaign the Turkish Third Army, commanded by Enver Pasha, lost over 80 percent (75,000) of its men in the short space of two weeks. Such was the magnitude of this debacle that it markedly shaped subsequent perceptions on both sides of the military front, as well as on both sides of the Armenian Question. One need not accept the apologetic Turkish reading of this critical military engagement to recognize that something dramatic, of far-reaching consequence, involving the direct collusion of Turkish and Armenian national interests, had occurred at Sari-kamish. Many, if not most, Armenians had now openly sided with the cause of Turkey’s enemy – in the midst of a life and death conflict for the Ittihadist regime. Even if the Armenian contribution to the Russian military cause was ultimately negligible, as measured by the overall size of the military forces engaged in the hostilities, and even if it was exaggerated for ulterior and heinous purposes by the Young Turks (as it was also exaggerated for their own domestic reasons by Armenian nationalists), the reality was that many Armenians had been actively disloyal in time of war.
The statist implications of Armenian action – for both nationalies – can be seen even more clearly in connection with the revolt at Van in April 1915. Whatever one’s final interpretation of this event, what is salient from our point of view is that both sides agree that the sizable Armenian population at Van, with direct Russian military assistance, did revolt. Whatever the initial provocation they, at least at first, succeeded in defeating the Turkish forces and establishing, if only briefly, an incipient Armenian state within the territorial boundaries of pre-war Turkey. The Armenians had temporarily won a great military victory carrying extraordinarily important nationalist implications. No ex post facto minimizing of Armenian nationalist aspirations, or of the wider meaning of this particular success, can negate this salient act. As Henry Wood, the pro-Armenian American United Press correspondent wrote belatedly from Constantinople on August 14, 1915:
The Armenians are in open revolt [and] actually in possession of Van and several other important towns, [and] may meet with fresh successes… The Armenians… are seeking to establish an independent government.10
All this is to argue that contrary to, for example, Helen Fein’s contention that the Armenians were “enemies by definition,”11 i.e., on a priori ideological or racial grounds – thereby allowing her erroneously to equate the action against Jews and Gypsies in World War II with that against the Armenians in World War I – the Armenians were “enemies,” to the degree that they were enemies in this context, on practical and political grounds. That is, on grounds that centered around long-standing policies of internal colonialism, the implications – and machinations – of national self-determination, and the provocative issue of loyalty in time of war. Accordingly, the objective of Turkish action, when it came in 1915–16, was the destruction, once and for all, of Armenian national identity. The criminality of the Armenians did not require – as I shall show in detail in a moment – the biological extinction of every Armenian man, woman and child – especially if such individual and collective survival took place outside Turkish national boundaries and therefore made no claims upon Turkish sovereignty or national territory.
This is not to ignore the magnitude of the crime perpetrated against the Armenian people, the misery and death entailed by the mass deportations, the continual abuse of Armenian women, the mix of ideology, sadism, and self-interest in the massacre of Armenian men, and the theft and murder of infants and children. It is, however, to insist that these deliberate acts of despoliation and near-unlimited cruelty be deciphered aright. And this means recognizing that even this vast, inhumane carnage involved limits. Being a political-national assault against a political enemy the Young Turks could achieve their preeminent goal – the protection of the nation as they defined it – without requiring the complete physical extirpation of every person of Armenian heritage. To this degree – and here I make only this limited and very precise claim – the intentionality behind, as well as the actualized structure of, the Turkish program for the eradication of Armenian national existence was unlike the biocentric war that Nazism carried on against the Jews. And this is because the “Armenian Question” differed in its quintessential character from the “Jewish Question.” The former had been a conflicted political issue for nearly a century, had created manifold pressures and functional comprises for the Ottoman state, and now could be, once and for all, resolved by the annihilation of the organized Armenian community within Turkey. In contrast, the “Jewish Question,” which had likewise been a central, exceedingly controversial, political concern in Europe since the beginnings of Jewish emancipation in the eighteenth century, was categorically transformed by Hitler into an inescapable metaphysical challenge – “blood” in the Nazi universe of discourse being understood as the elementary vehicle by which ontological values become incarnate in history – that could only be solved by an uncompromising genocidal assault. The Third Reich therefore insisted not only on the elimination of Jewish collective identity and communal existence but also on the murder of every Jewish person of whatever age and gender.
Three additional seminal factors that strengthen the morphological dis analogy between the Armenian tragedy and the Holocaust need to be introduced into our argument at this juncture. They are: (1) the possibility of Armenian Christian conversion to Islam as a way of avoiding deportation and worse; (2) the specific character of the forced deportations; and (3) the non-totalistic nature of the anti-Armenian crusade.
As regards the mediating role of conversion to Islam, the eyewitness accounts of the tragedy repeatedly mention this life-saving though communally destructive possibility. Both “willingly” and unwillingly, large numbers of Armenians became Muslims. There appears, in particular, to have been extensive forced proselytization of Armenian women and children. It is difficult to ascertain just what role official Ittihadist ideology played in these coerced prophylactic rituals, though it is clear that the C.U.P. (Committee of Union and Progress, the party of the “Young Turks”) devoid as it was of a racist ideology, did not oppose such recreative, death-deflecting, actions. Indeed, to the degree that Islamicization constructively reinforced the Young Turks normative political agenda – Islam being a fundamental buttress of Turkification (while Christianity was the key element in Armenian self-identity) – this survivalist (flagrantly inhumane) program was consistent with C.U.P. ambitions. And it found wide instantiation. So wide in fact that Lepsius again and again excoriates the Turkish government for allowing, even encouraging, this tyrannical policy, while Toynbee accusingly refers to “survival being purchased by apostatizing to Islam.”12 Likewise, the German, American, British (and other) governments are on record as protesting this unwelcome practice.
In that neither Islam nor Turkism was predicated on inelastic biologistic concepts, both possess absorptive capacities that create existential as well as socio-political possibilities unavailable in Nazism. Accordingly, the “other” is not only defined differently by the Ittihad elites than in Hitler’s Reich – not genetically and without reference to metaphysical canons of ontic pollution and decadence – but the required response to the “other” allows for the remaking of the “other,” primarily through the mysterious rite of conversion, so as to obviate still more complete – that is exterminatory – forms of overcoming. Thus, for example, children in Christian orphanages were converted en masse. And it was not only women and children who were forcibly converted. Lepsius, for instance, records that the entire male medical staff of the German Mission Hospital in Urfa was coerced into becoming Muslim, as were Armenian army physicians at Sivas.13 In Aleppo, the entire Armenian labor battalion was converted in February 1916, and further large-scale conversions of Armenian males occurred in March and April 1916. Lepsius also reports that “all Armenian villages in the Samsun area and in Unich have been Islamicized. No favors were granted to anyone, apart from renegades.”14 In fact, Lepsius conservatively estimates that 200,000 men, women and children, approximately 12 to 13.5 percent of the entire Armenian community, were forcibly converted and thereby saved,15 however objectionable the instrument of their salvation. In this respect, Turkish policy reproduces medieval procedures of cultural homogenization, not modern procedures of physical genocide. As such, it kept Armenians, if not Armenianism, alive.
Second, the Armenian deportations were not uniformly events of total annihilation. Though these Armenian removals, carried out under the most brutal conditions, were regularly occasions of mass death – that sealed the fate of hundreds of thousands – several hundred thousand Armenians did survive these horrific journeys. Lepsius, for example, (under)estimates the remnant at 200,000 individuals. Toynbee cites a total of 600,000 Armenian survivors – the combined total of those who lived through the deportations and those who fled into Russian territory – up to 1916.16 He summarizes that:
in general wastage [death during the deportations] seems to fluctuate, with a wide oscillation, on either side of 50 percent; 600 out of 2,500 (24 percent) reached Aleppo from a village in the Harpout district; 60 percent arrived there out of the first convoy from the village of E. (near H.), and 46 percent out of the second; 25 percent arrived out of a convoy from the village of D. in the same neighborhood. We shall certainly be well within the mark if we estimate that at least half of those condemned to massacre or deportation have actually perished.17
Supporting these large estimates of the number of those who were not killed during these forced evacuations are the figures for Armenians who found refuge in Arab countries and then later in Western Europe and America. Richard Hovannisian, writing of their acceptance in the Arab world, indicates: “Many of the deportees suffered a cruel fate at the hands of certain Bedouin tribes in the Syrian desert, but most were accorded sympathetic asylum by the Arab peoples, who had themselves endured four centuries of Ottoman domination. In all, the number of Armenian deportees who found refuge in Arab lands, by 1925, is estimated at well over 200,000,”18 and this figure excludes the 50,000 who found refuge in Iran. More specifically, Hovannisian breaks these refugee figures down as follows: Syria accepted 100,000 Armenian refugees, Lebanon 50,000, Palestine and Jordan 10,000, Egypt 40,000, Iraq 25,000, and Iran 50,000, making a total of 275,000 survivors. These numbers are supported by later governmental statistics issued by the respective Arab countries. Census data released between 1931 and 1945 by the individual Middle Eastern states indicates that Syria had an Armenian population of 125,550 (1945), Lebanon 72,797 (1944), Palestine 3,802 (1931), and Egypt 19,596 (1937). And to these aggregates Justin McCarthy adds the following estimates for Armenian refugees in various European and North American locations (to what degree these overlap with Hovannisian’s figures for the Arab world, for there must have been such overlap, is unclear. McCarthy [p. 129, Table 7.6] makes no such allowance): France 30,000, Czechoslovakia 200, Switzerland 250, Greece 34,000, Cyprus 21,500, Bulgaria 20,000, Hungary 15, Austria 270, Yugoslavia 543, Italy 603, Canada 1,244, and the United States of America 34,136. If we therefore put the number of survivors of these inhumane transfers at between 300,000 and 400,000, we shall be on secure grounds – or at least grounds that are as secure as possible given all the statistical uncertainties – remembering that Hovannisian’s total of 275,000 does not include any survivors in Russia, Europe, or the United States of America. This translates into somewhere between a 17.7 percent (300,000 out of 1,700,000, the maximum Armenian population) and 26.6 percent (400,000 out of 1,500,000 the minimum Armenian population) survival rate. Then, too, beyond the mathematics alone, these substantial statistics indicate that the Turkish oppressor did not require, did not demand, the death of all Armenians. The Turks had all these individuals, this entire defenseless population, within their control and could have murdered them all – despite the practical difficulties involved in murdering an entire people in a country as large as Turkey – had they so desired. But, evidently, this was not necessary.
Third, the enacted policy of deporting Armenians was not universally applied even within the borders of Turkey. The Armenians of Constantinople numbering up to 200,000 and the Armenians of other large cities, e.g., Smyrna (where between 6,000 and 20,000 Armenians lived), Kutahia, and to some degree Aleppo, were not uprooted en masse during the entire war period. Lepsius estimated (and in his own word perhaps “overestimated”) that the number of Armenians so protected represented 1/7 to 1/9 of the total Armenian population, or some 204,700 persons (out of what he projected as an original Armenian population of 1,845,450).19 Though recent studies20 require that we temper Lepsius’s figures, and indicate that up to 30,000 Armenians were in fact deported from Constantinople, the need to modify all generalizations as to Turkish intentions given the very real limitations placed upon evictions from Constantinople and elsewhere stands. To gain a full picture of all the relevant statistics bearing upon the question of Armenian survival we must also add in the 300,000 or so Armenians who retreated with the Russian army back into Russian territory after the final defeat at Van in the summer of 1915 and the 4,200 who survived the famous battle of Musa Dagh and were rescued by the French in mid-September 1915. Accordingly, the comprehensive demographic picture regarding casualties and survival is indicated in the table below.
| Minimum | Maximum | |
|
|
||
| 1914 Armenian population | 1,500,000 | 1,700,000 |
| Converts to Islam | 200,000 | 300,000 |
| Survive deportations outside Turkey | 300,000 | 400,000 |
| Survive in large Turkish cities | 170,000 | 220,000 |
| Survive in Russia | 250,000 | 300,000 |
| Survivors of Musa Dagh | 4,200 | 4,200 |
| Total survivors | 924,200 | 1,224,200 |
| Total deaths (1915–18) | 476,000 | 776,000 |
This is not the Holocaust.
I would now like to consider, however briefly, a second hard case that has recently gained a new prominence as a consequence of the corrupt thesis of the so-called German Revisionists led by Ernest Nolte.
Nolte argues that the Shoah is not a singular event, having been modeled after Stalin’s Gulag. In lieu of a more extended rebuttal of this erroneous claim, I would say only this: while there are many good reasons to abhor the Gulag and the vast evil that it perpetrated, the reality is that this comparison of the Soviet work camps and Auschwitz is deeply flawed. I have argued elsewhere21 that it is necessary to understand the Gulag as a cross between a penal institution and slavery that was utilized by Stalin both to eliminate his political enemies and, even more importantly, to create an unfree labor pool whose labor could be tapped to support the much needed modernization of Russia. I will not repeat these arguments at length here. Instead, in support of my thesis regarding the need for scrupulous care in the writing of comparative history, I would draw attention to several phenomenological characteristics that I believe clearly indicate the primal difference that separate Auschwitz from Kolyma.
I begin with a small but significant detail: the Russian convoys to Siberia and the Arctic carried a doctor or medical officer. Ignore, for the moment, the indifference of these medical officers, even their criminal complicity in the terror, and concentrate instead on the structural fact of their presence itself: medical officers accompanied the convoys. Does this unexpected element, this sign of at least a utilitarian discipline, not suggest that the comparative judgment as to the larger meaning(s) of these alternative events – that is, Auschwitz and the Gulag – has to be varied? That, in fact, the Soviet convoys, however wretched, should be likened phenomenologically more exactly to the Middle Passage than to the train shipments organized by Eichmann and the SS? Slave vessels also carried ships’ surgeons whose job was more than perfunctory, and whose remuneration, in part, depended on the successful crossing of their cargoes, i.e., they received a bonus for bringing their slave cargoes in alive.22 One could not make a profit from dead slaves, and one could not mine the Kolyma or fell the needed export timber of the northern forests with dead men. By comparison, the Reichsbahn and the SS had no similar incentive, for their substantive enterprise was predicated on an antithetical rationality. The Reichsbahn was paid whether their “shipments” arrived alive or dead; when its Jewish cargo arrived as corpses the SS had already done their primary job without taxing the ovens and incinerators.
This detail, the importance of which is not to be exaggerated, points to a larger elemental truth: the Gulag, in its vastness, exists to meet real, economically significant, quotas – to extract minerals necessary for the national good; to mine gold needed by the national treasury; to fell timber for export; to supply labor that could be exploited in the name of rapid industrialization. In this environment utilitarian motives, however base, count against ideological fantasies and death. Collective gain, wealth, production, industrialization, and socialist modernization are the justification for the violence. It is this immanent, practical, economic and industrial design that defines the Gulag. In contrast – and I make this comparative observation not to diminish the Soviet camps and the experience of their inmates, but to distinguish them – the evil(s) of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and Chelmno had almost no linkage to utilitarian norms, to production goals, national wealth, industrialization, required modernization, or even to self-enrichment; Auschwitz and the other Death Camps existed essentially as a negation of utilitarianism and in contradiction to the ethos of survival. The SS did not seek to exploit the Jew but to transform the Jew into an Untermensch, and then into a corpse.23
If we now pursue the structural disparity between the Gulag and Auschwitz, if only schematically, we will discover that the victims of Stalin’s regime were subjected to a less total rupture with their past than was the case with Jews during the Shoah. Gustav Herling, for example, tells of the Dom Svidanyi, the House of Meeting, at Kargopol in the early 1940s “where prisoners were allowed to spend between one and three days with their relatives who had come from all parts of Russia to Kargopol Camp for this short visit.”24 Such renewing, pain-filled encounters, while difficult to arrange – and recognizing all the manipulation by the authorities that they were heir to – were, in many cases at least, a possibility once a year. Solzhenitsyn confirms this,25 as do Roeder26 and other chroniclers of the Gulag.27 And even when this was not possible, or between visits, mail28 was allowed into and out of the Camps, even “care” packages,29 including food,30 and the sending of money,31 though an uncommon occurrence, was permitted. In contrast, Jews neither visited nor corresponded. Their loved ones were either already ashes or living in another segment of the Kingdom of Night.
It might be objected that I here exaggerate the structural and existential differences between Nazi death camps and the Gulag, for in the latter such family meetings were rare occurrences and letters and parcels were likewise exceptional. Such objections, however – true enough on the face of it – would miss the essential matter – namely, that between some visits, no matter how intermittent, and some mail, no matter how rare, and no visits, and no mail, i.e., the systemic denial of all human contact outside of the camp, and the complete negation of one’s historic community, there exists a qualitative metaphysical abyss.
Here I note, too, the odd presence in the Soviet camps of the so-called KVCH – the Cultural and Educational Section. Not surprisingly, these centers were hopelessly run, poorly staffed, and provided with extremely limited facilities. As Solzhenitsyn announces: “If anybody should ever try to tell you with shining eyes that someone was re-educated by government means through the KVCH… you can reply with total correctness: Nonsense.”32 And, of course, he is right. With his accustomed biting wit, he dismantles any pretense regarding this uncommon program of “re-education.” Yet its very existence is of some interest, whatever its monumental lack, even if by design, of accomplishments. For by merely being there it informs us of the distinctive political consciousness that was implicated in the organization of the Gulag which made class and status transformation – as compared to an uncompromising program of physical genocide – an ideological, if not a practical, goal.
The KVCH organized classes, lectures, movies, plays, and concerts. In contrast, the Nazis permitted Jews none of these things. Even the pretense of “re-education” – re-educate lice? – is absent. When one reads of rabbinical leaders offering courses to their fellow Jews in the death camps it must be remembered that this was done solely on their initiative, against orders, as an act of overwhelming fidelity, despite the Nazis. The official SS ideology permitted no such activity, severely punished it when discovered, and did everything it could to see that it did not take place. Possession of any Jewish cultural or religious artifact could easily mean “selection,” any sign of Jewish commitment would make one the special target for verbal and physical abuse, for “sportmachen,” often ending in death. That Jews celebrated, prayed, remembered their liturgical calendar, “learned,” even in Auschwitz, is a testimony to their remarkable courage and faith; it was not the design of the camp’s creators.
Touching upon the most intimate matters of human subjectivity and identity the evidence for differentiation and distinction becomes still more convincing. “There was,” we are correctly informed by Terence Des Pres, “more sexual activity in the Soviet camps because there was more opportunity, but also because conditions were less openly horrible.”33 This significant observation regarding the availability and extent of sexuality in the Gulag, and the immediate reasons for it, is borne out by all the detailed autobiographical accounts.34 There existed a Hieronymous Bosch-like underworld in the Gulag that exhibited a sexually explicit, surrealistic, salaciousness that finds no authentic analogue in the Nazi ecology. Not that the latter was devoid of all sexuality, or perversion, or sexual exploitation, but rather that the immediate parameters, both spatial and temporal, for such carnal activity were far more controlled and constrained – and the moderating effects of these functional limits were compounded by the sheer debilitation of Jewish physical strength. There was simply less possibility in the Nazi death camps of enacting the lurid, obscene, sexual rituals that played a fundamental part in the daily life of the Soviet camp empire.
But there is, there was, something more fundamental at issue. One knows that Jewish women, as women in the Gulag, were exploited sexually, and that they, like their Russian counterparts, tried on occasion to trade sex for life – though for the most part the technological and bureaucratic forms that governed the “Final Solution” created far fewer opportunities for such sexual exploitation. But with the SS this trade, even momentarily “accepted,” almost never meant survival. It was not functional, it had no value relative to the future. It was a futile act that could not alter one’s fate. The luciferian biocentrism of the Nazi system precluded the possibility that such exchanges – which constituted a racial crime – could have any but very temporary results. The SS would sexually assault Jewish women and then murder them. They were obligated to murder them.
Even more revealing, more informative, is the fate of children in the Gulag and during the Shoah. Olga Lengyel tells us of Auschwitz:
One day we decided we had been weak long enough. We must at least save the mothers. To carry out our plan, we would have to make the infants pass for stillborn…
Unfortunately, the fate of the baby always had to be the same. After taking every precaution, we pinched and closed the little tike’s nostrils and when it opened its mouth to breathe, we gave it a dose of a lethal product. An injection might have been quicker, but that would have left a trace and we dared not let the German suspect the truth.
We placed the dead infant in the same box which had brought it from the barrack, if the accouchement had taken place there. As far as the camp administration was concerned, this was a stillbirth.
And so, the Germans succeeded in making the murderers of even us. To this day the picture of those murdered babies haunts me. Our own children had perished in the gas chambers and were cremated in the Birkenau ovens, and we dispatched the lives of others before their first voices had left their tiny lungs.35
These murdered infants stand for an entire generation of doomed Jewish children. No Jewish child was to be allowed to live; over one million Jewish children were actually killed.
By comparison, Elinore Lipper writes as follows of pregnancy and childbirth even in the severe conditions of Magadan, in the Kolyma region:
The new prisoners would be sent to chop wood. That was not allowed from the sixth month of pregnancy on. In winter they (pregnant women) could do no snow shoveling or field work in the spring. During the last month of pregnancy, the women would be relieved of work and placed in the highest ration category.36
And when it was time for the birth of the child:
The children come into the world in the prison hospital. For a week mother and child stay together. Then the mother is dismissed from the hospital and the child is taken to the children’s house, or “combine,” as it is called. The mother is not obliged to work for the first month after the birth of the child. Then she is sent to work at a place fairly near the children’s combine, for it is Russian custom that the mother has the right to nurse her baby for nine months. At certain times the nursing mothers, who are called mamki, are assembled and taken under guard to the combine.”37
And Lipper’s testimony is in no sense unique in the literature of the Gulag. There is abundant evidence38 that pregnant women were accorded privileges in this time and place, however meager these privileges may appear to us.
Mother and child had a legitimate, if wretched, place within the system. The Soviet state, even under Stalin, even in the northernmost slave-labor camps after 1937, recognized some obligation to these mothers and to these infants. Lipper’s particular description of this natural cycle in the midst of this unnatural environment may be too mechanical as well as too benign, the reality far more punishing, unquestionably less ideal, but whatever the humanizing exaggerations of her account, it belongs to an altogether different history, and results in a radically alternative reality, than that played out at Auschwitz.
The most significant fact is that both the Russian mothers and the Soviet state, whatever their mixed motives, whatever the pain involved, wanted the babies produced in the Gulag. Despite the terrible material conditions into which and under which they came into the world there is no presumption of inherited and accusing guilt. The innocence of these newborn, whatever the crime of their mothers, is acknowledged. Being born in the Gulag will have terrible and life-long ramifications – but one of them is not necessarily the sentence of death.
Only under the Third Reich were Jewish mothers and children intentionally, systematically, unrelentingly, and without exception murdered. (Not in the Soviet slave empire, not in ancient or modern slavery, not in the medieval wars of religion, not in the conquest of the New World, not in World War I Turkey, not in Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, not in Indonesia, China, or Cambodia, indeed nowhere else in history did such an uncompromising imperative exist. I now feel prepared to affirm this categorically.)
If I might generalize, I would say that all the truly important differences between the Stalinist and Nazi camp-worlds are a consequence of the fact that in the former the prisoners were still, in principle, considered juridically, ideologically and metaphysically fellow human beings. Despite their “crimes” – even if “class enemies,” “wreckers,” deviationists,” “capitalists,” “rootless cosmopolitans,” “enemies of the people,” and “Zionists” – these criminals against the socialist order remained, theoretically at least, inhabitants of the same moral universe as their accusers and jailers.
Consider, as one example which stands for many, the interesting and puzzling system of “wages” for camp prisoners that was kept at all labor camps.39 This phenomenon in particular, insofar as it carries anthropological and ethical implications, supports our measured (not naive!) understanding of the Soviet conception of who its camp inmates were. The policy of tracking and recording the productivity of prisoners in order to pay them for their work that was standard procedure in the Gulag unmistakably indicates – despite all the abuses and dishonesty that this bureaucratic procedure lent itself to – that the prisoners were still fellow persons, beings whom the socialist state was still obligated to deal with in some legal (economic) fashion. As such, their labor could not be completely stolen40 – whatever the daily reality.
One is struck in this connection by the “voluntary” war bond subscriptions, aimed at the camp earnings of prisoners, carried out among the Gulag slave laborers during World War II. This was certainly, on the most fundamental level, a Kafkaesque performance in which what was voluntary was compulsory and the meaningful possibility of authentic human autonomy was altogether absent. However, on a second, and different, level it again points towards at least a theoretically maintained conception of the humanity of the camp population. And this in three ways: first, these inmates were entitled to wages for work done; second, even these Siberian prisoners were entitled, recognizing all the practical, legal and contextual constraints that were here operative, to do as they would with the money they earned. Even Soviet legality, wherein putative historical necessities trampled human freedoms and positive law, recognized this right. And so they must agree – the need of their agreement being the legal-ethical condition that makes the situation both interesting and paradoxical – to contribute part of what they had earned to the national war effort. Third, even such slaves were believed capable of selfless patriotism – and it was expected of them.
Now no one should take these transactions at face value – surely neither the camp personnel nor the prisoners did so. Yet intrinsic to this historical scene, necessary for this peculiar civic dialogue to continue at all, is a lingering metaphysical belief, if only in an attenuated vestigial form, that somehow these presently mutilated individuals were still moral subjects. One certainly must tread carefully in interpreting such realia for the descriptions of such scenes as the sale of war bonds in the Gulag have a fantastic quality about them. But that such events took place at all, that the state felt the need for them to take place, that the state staged them, this too has a phenomenological valence that is not to be ignored.
I must content myself with these broad observations. They will, I hope, at least suffice to warn others of making too easy a linkage between Hitler’s death camps and Stalin’s labor camps and, in any case, support the complete rejection of the apologetic and dishonest German revisionist reading of these two grotesque but fundamentally alternate historical circumstances.
There is much more to be said, many additional cases, issues and categories to be explored in the comparative investigation of the Holocaust. But let what has already been argued stand as an introduction to a vast topic – and as support for our larger thesis as to the uniqueness of the Nazi Kingdom of Night. Still more generally, let it be understood that the close, painstaking work of comparative historical analysis will show, as we have shown in our analysis of the Armenian tragedy and the Gulag, that fundamental, defining, distinctions – necessarily varying from case to case and context to context – will need to be made in every instance in which the Shoah is said to be like another historic event of mass death. For in the final analysis the destruction of European Jewry stands alone not as a moral but as a phenomenological and historical novum.
My research on the Holocaust and comparative history began in the early 1980s with the publication of an essay entitled “The Unique Intentionality of the Holocaust,” that appeared in the first number of Modern Judaism in May 1981. In the opening paragraph of that paper I described Nazism as having, “as an integral part of its purpose and behavior the total eradication of world Jewry.” I then asked the following question: “In so doing was Nazism ‘unique’? Indeed, does the uniqueness of Nazism lie in its genocidal intent against the Jewish people?”
To try and answer this question I very briefly commented on the historical occasions that suggested comparability to the Holocaust and, therefore, refuted the claim to “uniqueness” that I was seeking to establish. Most of these historical cases were already being discussed in what was then a small but growing literature on the Holocaust in comparative terms and the separate, but related, issue of “genocide.” Thus I made mention, very cursorily, on topics arising from Jewish history that I already knew quite well, for example, the Assyrian Conquest in 722–721 B.C.E.; the Babylonian Conquest of 586 B.C.E.; the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem; the abuses by Antiochus IV, and the Hellenistic kings of Syria in the second century B.C.E.; the Roman conquest at the end of the “Great Revolt” of 66 to 70 C.E. that concluded with the destruction of the Second Temple; the failed revolt of Bar Kokchba against Rome in 132–135 C.E. with its disastrous consequences; Christian antisemitism beginning with the polemical writings of Paul and the severe condemnation of Jews and Judaism in the New Testament; and Islamic anti-Judaism.41
Among the many cases of mass violence in non-Jewish history that I discussed were: the terrible treatment of American and Brazilian Indians by European colonizers; the horrific murder of Armenians during 1915–1916 in the midst of World War I; and the killing of gypsies by the Hitler state. In retrospect, what is now striking is that, while I also mentioned the Nigerian Civil War, I did not refer to the crimes of Stalin in either the Ukraine or the Gulag. In any case, this brief and very limited review completed, I then concluded:
Much additional research has to be done to draw a complete phenomenological description of each of the historical episodes we have quite briefly reviewed, as well as the many we have not had the space to comment upon. Yet, while recognizing this need for further analysis, I believe enough evidence has been marshaled to suggest that in and through the category of “intention” we can begin to perceive at least one seminal individuating characteristic of the Holocaust.42
For the past four decades I have been pursuing this “additional research” in order to test my original thesis. This study has led me in many fascinating directions and has taught me a great deal about important subjects regarding which I was, in 1981, woefully ignorant. As I carefully began this work in the 1980s and 1990s I began to reduce my ignorance, both as regards the historical events I was trying to understand as well as concerning the thicket of hermeneutical and methodological issues that I felt needed to be sorted out if I was going to do comparative study seriously and with the needed scholarly accuracy and integrity. This, in turn, led to the publication of a series of essays that more deeply probed the relevant instances of mass death that challenged the claim that the Holocaust was unique. In addition, it led to a more encompassing investigation of essential issues like the definition of “genocide,” the significance – and limits of the significance – of high casualty counts, and the major importance of the concept – the issue – of intention. A number of the individual essays that were written during this period are now reprinted here, beginning with the Leo Baeck lecture given in 1993. In that lecture my main foci were the previously neglected subject of the Gulag and the heinous murder of Armenians during World War I by the Young Turks, then in control of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire.
In the lecture I argued that while both circumstances were horrific, and no distinction should be made morally between them and the murder of European Jews – or, as I began to understand, vis-à-vis the suffering of the victims in all three circumstances – there were what I began to identify as “phenomenological” differences between them. The organizing structure and the energizing intentions of Stalin’s crimes, the barbaric actions of the Turkish leadership and their cause(s), and the Holocaust, were all very different. Not least in significance, in the cases of the Gulag and the Armenian massacres the victimizers did not intend the total eradication of the victim groups, as was the case in the Holocaust.
Since I made this presentation, the literature on all aspects of Holocaust studies, genocide studies, and comparative history has exploded, and I have attempted to keep up with it. Interestingly, during these years, original research on the Armenian tragedy has continued to be published and the claim that this new literature most often advances is that what occurred in wartime Turkey represents a legitimate comparison to the Holocaust. I note in this regard that when Leo Kuper published his wide-ranging study, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century,43 he felt it appropriate to call the Armenian case “the forgotten genocide of the twentieth century.” This is certainly no longer the case. So one finds, for instance, that, next to the Holocaust, the systematic destruction that occurred in wartime Armenia has been the second-most discussed subject in the prestigious American Holocaust journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And almost every recent collection of essays on the subject of “Genocide” includes analysis of the Armenian massacres and overwhelmingly accepts that the term “genocide” appropriately applies to this event. Thus, one is not surprised to learn that, for example, when Manus J. Midlarsky set out to study the three paradigmatic cases of genocide in the twentieth century, he chose as his subjects the Armenian massacres, along with the Holocaust and the killings of the Tutsi (and others, including Hutu and Twa) in Rwanda.44
I, however, have continued to insist on the structural differences between Armenia and Auschwitz, the main reason for my doing so being my interpretation of the empirical evidence. On my reading, what took place in Turkey in 1915–1916 was not “genocide” as I understand the technical meaning of this legal concept. I use the term, having in mind the Holocaust, to indicate the “intention to murder all members of a group.”45 In this I am at odds with the United Nations’ Genocide Convention46 that I believe is too loose in its criteria. I agree that, by employing the U.N. definition, one can label the Armenian tragedy as “genocide.” On my tighter definition, however, this is not the case. The Turks did not set out to murder all Armenians, either in the Ottoman Empire or elsewhere, nor did they have any need to do so. Therefore, relative specifically to the issue of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, i.e., independently of all other considerations, I abide by my original judgment that the Armenian case does not compare phenomenologically (not morally) to the “Final Solution.”
Unfortunately, the scholarly issues related to the Armenian case have been overtaken by both American and international politics. The Turkish government has resisted, and continues to resist, all public pressure to accept the accusation of “genocide,” while the U.S. government has rejected applying this term for reasons of its own.47 Alternatively, many individual scholars and groups, like the International Association of Genocide Scholars, have sought to intervene on behalf of the Armenian position and to defend the claim that what happened was, without doubt, “genocide.”48 The application of Turkey to join the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the most prestigious international Holocaust organization, comprising thirty-one countries and organizations such as the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and UNESCO, has also been kept at bay until such time as the Turkish government makes some meaningful acknowledgment regarding this issue. In this political context I recognize that there is virtue in criticizing the actions and attitudes of the Turkish government but, at the same time, it is imperative to understand that the problematic political position adopted by the current Turkish state does not bear upon the scholarly matters of concern. Scholarship as scholarship needs to respect the fundamental difference between advocacy and research.
Consider, in defense of this distinction between research and public protest, that the crucial issue of the number of Armenians killed, on which many of the central academic-historical questions turn, is still unresolved. The Armenian community and its supporters claim the number of victims was between 800,000 and 1,500,000.49 Alternatively, according to scholars supporting Turkish claims, the number was approximately 400,000. My own position is that there was a total of approximately 1,500,000 Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and of these 476,000 to 776,000 were killed.50 To date I have seen no evidence that requires that I change my mind. Moreover, this death toll, and the percentage of the Armenian community in Turkey that it represents, given the absolute vulnerability of the Armenian community in this context, tells us something important about the Turkish agenda that precipitated this lethal campaign: that is, the numbers of dead supports the interpretation that the Turkish ambition was to decapitate Armenian nationalism, not kill all Armenians in the state (and certainly not outside the Turkish state). This could be accomplished by uprooting the Armenian community in the Empire, and murdering a percentage of the Armenian population that harbored its own nationalistic goals. It did not require the complete extermination of this Christian minority. Alternatively, it is relevant to observe that this territorial nationalism, and the specific agenda it entailed, was altogether absent in the assault, and the reasons for the assault by the Third Reich against European Jewry.
It is often argued that Hitler’s Weltanschauung was profoundly nationalist and his campaign against the Jews was a consequence of this. This is a serious, if common, error. Hitler was not a nationalist in any usual sense of this term. Instead, and very different, he was an ardent racist who divided the world by racial criteria. His murder of the Jews, his effort to make Europe Judenrein, has little to do with the concept of nationalism and everything to do with the racial re-engineering of the human family. Just consider the realities that existed in the Third Reich. An Austrian (Hitler) became Chancellor of Germany and took it as his most basic political and moral obligation to deport all the Jews from places as separate and distinct as Greece, Bulgaria, Norway, Denmark, France, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, among still other places, to camps in Poland created solely for the purpose of annihilating them by gas and other means. What sort of nationalism is this?
The differing ambitions of Young Turks vis-à-vis Armenians and German National Socialists vis-à-vis Jews is evidenced by the fact that roughly one-third of Armenians in Turkey were murdered compared to more than 90 percent of Jews in locations such as Lithuania, Poland, and Greece. And with regard to the latter, the murderous action was propelled by the intention that the Jewish death rate in these contexts should be 100 percent. It is not of minor significance, for instance, that the essay, “The Armenian Genocide” by Donald Bloxham and Fatma Müge Göçek in the Historiography of Genocide, edited by Dan Stone,51 mentions this crucial subject of losses but makes no attempt to resolve the competing narratives, and does not even supply a footnote referring to any literature on the issue.52
As for the Gulag, while the study of Stalin’s regime has continued in a productive way among those interested in the history of Russia, in the larger conversation among comparativists there is far less emphasis on the world of the Siberian labor camps and the Gulag and less insistence on the claim that they represent authentic counterparts to Auschwitz. Thus, to refer again for evidence to Midlarsky’s The Killing Trap, it is to be noted that while he discusses Stalinist crimes throughout his study he chooses not to include them as paradigm examples of “state-sponsored systematic mass murder” (p. 34). Likewise, Adam Jones, in his edited volume New Directions in Genocide Research,53 provides a description of five “Cases” (of Genocide), one of which offers a “Fresh Understanding of the Armenian Genocide,”54 but does not include a chapter on Stalinist crimes.55
There has of course, independently of the matter of “genocide,” continued to be important research published on all the main aspects of the Stalinist regime: the collectivization of agriculture and the persecution of the Kulaks; the deportations to, and life within, the Gulag; the exile of the minority nations; and the catastrophic famine in the Ukraine.56 But while all these impressive works add significant details to our knowledge of the operation of the Gulag, and have taught me many new things about Soviet Russia, they have not required that I change my view that Stalin was not interested in physical genocide and did not pursue such a policy against any of his “enemies.”57
There is no doubt that both the killing of the Armenians and Stalin’s victimization of many different groups present specific, and distinctive, methodological and historical challenges that must be confronted by anyone who would pursue comparative study of twentieth-century history and the place of the Holocaust within it. But, at this juncture, in light of what I now know about these two great tragedies, each involving evil intentions and mass death, I am still prepared to defend the conclusion originally offered in my Leo Baeck lecture as to the singularity of the Holocaust.
1 For a description of this phenomenon as it pertains to the writing of medieval history see my essay, “Misusing the Holocaust Paradigm to Mis-Write History: Examples from Recent Medieval Historiography,” in Dina Porat and Shlomo Simonsohn (eds.), Michael: On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora, vol. 13 (Tel Aviv, 1993), pp. 103–30.
2 R. J. Rummel, China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991).
3 For a full presentation of my argument, with supporting evidence, consult vol. 1 of my Holocaust in Historical Context: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (New York, 1994).
4 For a full presentation of my argument, with supporting evidence, consult volume 1 of my Holocaust in Historical Context: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (New York, 1994).
5 Arnold Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (London, 1915), p. 7.
6 Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (London, 1929), p. 405.
7 Hatiralar (1977), p. 438, cited from Vahakn N. Dadrian, “Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and Its Contemporary Legal Ramifications,” Yale Journal of International Law, 14.2 (Summer, 1989), p. 259.
8 Richard Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence (Berkeley, 1967), p. 42.
9 R. Hovannisian, “Genocide and Denial,” in Israel W. Charney (ed.), Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide (Boulder, CO, 1984), p. 88.
10 Reprinted in Lord Bryce, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916 (London, 1916), p. 2.
11 Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide (New York, 1979), p. 30.
12 Arnold Toynbee, The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks (pamphlet: New York, 1917).
13 Johannes Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien, 1914–1918 (Potsdam, 1919), p. 283.
14 Ibid., p. 160.
15 Ibid., p. LXV.
16 Arnold Toynbee in Bryce, The Treatment of the Armenians, pp. 648–50.
17 Ibid, p. 650.
18 Richard Hovannisian, “Ebb and Flow of the Armenian Minority in the Arab Middle East,” Middle East Journal 1.28 (Winter, 1974): 20.
19 J. Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien, pp. LXII – LXIII.
20 See Vahakn N. Dadrian’s important qualification regarding the Armenians of Constantinople, Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law, p. 262, n. 131; and again, V. Dadrian, “The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 23.4 (November, 1991): 570, n. 26. According to Dadrian’s reconstruction, based on the testimony of German Ambassador Wolff-Metternich on December 7, 1915, who gave as his source the Turkish Chief of Policy, 30,000 Armenians were deported from Constantinople, and more deportations were feared.
21 See my essay “Auschwitz and the Gulag: A Study in Dissimilarity,” in Alan Berger (ed.), Bearing Witness to the Holocaust 1939–1989. Proceedings of the Holocaust Scholars’ Conference (Lewiston, ME, 1992), pp. 71–89. (Reprinted as essay 3, pp. 57–73 below.)
22 I present the full evidence on the relevant aspects of the Middle Passage vis-à-vis the Shoah in The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History (New York, 2019), Vol. 1, pp. 68–128.
23 The industrial plant established at Auschwitz – that did not exist at Treblinka, Sobibor or Chelmno – does not contradict this conclusion though it does complicate it, if only marginally. And this is because these industrial operations were organized in such a way that all the Jewish workers in these plants were intended to be killed through their work regimen in a very short period of time. That is, this work should be understood as another aspect of the genocidal program. I provide a fuller analysis of this issue in The Holocaust and New World Slavery. And see essay 7 below.
24 Gustav Herling, A World Apart (New York, 1951), p. 86.
25 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago (New York, 1975), vol. 2, p. 225.
26 Bernhard Roeder, Katorga (London, 1958).
27 See Vladimir Tchernavin, I Speak for the Silent: Prisoners of the Soviets (Boston, 1935), p. 306.
28 See, e.g., Vladimir Petrov, Soviet Gold (London, 1951), pp. 184–85; and Erica G. Wallach, Light at Midnight (New York, 1967), pp. 279–80.
29 Note, for example, Varlem Shalamov’s comments in Graphite (New York, 1981), pp. 270–71; and E. Wallach, Light at Midnight, pp. 281–83 and 319–22.
30 Reported by Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta (London, 1954), pp. 82–83; and Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever (Philadelphia, 1977), p. 253.
31 Helene Celmina, Women in Soviet Prisons (New York, 1985), p. 196.
32 A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 468.
33 Terence Des Pres, The Survivor (New York, 1976), p. 190.
34 See, for example, Michael Solomon, Magadan (Toronto, 1971), pp. 140–56; and E. Wallach, Light at Midnight, p. 317.
35 Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz (New York, 1947), pp. 110–11.
36 Elinore Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps (London, 1951), p. 120.
37 Ibid., p. 120. The same policy is reported by Karlo Stajner, Seven Thousand Days in Siberia (New York, 1986), p. 89.
38 Consult, e.g., Margarete Buber, Under Two Dictators (New York, 1949), p. 81; and Michael Solomon, Magadan, pp. 155–56.
39 See Gustav Herling’s comments on this in A World Apart, p. 43. Herling is writing of 1939 and subsequently, though the system existed earlier. He refers to the occasion – that took place only once in his presence – during which “a camp’s pay officer [came] to [the] barracks with statements of our earnings” (p. 43). See also Elinore Lipper, Eleven Years, pp. 136, 194–97.
40 Prisoners who accomplished their assignment were given “premium compensation” in special SPU scrip – manual laborers three to four roubles a month, specialists of exceptional qualification up to 25 and even 35 roubles. With this money they could buy “premium products,” in the GPU stores from a list which changed every month. In 1931 one could buy, during a month, about 200 grams of sugar, 100 grams of biscuits, two to three packages of low grade tobacco, two to three boxes of matches, and sometimes 200 grams of melted lard; in 1932 sugar, biscuits, and lard were omitted from the list. Furthermore, the prisoner could purchase on his premium card 200 extra grams of bread per day, but even this extra ration – highly valued by the prisoners – could not be relied upon since the stores were often short of bread. Nevertheless, however small this premium compensation might be, it was a powerful incentive to hungry prisoners” (V. Tchernavin, I Speak for the Silent, p. 305). Dimitri Panin reports using his camp account to buy an extra bread ration, Notebooks of Sologden (New York, 1976), p. 165; while P. Yakrit tells us: “Passengers kept looking into our compartment with a certain amount of surprise: two kids under escort was not a common sight. All around, as is usually the case with railway carriages, people were getting out their parcels and in fact one person had already started eating. We too were very hungry. We put this to the escort commander. He said that our journey would only last for two and a half hours, but if we had any money, then we could buy something to eat at the station. We had in fact been given all that we had in our account. After we left the next station some food appeared on the little table in our compartment: bread, butter, sausage and even some vodka. The guards ate with us. (Piotr Vakir, A Childhood in Prison [New York, 1973], p. 103)
41 I returned to examine all these historical events in much greater detail and with a careful review of the relevant primary and secondary sources in The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1, Mass Death Before the Modern Age (hereafter HHC) (New York, 1994).
42 The essay, “The Unique Intentionality of the Holocaust,” was republished in my Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York, 1983), pp. 287–317. I here cite p. 310.
43 (New Haven, CT, 1982), p. 195.
44 Manus Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK, 2005), p. 34.
45 For a fuller explanation see my argument in the paper, “On the definition of genocide and the issue of uniqueness,” in this volume, and my more detailed review in HHC, pp. 125–39, where I have explained at length my reasons for not accepting, for purposes of scholarly work, the U.N. definition of “genocide.” I here reprint my main (but not only) objection to the U.N. definition:
“as to the ‘degree’ of violence done to a group required for said violence to qualify as genocide [according to the U.N. Convention] (i.e., as regards the extremely vague and problematic notion that genocide is to be defined as any act ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group’), I demur. It is logically and practicably impossible to employ these criteria both meaningfully and with control. For the intended destruction of what percentage, what ‘part,’ of a group constitutes sufficient intent? Any part at all? One percent, 20 percent; one-half, three-quarters? Therefore, this definition, whatever its functional value in the political arena, must give way to something tighter and more exact. For myself, I shall use the following rigorous definition: the concept of genocide applies only when there is an actualized intent, however successfully carried out, to physically destroy an entire group (as such a group is defined by the perpetrators)…” Therefore, “the intention to physically eradicate only part of a group – in contradistinction to the U.N. Convention and most alternative definitions proposed by others – I will not call genocide.” (pp. 127–29).
46 Reprinted, among many other places, in Alexander Hinton, Genocide: An Anthropological Reader (Oxford 2002), pp. 43–47. See also Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of Nation States, vol. 1: The Meaning of Genocide (London, 2005); Adrian Gallagher, Genocide and Its Threat to the Contemporary International Order (Houndmills, 2013), chapter 2, “Words Matter: Genocide and the Definitional Debate,” pp. 18–39; and Martin Shaw’s confused efforts to redefine the term “genocide” in his Genocide and International Relations (Cambridge, UK, 2013).
47 The subject has been discussed by Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York, 2013).
48 This observation should not be misunderstood. There is a justified place for public protest of the serious misdeeds of political regimes and national states. But such protests, and the positions staked out in these protests, should not be mistaken as the equivalent of technical scholarly analyses and should not be taken as defensible scholarly argument.
49 Rouben Adalian recycled the high number of 1.5 million in his 2009 essay, “The Armenian Genocide,” in Samuel Totten and William Parsons (eds.), Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 3rd edition (New York, 2009), p. 71.
50 The explanation of these numbers can be found in the present essay, pp. 10–12.
51 (Houndmills, 2008), pp. 344–72.
52 Amongst useful and informative studies that have appeared since the publication of my Leo Baeck lecture, see: Fatma Müge Göçek, Norman Naimark, and Ronald Gregor Suny (eds.), A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York, 2011); Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago, 2006); and Ronald Grigor Suny, “They can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else;” A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, 2015).
53 (London, 2012).
54 Ibid., pp. 198–214.
55 This is not to ignore the learned additions to the literature on Stalin’s crimes and the issue of genocide. See, for example, the relatively long discussion in Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT, 2007), pp. 486–511; Benjamin Valentino’s analysis in his Final Solution: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, 2004), pp. 91–117; Nicolas Werth’s essay “The Mechanism of a Mass Crime: The Great Terror in the Soviet Union, 1937–1938,” in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (eds.), The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, UK, 2003), pp. 215–40; idem, “The Crimes of the Stalin Regime: Outline for an Inventory and Classification,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Houndmills, 2008), pp. 400–419; and Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, 2010). It should also be said that this decline in references to Stalin’s crimes as comparable to the Holocaust is a sign of better scholarship. It is a conclusion for which I argued early – before it became more widely accepted – in several essays republished in this collection, see “Mass death under Communist rule and the limits of otherness”; “Auschwitz and the Gulag: A Study in Dissimilarity”; and “Children in Auschwitz and the Gulag.”
56 On the Gulag consult: Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s Non-War on the Ukraine (New York, 2017); Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2001); and J. P. Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949 (Westport, CT, 1999). On the collectivization of agriculture take note of R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931–1933 (New York, 2004); and S. Courtois, N. Werth, J.-L. Paine, et al. (eds.), The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, MA., 1999). On the Ukraine see the discussion in Chapter 2 in this volume, “Mass death under Communist rule and the limits of otherness.” pp. 33–39.
57 See my further analysis of Stalin’s actions in Chapter 2.