Among the most chaotic death marches were the many that moved more than fourteen million people between India and Pakistan during the region’s partition in 1947, when the British pulled out. Although this population transfer was intended to allow Muslims in India and Hindu living in Pakistan to resettle in the other country, they became death marches that took the lives of roughly a half million people. Their transformation into mutual eliminationist assaults came about in part because the local populace in many regions, and on both sides, understood them as death marches and because those same local people were encouraged by their leaders with their killing squads to turn their conceptions of what the marches were, or should be, into reality.
Unlike camps, which are fixed in space, multipurpose installations, death marches are transitory, single-purpose institutions. Although they sometimes are revived or reconstituted, they generally come into being for a defined time and expire when their victims are gone. Most death marches are either mainly annihilatory, as the Germans’ marches of the Herero and, forty years later, of Jews were, or mainly expulsive, as the Serbs’ march of Kosovars, the Dergue’s march of northern Ethiopians, and the Sudanese Political Islamists’ driving from their homes of Darfurians have been. Whichever, all such marches are variations upon a lethal eliminationist theme.
Since expulsion marches of civilians are by definition eliminationist, they inherently tend toward lethal violence. Perpetrators who compel people to abandon their homes, or banish them abroad, convey the message that these people are dangerous or noxious, enough to deserve elimination. In the modern world, social and physical attachment to a physical place is seen as a constituent part of community membership. Being wrested from one’s place suggests an abrogation of a person’s full humanity. Ordinarily, societies treat only criminals in such a way. Those violently driving people from their homes, particularly families that have resided there for generations, relegate their victims to the status of outlaws—literally, outside the law—to whom virtually anything may be done. The Soviets treated the Crimean Tatars, one of the eight ethnic groups they deported for putative disloyalty, with murderous brutality:At 2:00 in the morning of May 17, 1944, Tatar homes were suddenly broken into by NKVD agents and NKVD 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. Without giving them a chance to collect themselves, they forced these residents out into the street, where trucks picked them up and drove them to railroad stations. They were loaded into cattle cars and shipped off to remote regions of Siberia, the Urals, and Central Asia.
People were not allowed to get dressed properly. They were forbidden to take clothes, money, or other things with them. The agents and armed troops swept through these homes, taking these people’s valuables, money, and anything they liked, all the while calling the Tatars “swine,” “scum,” damned traitors,” and so on.
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 NKVD troops would seize the corpses and throw them out of the freight car windows.19
Death marches and expulsions express eliminationist beliefs’ multiple potential. For the perpetrators, expelling and killing go hand-in-hand and are interchangeable. This is so for leaders creating the marches, those guarding them, and the local people jeering, brutalizing, and sometimes murdering the marchers whose banishment they celebrate. The same spirit infuses death marches and expulsions’ aftermath: The perpetrators deposit the survivors en masse in distant places without physical or economic infrastructure, and so, predictably, many more die. The perpetrators know, witness, and promote this, or at least allow it to happen, with perhaps the most infamous instance being the Khmer Rouge.
The Germans’ deportation plans for Jews are documented cases of eliminationist intent and of the interchangeability of eliminationist solutions. The two most comprehensive proposals receiving serious consideration were, first, to create a “reservation” for the Jews in eastern Poland’s Lublin region and, second, to ship millions of Jews to Madagascar. The Germans’ proposals for mass expulsion, including these two, were interim steps on the road to the Jews’ extinction. Those fashioning these schemes conceived of the proposed dumping grounds as uninhabitable environments. As the district governor of Lublin suggested in November 1939, the “district with its very marshy character could . . . serve as a Jew-reservation, a measure which could possibly lead to a widespread decimation of the Jews.”20 The proposed reservations were to be enormous prisons—like walled-in ghettos that the Germans constructed for Polish Jewry—consisting of economically unsustainable territory, where the Jews, cut off from the world, would die off.21 In Ethiopia, the Dergue expelled 1.5 million northerners, exposing them to new diseases, including malaria, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths—especially the sick, the elderly, and children. One former Dergue member, who witnessed the Tigrayans’ brutal, murderous deportation, packed into buses like Jews in cattle cars, called the resettlement a “genocide of helpless people.”22
Another often used eliminationist killing institution is the mobile killing squad. Its function (unlike the death marches) is unambiguously recognized. It is neither some informal marauding, murderous group, nor an established institution of a normal polity, such as the military, that might kill episodically, along with other noneliminationist duties. The mobile killing institution is both formal and enduring, principally devoted to annihilation and elimination.
To spearhead and execute the Armenians’ elimination, the Turkish leaders created a substantially autonomous institution, the Special Organization, which, having its own funding and organizational structure, functioned as a virtual “state within the state.” Consisting of approximately thirty thousand men, mainly criminals, the Special Organization’s principal task was to exterminate the Armenians. Its units went from town to town rounding up victims, shooting men, and sending the remainder on death marches, which the Special Organization’s men would sometimes themselves murderously fall upon.23
Among the new institutions the Ethiopian Dergue created to conduct its operations were “revolutionary death squads” and the Dergue Special Forces, which early in the regime’s tyranny killed fifteen to thirty youths in each of Addis Ababa’s twenty-eight zones, in order to terrorize its actual and potential opposition.24 In many Latin American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, murderous regimes created shadowy death squads that struck anywhere, descending upon targeted individuals and groups, killing or abducting them (usually to kill them later), and then melting away. In Guatemala, the regime and army created a special mobile killing institution that was formally conceived of as a counterinsurgency force, called Kaibiles. Their training “included killing animals and then eating them raw and drinking their blood in order to demonstrate courage.” Their Decalogue stated baldly: “The Kaibil is a killing machine.”25
Among the most lethal and notorious mass murderers were the German Einsatzgruppen, which the German leadership established for the attack against the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Einsatzgruppen, in conjunction with supporting police and military units, and sometimes also with local Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and other auxiliaries, began, as planned, in the campaign’s first few days to slaughter Jews. As the Germans went deeper into Soviet territory, their killing pace and scope increased. Typically, they rounded up the Jews of a conquered town or city in the city square or at its outskirts, brought the victims to anti-tank ditches or ravines, or to a location where they forced the Jews to dig large ditches, and shot them at point-blank range in wave after wave after wave. Sometimes they stood the victims at the ditch’s edge to be shot in turn. Sometimes they compelled the victims to lay themselves down in the ditch upon the bleeding dead bodies of the group just killed, and then shot them. Depending on the Jewish communit
y’s size, and the Germans’ operation logistics, the number of victims ranged from a few dozen to ten thousand or more. The Einsatzgruppen’s most infamous killing operation was on Kiev’s outskirts, at Babi Yar’s ravines, where over two days they, together with other German units and Ukrainian auxiliaries, shot more than thirty-three thousand Jews. During the assault on Soviet Jewry’s first wave, from June 1941 to the first part of 1942, the Germans in the Einsatzgruppen slaughtered probably more than half a million Jews, mainly by shooting them.
For their mass murdering and expulsions in Bosnia, the Serbs employed their own mobile killing units, which often went by colorful names: the Yellow Wasps, the White Eagles, the Wolves from Vućjak, and most notoriously Arkan’s Tigers. Because the Serbs had opted for a mixed eliminationist solution—kill many people, expel more—these squads were not as pure a killing institution as the Germans’ Einsatzgruppen were toward Jews. The Serbs’ units slaughtered Bosniaks as they expunged town after town of non-Serbs. Their brutality and cruelty became legendary in Bosnia and throughout the region. Arkan’s Tigers became the institution that epitomized and became almost synonymous with the eliminationist assault itself.
Infamous though they have become, the creation of such distinctive formal mobile killing institutions has not been common because most eliminationist regimes that need mobile units use the military and police. Often they rely on local police and other forces to do the dirty work against their neighbors. They sometimes raise these units, as the Germans and Guatemalans did, because they decide that specialized killing units will serve them especially well. At other times, as in Bosnia and several Latin American countries, such units operate in the shadows, providing political leaders deniability. In Latin American countries they have been appropriately called death squads.
Still more permanent and more lethal than mobile killing institutions have been camp systems, some of which are called concentration camps. More often, the perpetrators, and those wittingly or unwittingly adopting their perspectives and nomenclature, call them various euphemistic names, including resettlement camps, labor camps, reeducation camps, agricultural camps, and cooperatives. Many regimes and people have used camps as eliminationist tools, including the Spanish, British, Germans, French, Soviets, Americans, Poles, Chinese, North Koreans, Indonesians, Cambodians, Serbs, Hutu, and more. Camps are sociopolitical systems for sequestering people, usually for broader domination, transformation, and destruction. Political leaders bent on eliminating a sizable number of people create them when existing institutions appear inadequate for their destructive or transformative goals. Eventually an integrated system of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of camps can become an enduring, useful, and seemingly indispensable instrument in eliminationist destruction, which the regimes put to several interrelated uses.
Camps eliminate unwanted people from society’s concourse, depositing them in a spatial, social, and moral netherworld. Permanent elimination may follow. Camps can be used for temporary elimination during military conflicts, as the British did in South Africa to Boers during the Second Boer War of 1899-1902 and then half a century later, at least initially, to Kikuyu during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, and as the Americans did to more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. In such instances, the incarcerators released the inmates when the war or declared emergency ended. Camps can also be used in a more temporary manner, as short-lived extermination facilities, or as intermittently lethal holding tanks, awaiting the moment when the elimination process of those surviving the camp’s initial killings moves to expulsion. In Rwanda, the Hutu set up ad hoc extermination camps in churches, hospitals, and other local institutions to which Tutsi had fled for sanctuary. The Hutu compelled the Tutsi to stay in these places, now camps. Daily, the Hutu brutalized and killed the Tutsi in the camp or removed them to kill them nearby. In Bosnia, the Serbs used camps as extermination facilities, mainly for Muslim men, and as way stations for Bosniak children and women—whom they often raped or otherwise brutalized—before expelling them, including on death marches.
Regimes also use camps for the semipermanent or permanent elimination of people. They can be a brutal, often lethal, temporary part of a larger eliminationist campaign, until the survivors’ expulsion ensues. The Turks established such camps for Armenians. The Poles created such camps for ethnic Germans after Poland’s liberation from German occupation, often using former German camps, including Auschwitz, Lamsdorf, and Jaworzno, to confine approximately 100,000 Germans suspected of being Nazis and then, having killed between 20 percent and 50 percent of them, dismantling the camps when they expelled the remaining inmates to Germany.26 In Kenya, the British camp system, which included the barbed-wire villages of the Kikuyu “reservations,” evolved into what was going to be a semipermanent or permanent arrangement to eliminate the noncompliant Kikuyu. The Indonesians, upon slaughtering communists, created a temporary camp system incarcerating between 650,000 and 1.5 million people for shorter or longer periods. Our era’s more permanent camp systems include, among others, the German camp world, the Soviet gulag, the Chinese Laogai, Cambodia’s cooperatives, and North Korea’s Kwanliso.
Camps, especially when they are permanent installations, are used to put people to work. The Germans during the Nazi period, the Soviets, the Chinese, the Khmer Rouge, and the North Koreans did this. But camps, and the work within, are not governed according to rational productivity’s norms or even the standard of the minimal humaneness accorded to society’s noncamp population. Take the camp system that was probably the most productive among all the major camp systems, the Soviet gulag. “In the fall they kept people” in Kolyma, located above the Arctic Circle, “soaked to the skin, out in the rain and the cold to fulfill norms [production quotas] that such hopeless wrecks could never fulfill. . . . Prisoners were not dressed for the climate in the Kolyma region. They were given third-hand clothing, mere rags, and often had only cloth wrapping on their feet. Their torn jackets did not protect them from the bitter frost, and people froze in droves.”27 No wonder these inmates froze: They worked outdoors regularly in temperatures as low as sixty degrees below zero. Murderous regimes and the executors of their policies work inmates under the most egregious conditions, denying them sufficient food, adequate clothing, shelter, sanitation, and medical care. Elinor Kipper, a former communist prisoner in Kolyma, explains:Even if the work performed is listed honestly, it is impossible for a person unaccustomed to physical labour to fulfill the quota. He quickly falls into a vicious circle. Since he cannot do his full quota of work, he does not receive the full bread ration; his undernourished body is still less able to meet the demands, and so he gets less and less bread, and in the end is so weakened that only clubbings can force him to drag himself from camp to gold mine. Once he reaches the shaft he is too weak to hold the wheelbarrow, let alone to run the drill; he is too weak to defend himself when a criminal punches him in the face and takes away his day’s ration of bread.28
In the massive camp systems incarcerating millions, the prisoners’ overall output can seem substantial. Yet, in these socially and economically artificial environments, productivity, the real measure of economic output, is incredibly low because of the dreadful circumstances and physical condition in which the perpetrators force their victims to work, and because of the poor available plant, machinery, and tools. Camp systems’ economic productivity is actually lower still, because in wresting irreplaceable people and resources from the normal economy, they disrupt it substantially. In Cambodia such economic destruction was almost total.
The camp systems that eventually return their victims to society leave lasting physical, mental, and emotional scars, and social disabilities. Like freed slaves who bear an ongoing social stigma, former camp inmates are people whom others wish to keep at arm’s length. Unless formally rehabilitated, as some were in the Soviet Union who then even rose to high positions, they are marked as having been in the camp netherworld. As long as the eliminationist regime is in po
wer, they are suspect. Getting close to such a person is potentially to court danger. Even those former inmates who are not seen in this way find that others—even sometimes in countries to which they subsequently emigrate—often define their lives by their time in the camps, mostly with pity.
Two other purposes of camps—whatever they are formally called—are well known: to kill and to terrorize a political regime’s enemies, potential opposition, or future targets. The Germans’ extermination camps, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and others, are the most notorious killing facilities. For Jews (and Sinti and Roma), though not for other prisoners, the Germans’ camps in general—not just these death factories constructed for mass annihilation—were extermination facilities, with mortality rates often approaching 100 percent. The large Mauthausen camp’s comparative death rates demonstrate the disparity.29
Death Rates in Mauthausen by Type of Prisoner
Similarly, the Germans killed, mainly by starvation, a vast number of Soviet soldiers in POW camps. Soviet, communist Chinese, Khmer Rouge, and North Korean camps were or are also institutions of colossal mass killing. Although Kolyma in Arctic Siberia, like other camps in the communist world, was formally a work camp, the Soviets “worked” its prisoners to death by the hundreds of thousands. The Soviet gulag and the Chinese camps housed and killed enormous populations. Under the most brutal communist regimes, the societies as a whole or at least many of their institutions are themselves organized like large, often murderous camps, or verge on being such institutions. Demarcating the formal camp system from a regime’s other institutions of domination that house people can be difficult. Yet if we restrict this discussion to “forced labor” camps, the numbers are staggering enough. The communist Chinese built at least one forced labor camp in each of more than two thousand counties during the 1950s. During the regime’s first few years, from 1949 to 1953, they eliminated ten million to fifteen million people by confining them in these lethal institutions. In central and southern China, they supplied their victims with about eighteen ounces (five hundred grams) of food a day. Estimates of the labor camp death toll during this period are, as with practically all of the Chinese’s mass murdering, wildly divergent, yet a conservative estimate is more than two million.30
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