The Age of Genocide

E X P L O R I N G 2 0 T H C E N T U RY G E N O C I D E S

MR.GAIJER
HUMANITIES
 A crime without a name…

“The aggressor ... retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his

Armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of
thousands - literally scores of thousands - of executions in cold blood
are being perpetrated by the German Police-troops upon the Russian
patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of
Europe in the Sixteenth Century, there has never been methodical,
merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale.

“And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to
follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks.

“We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”

- Winston Churchill describing the brutality of the German

forces occupying Russia, 1941.
Russian Children rounded up by Nazis
Russians murdered and buried in mass graves
Nazis before they move out…
 Genocide
geno – meaning race
cide – meaning killing

•T H E W O R D G E N O C I D E W A S C O I N E D I N T H E M I D S T
O F T H E H O L O C A U S T.

•D E F I N I T I O N :

•Acts committed with intent to destroy, in

whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or
religious group
 Major genocides of the 20th century

 The Herero Genocide, Namibia, 1904-05

Death toll: 60,000 (3/4 of the population)

 The Armenian Genocide, Ottoman Empire, 1915-23

Death toll: Up to 1.5 million

 The Ukrainian Famine, 1932-1933

Death toll: 7 million

 The Nanking Massacre, 1937-1938

Death toll: 300,000 (50% of the pop)

 The World War II Holocaust, Europe, 1942-45

Death toll: 6 million

 The Cambodian Genocide, 1975-79

Death toll: 2 million
 Namibia, 1904-1905

 Under German colonial rule, German

Southwest Africa is modern day Namibia.

 German Lieutenant-General Lothar von

Trotha said, 'I wipe out rebellious tribes
with streams of blood and streams of
money. Only following this cleansing can
something new emerge'.

 On October 2, 1904,
 von Trotha issued his order to
exterminate the Herero from the
region.

 800,000 DIED.
 The Armenian Genocide, 1915

U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau Sr.,

concluded a “race murder” was occurring. He cabled Washington
and described the Turkish campaign:

”Persecution of Armenians assuming

unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely
scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to
uproot peaceful Armenian populations and
through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures,
whose-sale expulsions and deportations from one
end of the Empire to the other accompanied by
frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder
turning into massacre, to bring destruction and
destitution on them.

What was the goal of Turkey???

To wipe out the Armenian people!

The documentary, The Armenian
Genocide aired on PBS in April, 2006.
 The Armenian Controversy

To this day, the Turks deny that the Genocide occurred.

This is a VERY controversial issue to the Turks.

Turkey suspended its military ties with France in 2006 after the
French parliament's lower house adopted a bill that would
have made it a crime to deny that the Armenian killings
constituted a genocide.

23 countries acknowledge the event was genocide

In early October 2007, the U.S. Congress opened debate on

whether or not to declare the Armenian event a genocide –
much to the dismay of the Turkish government.
 The Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933

 Joseph Stalin, leader of the

Soviet Union,
 set in motion events designed to
cause a famine in the Ukraine to
destroy the people

 Result:
 7,000,000 persons perished
 The Holocaust, 1939-1945

•The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored

persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi
regime and its collaborators.

•"Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire”.

•The Nazis, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the
Jews, deemed "inferior“, were an alien threat to the so-called German
racial community.

•Result: 6,000,000
dead
 Cambodia
1975-1979

•The Killing Fields

•Number of sites in Cambodia where thousands of people were killed and
buried by the Communist regime Khmer Rouge, which ruled the country
from 1975-1979.
One Khmer slogan ran:
'To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.'

The massacres ended in 1979, when Communist Vietnam invaded the

country and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime.
 Rwanda
1994

800,000 Tutsis were murdered by

Hutus in a 3 month period. The
international community watched the
event unfold and did nothing.
 Darfur
2003-present

 Is it genocide? Debatable death toll stands between 100 and 500,000.

 Why doesn’t the international community act?

Relatives mourn over the body of a one-year-old child who died of malnutrition in June 2004
 Genocide
What can you do?

 Educate yourself on the issues

 Demanding action from your government

 Educate your community ~ raising awareness

 Stop judging others…. It leads to bad things!