60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

colonialism and the holocaust – towards an archeology of genocide 107
The mass murders were also related to the general settlement policy.
In a Europe-wide attempt at ‘ethnic disentanglement’ (Entfl echtung),
the Germans to be settled in those occupied territories were to come
from areas such as South Tyrol, Bessarabia, or the Bukovina where
they comprised ethnic minorities. In a ‘policy of ethnic dominos’, these
people were to be allocated areas from which Polish farmers, for example,
had been expelled while they in turn would take the place of Jews
who were to be deported to the margins of the German area of rule. As
this was ultimately impossible due to the military situation, and none
of the German governors wanted to keep the Jews in their dominions,
the readiness to kill them grew (Aly 2000, Aly 1999).
Aside from the concentration camps, mass murders were also committed
in prisoner of war camps, ghettos, and settlements in the occupied
territories. The fate of Russian prisoners of war constitutes
an intermediate point between industrial annihilation and genocidal
massacres. They were interned and subjected to bureaucratic authority
and then killed through intentional neglect, a policy that was also
genocidal, as the victims were left to die because of their Russian descent.
31 There was no such policy in camps with British, French or
American prisoners of war.
In addition to this bureaucratically-organised form of murdering millions
of people, there were also genocidal massacres. These included
both mass shootings carried out on orders from above as well as in
the context of fi ghting partisans (Gerlach 1999: 859-1054). The killing
of partisans should be seen as genocidal because whole areas of land
were to be cleansed, and children and old people were deliberately
murdered, indicating the connection of these measures with broader
demographic objectives. 32
In contrast to National Socialism, the individual cases of genocide
in the history of European colonialism are more diffi cult to identify
31 See the classic study on prisoners of war by Streit (1978).
32 It should be pointed out that supporters of the singularity thesis reject the collective
consideration of several groups of victims under the term ‘genocide’. For Steven T.
Katz, the Sinti and Roma were not the victims of genocide, but were suff ocated with
gas in Auschwitz because they had typhoid (see Fein 1997: 15). This is also true of
Yehuda Bauer who accepts the category ‘genocide’ but uses the expression ‘Holocaust’
as a special category for the murder of the Jews: ‘The conclusion to draw is that one
ought to diff erentiate between the intent to destroy a group in a context of selective
mass murder and the intent to annihilate every person of the group. To make this as
simple as possible, I would suggest retaining the term genocide for ‘partial’ murder and
the term Holocaust for total destruction’ (Bauer 2001: 10-11; emphasis in original). In this
view, ‘total destruction’ was until then only intended for the Jews, and the Holocaust
was thus ‘unprecedented’.