Eliminationist assaults’ front-line perpetration has been overwhelmingly men’s work. Yet women have been involved, and the population broadly supporting the politics and acts of elimination, including mass slaughter, has not been a single-sex affair. In Germany women sometimes staffed camps and death marches for women. They treated their victims as cruelly and murderously as their male counterparts. One death march of 580 Jewish women took place during the war’s last three weeks, departing the Helmbrechts camp in southeastern Germany. The German women and men subjected the Jews to a regime of hardship, privation, and brutality, killing between 178 and (more likely) 275 of them. At war’s end the surviving women were lucky enough to be immediately treated to intensive life-saving measures by American medical personnel. The treating American physician testified that without these measures 50 percent of the 300 to 400 survivors would have died within twenty-four hours. (By contrast, it is likely that not even one of the march’s 590 non-Jewish prisoners died, the German guards having deposited them in another camp after one week of marching!) The surviving Jews report that the female guards were without exception cruel to them, probably more so even than the men. The female guards even beat the starving, emaciated Jews when sympathetic Czech bystanders offered them food. The chief female guard confessed that the women serving with her were incredibly cruel, explaining that “all the ‘SS’ [they were SS in name only] women guards carried rods and all of them beat the girls.”12
From the Germans’ slaughter of the Herero until today, women have been in various ways deeply involved in mass eliminations, including sporadically killing or torturing victims themselves, which it appears they have done voluntarily, or doing it in conjunction with men. Women frequently have accompanied men on their eliminationist forays, or urged them on. In what number, and exactly when and how, they crossed the line from bystanders to perpetrators is, given our knowledge, impossible to say. Yet under an appropriately comprehensive understanding of what constitutes a perpetrator, the number of female perpetrators during our time is certainly enormously large. A vast number of women have been part of eliminationist colonizations, appropriating the lands and homes that belonged to the victims their countrymen and (sometimes they) have expelled or killed. A vast number of women have used elimination’s victims as slaves or have supported eliminationist assaults logistically. Nevertheless, women and men become perpetrators, especially executioners, in very different numbers, but only because of the customary sexual division of labor. This is so even when mass murders, expulsions, incarcerations, or enslavements are being perpetrated amidst broader populations, with women present and, in large or small ways, involved, such as the Germans’ extermination of the Jews and their eliminationist campaigns and colonizations in Poland and elsewhere, the Indonesians’ assault on communists, the communists’ various murderous policies in China, the Serbs’ eliminations of Muslims, and the Hutu’s annihilation of Tutsi.
In Rwanda, Hutu women in enormous numbers participated in and supported their neighbors’ slaughter. The number or percentage of the killers, or of those hunting Tutsi, who were women is unknown. Rwandan justice officials’ estimate is that the percentage of killers who were women was relatively small (under 10 percent), which, however, makes the absolute number very large—larger than some mass murders’ total number of perpetrators—as hundreds of thousands of Hutu were perpetrators. 13 Many Hutu women have been convicted of killing Tutsi. Hutu women wanting to kill Tutsi in the Nyamata commune, according to the testimony of the killer Adalbert Munzigura, were “prevented by the organizers, who lecture them that a woman’s place was not in the marshes.” There were exceptions, including “one case of a woman who bloodied her hands out there, a too quick-tempered woman who wanted a reputation for herself.” In the villages “if women happened to come upon some Tutsi hidden in an abandoned house, that was different.” Léopord Twagirayezu, another Hutu executioner, confirmed this: “The women vied with one another in ferocity toward the Tutsi women and children that they might flush out in an abandoned house. But their most remarkable enterprise was fighting over the fabric and the trousers. After the expeditions they scavenged and stripped the dead. If a victim was still panting, they dealt a mortal blow with some hand tool or turned their backs and abandoned the dying to their last sighs—as they pleased.” Marie-Chantal, a local Hutu leader’s wife, confirms women’s general support for their men’s work:I don’t know of any wife who whispered against her husband during the massacres. Jealous wives, mocking wives, dangerous wives—even if they did not kill directly, they fanned the burning zeal of their husbands. They weighed the loot, they compared the spoils. Desire fired them up in those circumstances.
There were also men who proved more charitable toward the Tutsi than their wives, even with their machetes in hand.
Marie-Chantal’s conclusion about the differences between men and women regarding the Tutsi: “A person’s wickedness depends on the heart, not the sex.”14 Little about eliminationist assaults suggests this is not generally true, especially, as we will see, if one includes the mind with the heart.
Eliminationist Institutions
Perpetrators have operated in a variety of institutions, some old, such as the military and police, and some new, such as death marches, specialized mobile killing units, and camps. Leaders bent on destroying groups of people have naturally used existing organizations that could easily be deployed. The military is the most obvious one. Even a cursory global tour provides abundant examples. Starting with the Germans’ annihilation of the Herero and Nama, militaries have participated in mass slaughters and eliminations throughout our age, as the lead killing institution or in a critical support role. In Asia, the Japanese military immediately before and during World War II was the principal agent of human destruction in China and in other countries. Elsewhere in Asia, soldiers have been at the center of the violence, including the Indonesians’ slaughter of the communists and later their eliminationist occupation of East Timor, and the Pakistanis’ assault on Bangladesh. In Uganda, in Burundi, and elsewhere in Africa, where the military has often been one of the few coherent institutions of the continent’s poor countries, it has been the main instrument of mass slaughter and elimination. In Latin America, including in Guatemala, in the 1960s through the 1990s, principally soldiers annihilated the various regimes’ targets. In the Middle East, the Syrian army leveled much of Hama and slaughtered its residents, and the Iraqi army killed first northern Iraq’s Kurds and then southern Iraq’s Shia Marsh people and lay waste to their habitat. It may be that in our age armies have killed or helped kill more people in human extermination campaigns than in military ones.
Paramilitary and police forces have also frequently slaughtered people in eliminationist campaigns. Such forces carried out much of the Serbs’ killing and expulsion of Muslims and Croats, and the Croats’ killing and expulsion of Serbs. Many of the Serbian murderers in Bosnia were paramilitaries, most notoriously Arkan’s Tigers—the butchers Arkan, whose real name was Željko Ražnatović, organized and led—who spearheaded killings and expulsions in Bosnia and earlier in Croatia. While Arkan’s Tigers came mainly from Serbia proper, such paramilitaries in Bosnia appear to have been mostly Bosnian Serbs. In Rwanda, where virtually every manner of person and organization took part in slaughtering Tutsi, the Interahamwe paramilitary force was at the slaughter’s forefront.
Often the preexisting institutions of violence work in concert. Militaries have frequently acted in a collaborative, auxiliary, or support role in eliminationist programs. The German army, its leaders and soldiers, though not the lead exterminatory institution, was still a partner in the Jews’ slaughter in large areas of Europe, most notably in the territories captured from the Soviet Union. It also murdered many Russians, Ukrainians, and others—most notably Soviet POWs, around three million of whom the German military’s leadership purposely starved to death or shot, while delivering Soviet political commissars and Jews to the SS and other German police units
to be killed as part of a formal extermination campaign. In Kosovo, the Serbian army provided the infrastructure for the eliminationist project, including the killing, and carried out much of it itself, though it left considerable dirty work to paramilitary and police forces. In many African countries, armies have collaborated with paramilitaries, police, and local gangs to slaughter targeted groups, including the Hutu in Burundi, the Tutsi in Rwanda, and Idi Amin’s real and imagined enemies in Uganda, as well as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan today.
Those leading mass eliminations, similar to many substantial national projects, often see the need for new specialized institutions. Unlike for other domestic or even international campaigns of violence, eliminationist leaders frequently create distinctive new destructive social systems: death marches, mobile killing units, and camp worlds.
Death marches are part of an eliminationist onslaught that has mass killing as a major component. The perpetrators force the victims to march for weeks or months to some distant destination, never to return. They starve their victims, expose them to the elements, privation, and suffering that cause many to die, in addition to those whom the perpetrators kill directly with guns or blows. Death marches vary in the percentage of their victims who end up lying dead along the way. Sometimes the perpetrators’ explicit purpose is to kill all or most of the marchers, having chosen marches as a surrogate for guns or blades. Sometimes the perpetrators let many marchers die from starvation, exposure, illnesses, or wounds, even though mass slaughter is not intended as their principal eliminationist means. Yet, whatever the perpetrators’ varying intent, and whatever the highly varying percentage of people who actually die on such marches, all these marches should be understood to be death marches because the perpetrators conduct all of them in a manner that guarantees many deaths, and from the perpetrators’ standpoint, and often in actual fact, the marches are a surrogate for killing their victims, with the survivors rendered socially and politically dead.
Death marches present a pitiable sight. The perpetrators force hundreds and thousands of emaciated, destitute, exhausted, bedraggled people to trudge through the countryside. These images of people subjecting others, including children, to such cruelty defies ordinary social experience. Death marches convey to onlookers that the victims are beyond sociability’s realm, vulnerable, and fair game to be attacked or robbed (of their meager possessions), tortured, or killed. Death marches have frequently provided a ready opportunity for onlookers to transform themselves voluntarily into perpetrators, as at different moments, Turks, Germans, Serbs, Sudanese, and others did.
Death marches span our age. The Germans in South-West Africa initiated the twentieth century’s mass murdering with the death march of the Herero into the Kalahari Desert, where the vast majority, as planned, perished. The century ended with the Serbs forcing the Kosovars on a death march to Albania, where almost all arrived (and stayed until NATO compelled the Serbs to let them return). The twenty-first century has opened with Political Islamic Sudanese driving Darfurians into neighboring Chad.
Regimes have created death marches as principal or auxiliary eliminationist institutions. The Turks sent hundreds of thousands of Armenians, mainly women and children, on marches of hundreds of miles, lasting weeks, encouraging local people along the way to attack, brutalize, and slaughter them. In 1918, the American Consul Jesse Jackson in Aleppo reported that survivors had recountedthe harrowing details of the separation of the grown male members of their families therefrom, or the actual killing of them before the eyes of, their relatives and friends, or of the robbing of the emigrants en route, of the unlimited suffering and death of famished women and children, the unbelievable brutality of the accompanying gendarmes towards young girls and more attractive women, the carrying off by the Kurds and Turks of beautiful girls, women, and children, and countless other atrocious crimes committed against them all along the way.
An extremely high, though unknown percentage, of the Armenians never reached Aleppo, their ostensible destination. In 1915, an American observing the deportations estimated that three-quarters of the deportees would die. In October 1916, Jackson described the Turks’ treatment of one death march caravan: “For another five days they [the Armenians] did not receive a morsel of bread, neither a drop of water. They were scorched to death by thirst, hundreds upon hundreds fell dead along the way, their tongues turned to charcoal. . . . On the seventy-fifth day when they reached Halep [Aleppo] 150 women and children remained from the whole caravan of 18,000.” In 1918, as the eliminationist assault was winding down, the American consul, Davis, reflected on the eliminationist assault of the past few years, “I predicted few of these people would ever reach Ourfa, which was all too true a prediction.”15 Yet the Turks did not spare even those Armenians who survived. According to one Turkish military intelligence officer, the Turks drove the Armenians “to the blazing deserts, to hunger, misery and death.”16
Armenian death march victims
The first march that had “death march” affixed to it as part of its proper name is the Bataan Death March of 1942, the murderous trek on which the Japanese sent American and Filipino POWs in the Philippines. The Japanese marched them in stifling tropical heat for a week, denying them food and aid, brutalizing them, and butchering stragglers and others, often in gruesome ways. The Japanese killed eighteen thousand of the seventy-two thousand on the march, a one-week mortality rate of 25 percent.
In World War II’s last six months, as the Germans emptied camps that would soon be overrun, they sent the Jews and non-Jews on scores of death marches, making them a familiar sight in much of Germany and Central Europe. The Jews’ death rate on many marches approximated that of extermination facilities. After the war, Poles, Czechs and others expelled millions of ethnic Germans. They sent these Germans on such marches, the local populace often treating them brutally, although the Germans often traveled on trains or other vehicles in what were, for expulsions, comparatively tolerable conditions.
The most concentrated, gargantuan death marches were created by the Khmer Rouge, which emptied Cambodia’s cities of virtually their entire populations. From Phnom Penh alone they drove between two million and three million of the country’s fewer than eight million people into the countryside, brutally propelling them onward, sometimes for weeks, until they reached the designated places for their camps, called cooperatives. Youkimny Chan recounts his death march. The Khmer Rouge, upon capturing Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, announced that everyone had to leave the city, dispossessing the city’s inhabitants, including, as was true of Chan’s family, their cars:Now everyone in our family had to walk, and we had to divide the remaining food among us to carry it on our backs. It was the dry season and it was very hot. There was no water. People began to get heatstroke and fall down on the road. The soldiers wouldn’t let us stop to help those who were sick. I couldn’t believe what was happening. We walked for days, then weeks. Pregnant women gave birth under trees by the road. Old people died from exhaustion and lack of water. Everywhere was the sound of babies screaming and people crying for loved ones who had died and had to be left on the road.
There was no time for funerals. Soldiers threw the bodies into empty ponds and kept everyone moving. Guns were pointed at us, and tanks forced us to keep moving. I saw two men with their hands tied behind their backs. Soldiers were questioning them on the side of the road. The soldiers cut off the men’s heads, which fell to the ground as their bodies slumped. There was nothing I could do. People were being murdered before my eyes. These were my friends, my neighbors. The rest of us kept walking.
Finally, after almost two and a half months of walking and stopping, walking and stopping, we arrived outside the province of Battambang, where most of the small villages in the jungle had been burned to ashes during the fighting. We were told that we must live in those burned-out villages.17
On these marches, the Khmer Rouge intentionally killed and drove to death many tens of thousands, perhaps as
many as 400,000 people. They forced the survivors to locales that could not sustain them, lacking housing, infrastructure, viable economies, and often even arable land. Thus began the Khmer Rouge’s eliminationist transformation of Cambodia. A partly parallel instance occurred in Ethiopia, when the Dergue dictatorship under Mengistu Haile Mariam starting in fall 1984 sent approximately 1.5 million people from northern Ethiopia on death marches to the southwest as part of a “resettlement” program, intended to pacify Ethiopia’s northern region, where rebel groups were fighting the government. The Ethiopian perpetrators killed about 100,000 people during the death marches or in their aftermath, as survivors perished in the “resettlement” camps.18
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