60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

do we need an alternative to the concept of genocide? 141
Gerlach may have grounds, thirdly, for his contention that ‘most of
genocide studies will continue to focus on one given victim group
in isolation’. However, also in this instance the real target should be
genocide scholars rather than the (legal) concept of genocide. For the
limiting criterion of ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ pertains
to the composition and not the number of victim groups involved.
Indeed the Nuremberg indictment describes the acts of the
accused in the following terms:
They conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination
of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations
of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular
races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups,
particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others (Quigley 2006: 6).
Although this seminal ruling was made prior to the adoption of the
Genocide Convention, it does not substantially diff er from the terms
of the Convention. Conversely, Gerlach posits an alleged tendency by
both perpetrator societies and victim groups to focus on a single victim
group, without demonstrating the relevance of this observation
to his subject matter. Thus, in the former case Gerlach suggests it is
‘much easier’ for societies that bear responsibility
to admit having morally failed in dealing with one group than with
many and thus create a more convenient, simpler stories… [that] it
is easier to identify with persons from one group rather than from
many diverse persecuted communities (Gerlach 2006; 464).
This is a questionable proposition. The observer of post-war West
Germany during the 1950s would have been forgiven for not realising
that there had, in fact, been an appreciable number of Jewish victims.
On the other hand, the German Democratic Republic famously dismissed
the notion of racial victims with its pious invocation of communist
ideology, to explain away Nazi ideology, and ‘the whole Nazi
period – including the Holocaust – as simply the ugly face of “fascist
capitalism” and “western imperialism”’. In both German states
the ‘murderers in our midst’ had been removed from view, while
select victims (the communist resisters in East Germany, the July
20 conspirators and White Rose martyrs in West Germany) were
elevated into each respective post-Nazi pantheon (Betts 2005: 61).
Denial is not a conceptual problem.
Even more problematic is Gerlach’s treatment of the victims insofar as
he argues that a singular focus on one given victim group ‘chiefl y…