Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

SCHREIBTISCHTATER
390
and more acts of daring, such as a run through the buildings of the university during which
leaflets condemning the Nazis were scattered liberally in the hallways. Shortly after this,
the Scholls, Huber, and a small number of others were denounced, identified, and arrested
by the Gestapo. They were placed on trial before the People’s Court (Volksgericht). The
Scholls were both executed by beheading on February 22, 1943—Huber suffered the same
fate on July 13, 1943—and in death they became a spur to other anti-Nazi groups as well
as the political left throughout Germany after 1945.
Schreibtischtater (German, Colloquially, “Desk Murderer”). A term used by some historians
and commentators in recent times to refer to those bureaucrats, primarily in the
Berlin offices of the SS, who maintained the paper flow of documents with regard to the
Nazis’ mass murder of European Jewry. Such documents would have related to personnel and
resource allocations, contracts, transportation schedules, and so on. Such persons,
however, were never instrumentally involved in the actual execution/extermination
process themselves, never experienced the events, and, more often than not, never even
visited the sites of the various killing centers.
Scorpions. A volunteer militia force composed of Bosnian Serbs, most active during
the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. The Scorpions began their operations during the siege
and destruction of the Croatian city of Vukovar during the fall of 1991, led by two brothers:
Slobodan “Boca” Medic (b. 1967) and Aleksandr “Gulja” Medic (n.d.). The group
was originally composed of ethnic Serbs from eastern Slavonia, in Croatia. It took its
name from their preferred weapon, a Czech-made handgun effective in close-range combat
and often used for the purpose of executions. Militia groups such as the Scorpions—and
there were several hundred operating with the Serb forces during the Bosnian war—were
employed by the official military authorities for the purpose of spreading terror and causing
mayhem among the local populations upon which they preyed. The Scorpions ranged
widely throughout the war, first in Croatia, then in western Bosnia, and finally in eastern
Bosnia, where they were involved in the Srebrenica massacre of some seven thousand to
eight thousand Muslim boys and men in July 1995.
In May 2005 the head of Belgrade’s Humanitarian Law Centre, Natasa Kandic
(b. 1946), made public a videotape she had uncovered of Scorpion members executing six
young Muslim men from Srebrenica. On June 1, 2005, the video was shown in The Hague
at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) during the trial
of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (1941–2006); later that month it was
aired on Serb television. Immediately after the broadcast, several members of the former
Scorpions were arrested in Serbia, and the recently televised crime was denounced across
the Serbian political establishment. (This did not, however, stop many others, in both
Serbia-Montenegro and Republika Srpska, from denying the video’s authenticity and
claiming that it was a Bosnian Muslim forgery.) The Scorpions also committed atrocities
and mass murders in Kosovo in 1999.
The disavowal of the Scorpions unit by the Serbian prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica
(b. 1944), is an indication of post-Milosevic Serbia’s enthusiasm to distance itself from the
dark days of the 1990s. This became particularly obvious when it was revealed that the
Scorpions continued their deadly work after the Dayton Peace Accords in late 1995,
which ended the Bosnian conflict.
Tellingly, it was Natasa Kandic who was responsible for bringing one of the Scorpion
members to trial within Serbia for committing war crimes during the NATO campaign of