Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

TECHNOLOGY AND GENOCIDE
II. A prisoner’s registration number, corresponding to the number allocated to them in the
Nazis’ file-card system, would usually be tattooed on the left forearm.
In the Buchenwald concentration camp between 1939 and 1944, the wife of the
Kommandant, Frau Ilse Koch (1906–1967), made a hobby out of collecting lampshades,
book covers, and gloves manufactured out of the skin of dead prisoners; from time to time,
she issued orders that inmates with exotic or picturesque tattoos be killed so their skin
could be stripped from them and prepared as leather. Arrested and tried a number of times
after the war, she committed suicide in prison in 1967.
Technology and Genocide. Modern technology (over and above conventional
weapons) has played a unique and insidious role in various genocides perpetrated over the
past one hundred years. From the Turkish-perpetrated Armenian genocide between 1915
and 1923 through the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the genocide perpetrated in the former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s, perpetrators of genocide have used technology to assist them
in the planning and/or implementation of their murderous actions. During the Armenian
genocide, the Ottoman Turks used their telegraph and railroad systems to carry out their
genocide of the Armenians. The telegraph was used to send messages back and forth
between the main government and its officials in the field carrying out the deportations
and killings. Furthermore, in certain instances, the Armenians were deported from their
homes via the railway network.
The Nazis’ use of technology for mass murder during the Holocaust was not only “innovative”
but systematic and thorough. In 1939, for example, the German government conducted
a census using a data-processing machine (Hollerith) in which the census cards of
all Jews were marked with the letter “J.” While it is not known whether the Hollerith
machine was used to develop deportation lists, the census data was used by the Nazis to
keep track of the prisoners entering and leaving concentration camps. As for the killing
process during the Holocaust, it advanced from lining victims up between ditches and
shooting them, to the development of gas vans in order to expedite and facilitate the murder
process, to the development of gas chambers. Dissatisfied with the inefficiency and
horror induced by the use of the gas vans (it was a slow and cumbersome process that
allowed for only a small number of people to be killed at a time, and it was also a gruesome
job for the Nazis to pull the dead from the vans), the Nazis developed gas chambers
and crematoria to carry out an assembly-like “production” of death. Their railroad system
also played a major part in transporting victims from all across Europe to the ghettos, concentration
camps, and death camps in the East.
During the 1972 genocide of the Hutu by the Tutsi in Burundi, government radio
broadcasts encouraged the population to “hunt down pythons in the grass.” That order
was interpreted by Tutsi in the interior as a license to kill all educated Hutu.
From 1987 through 1988, the Iraqi government used chemical weapons to commit genocide
against part of its Kurdish population. In all, approximately one hundred thousand died.
During the Rwanda genocide in 1994, at which time Hutu extremists and their followers
massacred between five hundred thousand and one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu in
one hundred days, the mass media (print and broadcast) was used to incite the masses
against the Tutsi and to both initiate and sustain the murder process. The radio broadcasts
went so far as to mention potential victims by name and state where they could be located.
During the “ethnic cleansing” and genocidal actions against the ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo in 1999, the Serbian government made wide use of its control of the media in the
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