Armenian Genocide
The War also brought full-scale genocide. The mass murders of Armenians by Turks in 1915 should not be thought of being marginal to Europe, committed amid a backward or ‘barbarous’ Islamic civilization. They were committed by a modernizing secular state, still a major player in European power-politics, committed to the most advanced European ideals. Thus I will address it at some length. [My italics N.M.]
The death-toll was somewhere over one million, fifty to seventy per cent of all Armenians in the Turkish lands.14 If this was slightly lower than the Jewish loss-rate in the ‘Final Solution’, this was mainly because more Armenians could flee into neutral countries—350,000 of them managing to reach Europe, the biggest group of refugees during the war. The genocidal decision was taken by the Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP), the highest level of the Ittihadist (Young Turk) government. The orders were transmitted through reliable Ittihadist Governors and army group commanders to local civilian, police and military authorities. Some officials at all levels refused. In most known cases, they were relieved of office and replaced by men specially selected by the CUP. Wavering officials, wishing to preserve their careers, then came into line. Alongside the official civilian and military administrations operated a third genocidal agency, the notorious 30,000 strong ‘Special Organization’. Its officers—though not the rank and file—had been specially selected for their commitment to the Ittihadist cleansing goal.15
The core of the Ittihadist movement consisted of modernizing young army officers and urban professionals—especially doctors—conducting the same political operation as was occurring over half of Europe. Refugees from Europe were also prominent. They had overthrown Abdul-Hamid’s Ottoman régime in 1909 in the name of democracy, though without being explicit about the form of democracy they intended. In government, they rapidly intensified the organic nationalism already growing in their movement, since they wished to repudiate what they denounced as the ‘backward’ multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottoman Empire. Though they found the Islamic notion of Jihad (holy struggle or war) a convenient mass mobilizing force, they themselves conceived the identity of their nation not as Islamic but as ethnic. It was ‘Turanian’, referring to the Turkic-speaking population inhabiting the lands stretching eastward from Turkey into Central Asia—supposedly descended from the great conquerors Attila, Genghis and Timur/Tamburlaine. How similar this is to the historical myths of half-a-dozen European organic nationalisms of the period! Indeed, there was a rival European claimant to be the inheritor of this very ‘Turanian’ mantle—the Hungarian fascist movement. The Ittihardists wished to refound an Empire recently destroyed by the European Powers by re-orienting it toward Western Asia. [My italics N.M.]
The Ittihadists saw the Armenians as blocking this goal. Since the Turks had lost their Christian lands, the Armenians were now the largest Christian minority left, clearly linked to the Europeans who had conquered the Ottoman Turks. Their main communities were in the east of the country, standing ‘threateningly’ astride the lines of communication with the rest of the Turanian people. As Eastern Orthodox Christians, they relied on Russia for external protection, and, indeed, some Armenian nationalists were supporting the Russians, who, in turn, were promising them a state. All these characteristics seemed to make them accomplices of the enemies of the organic Turanian nation. Indeed, the actual killings were triggered by the disastrous defeat in 1915 of Enver Pasha’s army sent against the Russians in the Caucasus. The Armenians were scapegoats and, in wartime conditions, neither the Western Entente nor Russia could protect them. In these respects, their status as ‘threatening enemies’ of the organic nation-state strikingly resembles that of the Jews. It is worth asking why Armenians, rather than Greeks, Jews or Kurds took the brunt of the Turkish fury. The answers seem to be that Greeks and Jews were protected by foreign states—especially by the powerful German ally—while Kurds were seen as too ‘primitive’ to be really threatening, candidates for coerced assimilation, not murderous cleansing. In these respects, therefore, the Jewish ‘Final Solution’ was not unique, but the worst case of the sequence of genocides committed by modern organic nation-statism—begun in 1915. [My italics N.M.]
Towards Nazi Genocide
The First World War had increased population flight among minorities, and sometimes it increased coercion against them. Thus, for example, about 10 per cent of Serbs were rounded up by the Austrian armies, sent to camps in Bulgaria and Hungary, mostly to be used as forced labour. The War was to destroy most multi-national states; it greatly weakened traditional conservatism, with its distrust of the masses; it provided an economic model of how statist intervention and planning might achieve development; and its mass-mobilized armies were to provide a military and paramilitary model of popular collective action in the pursuit of nationalist goals.
War’s end brought an even more politicized wave of pogroms in Eastern Europe, as extreme rightists connected their political enemy, ‘Bolshevism’, with ethnic enemies. German and Italian rightists attacked Slavs, though Jews remained the favourite target. Although leftists were also often anti-Semitic or anti-Slav, their leaders recognized that this was in principle wrong, conflicting with socialist or anarchist internationalism. In the Russian Civil War, a few pogroms were committed by Red Army units, rather more by local peasants themselves. But a quarter of the 100,000 victims—10 per cent of Ukrainian Jews—were killed by Ukrainian nationalists and over half were killed by the White Army. The Whites blamed Russia’s misfortunes on the ‘diseased microbes’ of the ‘Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy’—eerily anticipating SS language. Even the more ‘liberal’ Whites, the Kadets, would not condemn the pogroms. When defeated, these fleeing rightists brought West the infamous and influential Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged manual for a supposed Jewish conquest of the world. The composite notion of a ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ conspiracy spread through the east of the continent. Rightist movements across Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, Romania and Hungary led local populations in murders of Jews.16
Cleansing by emigration was then officially ratified by the 1918 Peace Treaties, implementing Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of ‘national self-determination’. Apart from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, each state was effectively assigned to a dominant ethnic group, comprising at least 65 per cent of the population. Anyone dissatisfied was given the right to change their state within one year. It was anticipated that many minority persons would move to a state where they would be part of the ethnic majority. After a year, those minorities staying put had to hope their state would respect the treaty clauses guaranteeing minority rights. Often they did not, and the Powers had little interest in enforcing them. The treaties increased the flow of refugees—as they were expected to do. But the reality of emigration, never expressed in the treaties, was that it was coerced—encouraged by local violence and seizures of property and sometimes enforced by states. By 1926, there were nearly 10 million European refugees, including 1.5 million forcibly exchanged between Greece and Turkey (1.2 million of them from Turkey), 280,000 similarly exchanged between Greece and Bulgaria, 2 million Poles, over 2 million Russians and Ukrainians, nearly 1 million Germans, nearly 250,000 Hungarians and 200,000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. [My italics N.M.]
Sixty million Europeans had been ruled by a foreign power before 1914, compared to only 20–25 million afterwards. In Eastern Europe, subordinate nationalities had been reduced from a half to a quarter of the population in only five years. Citizen rights were now substantially identified with ethnicity. Such ethnic cleansing was not at the margins of Western society. It was encouraged, by its Great Powers, European and American. And all this had occurred long before the rise of Hitler. [My italics N.M.]
The Conservative Switch
In the inter-war period, organic nation-statism, involving attempts to exclude minorities and opponents from full membership of the nation, grew in Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, (Czech-dominated) Czechoslovakia, (Serb-dominated) Yugoslavia and Turkey. Stateless nationalist movements such as the Slovakians, Ukrainians and Croatians followed suit. All sought states resting on an organic nation, denying the salience of class conflict, excluding other nationalities from full membership. They were not, at first, majority movements. But they began to surge as conservatives made a world-historical switch: to compete with the Left, they sought to mobilize the people behind nationalism.17
Across the Centre, East and South-East, conservatives and nationalists joined forces. Sometimes, conservatives stole populist and even fascist clothing while suppressing actual fascists. Such organic nationalism proved extremely successful, coming to dominate the states and movements mentioned above—except for the rather milder Czech and Bulgarian régimes and the more divided Slovakian and Croatian movements. Only a few of these movements went as far as fascism, but they almost all borrowed one fascist organization, the paramilitary formation, which was proclaimed as the armed vanguard of ‘the people’, potentially capable of inflicting terror on its ‘enemies’—as well as intimidating potential opposition within ‘the people’ into silence.
The presence of conservatives ensured a strong class bias in most movements—least of all in fascism. But leftist opponents were denounced as quasi-ethnic enemies of the nation. Liberals were denounced as foreign ‘internationalists’, socialists as ‘internationalists’ or ‘Bolsheviks’, a term intending to convey both ‘Russian’ and ‘Asiatic’ connotations. Religious and ethnic minorities represented ‘foreign’ interests and states. Liberals were the most mildly treated, their meetings broken up, their leaders roughly jostled, deprived of office merely by election-rigging amid a climate of intimidation. [My italics N.M. Today French leftists are denounced by liberals and conservatives as Islamo-fascists.]
Socialists were more harshly treated, sometimes banned, their militants jailed, occasionally murdered. Paramilitaries spearheaded all these activities. But socialism is only a belief-system. If socialists renounced their beliefs, they could be assimilated into ‘we, the people’—coerced assimilation. Religious minorities suffered more variable treatment. Almost all these states—plus the three main stateless movements—possessed their own church, supposedly expressing the ‘soul’ of the nation. Minority churches experienced persecution, mitigated if they could wield influence through other states. Minor religious sects such as Jehovah’s Witnesses or Orthodox Innocentists, unprotected abroad, suffered worse. Nonetheless, the Christian religions were belief-systems and, like socialists, their adherents could convert.
During the Second World War, the Croatian Ustashe paramilitaries engaged in mass forcible conversions of Orthodox Serbs, though these were interspersed with mass murders. But, by the 1930s, the attacks were directed mostly against ethnic minorities. Germans and Czechs, Germans and Poles, Poles and Ukrainians, Romanians and Magyars, Croats and Serbs and so on recognized each other as possessing enduringly different essences, partly biological, partly cultural, but not very malleable. In order to protect the integral unity of their nation, dominant nationalities passed laws in the educational and civil service realms discriminating against minorities. They also curtailed the freedom of association of minority cultural and political organizations. But even coercive assimilation appeared insufficient to many.
What happened next was influenced by the rise of fascism, the world-historical power of Germany and the world-historical accident of Hitler. Without the idiosyncratic Nazi leadership, genocide would have been a much less likely outcome than intermediate stages of ethnic cleansing. Yet the Nazi genocides, and ‘The Final Solution’, were recognizably the apotheosis of what I have been describing.
From Cleansing to Extermination
The first group to be murdered was mentally handicapped German and Austrian Gentiles. The Nazis expanded the widespread practice in early twentieth-century Protestant Europe and America of the sterilization of the mentally handicapped and ‘deviants’ (biological assimilation) into murderous cleansing. Seventy thousand mental patients were killed to preserve the ‘biological purity of the people’ before the war even started. From now on, the paramilitary SS spearheaded the genocide. Almost 200,000 more patients were murdered as the net then widened after 1939 to include Polish, Russian and French patients.18
Then, in a burst of colonial-style ‘native clearances’, more than two million Poles were murdered to cleanse the land for Aryan colonists.19 This was the extreme culmination of the tensions which had endured for some time between Germans and Poles living as minorities inside the other’s state. The next two targets proved to be the main ones: Jews and Russians. Somewhere just short of six million Jews—nearly three-quarters of European Jews—were ruthlessly murdered. Though the killing of somewhere around seven million non-Jewish Soviet civilians and three million Soviet prisoners of war was essentially murderous political cleansing, aimed at persons described by the Nazis as ‘Bolsheviks’, the victims were also consistently described in racial terms, as Untermenschen, ‘subhumanity’.
Conversely, Jews, seemingly a racial/religious target, were routinely described in political terms as ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’. Jews and Russians were viewed as aligned in a leftist ‘international conspiracy’. Jews were also linked to a second ‘international conspiracy’ involving finance capitalism and the liberal powers, who had humbled Germany after the First World War. The killing orders issued to German troops routinely entwined political and racial targets—‘Jews, gypsies, racial inferiors, asocials and Soviet political commissars’, or ‘all racially and politically undesirable elements among the prisoners’, or ‘second-class Asiatics’, ‘criminals’, ‘anti-social elements’ and ‘agitators and saboteurs’.
Finally, the gypsies and various small ethnic groups—such as the Kashubians, Sorbians and Krimtchaks—became targets, largely for reasons of contingent ideological consistency, alongside persons with physical handicaps, recidivists, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Like milder organic nationalists, the Nazis had developed a mixed political-ethnic, domestic-international sense of the enemy to be cleansed.
Though many ‘ordinary Germans’ were involved as perpetrators of genocide, the core staff were ‘real Nazis’. In current research on the biographies of 1581 German war criminals—who tended to be either the leaders or the most repetitive killers among the perpetrators—I find that virtually all were members of Nazi organizations, that two-thirds had a long history of Nazi activities and that more than half had prior experience of extreme violence. I also show that they were recruited disproportionately from ‘core Nazi constituencies’—that is, ‘lost’ or ‘threatened’ border territories, the public sector and professions amid whose practices Nazi ideology resonated strongly. These experiences all made them strong nation-statists, anxious to cleanse the organic nation-race by all steps necessary, including mass murder. [My italics N.M.]
These Nazis also found their main murderous collaborators among the organic nationalist movements and paramilitaries I have been discussing—the Thunder Cross and rightist fraternities and militias of Latvia, the Lithuanian Activist Front, the Ukrainian ONU, the Hungarian and Romanian ‘radical rightists’ and fascists, the Slovakian Hlinka Guards, the Croatian Ustashe. All claimed their justification was a combined political-ethnic, domestic-international threat to the organic nation.* Among these, the Romanians seized the chance to also murder Ukrainian nationalists and Orthodox Innocentists, while the Ustashe cleansed their land of Serbs—murdering almost 400,000 and forcibly converting a similar number. Even the Italian fascists, originally possessing a cultural rather than a racial view of the nation, moved toward racism while committing genocide in Ethiopia. Near the war’s end, many of them turned this on the Jews. [My italics N.M. *More recently, From Margaret Thatcher to Europe’s far right today, immigrants, Muslims, and others are ‘invading Europe with alien cultures’.]
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing, NLR, May/June 1999
Notes
14. There are now several reliable overviews of this genocide—for example, V. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, Providence 1995; R. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. New Brunswick 1986; G. Libaridian, ‘The Ultimate Repression: The Genocide of the Armenians, 1915–1917’, in Genocide and the Modern Age, edited by Wallimann and Dobkowski.
15. V. Dadrian, ‘The Role of the Special Organisation in the Armenian Genocide in the First World War’, in Minorities in Wartime, edited by P. Panayi, Oxford 1993, p. 68; The History of the Armenian Genocide, pp. 43–9.
16. P. Kenez, ‘Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War’, in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, edited by J. Klier & S. Lambroza, Cambridge 1992; Marrus, The Unwanted, pp. 62–64.
17. Michael Mann, ‘Sources of Variation in Working-Class Movements in Twentieth-Century Europe’, NLR 212, July–August 1995, pp. 14–54.
18. M. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany, 1900–1945, Cambridge 1994.
19. For the murder-rates among the Slav nations see M. Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims. Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, New York 1990.
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