60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

do we need an alternative to the concept of genocide? 135
ence is thus multiplied innumerable times, reinforcing the leader’s
control of the movement, whose peculiar ‘shapelessness’ and dynamic
– Arendt’s notion of the ‘“total” quality’ of totalitarianism (Arendt
1979: 391) – has nothing to do with Kershaw’s ‘notions of the “monolithic”
“totalitarian” State’ (Kershaw 1996: 63). Mommsen, too, misconstrues
this dimension of the ‘concept of totalitarianism’, arguing
that ‘all these patterns of explanation tend to omit the point that the
Nazi dictatorship was characterised by an inherent tendency towards
self-destruction’ (Mommsen 1997: 75). Arendt explicitly argues that
‘totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the seeds of its own destruction’
(Arendt 1979: 478), and much of the third part of Origins is
devoted to describing this tendency.
On the other hand, Arendt contends that the centrally authored terror
is only part of the apparatus and dynamic of destruction, which
was also characterised by power contests between central, regional,
and local bodies across civil, military, party and state institutions
(Arendt 1953: 303-305; Arendt 1979: 374, 389-419). Thus Arendt does
not rest with the ‘polycracy’ thesis. For she discerns a more complex
dynamic in which policy intent is realised through the manipulation
of an autonomous structural dynamic that constitutes a deliberate
device of totalitarian power. As an example of this Arendt cites
Himmler’s reorganization of the German police by introducing into
hitherto centralized apparatus of the secret police the multiplication
of offi ces – i.e., he apparently did what all experts of power who preceded
the totalitarian regimes would have feared as decentralization
leading to a diminution of power (Arendt 1979: 406).
If Gerlach is able to point to important fi ndings of recent empirical
research in regard to the dynamic interplay between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’,
this dynamic had already been theorised by ‘the totalitarianists’
during the early 1940s and it is not an original insight springing
from more recent research. Moreover, as Gerhard Weinberg argues,
it is an inherent risk in any, even the best, study focused on a specifi
c local situation, time frame, or segment of the killing apparatus
that the wider context can be lost sight of all too easily – and
with that loss comes a major reduction in the signifi cance of what
has been found (Weinberg 2004: 256).
In other words, interpretations of the Nazi dictatorship that ‘utilize
German rationalizations for murder as a true indication of purpose,
as opposed to the dominance of ideological presuppositions, cannot
convince’ (Weinberg 2004: 256). Nevertheless, we should acknowledge
Gerlach’s argument that