Abstract
In the late 1950s, a survivor recounted his experience of deportation during World War II:
At 2:00 AM in the morning… homes were suddenly broken into by… troops armed with automatics. They dragged sleeping women, children, and old people from their beds and, shoving automatics in their ribs, ordered them to be out of their homes within ten minutes … [T]rucks picked them up and drove them to railroad stations. They were loaded into cattle cars …
The agents and armed troops swept through these homes, taking these people’s valuables … all the while calling [them] ‘swine’… [and] ‘scum.’
These people left their homes naked and hungry and traveled that way for a month; in the locked, stifling freight cars, people began to die from hunger and illness. The… troops would seize the corpses and throw them out of the freight car windows.
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Notes
From the testimony of Shamil Aliadin, a Crimean Tatar, before the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1957, in Aleksander M. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples (New York: Norton, 1978), 111.
Nikolai Federovich Bugai, ‘The Truth About the Deportation of the Chechen and Ingush Peoples’, Soviet Studies in History 30: 2 (1991): 66—82, figure 81.
For recent examples, see François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and
Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917—1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994).
Hitler decree, ‘[Zur] Festigung deutschen Volkstums’, 7 October 1939, in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Das Dritte Reich, vol.2: Weltmachtanspruch und nationaler Zusammenbruch 1939—1945 (Munich: DTV, 1985), 118.
See Himmler’s comments, ‘Einige Gedanken über die Behandlung der Fremdvölkischen im Osten’, 15 May 1940, in Michalka, Drittes Reich 2: 163—66. On the Wehrmacht, see for example ‘Befehl des Armeeoberkammandos 6 über das “Verhalten der Truppe im Ostraum’”, 10 October 1941, in Michalka, Drittes Reich 2: 189—90. On academicians and mid-level officials, see especially Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (1991; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993).
Figure from Götz Aly, ‘“Judenumsiedlung”: Überlegungen zur politischen Vorgeschichte des Holocaust’, in Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939—1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998), 67.
Tobias Jersak, ‘Die Interaktion von Kriegsverlauf und Judenvernichtung: Ein Blick auf Hitlers Strategie im Spätsommer 1941’, Historische Zeitschrift 268 (1999): 327—28, and
Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 106—11, though Browning suggests that these developments did signify mass killings, not just deportations.
The primacy of race thinking in Nazi policies may seem so self-evident that it is hardly worth belabouring. Yet, in fact, in case after case, scholars have made race a secondary factor derivative of other social processes. To give just a few more or less recent examples: Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988), sought to make Nazi anti-Semitism derivative of the Nazis’ anti-communism. Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat, with their notion of ‘cumulative radicalization’, were so focused on the internal workings of the Nazi system that one loses any sense for the role of ideology, in particular for racial anti-Semitism, in causing the Holocaust. See Mommsen, ‘Realization of the Unthinkable’, and Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich, trans. John W. Hiden (London: Longman, 1981). Some feminist writings on the Third Reich have sought to depict women as a category as victims, a position that blends out the distinctions between race and gender. See Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zue Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), and, especially, ‘Gleichheit und Differenz in der nationalsozialistischen Rassenpolitik’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19: 3 (1993): 277—310. Even Christopher R. Browning’s very important book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), tends to deempha-size the role of ideology. In his self-described ‘moderate functionalist’ view, group psychology — peer pressure, the desire to belong, but not anti-Semitism — are the main factors that explain how ‘ordinary men’ became perpetrators of genocide. Finally, the recent, pathbreaking work of Aly and Heim on the planners devotes a good deal of attention to Nazi anti-Semitism. But the authors then argue that the planners’ real motivation was economic rationalization. The Holocaust then becomes a byproduct of the modernizing impulse of a technical class.
For the term, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 1994).
See Wolfgang U. Eckart, Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus: Deutschland 1884—1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997).
See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951). See also Herbert’s brief comment on the connection between colonial racism and anti-Semitism, in ‘Vernichtungspolitik’, 27. Only in the last few years has Arendt’s insight begun to attract historiographical attention, and in Germany the resistance against this is quite sharp.
The expression comes from Zbigniew Brzesinski, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), though he uses it in quite a different sense.
J.V. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question (1913), in idem, Works, vol.2, 1907—1913 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 300—81.
See Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917—1930 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992), 35–39.
Yuri Slezkine, ‘USSR as a Communal Apartment,’ or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, Slavic Review 52: 2 (1994): 414–52, quote 444.
Francine Hirsch, ‘The Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category Nationality in the 1926, 1937, and 1939 Censuses’, Slavic Review 56: 2 (1997): 268–71.
Terry D. Martin, ‘An Affirmative Action Empire: Ethnicity and the Soviet State, 1923–1938’, (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996), 964—65.
Yuri Slezkine, ‘N. la. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics’, Slavic Review 55: 4 (1996): 826–62, here 858.
For the constant tension between the Russian Empire and its constituent nationalities and ethnicities, and the impact upon Russian and Soviet history, see especially Andreas Kappeier, Rußland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich: Beck, 1992). Compare Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552—1917 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Kappeler emphasizes the tensions that resulted in the multi-ethnic character of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Hosking investigates the contradictions between Russian nationalism and the requirement of maintaining the empire. Despite their different approaches, the two works complement one another quite well.
For the latter case, see Terry Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History 70: 4 (1998): 813–61, here 82–29.
Note also Terry Martin’s comment: ‘… the most striking paradox of the last two decades of Stalin’s rule [was] the simultaneous pursuit of nation building and nation destroying’, in, ‘Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, 816. See also Amir Weiner, ‘Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism’, American Historical Review 104: 4 (1999): 1114—55. It should be noted, however, that Martin and Weiner both stop short of applying the concept of race to Soviet policies.
See Nicolas Werth, ‘Ein Staat gegen sein Volk’, in Stéphane Courtois et al., Das Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus (Munich, 1998), 113—17, and Peter Holquist, ‘A Russian Vendée: The Practice of Revolutionary Politics in the Don Countryside’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995).
Martin, ‘Affirmative Action Empire’, 734—35, 753–54, 956–60, and N.F. Bugai, ‘K voprosu o deportatsii narodov SSSR v 30–40-kh godakh’, Istoriia SSSR 6 (1989): 135–44.
See Michael Gelb, ‘An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-Eastern Koreans’, Russian Review 54 (1995): 389—412, and
N.F. Bugai, ‘Vyselenie sovetskikh koreitsev s dal’nego vostoka’, Voprosy Istorii 5 (1994): 141–48.
For a summary in English, see Lyman H. Legters, ‘Soviet Deportation of Whole Nations: A Genocidal Process’, in Genocide in the Twentieth Century, eds. Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charney (New York: Garland, 1995), 139—53.
See also N.F. Bugai, ‘“Pogruheny v eshelony i otprveleny k mestam poselenii…”: L. Beriia-I. Stalinu’, Istoriia SSR 1 (1991): 143—60.
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 234.
Werth, ‘Staat gegen sein Volk’, 275, and Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 374.
See Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Michael Geyer, ‘Restorative Elites, German Society and the Nazi Pursuit of War’, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts, ed. Richard Bessel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 134–64, here 154.
As Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat have argued. See Broszat, Hitler State, and Mommsen, who has made the case in numerous publications. For an effective statement of his views, see for example ‘Cumulative Radicalisation and Progressive Self-Destruction as Structural Determinants of the Nazi Dictatorship’, in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75—87.
See Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918—1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, vols. 1—2, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 35, 42, 77.
The title of E.P. Thompson’s classic article, ‘English Society in the Eighteenth Century: Class Struggles without Class?’ Social History 3 (1978): 133—68. See also Etienne Balibar, ‘Is There a “Neo-Racism?”’ in idem, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 21, where he writes of ‘racism without races’.
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Weitz, E.D. (2001). In the Age of Genocide. In: Roth, J.K., Maxwell, E., Levy, M., Whitworth, W. (eds) Remembering for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_8
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