Germany’s ambassador, Tanja Beyer, has objected (letters, February 29) to my suggestion that Germany’s “experience with genocides rivals Elizabeth Taylor’s with husbands” (February 22).
Had she stopped there, I’d have let it pass. But she also accused me of belittling the “unique severeness of the Holocaust”. That is a grave charge. If I don’t respond, I’d be guilty of taking it lightly.
Beyer reminds us that the legal definition of genocide includes the intent to destroy a group in part or in whole. The sheer number of victims, alone, does not decide the issue.
In principle, it’s possible to be guilty of genocidal intent without killing many people. And a State may aim to kill a great many people without also wishing to exterminate them as a group. A crime against humanity isn’t necessarily genocide.
These are distinctions I’ve made more than once, including in the column Beyer refers to. In fact, I have refrained from saying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 were war crimes and, obviously, Israel has the right to defend itself. But I share the urgent concern of many genocide and Holocaust historians, like the leading scholar Omer Bartov, who warn against the potential for genocide in Gaza.
Like them, I prefer to warn before the fact, rather than condemn afterwards. That was the brunt of my column; my reference to Germany was brief.
Still, facts matter, no matter how briefly stated. Beyer says my suggestion that Germany’s experience with genocides rivals Taylor’s with seven husbands is “legally wrong”. She did not say what number is legally right. Let’s see.
Apart from the Holocaust, there’s imperial Germany’s Herero-Nama genocide (1904-08), which Germany recognised in 2015.
There is then the Nazi genocide of ethnic Poles (estimated at up to 2.77 million). The Cambridge World History of Genocide (volume 3, published last year) shows why it is indisputably a genocide.
The Nazi mass murder, internment and sterilisation of Gypsies (including Romani, Sinti and others who identified as neither) is today recognised as genocide. The intent to eliminate the Gypsies as a race was established following the opening of archives in Eastern Europe and the former USSR.
The Nazis were not alone; there often was collaboration by other European administrators and forces. But only in Croatia and Romania did the genocide proceed independently of the Nazis.
I don’t question Germany’s right to make its own determination whether genocidal intent is present in Israeli actions in Gaza
That’s four cases that are considered clear by specialist historians. Then there are the debatable ones.
Imperial Germany’s crimes in Tanzania (1905-1907) left up to 300,000 dead – killed, starved or ravaged by disease. Tanzania has stopped short of calling it genocide; Germany has asked for forgiveness. But a 2021 article in the scholarly journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies has argued that the legal conditions for genocide were, in fact, met.
There is also the case of Soviet POWs: a total of 3.3 million killed. Up to early 1942, they were murdered in larger numbers than were the Jews – from mass starvation, lack of shelter, disease and mass executions.
The concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau first housed Soviet prisoners. It was there, in 1941, that Zyklon B, the hydrogen cyanide used to gas Jews, was first tried on a mass scale with 600 POWs.
In the same 1943 speech where the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, spoke explicitly of the extermination of Jews, he also referred to Slavs as subhumans, and said he didn’t care if 10,000 Russian women died under hard labour conditions.
Was all this legally genocide? The Nuremberg Tribunal stopped short of that. It spoke instead of crimes against humanity. The problem for the legal standard is that “Soviet” covered several nations and groups while the severity of punishment was not the same everywhere.
However, Norman Naimark, writing in The Cambridge World History of Genocide (volume 3, p. 377), allows that it could be called a “genocide in the making”. He adds that, had the Nazis been victorious, then:
“Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians would surely have shared the same fate of the Poles and been eliminated culturally and ethnically as distinct peoples and nations. Genocidal actions against those peoples would have been completed.”
So, that is how I arrived at the “legally wrong” number of German genocides, rivalling the number of Taylor’s husbands. However, before the insistence on strict legality, I am ready to yield: I should have said Germany’s experience with genocides rivals Jennifer Lopez’s with husbands (four, so far, plus two notable partners).
As for the charge that, with such analogies, I am belittling the Holocaust, that’s nonsense.
First, drawing attention to all the victims of a criminal never belittles the victims of his most heinous crime.
Second, it is clear that the suffering of the victims is not the target of my ridicule. I don’t even question Germany’s right to make its own determination whether genocidal intent is present in Israeli actions in Gaza.
My target is rather Germany’s nerve in lecturing others on genocide – including its past genocidal victim, Namibia – saying that any accusation “has no basis whatsoever”. It’s like Taylor, or Lopez, lecturing us on marriage.
Like Bartov, an Israeli Jew, the UN court has decided otherwise. It has not said that genocide is taking place but it has affirmed that there is a basis for investigation.
I didn’t single out Germany for mockery. I included statements by the foreign ministers of France and the UK. All three are countries with many traditions and institutions to admire, from which Malta can learn much.
Europe’s contribution to human dignity and decency would be far smaller without these three major European states. My reading about their crimes is driven by a desire to understand the conditions under which high civilisation can fall so low.
Without understanding and criticism, the risk is greater that the crimes are repeated.