Genocide: Historical Aspects
Hinton A L 1998 A head for an eye: Revenge in the Cambodian
genocide. American Ethnologist 25(3): 352–77
Jones L 2000 Adolescent understandings of political violence
and their relationship to mental health: A qualitative study
from Bosnia Herzegovina.
http:\\www.waraffectedchildren.gc.ca\socscimedpaper-e.asp
Kirmayer L J 1996 Landscapes of memory: Trauma, narrative
and dissociation. In: Antze P, Lambek M (eds.) Tense Past:
Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Routledge, London,
pp. 173–98
Kuper L 1982 Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth
Century. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
Lemarchand R 1997 The Rwanda genocide. In: Totten S,
Parsons W S, Charny I W (eds.) Century of Genocide: Eye-
witness Accounts and Critical Views. Garland, New York, pp.
408–23
Novick P 1999 The Holocaust and Collecti
e Memory: The
American Experience. Bloomsbury, London
Sorabji C 1994 A very modern war. In: Watson H, Hinde R
(eds.) War: A Cruel Necessity: The Bases of Institutionalised
Violence. I.B. Tauris, London, pp. 80–95
Spencer J 1990 Collective violence and everyday practice in Sri
Lanka. Modern Asian Studies 24(3): 602–23
Taylor C C 1999 Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of
1994. Berg, Oxford, UK
Young J E 1993 The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials
and Meaning. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
M. Stewart
Genocide: Historical Aspects
Genocide is any intentional act to physically eliminate
a non-combatant group in whole or in part by direct
assault, or by inflicting deadly life conditions including
measures to prevent biological, economic and cultural
reproduction.
This article will outline the development of genocide
research as well as the tasks of this young academic
discipline (Sect. 1). It will, in Sect. 2, deal with the
problem of applying the twentieth-century term
genocide to a wide variety of mega-killings which have
happened throughout history. The term genocide has
generated a tendency not only to rewrite, but also to
morally judge anew, historical events to settle recent
political accounts. Groups whose ancestors have
suffered massacres at a period in which neither they
themselves nor their victorious opponents had drawn
up or adhered to international legal standards out-
lawing such atrocities may yet label their past fate as
genocide to attract attention to contemporary plights.
The entry will try to circumvent this extra-scholarly or
ideological use of the term genocide by implicitly or
explicitly using a caveat of the sort that an event called
genocide ‘today’ was not seen as such then. It has to be
stressed that all figures used in this entry are estimates.
There is no such thing as an undisputed figure for even
the best researched genocides.
1. The Term Genocide and the De
elopment of
Genocide Research
Genocide is not only a historical concept but also an
international crime defined by the 1948 United
Nations Con
ention on the Pre
ention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide. In its Article II
genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the
group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in
whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of
the group to another group.
The crimes mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (e) of
Article II of the Convention are generalizations of
practices employed by Nazi Germany after September
1, 1939 (beginning of World War II) against Slavs
and\or Jews, and gypsies. The UN Convention was
mostly written by a Polish lawyer and Holocaust
refugee, Raphael Lemkin (1900–59), who had first in
1933 proposed a similar measure to the ‘League of
Nations.’ In 1943, he had termed the crime in Polish as
ludoboT jstwo (lud l people; zaboT jstwo l murder). A
year later, he translated it into English as genocide
(from Greek genos l people, and Latin caedere l kill,
see Lemkin 1944, p. 79).
Since the UN Convention—today signed by some
140 nations—excluded ‘politicide’—the murder of any
person or people because of their politics or for
political purposes—as well as ‘ideological geno-
cide’—the murder of any person or people because of
their ideology, theory or knowledge—scholars have
broadened the concept. Rudy Rummel’s term
‘democide’ may be considered as the most compre-
hensive one. It is the murder of any person or people
including genocide in the international legal sense,
politicide as well as ideological mass murder (Rummel
1996, p. 39).
Besides the narrower term genocide and the more
inclusive term democide the term ‘crimes against
humanity’ is still in wide use. It was coined on May 24,
1915 by France, Great Britain, Russia, and the USA
on behalf of the slaughtered Ottoman Armenians as
‘new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civili-
zation.’ The term ‘crimes against mankind’ created,
on October 12, 1942, in London (Declaration of
St. James) to denounce the Nazi Holocaust of Euro-
pean Jewry is also still in use. Less known though quite
appropriate is Gracchus Babeuf’s French term ‘popu-
licide,’ a shorthand for his ‘syste' me de de! population’
executed—during the French Revolution—in the
Vende! e (1793\94) by killing its entire royalist peas-
antry of some 120,000 (Babeuf 1795).
The discipline of comparative genocide research
draws on the entire corpus of historical research of the
6153
Genocide: Historical Aspects
last three millennia. Mega-killings have always at-
tracted the attention of laymen and scholars alike.
Yet, a first world history approach to genocide was
tried by Lemkin who had drafted three volumes on the
History of Genocide by 1959 (Jacobs 1999). Several
publishing houses had turned him down. The manu-
scripts are only now being prepared for publication by
Steven L. Jacobs.
The 1967–1970 massacres of half a million Ibos in
Biafra\Nigeria triggered a new interest in the subject.
In 1970, Yvan van Garsse published A Bibliography of
Genocide Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes
(Garse 1970). The genocide, in 1971, of some 1.5
million citizens of East-Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh)
also has drawn a steady albeit not widespread atten-
tion to the subject. Both killings had world wide
television coverage. Only a year later, in 1972, The
Twentieth Century Book of the Dead by Gil Elliot
became the first major published monograph devoted
to comparative genocide research (Eliot 1972) . In
1975, sociology entered the field with Dadrian (1975).
Irving Louis Horowitz’s Genocide: State Power and
Mass Murder followed in 1976 (Horowitz 1997). In
1981, Leo Kuper reached a major academic publisher,
Yale University Press, with Genocide: Its Political Use
in the Twentieth Century (Kuper 1982). More sys-
tematically and historically minded works followed in
1990 with Fein’s (1990) Genocide: A Sociological
Perspecti
e as well as Chalk’s and Jonassohn (1990)
The History and Sociology of Genocide.
The first—one person—institute devoted to the
subject: ‘Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide,’
was founded in 1979 by Israel W. Charny in Jerusalem.
Helen Fein followed in 1982 with the ‘Institute for the
Study of Genocide,’ in New York. Next were Frank
Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn with the Canadian ‘Insti-
tute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies’ (Mon-
treal, Concordia University). Australia with the
‘Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies’ (Mac-
quarie University), and Europe with the ‘Raphael-
Lemkin-Institut fu$ r Xenophobie- und Genozidfor-
schung’ (University of Bremen, Germany) followed in
1993. An international ‘Association of Genocide
Scholars’ was established in 1995 with some 150
members by mid-2000. The first encyclopedia of
genocide was published in Germany (Heinsohn 1999).
A similar endeavor in English followed shortly after-
wards (Charny 1999). Both works, with a combined
volume of some 1,200 pages, cover most of the
contents of this entry.
Historical, sociological, and sociopsychological
studies of genocide aim at the assessment of genocidal
potential as well as the formulation of means to
prevent the crime. Interventions against ongoing
genocides are rather dealt with in studies of warfare
than in comparative genocide research. The preven-
tion of genocide requires an early warning system.
Historically, roughly 25 percent of high risk nations
have transformed their perpetrator potential into
6154
actual genocide (the rate is higher for democide). Since
every genocide needs certain steps of preparation
which are difficult to conceal, like, e.g., registering the
victims and training the killers, all nations with
perpetrator potential (today close to 100) may one day
be scanned for these red alert signals indicating the
imminence of a genocide.
2. History of Genocide
Because of its modern provenance it is difficult to
employ the term genocide to the common period-
ization of history. Homer’s Iliad (VI: 55–62), e.g.,
paints, as perfectly legitimate, an intention that today
would be considered as genocidal in its full legal sense:
‘‘My good Menelaos’’ [king of Sparta], said he [Agamemnon,
king of Mycene], ‘‘this is no time for giving quarter. Has,
then, your house fared so well at the hands of the Trojans? Let
us not spare a single one of them—not even the child unborn
in its mother’s womb; let not a man of them be left alive, but
let all in Ilius [Troy] perish, unheeded and forgotten.’’ Thus he
did speak and his brother was persuaded by him, for his
words were just.
Moreover, a practice of killing considered the
expectable as well as acceptable outcome of conflict in
an early period of history may continue to this very
day. As an example in question one may look at the
Yanomami Indians of Southern Venezuela and
Northern Brazil. They must—since 1980—be con-
sidered a possible victim of genocide by modern
settlers and—at the very same time—were successful
in nearly wiping out a neighboring tribe (Keegan 1993,
p. 97).
2.1 Tribal Societies
Genocidal acts in the modern sense were hardly
distinguishable from acts of war in tribal societies—
covering the longest stretch of human history—
because there was no separation of noncombatant
civilians and warriors. Warfare was ‘‘‘ecological’’ in
motivation’ and led to the redistribution of hunting
and fishing grounds or arable land ‘from the weak to
the strong’ (Keegan 1993, p.101). Means of these wars
were ‘battles of annihilation’ or, if space allowed,
‘displacement of the weaker’ (Keegan 1993, pp. 29,
387). Genocidal tribal raids continued well into the
second half of the twentieth century in territories of
the Amazon, New Guinea, the Philippines and else-
where: ‘Typically the goal in such raids is to destroy an
entire village or settlement, the common intention
being to kill everyone, perhaps excepting a few of
the younger women and children who are carried off
for incorporation into the home group’ (Glick 1994,
p. 45).

2.2 Early Antiquity
Early stages of civilization (Early and Middle Bronze
Age with priest-kingship feudalism) saw tribal
practices of annihilation on a larger scale: ‘I slew them
without sparing them, they sprawled before my horses,
and lay slain in heaps in their blood,’ Egypt’s Pharaoh
Ramses II (conventionally dated 1279 to 1212) boasted
after a campaign against the Hittites whose leader,
then, begged him for mercy: ‘Look, you spent yes-
terday killing a hundred thousand and today you
came back and left no heirs. Be not hard in your
dealings victorious king’ (Lichtheim 1976, pp. 70 f.).
Other powers of the Ancient Near and Far East
behaved very much in the same way, as did Bronze
Age, i.e., Mycenaean Greece.
2.3 Antiquity\City States
The annihilation practices of time immemorial were
cast into a principle by Athenians. When, in the
Peloponnesian War (431 to 404 BC), Athens had
decided to wipe out Sparta’s ally Melos, the admirals
in charge tried to formulate an eternal law underlying
their action:
Our knowledge of men leads us to conclude that it is a general
and necessary law of nature to rule wherever one can. This is
not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we the first to act
upon it when it was made. We found it already in existence,
and we shall leave it to exist for ever among those who come
after us. […] We know that you or anybody else with the same
power as ours would be acting in precisely the same way. […]
The Melians [in 415 BC] surrendered unconditionally to the
Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age
whom they took, and sold the women and children as
slaves (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, (1954 trans)
V: 85 ff.).
As a first step away from mutually slaughtering their
males, the Greeks developed the practice of exchang-
ing prisoners of war.
Within the Roman Empire—a private ownership
based society on a much larger scale—the practice of
destroying enemies who had caused problems in the
past was continued. The elimination of Corinth
(metropolis of mainland Greeks) and Carthage (metro-
polis of Phoenicians) in 146 BC, of Numantia (capital
of Spanish Celtiberians) in 134 BC, and the elim-
ination of the Etruscans (92 BC) and the Samnites (82
BC) as major opponents in Italy proper provide
typical examples with 50,000 to 150,000 dead in each
case. Of course, the opponents acted in the same
manner as, e.g., in the slaughter of the inhabitants of
the Greek cities Selinus and Himera (Sicily) in 409 BC
by the Phoenicians of Carthage. In 88 BC all Romans
and Italians, including women and children, living in
Greek Asia Minor were put to the sword by orders of
Mithradates VI. The Romans of Britannia met a
similar fate in 61 BC. Within the Roman Empire a ius
gentium was developed for strangers who did not hold
Genocide: Historical Aspects
citizenship with, sometimes, more protection for these
minorities than for full citizens.
Parallel to practices of the Greek City States and the
Roman Empire, movements against blood sacrifice
emerged around 600 BC. Well known are Buddhism
in India and the Pythagoreans of Classical Greece. It
was, however, monotheistic Judaism whose moral
code—albeit slowly—came to influence international
ethics most deeply. To overcome expectations of
salvation tied to the slaughter rituals of blood sacrifice,
Hebrew prophets found a new moral vision: ‘I desired
mercy, not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more
than burnt offerings’ (Hosea 6:6). The sanctity of life
became the highest principle: ‘Thou shalt not kill’
(Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17)] including—in
its universal character—the strict outlawing of in-
fanticide.
The Torah—rather a moral compilation than a
historical record—emphasizes the sanctity of life as
the core of the law and as a value identical with
goodness (‘the good law’): ‘See, I have set before thee
this day life and good. […] I call heaven and earth to
record this day against you, that I have set before you
life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose
life, that both thou and thy seed may live’
(Deuteronomy 30:15, 19). From the principle of life’s
sacredness derived other commandments like ‘Thou
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’ (Le
iticus 19:18).
Anti-xenophobic teaching followed suit: ‘And if a
stranger sojourn with thee in your land, you shall not
vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall
be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt
love him as thyself’ (Le
iticus 19:33–34). ‘Are ye not as
children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of
Israel? Saith the Lord. Have not I brought up Israel
out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from
Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir’ (Amos 9:7).
Against Judaism, the first recorded order (of
Haman) for an ideological, though abortive, genocide
(also called religiocide) was issued in the Akhaemenid
Empire of fourth century BC: ‘And the letters were
sent by posts into all the king’s provinces, to destroy,
to kill, and to cause to perish all Jews, both young and
old, little children and women, in one day’ (Esther
3:8\13). Christians who had adopted the Jewish
rejection of blood sacrifice to planetary deities actually
suffered the first well recorded religiocides. The edict
of Emperor Decius of AD 250 forced them to eat
sacrificial meat or suffer death. Four more edicts by
Diocletian from AD 303\304 repeated the order upon
pain of death. The massacres ended in AD 312 when
Constantine the Great converted to the new faith.
2.4 Middle Ages
The Middle Ages saw attempts at a Pax Romana,
directed by the Papal See. Its concept of a Pax Dei
(peace of God)—developed since AD 975 and extended
over all Christian lands at the Synod of Clermont
6155
Genocide: Historical Aspects
(AD 1095)—outlawed war from Wednesday night to
Monday morning as well as on Christian holidays.
Excommunications and interdicts were the only means
of enforcement. It was the beginning of international
law based on the Judeo-Christian code of ethics. Yet,
the transgressions were severe and, in modern ter-
minology, definitely genocidal.
The crusades—starting in AD 1096—not only
brought massacres of thousands of Jews in Germany
and tens of thousands of Jews and Muslims in
Jerusalem (AD 1099), but also of fellow Christians.
Against Pope Innocent III’s interdict, Dalmatia’s port
Zadar, arch rival of Venice, was bathed in the blood of
all its inhabitants in November 1202 during the fourth
Crusade by French and Italian troops transported on
Venetian ships. The same men butchered 2,000 inhabi-
tants of Greek Constantinople on April 13, 1205 before
they went on a three-day-rampage of indiscriminate
slaughter, not sparing women and children.
Since 1167, the Cathars (from Greek katharoi l
pure), called Albigensians after the French city of
Albi, suffered a series of religiocides by Catholic forces,
because they rejected any spilling of blood and did not
believe in the resurrection of Christ, and the Holy
Communion as the residue of blood sacrifice within
Christianity. By 1234 the Cathars were wiped out with
the massacre of Be! ziers as the largest slaughter of this
crusade in which all 15,000 inhabitants were killed.
A few years later, in AD 1211, Gengis Khan’s
Mongols (Morgan 1986)—with no authority to arouse
their consciousness by threats of excommunication or
invoking the image of all men as protected children of
the one God—began their terrifying campaigns from
the Japanese to the Baltic Sea. To turn their fertile
areas into horse pastures the Mongols have, up to
AD 1290, eliminated some 25 million Chinese. Another
5 million perished in Persian, Arab, and Christian
territories where the Steppe warriors revived the
memory of Attila’s fifth century Huns. Behind their
lines, the Mongols used to kill everyone perceived as a
future threat, i.e., all males not suitable to join their
ranks. Defeated armies were allowed a brief lease to
life by serving as shields or trail blazers for advancing
Mongol troops. Tamerlane, a pious Muslim, sup-
posedly had, in a single day of 1398, some 100,000
Hindus strangled in sight of the walls of Delhi which
had rejected surrender. In 1402, he dealt a mortal blow
to Arab civilization by killing 90,000 inhabitants of
Baghdad.
2.5 Modern Period
A sovereign’s right to war (ius ad bellum) dominated
the period of sixteenth to nineteenth century in which
Europe came to dominate the world. What happened
within a war was more or less up to the sovereign.
Laws of warfare or the definition of crimes of war (ius
in bello) had to wait for the turn of the nine-
6156
teenth\twentieth century. In Europe as well as over-
seas, the results were genocidal. To give only two
examples, Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital in the valley
of Mexico with its 100,000 inhabitants, was totally
annihilated by Cortes’ Spaniards in 1521. All 30,000
inhabitants of German Magdeburg, the richest city of
Protestantism, were slaughtered on May 10, 1631 by
Catholic troops under General Tilly in the Thirty
Years’ War.
The European Population Explosion—beginning at
the end of the fifteenth century, and still not fully
understood—bestowed this small continent with 25
percent of world population by 1900. During the same
period, some 60 million young Europeans, with the
superior military technology of their ownership-based
economies but no attractive positions in an over-
crowded continent, conquered their settlement space
in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Northern Asia.
In the wake of this ‘emigration,’ a population of 55 to
85 million native Americans estimated for 1492
(Spanish conquest) was reduced by 85 to 95 percent
around 1650. Between 250,000 and 500,000 native
Australians estimated for 1788 (British conquest) were
reduced to 60,000 by 1921. All means of killing were
employed from outright genocide to infections—
including intentional ones. Africa, between 1500 and
1870, lost up to 20 million inhabitants into American
slavery with 2 million dying on transport. The slave
trade within Africa may have cost, for the same
period, the lives of 4 million. On the slave routes
to—mostly Islamic—Asia another 11 million may
have perished in these gigantic democides (Rummel
1996, p. 48).
Though not an invention of modern times, politicide
became one of the most heinous activities of this
period. It does not necessarily include the killing of the
families of the victims. However, in a so-called
‘Vespers’ in which politicide is turned against a foreign
elite, it usually grows into a full blown genocide. It
took its name from the Easter massacre in Palermo on
March 29, 1282, at the hour of evening prayer
(Vespers) when the French in control of the Kingdom
of Sicily were killed with their families (‘Sicilia Ves-
pers’). It had been preceded, in 1268, by the butchering
of some 5000 members of the Hohenstaufen elite of
Sicily by the hands of the French conquerers. The best
remembered example of politicide was the an-
nihilation, after eight inconclusive civil wars, of the
Protestant leadership of France (ca. 100,000 victims),
starting on Saint Bartholomew’s Day (August 24,
1572) when the Huguenots—easily recognizable by
their black clothing—were guests at the royal marriage
of Henri of Navarra and Marguerite of Valois. The
politicide, in February 1579, against Novgorod, Rus-
sia’s richest city, by Ivan IV (the Terrible) was peculiar
insofar as the Tsar had put together special killing
units—the ‘Oprichniki’—because the army was not
trusted to act ruthlessly enough. In the ‘Ulster,
Massacre’ (October 23, 1641), as the last ‘Vespers’ of

Table 1
Rough estimates of numbers of victims by genocides,
politicides and ideological mass murder of a wide
variety of regimes usually lumped together under the
term Communism (Rummel 1996).
Soviet Union, 1917–87 40–60,000,000
Red China plus Maoists before 1949 40–60,000,000
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, 1975–79 2,000,000
North Korea, 1945 onwards 1,700,000
Yugoslavia of Tito, 1941–87 1,100,000
North Vietnam, 1945–87 1,700,000
Poland (deportations of Germans), 1,400,000
1945ff.
Czechoslovakia (deportations of 240,000
Germans), 1945ff.
Ethiopia, 1974–91 4,000,000
Albania, 1944–90 100,000
Communist Germany 1945–52 96,000
Western Europe, Irish rebels killed most of the
Protestant British settlers and administrators on their
island. The Creoles of Haiti delivered their French
masters a ‘Vespers’ in 1791\1805 as did, in 1857\58,
albeit with no lasting success, the sepoys to the British
masters of India.
2.6 Twentieth Century
The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 with The
Regulations Respecting the Law and Customs of War
on Land prohibited, in Articles 22–8, the murder, ill-
treatment, or deportation of enemy civilians and
prisoners of war. The use of poison and special
ammunitions was banned. However, a nation’s harm
to its own civilians was not taken into consideration.
This had to wait for the ‘Istanbul Trials,’ installed in
January 1919 to inflict punishment on those re-
sponsible for the Armenian massacres. On April 10,
1919, Mehmet Kemal Bey, procurator of the province
Bogazliyan, became the first person executed for
genocide, then called crime against humanity. In the
Nuremberg Trials of Nazi-Germany’s leadership
(1945\46) as well as in the Tokyo Trials of Imperial
Japan’s leaders (1946–48), ‘International Military
Tribunals’ further developed the legal tools to punish
perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Special
United Nations courts explicitly devoted to the crime
of genocide started, in 1993, to prosecute the per-
petrators in Yugoslavia (‘ethnic cleansings,’ since 1991)
and, a year later, in Rwanda (genocide of Tutsis in
spring 1994). The statute for a permanent ‘Inter-
national Criminal Court’ was passed in Rome on July
17, 1998.
The entire twentieth century is on record for close to
180 million victims of democide according to Rum-
mel’s statistics. The extermination of the Ottoman
Armenians (1894–96, 1909, 1915\16, 1919, 1923)
Genocide: Historical Aspects
combined strategic, racial, and ideological intentions
(Dadrian 1995). A shrinking empire was to be con-
solidated by a homogenous pan-Turkic population
within an undivided settlement space under Islam as
the only religion. That’s why not only more than 1
million Armenians suffered genocide but also other
Christian minorities like Maronites (1860), Assyro-
Chaldaeans (1915), and Greeks (1915–23) with a
combined death toll of some 440,000.
Since 1917, single party totalitarian regimes with
agendas may have killed up to 110 million people
(Rummel 1996, Courtois 1997). After World War II,
‘one-party communist states are 4.5 times more likely
to have used genocide than are authoritarian states’
(Fein 1933b, p. 79)
The figures given in Table 1 are all estimates.
Totalitarian regimes are not only known for most of
the killings of the twentieth century, but also present
the most difficult problems for research because
archives were destroyed and many deeds never re-
corded. Thus, totalitarian regimes have to live with
possibly exaggerated figures of their atrocities.
Extreme anti-capitalism slowed economic devel-
opment though superior prosperity was promised.
The shortcomings were frequently blamed on sabotage
and\or party comrades still infested with the reac-
tionary spirit of ownership. This view was used to
justify massive party purges like the ‘Great Terror’ in
the Soviet Union (1934, 1936–38) with more than 7
million or the ‘Cultural Revolution’ in China
(1964–75) with nearly 8 million dead.
Annihilation through forced labor in camps was
initiated by Trotzki on June 26, 1918. By 1922, 23
Soviet camps were at work, forming the nucleus of
Stalin’s Gulag fully emerging in 1928, and eventually
running some 8000 camps. Working people to death
became, in the long run, the most devastating killing
tool of history. It allowed the elimination of opponents
by simultaneously using them for the creation of big
projects—like canals, railroads, subways, etc.—to
prove by ‘miracles’ the promised productive superi-
ority of communism that otherwise was wanting.
The traditional siege tool of man-made famines had
to wait for the twentieth century to be welded into the
most efficient fast-killing techniques ever. To crush
national ambitions of the Ukraine, for example, a
famine was turned into the mass death of some 7
million in the single winter (4 months) of 1932\33.
Ethiopia’s Derg managed to kill up to 4 million
peasants between 1982 and 1986 by the same means,
often intentionally aggravating natural disasters.
The mega-killings by left totalitarian regimes came
as a combination of politicides (elimination of like
minded rivals for power), genocides (elimination of
minority nations, mostly in the Soviet Union and the
Peoples Republic of China), and ideological genocides
(foremost the elimination of proprietors or property-
infested citizens). The latter category probably became
the largest victim group in history with some 50
6157
Genocide: Historical Aspects
million dead (55 percent in China, 40 percent in the
Soviet Union, 5 percent in the other communist
regimes).
Of all twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, Nazi
Germany was the most genodical. Following Sept-
ember 1, 1939, deformed newborn and mentally-
handicapped Germans—as well as some German
soldiers severely wounded in the military campaign
against Poland—were killed by injections or in gas
chambers. Close to 130,000 handicapped eventually
ended in this so-called euthanasia operation. Later
exterminations struck Gypsies, stigmatized as socially
inferior, as well as non-reproductive homosexuals etc.
A bigger target, however (outlined in the ‘Generalplan
Ost’ (Masterplan East)) were 100 million Slavs
(Czechs, Poles, White-Russians, Ukrainians, and
Russians) living between Germany’s Eastern border
and the Ural Mountains, a territory marked to become
Germany’s ‘Lebensraum.’ Of the Polish elite, 75,000
members, most of them holders of academic degrees,
were killed in autumn 1939. The second Eastern
campaign, against the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941),
was aimed at the immediate killing of 30 million Slavs.
Another 30 million were destined to be worked to
death to lay the infrastructure for German settlements.
The remaining 40 million were to be driven into
Siberia with a calculated death toll of another 10
million. With 13 million Slavic civilians and prisoners
of war killed by 1945 (Kumanev 1990, Vitvitsky 1990),
Nazi Germany had fallen short of its 70 million goal
but still had committed the largest twentieth-century
genocide explicitly directed against a particular ethnic
group. Nazi Germany’s Eastern campaigns, thus, were
not only massive wars but also militarily enforced
genocides (Hillgruber 1993).
In connection with the Eastern wars, 5 to 6 million
Jews were killed. Though a ‘theory of the Holocaust is
lacking’ (Herbert 1998, p. 66), Hitler’s practice of
‘strengthening’ Germany by killing its handicapped
and of gaining settlement space through genocide of
its Slavic inhabitants put him inevitably against the
Torah. To him the sanctity of life was a Jewish
‘invention,’ a weakening ideology that could be
cleansed from the German sphere of influence by
exterminating its ‘carriers.’ The Holocaust, in this
perspective, was a ‘genocide for the purpose of
reinstalling the right to genocide’ (Heinstohn 2000,
p. 424).
Since 1944\45, some 100 acts, fulfilling the definition
of the UN Genocide Convention have taken place. In
the two decades from 1980 to 2000, some 80 distinct
ethnic and religious groups—mostly in Africa, Asia,
and Latin America—were victimized with 12 of them
going through full blown genocide: Bosnian Muslims,
Kurds, Tibetans, Dinka (Sudan), Nuba (Sudan),
Shilluk (Sudan), Isaaq (Somalia), Tutsi (Rwanda),
Mayans (Guatemala), Albanians (Serbian Kossovo),
and Timorese of Indonesia (Harff and Gur 1996,
updated by the author).
6158
2.7 The Future
Ecologically and ideologically motivated genocides
most probably will have a future in the twenty-first
century. Politicides may also occur wherever solidly
established democratic structures are missing. Democ-
racies usually do not go to war against each other.
The same cannot be said for democide like nuclear and
carpet bombing against totalitarian powers with, e.g.,
a death toll of 1.5 million in Germany (600,000) and
Japan (900,000) during World War II.
The prevention of genocide by spreading democracy
remains the preeminent goal for the future. Mean-
while, some experience with intervention has been
made, in 1999, in Kossovo and Timor. To preempt the
cruelties unavoidable in an intervention by force,
genocide early-warning stations are now seriously
considered. They may be in place within a few years.
See also: Communism; Ethnic Cleansing, History of;
Ethnic Conflicts and Ancient Hatreds: Cultural Con-
cerns; Eugenics, History of; Genocide: Anthropo-
logical Aspects; Holocaust, The; National Socialism
and Fascism; Religion: Nationalism and Identity;
Religion: Peace, War, and Violence; Totalitarianism;
Violence, History of; War Crimes Tribunals; Xeno-
phobia
Bibliography
Babeuf F N 1795 Du systeZ me de la deT population … a
ec la guerre
de la VendeT e. Franklin, Paris
Chalk F, Jonassohn K 1990 The History and Sociology of
Genocide. Analysis and Case Studies. Yale University Press,
New Haven, CT
Charny I W (ed.) 1999 Encyclopedia of Genocide. ABC-CLIO,
Santa Barbara, CA
Courtois S (ed.) 1997 Le Li
re Noir du Communisme: Crimes,
terreur, reT pression. Laffont, Paris
Dadrian V N 1975 A typology of genocide. International Re
iew
of Modern Sociology 5: 201–12
Dadrian V N 1995 The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic
Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (1995),
Berghahn. Providence, RI
Elliot G 1972 Twentieth Century Book of the Dead. Allan
Lane\The Penguin Press, London
Fein H 1993a Genocide: A Sociological Perspecti
e. Sage
Publications, London
Fein H 1993b Accounting for genocide after 1945: Theories and
some findings. International Journal on Group Rights 1: 79–106
Garsse Y v 1970 A Bibliography of Genocide, Crimes Against
Humanity and War Crimes. Studiecentrum voor Kriminilogie
en Gerechtelijke Geneeskunde, Sint Niklaas Waas, Belgium
Glick L B 1994 Religion and genocide. In: Charny I W (ed.) The
Widening Circle of Genocide. Genocide: A Critical Biblio-
graphic Re
iew. Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ,
Vol. 3, pp. 43–74
Harff B, Gurr T 1996 Victims of the state: Genocides, politicides
and group repression from 1945 to 1995. In: Jongman A J
(ed.) Contemporary Genocides: Causes, Cases, Consequences.
PIOOM. Leiden, The Netherlands, pp. 33–58

Heinsohn G 1999 Lexikon der VoW lkermorde, 1st edn. 1998,
Rowohlt, Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Homburg,
Germany
Heinsohn G 2000 What makes the Holocaust a uniquely unique
genocide. Journal of Genocide Research 2: 411–30
Herbert U (ed.) 1998 Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik
1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontro
ersen, Fischer,
Frankfurt, Germany
Hillgruber A 1993 Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegfuehrung
1940–1941 [1963]. Bernard & Graefe, Bonn, Germany
Horowitz I L 1997 Taking Li
es: Genocide and State Power.
Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ
Jacobs S L 1999 The Papers of Raphael Lemkin: A First Look.
Journal of Genocide Research 1: 105–14
Jonassohn K, Bjo$ rnson K S 1998 Genocide and Gross Human
Rights Violations in Comparati
e Perspecti
e. Transaction,
New Brunswick, NJ
Keegan J 1993 A History of Warfare. Knopf, New York
Kumanev G A 1990 The German occupation regime in
occupied territory in the USSR (1941–1944). In: Berenbaum
M (ed.) A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and
Murdered by the Nazis. New York University Press, New
York, pp. 128–41
Kuper L 1982 Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth
Century. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
Lemkin R 1944 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC
Lichtheim M 1976 Ancient Egyptian Literature. Volume II: The
New Kingdom. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
Morgan D 1986 The Mongols. Blackwell, Oxford
Rummel R J 1995 Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass
Murder Since 1900. Center for National Security Law,
Charlottesville, VA
Rummel R J 1996 Death by Go
ernment 1994. Transaction, New
Brunswick, NJ
Thucydides 1954 The History of the Peleoponnesian War, trans.
R Warner. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, UK
Vitvitsky B 1990 Slavs and Jews: Consistent and inconsistent
perspectives on the holocaust. In: Berenbaum M (ed.) A
Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the
Nazis. New York University Press, New York, pp. 101–8
G. Heinsohn
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Genotype and Phenotype
The fundamental distinction between genotype and
phenotype was first introduced into biology by
Wilhelm Johannsen in 1911 to make explicit a dis-
tinction that was implicit in Mendel’s explanation of
heredity, and which marked it off from previous
theories of inheritance. Mendel found that when he
crossed two pure-breeding varieties of garden pea, the
first generation of hybrid offspring were indistinguish-
able from one of the two parental strains, but if these
hybrids were crossed with each other, both of the
original types appeared in the offspring of these
hybrids. So, for example, a pure bred red-flowered
crossed with a pure bred white-flowered form pro-
duced all red-flowered plants, but these, when
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Genotype and Phenotype
interbred with each other produced both red- and
white-flowered plants.
In order to explain this extraordinary result, Mendel
postulated the existence of internal, unseen ‘factors’
contributed by each parent to the offspring, factors
that were causal determinants of the outward ap-
pearance of the plants, but whose nature was un-
affected by their passage from one generation to the
next. So, pure bred white-flowered plants had two
white ‘factors’ one contributed by the pollen and one
by the egg of their male and female parents, while pure
bred red-flowered plants had received two red ‘factors’
from their two parents. The hybrids of red-flowered
and white flowered forms would then contain one red
and one white ‘factor,’ yet these plants were indis-
tinguishable in appearance from a parent that had two
red ‘factors.’ There was then a fundamental distinction
between the state of the internal causal ‘factors’ and
the outward state of the plant that carried them.
Moreover, to explain the reappearance in the next
generation of some white-flowered plants, Mendel had
to suppose that the temporary coexistence of red and
white ‘factors’ in the hybrids had no effect on their
nature, but that they could be passed on uncontami-
nated to the offspring of the hybrids. An offspring of
the hybrids that happened to contain two white
‘factors’ was then white like its white grandparent.
This scheme of explanation makes a radical sep-
aration between the internal factors that behave
according to one set of physical relations in their
passage between generations, the laws of heredity, and
the external appearance of the organism that results
from a different set of physiological relations which
determine the consequences to the organism of carry-
ing those factors, the laws of de
elopment. This
distinction between the phenomenon of heredity and
the phenomenon of development which we usually
associate with August Weissman’s separation of the
germplasm from the somatoplasm had already been
made by Mendel twenty years earlier. Earlier theories
of heredity had not made such a separation of inner
factors from outward manifestation and had been
posed as the problem of the inheritance of the
organism’s characters themselves. It was Mendel’s
realization that characters are not inherited, they
develop. In Johanssen’s terminology the description of
an organism’s internal factors that were passed on to it
in the gametes from its parents is a specification of the
organism’s genotype, while the description of the total
physical and behavioral state of the organism is a
specification of its phenotype.
1. Description of Genotypes and Phenotypes
As a result of the discoveries in molecular and cellular
biology since Johanssen’s time genotypic and pheno-
typic descriptions have become more concrete, more
detailed and greatly amplified in their scope. Originally
genotypes had no independent physical descriptors
6159
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7