Over the years I have asked educators to provide me with a definition of the Holocaust. Much to my surprise no matter what state I was in, whether it was Minnesota, Tennessee or California, I have heard several different answers. Numbers of dead ranged from 6 to 12 million and several victim groups were covered under the term.

A few weeks ago the Rialto School District in California had written and distributed an assignment to eighth graders asking them to debate whether the Holocaust was an actual event in history or a hoax perpetrated on the public to raise funds for Israel. They asked students to look at newspaper articles to form their answers. With the thousands upon thousands of primary source documents (mainly left by the perpetrators themselves) available, they thought opinion based articles were the best method towards the students forming their own ideas under the guise of increasing the students’ critical thinking skills.

So how are these two events related? And why does it matter that we have only one definition of the Holocaust? We can debate whether the term “Holocaust” is the most fitting to describe the event, but there is no debate to what it signifies. Holocaust is the term that defines the destruction of the six million European Jews by the Nazi’s and their collaborators between 1933-1945.

How we define the Holocaust is important to how we teach it. If we continue to add other groups to the equation, such as Homosexuals, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, the Handicapped and the Sinti-Roma (Gypsies), it takes away the fact that the Nazis and their collaborators specifically planned and attempted to carry out the complete destruction of European Jewry. This is not to say that these other groups did not suffer greatly, nor should they be forgotten in the study of the Third Reich, as their persecution is also important to our understanding of the Holocaust.

The Nazis came to the Final Solution by problem solving and perfecting persecution. The extermination camps profited greatly from the knowledge gained during the T4 program use of gas vans and shower rooms to murder the mentally and physically disabled. It should also be noted that the T4 program was discontinued due to public outcry, something that did not happen for the Jews.

Every decade we move further from the event, the more we water it down the further damage we do. Singly defining the Holocaust as an event that took place against Jews does not negate the Holocaust as an event that has universal implications.

Genocides are “any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:.” If everything is equal, and all victims of Nazism are included under the term Holocaust, then the historical specificity of the genocide of six million European Jews is blurred. This of course plays right into what Holocaust and genocide deniers want you to believe. That it did not happen the way it has been written, history is arbitrary and events can be debated on opinion rather than fact, just like in Rialto. This is why we need to get the definition right, for if we truly want to ignore what made the Holocaust unique then we not only dishonor the victims of that genocide but all others, doing a disservice not only to them but to ourselves.

Jodi Elowitz is the Outreach Coordinator for CHGS and the Program Coordinator for the European Studies Consortium. Elowitz is currently working on Holocaust memory in Poland and artistic representation of the Holocaust in animated short films.

In June 2013, it was revealed after an investigation by the Associated Press that local Ukrainian immigrant and retired Minnesota carpenter, 95-year-old Michael Karkoc, allegedly served as a top commander of a Nazi SS-led unit accused of burning Polish villages and killing innocent civilians during WWII. Evidence surfaced that Karkoc entered the United States illegally in 1949 by concealing his role as an officer and founding member of the infamous Ukrainian Self Defense Legion.

Debate ensued regarding whether – almost 70 years after the events – justice could be served and, if so, where and delivered by whom? CHGS maintains its firm belief that not pursuing justice is a betrayal to the victims. The prosecution of Nazi criminals and their allies, regardless of their age, serves also as a valuable means by which to remind the world of the horrors of the Holocaust and to confront those who would deny or willingly forget the past.

This May, Germany’s highest criminal court ruled that, even though Karkoc’s alleged crimes were against non-Germans and not committed on German soil, his role in a SS-led office “served the purposes of the Nazi state’s world view.” This gives Germany legal jurisdiction over the matter and, as such, the case has been referred to Munich prosecutors who will examine the evidence again to determine whether to charge Karkoc and seek his extradition from the United States.

To see Director Alejandro Baer’s comments on the ruling on KSTP channel 5, please click here.

“The Jews are our misfortune!” (Die Juden sind unser Unglück!). This was always the tag line on the cover page of Der Stürmer, a Nazi weekly tabloid published between 1923 and 1945. The editor of this incendiary paper, Julius Streicher, was tried and sentenced to death on October 1st 1946 at the Nuremberg Tribunal. The judgment against him read, in part:

“… In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution…”

There is a Spanish saying that reads “muerto el perro, se acabó la rabia”, which is used to express that it is much easier to kill the dog than to cure the rabies. Indeed, many trusted that with the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies the problem of antisemitism would have been eradicated once and forever, that societies were now ultimately vaccinated against the recurrence of this scourge.

We know this was not the case and the killings in April in a Kansas Jewish Community Center or the deadly attack in Brussels’ Jewish Museum last weekend are only the most recent reminder that antisemitism is also a present-day reality.

As perplexing and incomprehensible as these crimes may appear, there is a rationale and an ideological structure behind them. Understanding them enables us to identify the threat of antisemitism at its first manifestations, and to treat the cases with the seriousness they merit, before it is too late.

Different from racism and negative or prejudiced attitudes towards a variety of groups or minorities, antisemitism is characterized by its abstractness and by the degree to which it is disconnected from any real inter-group relations. As the study released this month by the Anti-Defamation League shows, antisemitism is on display in countries without Jewish populations. Furthermore, individuals can harbour anti-Semitic views without ever having met a Jew.

Sociologist Theodor W. Adorno wrote that for the anti-Semite of past and present, Jews are neither a minority nor a religious community. They are the “negative principle as such.” In this explanation lies the core of its lethal nature. The Nazis believed firmly that the extermination of the Jews was a precondition to the world’s well-being. The killer of Kansas City’s JCC and the man who pulled the trigger in Brussel last Saturday (regardless of whether this perpetrator is also a neo-Nazi, a right wing religious extremist or a Muslim fundamentalist) saw the Jews as the incarnation of evil and as the cause of their own, their country’s and the world’s misfortune.

The dogmatic aphorism in Julius Streicher’s Nazi tabloid and these recent killings should serve as a reminder that the path that leads from anti-Semitic incitement to fatal anti-Semitic action is often short. There is no shortage of warning signs – the most recent one: far-right parties with strong anti-Semitic leanings making substantial gains in last Sunday’s EU Parliament elections. Unfortunately, for the victims, warnings signs always come too late.

Alejandro Baer is the Stephen Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He joined the University of Minnesota in 2012 and is an Associate Professor of Sociology.

This May, CHGS is sad to announce the loss of two friends, Margot De Wilde and Fred Baron.

Margot De Wilde was born July 17, 1921, in Berlin, Germany.  Margot lived in Holland at the time of the Nazi occupation in the late spring of 1940. Margot worked in the underground by delivering false passports and identification cards to Jews to aid them in leaving Holland. Margot and her husband were arrested when attempting to escape using these underground papers via train to Switzerland. Both were sent to Auschwitz where Margot’s husband later died.

Margot endured and survived the infamous Nazi medical experiments that were performed in Auschwitz under the supervision of Dr. Josef Mengele. She was transferred near the end of the war to Ravensbrück concentration camp and was liberated at a satellite camp near the demarcation line of the British and Russian troops. After the war Margot returned to Holland and was reunited with her mother, father and brother who had survived the war in hiding.

Margot immigrated to the United States in the 1960s and was an active speaker in the community for more than 30 years before retiring from public speaking in 2010. In 2009 Margot’s story was published in the book Margot 47574: The Story of an Auschwitz Survivor.

Margot passed away at the age of 92 on May 1, 2014.

To read a tribute to Margot by CHGS Program Coordinator, Jodi Elowitz, please click here.

Fred Baron was born in Vienna in 1924. He was 15 when the Germans annexed (Anschluss) Austria in 1938. Fred’s father had died while his sister was sent to England as part of the Kindertransport in 1939. Meanwhile, he and his mother sought shelter and lived in hiding. In 1941 they managed to escape to Hungary. Fred was arrested in Hungary and imprisoned for a time while his mother was sent to an internment camp. In June 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz.

After time in various labor camps, he was liberated by the British Army at Bergen-Belsen; in terrible health he was taken to Sweden for medical care. At the hospital he met his future wife Judith, who was also a Holocaust survivor, and was reunited with his sister. He resettled in Minnesota in 1947, attracted to the large Swedish population.

With Judith he raised a family, started a successful business and was a great supporter of the community. He had a kind and gentle spirit and a very optimistic outlook on life. He spoke often about his experiences and generously supported Holocaust education.

Fred died at the age of 91 on May 23, 2014.

Both Fred and Margot will be sorely missed.

On April 16, 17 & 19, the Institute for Global Studies, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Human Rights Program held a series of events to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1994 genocide that took the lives of an estimated 500,000-1,000,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The events included a public conference, a student conference, and a K-16 teacher workshop.

The commemoration began with the public conference, Genocide and its Aftermath: Lessons from Rwanda, featuring an opening address by Taylor Krauss, founder of Voices of Rwanda, an organization dedicated to filming testimonies of Rwandans to ensure that their stories inform the world about genocide and inspire a global sense of responsibility to prevent human rights atrocities. Krauss theorized that the final stage of genocide is to eliminate its trace, erase its history, so that it is made complete. As such, Krauss has been working since 2006 to film the testimonies of survivors to remind us what aftermath really means. He shared excerpts of three of these testimonies, demonstrating survivors’ essential need to remember. Krauss concluded his address stressing that listening is not a passive act, it demands a response, reminding the audience that many nations still harbor perpetrators of this horrific crime.

Click here for Krauss’ opening remarks. 

The first panel, Rwanda 1994 and its Representations, examined the failure of nation-states to intervene in Rwanda, the response of the human rights community, the use of commemoration to promote peaceful coexistence and the narrative on ‘lessons learned’ surrounding genocide today.

Click here to see the first panel. 

The second panel, Immediate Aftermaths: Justice, Redress and Memory, addressed the impact of the Rwandan genocide on developing international criminal law and defining what constitutes genocide. The role of memorials in changing social constructs, providing remembrance and giving hope to survivors was also analyzed.

Click here to see the second panel.

The final panel, Long-term Implications: Impact, Prevention and Intervention, dealt with the implications of interventions, or non-interventions, into genocides, as well the effectiveness of resulting transitional justice mechanisms. The panel also provided a critical examination of the practice of tying intervention to the designation of genocide.

Click here for the third panel. 

Finally, Adama Dieng, UN Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, delivered the evening keynote address. Dieng addressed the past failures to intervene in the crime of genocide, acknowledging that the United Nations and its member states have not been as effective as they could have been. He emphasized the need to build and support prevention and response institutions and to understand the price of inaction. “When powerful minds put their strength to justice…justice will prevail,” affirmed Dieng. Furthermore, the failure to address past atrocity crimes, Dieng asserted, leads to a high risk of future crimes, adding that there should be no tension between peace and justice but that they are instead mutually reinforcing. 

Click here for Dieng’s closing remarks.

For more information on the public and student conferences, the K-12 Educator’s Training, along with speaker biographies and other resources, please click here.

As we approach the 20th anniversary of the Genocide in Rwanda questions surrounding justice, commemorating the victims, and lessons learned take center stage. With regards to justice, events in Germany and in France in the past two months demonstrate that persistence and international cooperation often work to ensure justice is served to those affected by genocide and mass violence. Two trials have just ended in these two countries that will certainly put Hutu fugitives living in Europe on edge.   

Last month, a German court sentenced a former Rwandan mayor to a 14-year jail term. Onesphore Rwabukombe stood trial for organizing, ordering and monitoring a church massacre in Kiziguro. The church massacre led to the death of 1200 people seeking shelter. He was found guilty of not only ordering the attack but also organizing the collection and dumping of dead Tutsis.

The case was the first of its kind in Germany; no other German court had brought charges against a Rwandan perpetrator living in Germany. Two other cities, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart, are now trying Hutu extremists and their supporters.

This month a French court sentenced Pascal Simbikangwa to a 25-year jail term for his role in the genocide. Pascal, an intelligence officer and cousin to president Habyarimana, was considered a ruthless operative during the genocide. He is credited with supervising the notorious roadblocks in which Hutu perpetrators demanded to see the identity cards of all that went through them. He was also accused of having taken part in organizing the genocide and distributing weapons to the Interahamwe (Hutu paramilitaries). What makes Pascal’s case even more fascinating is that both his mother and wife were Tutsi, a fact he brought up during his defense.

France and Germany join Belgium, Sweden and Norway in prosecuting Hutu perpetrators living within their jurisdiction. The trials point to a widening of prosecutorial reach and reduce the number of countries where genocidaires can seek refuge. The international policing organization (Interpol) has also issued a red alert for approximately 100 Rwandans in Europe who may have been involved in the genocide.

These events mark the beginnings of the first of hopefully many steps in the pursuit of justice for the approximately 800,000 dead. It should not be lost in the euphoria that these two powerful players in the genocide received a combined total of 39 years in jail; significantly less than what the respective prosecutors were asking for, as well as far less than what most of those tried in Rwanda and at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) received for comparatively similar charges. While 14 and 25-year sentences are considerably long prison terms and better than none, this is neither sufficient nor is it a strong enough signal to other perpetrators residing in Europe.

Wahutu Siguru is the 2013 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa. 

Professor Philip Spencer is Director of the Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Rights, Conflict and Mass Violence, at Kingston University. The Centre, which he founded in 2004, provides a focus for research and teaching in these areas. His own research interests include the Holocaust, comparative genocide, nationalism, and antisemitism. He is also Director of the University’s European Research Department.

Professor Spencer was a panelist at the CHGS and the Center for Austrian Studies’ discussion on “Antisemitism Then and Now” and gave a lecture on “The Recurrence of Genocide Since the Holocaust”, both of which took place at the University of Minnesota December 5 & 6, 2013.

Is there a necessary divide between Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies?
The field generally was dominated by the study of the Holocaust; that is the genocide about which we know the most. There are complicated reasons why this is the case, but there is massive literature about the Holocaust, which significantly outnumbers literature about any other genocide. Historically, the study of genocide emerged out of Holocaust Studies, and scholars or survivors of the Holocaust became interested in genocide more generally. Some people argue that the Holocaust distorts our understanding about other genocides because it is not a typical case. So one answer was to set up an alternative to Holocaust Studies: Genocide Studies, which is actually challenging the place of the Holocaust, sometimes with a polemical edge, especially in North America. So then you argue we need to move beyond this unhealthy competition, which is a kind of competitive victimology, which is not sensible or right. One should not compare suffering. It´s not about suffering, it is about the nature of a conscious genocidal project. It has a distinctive specificity because of the particularity of the project; Antisemitism as ideology is an important factor.

What is your approach?
We need to understand that both Holocaust and Genocide Studies have a place. But we need to do this by rethinking the place of the Holocaust in the history of genocide. Genocide is both intent and outcome, and the Holocaust is part of the history, it was preceded and followed by genocides. The most influential way of thinking about this now is that we shouldn´t privilege one over the other and we need to think in a more sophisticated way about structure and intent. That view would lead you to thinking that we don´t need to privilege the Holocaust, that we shouldn´t have something called Holocaust and Genocide Studies. My approach is to say, yes, there are important ways of which to say the Holocaust was part of a bigger genocidal story, but the Holocaust also has particular features, which make it a central event in the history of genocide.

If you think about the history it is unlikely that the Genocide

Convention would have been possible without the Holocaust. The Holocaust provided the language and the law to talk about genocide.

How and when should there be intervention?
I try to distinguish the elements necessary for genocide to take place. If you had the intent, the desire, and the fantasy to commit genocide, what would be possible to carry it out? But what I am most interested in are motives and the motivation of states and their populations to intervene and when they are reluctant to become involved. The question of how and when intervention should take place had to be reconsidered at the end of the 1990s, after Rwanda and Yugoslavia. We are reasonably clear now, with what authority the interventions should take place, but we are less clear on the timing. We can take the research on likelihood and proportion, but we do not know about political will.

How do people move from being bystanders to rescuers?
There is quite limited literature on rescuers, especially compared to a lot of literature on perpetrators. Most of it is indeed psychological, about distinguished moral virtues of helpers, their feeling that they just had to help.

But I think it is also important to note that people are not always heroes from day one to the end. Rather, people can move around, become one and the other at different times of a genocide.

What is interesting is the research about the political aspect of what makes people more likely to help others, like resources, capacities and pressures. The question of under what circumstances could people become rescuers raises a valuable contribution to stopping genocides.

— This interview was conducted by Wahutu Siguru & Verena Stern

Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation

by Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich

Museum administrators and curators have the challenging role of finding a creative way to present Holocaust exhibits to avoid clichéd or dehumanizing portrayals of victims and their suffering.

In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines representations in three museums: Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She describes a variety of visually striking media, including architecture, photography exhibits, artifact displays, and video installations in order to explain the aesthetic techniques that the museums employ. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel, and the United States.

Every year in April, the international community recalls the genocide in Rwanda and the failure to intervene. This year, on the 20th anniversary of the genocide, we did the same in several sites and countries around the world. Here at the University of Minnesota, we held a three day-long event that brought together practitioners, scholars, activists and K-12 educators. We asked ourselves what we learned from the Rwandan experience and how these lessons can be used to prevent and intervene in future atrocities. I personally think the world has learned very little from the genocide in Rwanda and that we have failed to efficiently put to use our limited knowledge to prevent other atrocities.

Over the last several months, I have highlighted the on-going atrocities in the Central Africa Republic (CAR) and South Sudan and the abject failure of the UN, African Union (AU), French and other foreign troops in stopping these two atrocities. In that time things have only gotten worse in both countries. Instead of recognizing these failures we have been accosted by reporting that seems hell bent on reminding us of the fact that lessons have been learned. This can be seen in online news organizations such as Think Progress, who thought it more important to remind us that the U.S. had prevented “another Rwanda” and the New York Times reminding us that we are allowing ‘another Rwanda’ in CAR.

The on-going atrocities in South Sudan presents more damning evidence against the assertion that the international community has learned from Rwanda. Last week in Bentiu town the atrocities reached a new low. Rebels stormed the town, killing and pillaging as they went through it. The target group appeared to be anyone that was not from the Nuer community. As the government and rebels trade accusation as to who is responsible, the U.S. government again seems to be twiddling its thumbs and merely called the atrocity in Bentiu an abomination.

The UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), like the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), has strongly condemned “the use of Radio Bentiu FM by some individuals associated with the opposition to broadcast hate speech,” and tried to evacuate as many civilian as it could. What started as a rebellion against the government is now taking a more ghastly turn as the AU and UN debate what to do and how to do it. Perhaps what is even more instructive about this particular atrocity is the fact that the rebels used FM Radio to order the attacks. This in itself should send chills down our spines but also perhaps push the UN and AU to act more decisively.

So have we learned anything from Rwanda? Unfortunately there is no clear answer to this question. From where I sit though, I believe we have learned nothing at all. If we had, I strongly believe we would stop calling every other atrocity ‘another Rwanda’ and instead work on nipping them in the bud. For the dead in the town of Bentiu it will be hard to convince their families that Rwanda has taught us anything, seeing as the order to attack was given on the radio. For the Muslims being evacuated from CAR and for all those who have died and been maimed there, how do we look them in the eye and say “yes, Rwanda did teach us some useful lessons that we have applied in CAR.”

The genocide in Rwanda happened, we let it happen, we need to stop focusing on trying to correct that mistake and focus instead on the current atrocities. This does not mean that the similarities in how the international community and the UN have behaved can be ignored, nor should they. We should think, however, very critically about the effect this has for the conflict. Lest we forget, for most people, Rwanda was a conflict that was particularly based on ethnicity and not political machinations or the fall of commodity prices in the global market. What we have in CAR and South Sudan is not and never was based on ethnicity. Both were a struggle for political power between the government and rebels groups that have now coalesced around religion and ethnicity respectively. These conflicts and related massacres are in no way “another Rwanda” and talking about them as such misses the point of the atrocities.

Wahutu Siguru is the 2013 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa. 

No nos une el amor, sino el espanto.
(We are not united by love, but by horror)

Jorge Luis Borges
(Argentinean poet)

Since Auschwitz it has indeed been possible to speak of a
German-Jewish symbiosis-but of a negative one. For both
Germans and for Jews the result of mass extermination has
become the basis of how they see themselves, a kind of
opposed reciprocity they have in common, willy-nilly.

Dan Diner
(Historian)

The above-cited quotes reveal a tragic irony. The Holocaust has bound forever “Germans” and “Jews” to the past. It has also opened an insurmountable gap that conditions the mutual relationship, as well as the passing on of group identity – of victims and of perpetrators stuck in a permanent position of culpability – to the next generations. Moreover, it perpetuates in time a binary division constructed by the Nazi ideologues: Germans vs. Jews.

Dan Diner’s “negative symbiosis” – this communality of opposites – is not only an appalling legacy of the Holocaust, it represents a fundamental dilemma in post-genocide contexts.

This month of April we commemorate Yom Ha Shoah and also the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. Between April and July 1994, approximately 800,000 people defined as Tutsi were brutally slaughtered by members of the Hutu majority. Today’s Rwandan Tutsi-led Government condemns and even outlaws the use of the vicious ethnic markers of Hutus and Tutsis. “We are all Rwandans” is the watchword. At the same time it insists on naming the events, in ceremonies, memorials and museums, the “Genocide against the Tutsi”.

We often hear that memory helps societies that have suffered large-scale political violence come to terms with and overcome their past. But is remembrance of genocide always a unifying and healing force? By remembering the genocide, Rwandans may well be trapped in the paradox of perpetuating the divisions that they are trying to overcome.

Genocide memory is thus entangled in a problematic logic of questionable group identities and boundaries. According to the UN convention of 1948, genocides are “acts committed withintent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (my emphasis). In other words, without defining a specific group that is targeted for destruction the crimes would not qualify as genocide. Rafael Lemkin coined the term with the objective to set international standards to prevent and punish these type of mass atrocities. But its public remembrance can be a mixed blessing.

Alejandro Baer is the Stephen Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He joined the University of Minnesota in 2012 and is an Associate Professor of Sociology.