Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

EICHMANN, ADOLF
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Examples of economically motivated genocide abound. For example, the lethal assault on
Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1923 freed large tracts of land once occupied
by the indigenous Armenians. Throughout the nineteenth century in eastern Anatolia,
the population of Kurds and Armenians outstripped the farming capacity of the land.
The elimination of the Armenians was a way of easing this chronic land shortage and offers
one reason why Kurds so eagerly participated in the ethnic cleansing of the territory inhabited
by Armenians. The success of Armenian businesses in the Ottoman Empire, owing to
their industriousness and initiative, also contributed to economically inspired jealousy. The
Nazi regime of Germany, between 1933 and 1945, posited numerous reasons for the need to
eliminate Jews from the life of the country. Obtaining the Jews’ wealth (and their presumed
wealth, which far outstripped reality) was a major (though usually unspoken) factor in the
Nazis’ brutal and, ultimately, genocidal actions. Jews were deprived of their factories, shops
and employment, not only to impoverish them, but to enrich Germany. “Aryanization” was
thus designed, on the one hand to reduce German Jews to penury, and, on the other to provide
Germany with Jewish assets—capital, employment, property, and the like. Innumerable
works of art were stolen from Jewish homes and subsequently acquired by German
museums and prominent individuals. The Nazi trade in gold confiscated from Jews constitutes
a classic case of widespread stealing in the context of the Holocaust.
Another common example of economic factors within the context of genocide is forced
labor. For example, between 1939 and 1945 the Nazi state and its component parts used
forced Jewish labor to enhance the war effort: Jews built roads, worked in ghetto factories,
dug antitank ditches, and engaged in other forms of slave labor. They were hired out to
private enterprise by the SS in their hundreds of thousands. Indeed, their forced contribution
to the German war economy was significant. At the same time, the conditions of
work were so stringent that labor frequently led to their death.
For all the reasons that can be given for the government of Sudan’s suppression of its
Christian population in the southern part of the country between the mid-1980s and the
early 2000s, a major goal was control of the oil deposits located there. Without it the
Muslim Arab northern region of Sudan would have remained an economic backwater. In
Iraq the murderous assaults of Saddam Hussein’s (1937–2006) regime on Kurds in the
north and Shiites in the south were driven by a similar concern: access to and control of
oil fields. In Rwanda the push against the Tutsi in the early 1990s (which culminated in
the 1994 genocide) came partially from the claim that they owned too much land at the
expense of the Hutu majority.
Eichmann, Adolf (1906–1962). Born in Solingen, in the Rhineland, Eichmann played
a central role in the Holocaust. In the very early 1930s, he joined the Austrian Nazi Party,
moved to Germany in 1934, and, in 1935, went to work for the Reich Security Main
Office (RHSA) in Berlin. He initially worked on the problem of forced Jewish emigration
and mass expulsion, but by 1939, with the start of World War II, he was appointed Head
of the Jewish Section for the Gestapo. Having participated in the initial discussions of the
“Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” he was asked by Reinhard Heydrich (Head of the
RHSA) to prepare for the Wannsee Conference of January 1941, where plans for the mass
extermination of Jews throughout Nazi-occupied Europe were delineated. The focus of
the Wannsee Conference, then, was not, as it is commonly misunderstood, held to plan
or debate the merits of the idea of the extermination of the Jews and others, but, since it
was a fait accompli, to delineate the plan of action.