Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

ROADBLOCKS, RWANDAN GENOCIDE
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Hygiene and Population Biology Research Unit with Ritter at its head, and in 1937 he
began systematically to interview all Gypsies in Germany. This necessitated visiting all
Gypsy communities and, later, concentration camps where they were incarcerated. Based
on his research, he concluded that 90 percent of Sinti, Roma, and Lalleri were of mixed
descent and therefore dangerous to German society. Ritter developed a descent index—
not unlike that applied to Jews in Nazi Germany—when constituting Gypsy genealogy in
order to determine mischlinge (mixed-descent) status. Convinced that a vast majority of
the racial admixture of the Roma and Sinti rendered them psychologically predisposed
toward criminality, his arguments to the Nazi authorities provided a strong racial justification
for at first sterilization, then outright extermination. Ritter retained his academic
position at the University of Tübingen (where he taught criminal biology) through the
end of the Nazi period and into 1946. In 1947 he joined the Frankfurt Health Office as a
pediatrician. Efforts to find ways in which charges could be laid against him for his Nazi
activities were eventually abandoned. In 1950 he unexpectedly committed suicide.
Roadblocks, Rwandan Genocide. It has been estimated by a UN inquiry that within
two hours of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana’s (1937–1994) assassination on
April 6, 1994, roadblocks had been erected in many parts of the capital city, Kigali. These
roadblocks stopped the traffic flow, at which point occupants of cars, trucks, and buses
were required to present their identity cards to the extremist Hutu militias manning the
roadblocks. If the identity card showed the bearer as a Tutsi, immediate and summary execution
by machetes, clubs, or (less frequently) gunfire would generally follow. The roadblocks
also enabled the Hutu killers to identify those who were termed “moderate” Hutu
or those who did not buy into extremist Hutu philosophy and/or were known to be
opposed to the killers’ murderous aims.
The roadblocks were often of the most rudimentary kind: tires (burning or not); planks
of timber laid between supports such as logs or oil drums; rocks, stones, or bricks strewn
across a specific point in the road; in fact, anything that could induce drivers to stop their
vehicle could be counted as a roadblock. Furthermore, many roadblocks ended up being
“built” by piling the dead bodies of the Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the middle of the
road. Ultimately, as the genocide spread, the use of roadblocks became a key element of
the Hutu campaign of mass murder, and they were employed in cities and towns throughout
the country. The building of roadblocks thus played an important part in the implementation
of Hutu ambitions for the annihilation of the Tutsi, and it appears that the
construction of such roadblocks had been carefully planned and coordinated some time
before the actual outbreak of the genocide.
Role of Physicians During the Holocaust. Among the more heinous aspects of the
Holocaust was the prominent role played by healers—physicians and nurses—in the
death camps themselves, where all manner of medical experimentation was forced upon
unwilling subjects, including children, under the guise of pseudo-scientific research (1) to
aid the German military efforts (e.g., high-altitude and deep-saltwater experiments, those
dealing with survival and rescue, and the treatment of wounds), and (2) to destroy supposedly
“inferior” persons (e.g., sterilization experiments with chemicals and x-rays).
Among the most notorious of such doctors was Josef Mengele (1911–1978), the “Angel of
Death,” whose particular experiments involved both twins and dwarfs, and included the
injection of dyes, other chemicals, drugs and various vaccines, daily blood analysis after
such injections, and surgeries without anesthetic (particularly upon pregnant women).