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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  A killing or eliminationist institution is one deployed for mass murder or elimination, and its members kill or eliminate, or tangibly hasten the deaths or elimination of others. Many different institutions have been used for these purposes, and their variety is examined below. In many instances they include central national institutions, including governments and ministries, and in certain instances, there may be so many as to include virtually entire bureaucracies, if these are deeply enmeshed in an annihilationist or eliminationist program, as in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany, in communist China, and in Baathist Iraq.

  The perpetrators of mass annihilation and elimination are not born as killers or brutes. They must be made, in two senses: by following some path that lands them in institutions of killing and elimination, and by making a transition from not imagining that they would slaughter or systematically eliminate other human beings to a point where, for whatever reason, they are mentally and emotionally prepared to do so. Whether each journey is short or long, direct or tortuous, at some point each perpetrator makes theses dual transitions.

  The perpetrators enter eliminationist institutions with different identities and in different ways. Political leaders or subordinates charged with implementing the eliminationist assaults decide on some recruitment method based on their notions of which organizations and people are preferable for the task. Some perpetrators are drafted (or assigned); some volunteer. When drafted, they can be transferred from institutions identified with their country’s political regime, which might suggest a predisposition on their part to participate in an eliminationist project, or they can be chosen haphazardly, without consideration of whether they are especially suited for the enterprise. The Soviet leaders staffed the gulag with NKVD troops, the regime’s ideological guardians, people of demonstrated fidelity to the communist creed and the use of violence to restructure Soviet society. The regimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, and Chile typically employed soldiers who were members of special elite units dedicated to rooting out the states’ real or designated enemies. The Turkish leadership employed a combination of special units of criminals, ordinary Turkish troops, and local people who took it upon themselves to torture and kill the Armenians trudging on their death marches, and to plunder their goods. Allowing for such local participation of ordinary Turks produced more than enough volunteers who worked as de facto auxiliaries of the major killing institutions. In Croatia during World War II, the Ustasha mass murderers of Serbs, Jews, and others were mainly volunteers. Similarly during the 1990s, the Serbian perpetrators in Bosnia and Kosovo, whether organized in marauding paramilitary units or having descended impromptu locally upon their neighbors, were by and large volunteers for the unabashedly murderous eliminationist enterprise. In Rwanda, Hutu in vast numbers, of all and no governmental or paramilitary institutional membership, butchered the Tutsi around them. Eliminationist perpetrators are frequently not the special storm troopers with previously demonstrated fidelity to the mass murderous regime. They are the groups’ or societies’ ordinary members.

  The Holocaust’s German perpetrators were an unusual amalgam. Those in the SS resembled the Soviet NKVD troops. They were the regime’s proud, ideological, and violent shock troops who, having earlier volunteered for the SS, were unsurprisingly sent to implement Nazism’s most apocalyptic designs. Others were volunteers, soldiers, or civilians joining in when the opportunity presented itself, as one German entertainment troupe, upon learning that the units they were providing diversion for were going to kill Jews, begged to participate in the genocidal slaughter. Others volunteered to guard local camps in Germany or to join the Death’s Head Unit staffing the camp system. Still others became perpetrators when the regime drafted them—without any regard for their backgrounds, ideological affinity for the regime, or martial spirit—into reserve police units that were then employed in the annihilationist program. The regime also used regular army soldiers to slaughter Jews and others, and policemen and other officials to take part in killing operations against local Jews. The German leadership used the whole range of recruitment methods, drafting those who likely had a predisposition for the task, relying sometimes on volunteers, and choosing an enormous number of German men almost at random, expecting them to participate in the annihilation of millions. Most striking about the political leaders’ methods for staffing killing institutions and operations is their casualness. They believed that just about anyone was fit to become an executioner, and seemingly never considered finding willing Germans a problem. They were right. (The Germans also employed local auxiliaries of various nationalities, both organized and volunteer, whose members generally freely opted to help kill Jews.) Many more Germans and non-Germans not formally serving perpetrators in killing institutions lent their hands knowingly to the mass murder.

  The number of people during our age who have participated in exterminationist and eliminationist assaults (let alone in associated abuses, violations, and crimes such as using victims as slaves or robbing them) is astronomical and unknown. It is hard to see how one could even come up with an estimate, given how little is known about the number of perpetrators involved in many eliminations, including some gargantuan ones. There may have been half a million Germans (Austrians at that time were members of the German Reich) involved in the Jews’ annihilation. Across Europe, thousands upon thousands of people of other nationalities participated in the same annihilation, especially Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians, who themselves killed many Jews during and sometimes, as in Poland and Ukraine, after the Holocaust. The French, Dutch, Slovaks, and others helped deport Jews to their deaths. Beyond this one aspect of the Germans’ various exterminationist and eliminationist assaults on Europe’s peoples, the Germans and their local auxiliaries staffed thousands of eliminationist institutions (twenty thousand camps alone). The Germans used more than 7.6 million slave laborers (many housed in the camps), all of whom had to be guarded and controlled by people using or threatening violence. If we count all the Germans (and their helpers around Europe) who fueled this economy of violent domination by servicing and doing business with these facilities, or who helped serve as the overlords for Europe’s peoples against whom the Germans were conducting eliminationist campaigns, the perpetrator population becomes astonishing—probably many millions.

  We know much less about the perpetrators of other annihilationist and eliminationist assaults. Yet even a quick survey suggests that an enormous number of people have lent themselves to such violence during our time. In Rwanda, Hutu all over the country and of virtually every institutional affiliation, background, and profession took a hand in slaughtering their neighbors. A study of Hutu perpetrators that employed a restrictive definition of what actions qualify someone as a perpetrator concluded that between 175,000 and 210,000 Hutu participated in the murdering or serious injuring of the 800,000 Tutsi victims. This amounts to a stunning 14 percent to 17 percent of the active adult male Hutu population ages eighteen to fifty-four.4 But this already extraordinarily high figure is likely an enormous underestimate. The Rwandan justice system, in its traditional communal justice institution Gacaca, has convicted approximately 900,000 people of participating in mass murder (often multiple people or large groups killed a single victim or a small group).5 More than seventeen thousand Serbs served in killing institutions in just one small part of the Serbs’ attacks, the mass murder and expulsion of Srebrenica’s Bosniaks. How many more Serbs perpetrated eliminationist violence during Yugoslavia’s breakup? More than thirty thousand Turks served in the special units (discussed below) set up to spearhead the exterminationist assault on the Armenians. How many more tens or hundreds of thousands were there in the army and police forces who, unbidden, participated in the annihilation and expulsion? How many Soviets, how many Chinese, how many North Koreans staffed their vast gulags and other eliminationist institutions and contributed to the deaths of the millions these regimes felled? How many Japanese soldiers and civilians gave themselves to their country’s
colossal mass murders around Asia? Add to these all the unknown thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of perpetrators from one eliminationist assault to the next, and the number of mass murderers and eliminationist warriors who have peopled our era is staggering.

  Mass annihilations and eliminationist programs show that leaders are knowledgeable about which people are suited to carry out the assaults on the targeted groups. Whatever initiative perpetrators take to join killing institutions or the eliminationist enterprise—from volunteers, to those who had the jobs thrust upon them, to those who chose to be their regime’s shock troops—regimes have rarely used coercion to bring perpetrators to kill or commit eliminationist violence. Leaders know that coercion cannot be a principal or widespread means for getting people to make their apocalyptic visions real. After all, a political leadership cannot coerce everyone or nearly everyone because there must be sufficient people who give themselves freely to regimes, particularly those practicing eliminationist politics and mass annihilation, if the regimes are to survive. The surest way for a political leadership to destroy itself is to try to force an enormous number of armed people to commit deeds that they think evil, which is what those who disapprove of mass extermination, expulsions, or incarcerations of civilian men, women, and children consider them to be. It is safer and easier to equip willing people of like eliminationist mind, though leaders of course might compel some others to aid them.

  Once political leaders decide upon mass elimination and identify the people to perpetrate it, they must turn eliminationist ideas into eliminationist projects. The designated executors must be activated, in two senses, to become perpetrators. Their minds and hearts must be animated for killing and its attendant cruelties. They must also be placed in the position to kill.

  The historical record—from the Germans in South-West Africa, to the Turks, Germans, Croats, and others during the Nazi period, the Japanese, the Chinese, the British in Kenya, the Indonesians, Khmer Rouge, Hutu and Tutsi, the former Yugoslavia’s various peoples, and to the Political Islamists in many movements and countries—provides every indication that perpetrators quickly comprehend an eliminationist policy’s announcement. Even though the measures are radical, the perpetrators understand the policies’ rationale and necessity. The perpetrators do not wonder whether the measures are those of a madman, whether the world has gone awry. They do not react with incredulity and overwhelming horror, the way Leslie Davis, the American consul in Harput, did to the Turks’ slaughter of the Armenians taking place around him. He felt as though “the world were coming to an end.”6 Instead, to the perpetrators, as a Turkish reserve officer, commanding a unit of perpetrators, calmly explained, annihilating people by the tens of thousands or more makes perfect and good sense. Their purpose “was to destroy the Armenians and thereby to do away with the Armenian question.”7 The perpetrators see the imminent eliminationist onslaught as a rational means to solve severe problems, restore order to the world, straighten a badly twisted society. The record reveals virtually no shock or befuddlement, let alone horror, among perpetrators upon learning of the eliminationist enterprise. Some incipient perpetrators know that the gruesome task ahead may test their mettle. There are dissenters. But the evidence suggests they are very few compared to the legions of nondissenters readily giving themselves to violent and lethal programs.

  In Rwanda, where the Hutu’s demonization of Tutsi was long, firmly established in the public discourse, and taken for granted in much of Hutu culture, and where in the years preceding the full-scale annihilationist assault there had been preparatory smaller-scaled mass murders of Tutsi, the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana together with Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994 (the culprits’ identities remain unknown) roiled the country. Voluminous testimony explicitly or implicitly conveys that Rwandans immediately understood that the assassination portended a potential bloodbath, and grasped its sources. Broadcasts on the two national radio stations, Radio Rwanda and RTLM, blamed the Tutsi for the assassination and, as in one broadcast that was recorded, explained that Tutsi should be attacked:Because of bad [Tutsi] plans we had discovered. Because before the killing of the President of the Republic, people were talking about it in rumours, saying that he was going to die, and even [Hassan] Ngeze wrote about it in Kangura, and others said that after they [the Tutsi] have killed the President, they will exterminate the Hutu. When the Hutu saw that they had just killed the President of the Republic, they said, “Their project is being put into practice now.” They started before them. So, the first reason is that they killed the President. The second one is that they attacked and the third because they were planning to exterminate the Hutu and I think there would be no Hutu left.8

  This all made sense to Hutu who were ready to slaughter Tutsi. Hutu inside and outside of paramilitary, military, and police institutions almost immediately were mobilized or mobilized themselves, requiring little or no explanation as to why the Tutsi would do the things that would make them necessary targets for annihilation. Hutu, led by local officials, held meetings in rural communities all over the country. A Hutu killer, Elie Ngarambe, recounts that “On [April] 10th that is when they started to call meetings of people. They were meeting in football fields, in primary schools, everywhere. So you can imagine all the people went to the meeting. They told them that things have changed, and that what was going to be killed were the Tutsi. They told them that the Tutsi are their only enemy. There was no one else that made the plane crash. There was no one else that killed the president of the republic except people who are called Inkotanyi. From this time on, fight against Inkotanyi. Fight against all their spies. Tutsi are their spies. Kill them all. That is how it is.” Having received the green light, Hutu in the military, paramilitary, police forces, and mostly in no formal organization at all, then sprang into action all over the country. Ngarambe explains that the authorities told them to “‘start patrols, stop the enemy, block all intersections to the point that wherever he would pass while fleeing, you will get him and kill him.’ So that is what happened after we came from the meeting. We went to a place where so many people pass and we got them. Some of them managed to escape and run, others were stopped by others because roadblocks were put in place almost everywhere. That is when the plan started to be put in action from the hour and a minute the authorities said so.” Ngarambe himself also killed people they stopped: “You would get him, put him down and hack him, after that you would hit him with a club, pull him and dump him somewhere and continue your journey.”9

  Many Tutsi, because they too knew how easily the already inflamed Hutu’s anti-Tutsi imagination would absorb the rationale for slaughtering them, understood the peril and tried to flee before the eliminationist onslaught began. Jean Pierre Nkuranga, then twenty, and his family and neighbors convened at night shortly after the president was killed, as the local community leader had earlier that day told them, with open satisfaction, that the next day they would be slaughtered together with all the country’s Tutsi. At this surreal meeting, Nkuranga’s family and friends resolved to flee into the bush, splitting up in the hope that some would survive. Nkuranga did. The Hutu hunted down and butchered the others.10

  Half a century earlier, in July 1942, Major Wilhelm Trapp, commander of Germany’s Police Battalion 101, assembled his men in an emblematic moment in our age’s eliminationist onslaughts. It was the night before their first of many killing operations in Poland. Kindly “Papa” Trapp, as his men affectionately called him, informed them that the next day they would exterminate Józefów’s Jews, including the children. He did not give them a long speech explaining its necessity, but sought only to strengthen their resolve for the gruesome task of shooting the Jews at point-blank range (he himself was somewhat fainthearted). How did he do it? By reminding them that their loved ones at home were endangered by bombing. Only to a Nazified mind that held the Jews to be a cosmic evil would this make sense, because Józefów’s Jews had no relatio
nship whatsoever to the bombing. Yet Trapp offered his rationale, and it was accepted at face value. The Germans needed no further explanation for the extermination order, and no further explanation as to why a threat to their own children in Germany should spur them to kill Jewish children in Poland. The vast record of the Germans perpetrators’ testimony shows that the reasons for, and the subjective sanity of, the annihilation orders made sense to them, as it did to millions upon millions of other Germans. In fact, when this major, as other German commanders did for their own units, explicitly offered his roughly five hundred men the opportunity to avoid becoming mass murderers, only a few accepted the offer.11

  Of those perpetrators not formally organized by state authorities, there can be no doubt that they assented to the mass slaughters and eliminations to which they freely chose to contribute. Voluntary participation has been a common feature of our age’s mass murders. Turkish, Kurdish, and other volunteers, murderously descended on columns of Armenians dragging themselves through the countryside. Germans and non-Germans alike volunteered across Europe to participate in the Jews’ mass murder. Lithuanians, Romanians, and Ukrainians voluntarily fell upon the Jews among them, often killing with a barbarism that impressed even some Germans. In the Polish town of Jedwabne, virtually the entire Christian Polish population, having received the implicit green light from the Germans, turned on the town’s Jews and slaughtered them, including the Jewish children. Volunteers, including members of religious schools (as in Indonesia), the victims’ neighbors (as in Bosnia and Kosovo and in Rwanda), and all manner of civilians joining paramilitary groups specifically to kill or to assist those in formal eliminationist institutions, have been integral to the mass slaughters and eliminations in Indonesia, Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, and many more.