BOOK SYMPOSIUM

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Notes

All views expressed in this essay are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

On German reprisal policy in Serbia, see Browning.

The best standard comprehensive work on World War II in Yugoslavia is still Tomasevich. For a magisterial study of violence in Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1941 and 1942, see Dulić.

Kerenji cites as an example: “Ethnicity in Bosnia-Hercegovina really became a matter of life and death only after paramilitary units dispatched from Belgrade, without any reason inherent to Bosnian society or rooted in its apparent ‘crisis,’ started systematically murdering Bosnian Muslim civilians in north Bosnia in the spring of 1992.” Again, Kerenji insists on the secondary character of social conflict; also, one wonders whether ethnicity and other divisions had not already become “a matter of life and death” in Bosnia in 1941–44, and whether there was no heritage of the bloody conflicts from then, just to mention one aspect.

Weiss-Wendt refers here to a passage (p. 281) where I briefly mention the role of ethnic German militias in Poland, Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria in World War II; the role of German military guards of Soviet POW camps who continued to mistreat prisoners in late 1941 and early 1942 despite a high-level policy switch toward a better treatment to begin massive exploitation as forced labor that caused, I wrote, “tens of thousands” of deaths; the mass rape of Central European women by Soviet soldiers in 1945 which “did not follow government policy”; and denunciations among the Soviet population in the 1930s and 1940s. Directly after this passage in my book follows this sentence: “Such private initiatives, however, often functioned in interaction with state organs or frameworks set by the authorities” (p. 281). Thus Weiss-Wendt's objection that the passage “dissociates” state and popular violence is untenable. In substance, his criticism appears to make sense only if one demands that the role of the state in violence must each time be placed at the center.

Furthermore, on my single sentence shortly after the mentioned passage, “In the Yugoslav succession wars, militias played a major role in the violence,” followed by a footnote referring to findings by Eric Weitz and Jacques Sémelin (p. 281), Weiss-Wendt comments: “The recent evidence suggests more direct links between Serb militias in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade than Gerlach is willing to admit.” I leave it to the reader to decide whether this criticism is apt.

While acknowledging that “the economic aspect of the destruction of the Armenian community in Ottoman Turkey has not been adequately examined,” Weiss-Wendt criticizes that this chapter does not discuss victim groups other than the Armenians and “create[s] an incomplete picture that presents economic profiteering as one of the main causes of genocide.” However, scope and approach of my case studies vary, and I start this one by explicitly saying that here I will examine the persecution of one group, with one set of motives involved, to show participatory effects, which does not mean that there were only economic driving forces. Moreover, at the end of that case study on the Armenians I also point to similar mechanisms in the persecution of other groups at the same time and add that I could also have explored such effects with regard to religious motives, trying to establish precisely the context Weiss-Wendt misses (pp. 92–93 and 117–20).

My second case study to attract Weiss-Wendt's criticism is the one on Greece under German (and Axis) occupation in World War II that contains some pages on the general character of Nazi German violence. Weiss-Wendt erroneously reads my pointing to German imperialism as a key context, given that 96% of the Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Germans were neither Germans nor Austrians, as merely economic. In doing so, he overlooks that imperialism also includes the ideological aspects that he says are missing. For instance, the chapter describes the German perception of Jews as a security threat during a guerrilla war and the reconstruction of Greeks (originally viewed as of noble antique heritage) by German occupiers as descendants of Slavs under the impression of destitution in a severe famine and given the armed and passive resistance.

Furthermore, I did not need to point to the Generalplan Ost of the SS, as Weiss-Wendt claims, because German settlement policy had little bearing on the actual occupation policies and German violence in Eastern Europe (let alone Greece), even in a settlement area such as Zhytomyr, Ukraine (Kalkulierte Morde; Lower 243). The actual settlement of Germans in Eastern Europe was largely limited to implanting ethnic Germans in Western Poland; otherwise, this happened only in a few isolated areas, mainly in minor parts of Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, and around Lublin. Again, Weiss-Wendt's insistence on this point reflects the usual overestimation of the impact of planning in this field, as opposed to action that really took place.

pp. 2, 187, 268–69, 272, 275–78, 280–82, 286–87; for the last point, p. 473 note 5.

With reference to p. 12, Kerenji seems to suggest that I trace mass violence in socialist countries back to “pressures from the international capitalist system” alone. This contradicts my note 44 on p. 296 precisely in reference to the passage quoted by Kerenji: “This does not mean, however, to deny grave deficiencies in the specific set-up of socialist systems themselves.” See also the passages I refer to in the previous note in this article, which refer to inner processes within socialist societies involving mass violence.

Weiss-Wendt asserts that I “project individual psychological traits upon the entire society” but can give no evidence for that. Instead, he himself uses such a projection with his Mike Tyson example in a manner that in no way reflects my thinking. Kerenji's argument that, in my account, “violence is too often understood as a product, as a result of all those factors, and thereby somehow still inherent to society” appears contradictory in itself. Besides, this reflects Kerenji's tendency to exonerate social groups (non-state actors) from any significant responsibility for mass violence.

Note 2, p. 290 (the second endnote of the entire book) states: “However, in my definition, cases where there is ‘only’ widespread structural violence (discrimination, exploitation, poverty, etc.) do not qualify as extremely violent societies. But, links between physical and structural violence are subject to my analyses.”

Cf. especially pp. 267–78, 283–87.

This also applies to works cited as examples for the contrary. For instance, Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, cited by Kerenji, focuses strongly on state policies (as the subtitle correctly indicates) and downplays popular participation, especially of locals. Donald Bloxham's The Final Solution: A Genocide also has great qualities but deals much more with some important contexts of the mass murder of Jews than with the destruction itself, and it says little about the persecution of other victim groups. Bloxham's book is an attempt at a comprehensive history of the destruction of the Jews but no proof that the field of Holocaust studies is not dominated by national historiographies, as I have claimed (as opposed to Weiss-Wendt).

Also, places and names that appear three times or more are listed in the index of the book; otherwise, I explain who a person was upon his or her first mentioning. It is therefore incorrect that “almost none of the place or individual names are listed in the index” (Weiss-Wendt). Yet Weiss-Wendt criticizes correctly that, due to size constraints, the volume does not contain a bibliography. A select bibliography has been included in the German translation of my book, Extrem gewalttätige Gesellschaften.

pp. 67–72, 133–35.