Robert Gellately

The Specter of Genocide: The Study of Mass Murder and Genocide

The twentieth century has been well described as an “age of extremes.” There were two world wars, major revolutions, colonial and anticolonial conflicts, and other catastrophes. All too often mass murder of noncombatant civilians marred these conflicts. The murders were usually state-sponsored or officially sanctioned. Indeed, by midcentury the pattern struck some scholars as so alarming that they began groping for new words to describe it. The Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin introduced the concept of genocide in a small book published during the Second World War. Later he helped prod the United Nations into formulating its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. The convention defined genocide broadly as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These acts included killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and also deliberately inflicting conditions on a people such as “to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The convention condemned measures like the prevention of births so that a people would die out and forcible transfer of a groups children to another group. Because the Genocide Convention is a good starting point for discussion of the phenomenon, we analyze both its nature and its implications.

Situating the "SS-State" in a Social-Historical Context: Recent Histories of the SS, the Police, and the Courts in the Third Reich

* The works reviewed in this article are George C. Browder, Foundations of the Nazi Police State: The Formation of Sipo and SD (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), pp. xii + 346,

Voting for Hitler and Stalin: Elections Under 20th-Century Dictatorships

35.00; Peter Lessmann, Die preussische Schutzpolizei in der Weimarer Republik (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1989), pp. 448, DM 48.00; Werner Best, Danemark in Hitlers Hand: Der Bericht des Reichsbevollmachtigten Werner Best uber seine Besatzungspolitik in Danemark mit Studien uiber Hitler, Goring, Himmier, Heydrich, Ribbentrop, Canaris u.a. (Husum: Husum Verlag, 1988), pp. 320; Herbert F. Ziegler, Nazi Germanys New Aristocracy: The SS Leadership, 1925-1939 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. xx + 181,

Book ReviewsThe Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. By Henry Friedlander. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xxiii+421.

29.95; Walter Otto Weyrauch, Gestapo V-Leute: Tatsachen und Theorie des Geheimdienstes (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), pp. xiv + 140, DM 48.00; Adolf Diamant, Gestapo Frankfurt am Main: Zur Geschichte einer verbrecherischen Organisation in den Jahren 1933-1945 (Frankfurt am Main: W. Steinmann & Boschen, 1988), pp. xvi + 459, DM 128; Herbert Schultheis and Isaac E. Wahler, Bilder und Akten der Gestapo Wurzburg uber die Judendeportationen 1941-1943 (Bad Neustadt an der Saale: Rotter Druck und Verlag, 1988), pp. 207, DM 49.00; Reinhard Mann, Protest und Kontrolle im Dritten Reich: Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft im Alltag einer rheinischen Grossstadt (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag, 1987), pp. x + 413, DM 58; Helga Schubert, Judasfrauen: Zehn Fallgeschichten weiblicher Denunziation im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1990), pp. 171, DM 29.80; Bernd-A. Rusinek, Gesellschaft in der Katastrophe: Terror, Illegalitat, Widerstand Koln 1944/45 (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1989), pp. 466, DM 22.00; Peter Huttenberger, Die Industrieund Verwaltungsstadt (20. Jahrhundert), vol. 3 of Dusseldorf: Geschichte von den Anfangen bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Dusseldorf: Schwann, 1989), pp. 738, DM 86.80; Hans Wullenweber, Sondergerichte im Dritten Reich. Vergessene Verbrechen der Justiz (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1990), pp. 254, DM 19.80; H. W. Koch, In the Name of the Volk: Political Justice in Hitlers Germany (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989), pp. xvi+325,

34.95.

35.00, and Volksgerichtshof: Politische Justiz im 3. Reich (Munich: Universitas, 1988), pp. 631, DM 78.00; Michael Stolleis and Dieter Simon, eds., Rechtsgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus: Beitrdge zur Geschichte einer Disziplin (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1989), pp. 202, DM 128.00; Gerhard Werle, Justiz-Strafrecht und polizeiliche Verbrechensbekdimpfung im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), pp. xxxvi+ 791, DM 248.00. l For a brief survey, see Brian Chapman, Police State (London, 1970), p. 11.

Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

products and processes of capital’s westward expansion. Thompson fought hard to keep a critical distance throughout his study. Most of the time he succeeded; a few times he fell flat on his face. This was especially true when, towards the end of his thesis, he awkwardly and offensively attempted to reconcile his intellectual insights with the Jim Crow world of his birth. Though unpleasant, that residual twinge of racism is no reason to leave this brief and brilliant book on the shelf. Thompson is as much a man for our time as are his better-known contemporaries. Indeed, it struck this reviewer that if more of us who are actively tracing slavery’s global and capitalist dimensions had read The Plantation earlier in our careers we would all be much further along in our work.

The specter of genocide : mass murder in historical perspective

This book and its companion, the co-edited volume Material evidence (Chapman & Wylie 2015), are the result of a collaboration between Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie, who define themselves, respectively, as a British, philosophically minded archaeologist and a North American philosopher of science with an archaeological background. Their cooperation started in 2010 when Wylie was a visiting professor at Chapman’s home institution, the University of Reading. This visit involved several lectures and a seminar on ‘Material culture as evidence’. Evidential reasoning in archaeology draws on these sessions and wider reflections to offer a muchneeded re-evaluation on the fundamental question of how archaeologists build up their claims from the datasets they record and use as evidence of the past. Despite the centrality of this issue for archaeological practice, it has received little attention over the past two decades; only recently has it gained renewed interest with the intellectual turn to things and materiality.