Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, by Isabel V. Hull. 2005. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London

Armenian Genocide and Herero Genocide. Little-Known Facts That Upend the Presumed Specialness of the Holocaust

A number of common talking points are falsely used to make the Holocaust seem distinctive, “uniquely unique”, or otherwise unprecedented. I focus on some of them.

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE WAS AS IRRATIONAL AS THE JEWS’ HOLOCAUST

Holocaust supremacists tell us that the Holocaust was uniquely irrational (and thereby unprecedented) because the Nazi Germany did not have to conduct the Holocaust in order to wage their war of conquest against other European nations, because the Shoah (allegedly) harmed the German war effort, and because the Germans knowingly deprived themselves of potentially useful Jews.

However, one can say much the same about other genocides! Consider the Armenian Genocide. Hull writes, “Standard military thinking suggested deportation, but not genocide…Genocide was not necessary to pursue the war; in fact, it was counterproductive. It harmed the war effort by consuming resources that might have supported the army, it ruined the economy (of which Armenian craftsmen and traders were the linchpin); it destroyed the security of the rear lines it was supposed to protect, especially regarding the 4^th Army, whose supplies stopped flowing on roads choked with corpses and rank with typhus.” (p. 277).

HERERO GENOCIDE: A GROUP DOES NOT HAVE TO BE DEEMED EXISTENTIAL ENEMIES IN ORDER TO BE TARGETED FOR GENOCIDE

Holocaust supremacists remind us again and again that the Jews were made into the existential enemies of the Third Reich (which implies that other Nazi-targeted groups were not), and that German newspapers (presumably) obsessed about Jews as deadly enemies. This is supposed to make the Holocaust super special and persistently enthroned above the genocides of all other peoples.

In opposition to this talking point, the Herero were targeted by the Germans for genocide even though the Herero were not existential enemies of the Germans. In fact, there was not even a substantial German ideological reason to target the Herero. Yet the Germans did target them. Hull comments, “With [Lothar von] Trotha’s enunciation of intent to make all Herero disappear from SWA, together with his far-reaching accomplishment in fulfilling this goal, he meets the qualifications that many authors have set for ‘genocide’. Intended totality plus a real effort to achieve it, not the complete eradication of a people, as the standards typically used to define a genocide. I believe historical analysis if better done freed of the fetters of this legalistic and static definition and the typologies it has spawned, so that we can concentrate instead on how genocide has sometimes developed from smaller causes in the absence of ideological motivation.” (p. 57).

For details on the Herero Genocide, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/german-caused-genocides-long-before-hitler-olusoga/