本文作者简介

Wolf Gruner, Founding Director, USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Professor of History, University of Southern California Department of History.沃尔夫·格鲁纳，美国南加州大学犹太大屠杀基金会种族屠杀高级研究中心主任、教授。

The Twisted Path of Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

Potential Avenues of Comparison with the 1937/38 Nanjing Atrocities

The twisted trajectory of Holocaust and genocide studies

In the beginning of Genocide studies, a simplistic understanding of the origins and causes of the Holocaust provided for many scholars a dominant blueprint to identify other cases of systematic mass murder. Following a 20th century-centric model, most scholars understood genocide as perpetrated by one state, fostered by one ideology, and targeting one victim group. While this scheme seemed to be applicable to the Genocide against the Armenians executed by the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, for most cases of systematic mass murder the historical conditions and situations have been more complicated.

Many of the earlier standard works on the Holocaust have dealt with the planning and implementation of national anti-Jewish laws, and the main German wide notorious violent events, such as the April boycott in 1933 or the Kristallnacht in 1938. These approaches focused on the decision making process of the Nazi leadership and concentrated on the party, the SS or the Gestapo as the chief perpetrator agencies.

While many renowned studies aimed rather at understanding the decision-making process, only a few explored the conditions and structures, which led to or enabled the killing, as Raul Hilberg’s early seminal work in the 1960s. The study of the impact of the persecution policies on the Jewish population has been equally rare, with the exception of Saul Friedlaender’s important studies and David Cesarani’s posthumously published work on the so called final solution.

For a long time, the common explanation for the rapid radicalization of anti-Jewish policies emphasized as its driving force whether the existence and spread of a radical anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (intentionalism) or a power rivalry among German institutions (functionalism). Yet, during the 1990s, scholarly research started to challenge this simplistic picture of the Third Reich. This development was fostered by the international debate on re-compensation for the victims, the opening of long closed archives behind the Iron Curtain and new questions and approaches generated by a new (international) generation of Holocaust scholars in Germany, Poland, Israel and the United Stated that left behind the traditional national separation in Holocaust studies.

First, new studies on Nazi persecution in Germany and Poland evolved that complicated our view on the persecution of the European Jews and the development of their annihilation over the course of the next decade. Scholars published in depth research on hitherto overlooked elements of anti-Jewish policy, as Aryanization, forced labor and the role of municipalities, and broadened our understanding of the radicalization processes, its driving forces and agencies.

Moreover, the intense research on the Holocaust of the last 25 years has convincingly demonstrated that the simplistic understanding of a central orchestration in Berlin, as described in the beginning of this article, does not serve well to explain the persecution and murder of the Jews in Europe. New studies painted a much more complex picture based on new evidence that demonstrated dynamic interactions between local, regional and central administrations whether in Germany or occupied Poland and how those radicalized the persecution and murder of the Jews. For example, new insights into the organization of Forced labor of Jews revealed that mainly labor offices and local administration, not the SS were responsible for the formulation and organization of these policies. In general, the room for maneuver at all institutional levels turned out to be bigger as historians previously expected and acknowledged. Moreover, rather economic than ideological reasons shaped this element of the persecution.

Such findings proved to be especially important, since some researchers connected racial radicalism exclusively with the generation of the around 1900 born young academics who led as the leadership of the SS the extermination of the Jews as well as the euthanasia program. By contrast, municipal elites were born mainly between 1880-1890, enjoyed different socialization and goals and if we are comparing their biographies with their activities, we find highly active non-party members on the one hand and old Nazi party members with indifference to anti-Jewish activities on the other and some others even changed their attitudes depending on the situation. Studies on different institutions revealed that individual motivations such as career advancement, greed, personal revenge, yet also neglected institutional interests, as in cheap labor, real estate or budget deliberations, might have shaped persecution more then we formerly expected.

New studies not only complicated the story of the Holocaust in Germany and Poland, as well as in the Baltic States and the former Soviet territories, but also taught us how the Holocaust in Western Europe unfolded. A new generation of scholars in France and the Netherlands explored the development of anti-Jewish policy and the involvement of local non-German institutions and personnel, investigating expropriation, courts and municipalities. Evidence from recent studies shows overwhelmingly that besides Gestapo, SS and other Germans officials in new regional and local administrations in the occupied territories who initiated anti-Jewish measures, also many indigenous actors in existing institutions were equally highly active in discriminating against Jews.

Thus, the broad participation of the German and indigenous people emerged as the most highly underestimated reason for the radicalization of the anti-Jewish persecution as well as for the stability of the NS-Regime in general. Comparative studies on the personnel that was involved in the holocaust is key to understand why some institutions played an active part and others did not, what drove the radicalization and who launched persecution policies and why.

What can we say about the state of genocide studies?

In the Handbook of Genocide Studies published by Oxford University Press in 2010, the two editors, Dirk Moses and Donald Bloxham claim that Genocide studies has formed indeed a field of study. They even call it a discipline, with its own journals, academic programmes, and public impact. While the claim of the latter seems overstated, since each academic discipline is defined by a set of specific skills and methods, Genocide Studies does indeed constitute an internationally growing field with two major international professional associations and biannual conferences.

Since the beginning, Genocide Studies had been deeply entangled with Holocaust studies, the latter furthering the interest in, yet also hindering methodologically the evolution of the former. While Holocaust studies were mainly advanced by historians, political scientists and sociologists authored the first prominent books on genocide and shaped the genocide field for the first decades. During the early period, much of the focus was documentation of the crimes, while much of the analytical discussion was consumed by the question about the proper definition. This development produced a dire need for a ‘historicization’ of genocide studies, as the editors of the 2010 Handbook called it.

Since a decade, a new generation of genocide scholars, who are overwhelmingly trained in history, started with a diversification of research topics and an investigation of mass crimes in their own right. They began to abandon the ‘Holocaust paradigm’ by studying context, causes and processes of mass violence and by departing from its early dominant obsession of the real definition of genocide.

The first decades were literally consumed by a heated debate about a) what is a genocide and b) which cases can be called a genocide. While these discussions about the definition never yielded a definitive answer, they often prevented deeper research of the origins and developments of the actual cases of mass violence.While in the beginning the monolithic and simplistic idea of a Holocaust served as the bar for other genocides, later more variations were accepted. Yet, still today we live with the contradiction that despite the existence of two prominent Genocide definitions, the original definition coined by Lemkin before 1944 and the United Nations convention from 1948, almost every genocide scholar feels tempted to challenge the two definitions.

Raphael Lemkin’s broad approach included the cultural dimension of the extinction of one group. Yet, he was not just an activist lawyer with a global message. He undertook serious historical studies, including on colonial mass violence, before drafting first the international crime of ‘barbarity’ (1933) and later coining the term ‘genocide’, which the United Nations adopted in 1948 with a rather flawed definition deprived of its original cultural dimension, but enriched by the category of “intent”.

Despite the existence of a legal definition, over the last decade many scholars resorted to the formulation of their very own private definitions of genocide -to escape the need to address the flaws of the legal definition or the over boarding broadness of Lemkin’s approach, as Adam Jones aptly accounts for in his “comprehensive introduction” to genocide studies. He cites dozens of individual definitions drawn from prominent publications of the last decades.

The problem with the definition points to another conceptual issue. Most of the scholarly genocide definitions restrict their focus onto the mass killings, reducing the more broad conceptions of genocide to the final phase of persecution, thus also reducing the interest in researching genocide to the phase of the murder and its immediate pre-history. Translated to Holocaust studies this would mean for the researchers to start their studies of the Holocaust only with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. By contrast, for decades Holocaust historians thoroughly dissected the 1930ies, scrutinized the 1920ies and even interrogated the 19th century to find hints for early Holocaust aspirations in Germany or Europe. Although the intense scrutiny of the pre-period for Germany might have gone too far in some cases, no in-depth analysis comparable to what the Holocaust field developed is available for any of the other genocide cases, where scholars scarcely studied earlier developments. Just look at the Ottoman Empire with the massacres against Armenians in 1895/6 and 1915. How the two instances of systematic mass violence relate to each other is still an open question. Here, the recent advancement of Holocaust studies, their scope and methodologies could function as a prime example and model in a positive way.

While it is remarkable, how a new generation of scholars has begun to transform the Genocide field so much: from its highly politicised and ‘Euro-centric’ start, to today’s transnational and global endeavour studying cases like Tasmania and California in the 19^th century or the partition of India, Cambodia and Guatemala in the 20^th century. However, this process is far from complete. As most scholars have been trained in and do work at North American and European universities, genocide research still needs to be developed further in Asia, Africa and Latin America itself. This is especially important to challenge western views and perspectives, which are still deeply influenced by the long lasting Holocaust paradigm.

Twisted memories of Holocaust and Genocide

In the West, memories of the European Holocaust seem to have eclipsed all other incidents of systematic mass violence. Only during the last two decades, the public and academia, triggered by the horrific mass violence in Rwanda, Darfur and recently Iraq, seemed to be more aware of other genocides.

The situation was different, though, before the Second World War. Exploring the famous diary of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew and university professor of Romanic literature in Dresden, one is struck by a surprising entry. On March 31, 1933, the very day the Nazi party announced a nationwide boycott of Jewish stores and offices for the next morning, Klemperer summarized the first wave of anti-Jewish repression of the previous weeks in his diary and concluded his entry with one remarkable sentence: “Instead of Germany one should call it Arminia. This sounds more like Armenia.”

As a trained academic, he obviously obtained sufficient historic knowledge to create this impressive metaphor for the plight of the oppressed Jews. Yet, would the rest of the German population have understood Klemperer’s metaphor in 1933?

The unexpected answer is yes. Knowledge about the systematic mass murder of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had spread quickly and widely already during and especially after the First World War in Germany. In the summer of 1919 the Kölnische Volkszeitung called the mass murder of the Armenian people “the biggest crime in world history.” By reading their newspapers, alone, Germans could learn about many horrific details of the massacre, including the fact that during four days in June 1915, the Turkish army slaughtered between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand people, mostly women and children, at the Kemach Gorge. Newspaper articles, lea flats, public talks of missionaries and wittnesses, public trials, books, even poems and theater plays stirred an almost uninterrupted public discussion and awareness from the end of the First World War until 1933. Entries in encyclopedias described the massacres. Even a special term “Armenian atrocities” (Armenier Greuel) was coined to describe the horror. German Politicians, journalists and lawyers as well as persecuted Jews frequently employed this special expression until 1945.

The widespread conscience about the “Armenian atrocities” in Inter-War Germany should not come as a surprise, when one considers that only seventeen years had passed since the atrocities had been committed. The mass slaughter of Armenians was no more distant for the German contemporaries in 1933 than the genocide in Rwanda is for us today.

Hence, after the beginning of the persecution of the Jews in Germany, references to the fate of the Armenians served repeatedly as a warning. In diaries written in Germany as well as in publications printed in exile, German and other Jews referred to the “Armenian atrocities”. After the Nazi occupation of Poland and the start of mass deportations from the Third Reich, some sharp-eyed German Jews understood these developments to be a serious threat and pointed again to the example of the extermination of the Armenians by the Ottomoans to alert European Jewry.

However, after 1945 the memory of the more recent Nazi extermination of the European Jews, quickly eclipsed the memory of the mass murder of the Armenian people. Back in 1930, Heinrich Vierbücher, a journalist, could still write about the singularity of the murder of the Armenians: “Annihilation of an entire nation with the conscious slaughter of women and children—to this progress the past was not ‘ripe.’[…] After all attempts to comprehend, using all available explanations such as the lust for murder, ravenousness, religious hatred, imperiousness and ignorance, there is still so much left that is inconceivable, that the tragedy of 1915 seems to us to have been the bloodiest and most atrocious mystery in history.”

Yet, after the end of the Second World War in 1945, such words would increasingly understood as a text pointing to the Nazi annihilation of the European Jews. New memories slowly began to conceal what had become the just three-decades-old history of the destruction of the Armenians. Auschwitz would eventually replace the “Kemach Gorge”, as the symbol of an “unprecedented,” horrific, and systematic slaughter of a people by another people.

Besides this European shift in memory, when the Holocaust eclipsed the Armenian genocide, another historic event of systematic slaughter got fully lost from memory, because it happened far away in Asia: The Nanking atrocities. Interestingly, on Christmas Eve in 1937, Georg Fitch, an American Protestant missionary in China, wrote a letter to his wife about the unfolding mass slaughter of Chinese people by the Japanese army that had started in December during the invasion of the Nanjing area. The words of the missionary reminds us very much of the judgement on the Armenian genocide by the German Vierbücher: “I pray it may be soon-but I am afraid it is going to go on for many months to come, not just here, but in other parts of china. I believe it has no parallel in modern history.”

Beyond the genocide canon: Avenues of comparison with the Nanjing atrocities

Beyond this personal impression of the unprecedented nature of the systematic mass violence, that a German journalist shared with an American missionary about two different events of mass murder, what similarities could a historian find looking at the atrocities perpetrated during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937/38?

Let us start with some obvious parallels standing out for a genocide scholar, who investigates the Nanjing massacres. From today’s standpoint, the history of denial by the Japanese state strikingly reminds one of lasting battle fought by the Turkish government on a daily basis. In both cases of mass violence, the arguments are very similar. The governments blame a) the victims for exaggerating its own losses, and b) the obvious casualties, that the perpetrators can’t deny, were to be only results of the war or in a different version have been produced by quelling the resistance of the victims.

Quite similar seem also the stories of their fading acknowledgement of victim numbers. Right after the end of World War I, the Turkish government publicly acknowledged the murder of 800,000 Armenians, but soon it decreased the number to 600,000. Today it would barely admit 200,000 victims, while the Armenian community claims that it had lost 1,5 Million people during the systematic slaughter of 1915/16. Similarly, Japan first accepted the verdicts of the post war crimes trials with the 1951 San Francisco peace treaty. In the former, the judgement of brigade commander Matsui Iwane mentioned the death of 200.000 civilians and POW’s in Nanjing and its vicinity. Yet, today, Japan would acknowledge only a marginal percentage of the former number.

Regarding the actual events, one potential avenue for scholarly comparison in the future could be to understand the Japanese conquest as a colonial expansion. Recently, there is some academic discussion, in which scholars classify Japan’s new order in the 1930ies as an imperial expansion and emphasize its colonial character. While there is an acknowledgement that Japan’s policy was characterized by a deep-rooted racism, at the same time some historians claim that this did not led to genocide.

In comparison, one can of several colonial genocides during the 19^tsh and 20^th centuries. One example could be the genocide of 1904, when the Germans defeated and massacred the Herero and Nama warriors in South West Africa and starved the rest to death in the desert. Yet, after some more deliberations, the obvious comparison to Japan is the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

However, in both cases, the Germans have colonized a territory using mass murder as a tool to control the space. Under the cover of a war, systematic murder was implemented to first gain and then to exercise control of the conquered lands. The German forces aimed at achieving security by breaking any existing or imagined resistance stemming from partisans or an armed guerilla.

When we analyze the Japanese invasion of China as a colonial expansion, we shall compare especially it to the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union, which more and more scholars perceive as a colonial enterprise recently. Here, systematic murder was implemented to exercise control of the quickly conquered vast lands, when resources were scarce, to achieve maximum security by breaking any emerging or imagined resistance.

In July 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the German security police, issued an order to kill all soviet commissars and all Jews in state functions in the occupied Soviet territories The order aimed at securing the hinterland by any means, and preventing a potential resisting guerilla from evolving. First, the Germans began to kill Jewish men in large numbers, because they were imagined as potential resistors. Soon, the security forces also started to murder Jewish women and children as potential harbors’ of future resistance in August of 1941.

Security concerns similar to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union are equally mentioned in Japanese sources. The sixteenth Japanese division took control of the Nanjing area after the invasion. Hence, the Japanese head of security, a brigade commander, called for so-called mop up actions in the city in January of 1938. The army were to search for potential resisters. Hence, they saw all youth and adult males as defeated stragglers or soldiers in civilian clothes and rounded them up, even in the international safety zone during so called mop up actions. As a result, soldiers executed several thousand men at the banks of the Yangtze River.  

While quelling resistance was an important element to explain the start of systematic mass murder in the occupied Soviet Union, there was an additional motivation according to scholars as Christian Gerlach: the extreme food shortage in the Nazi occupied East. Especially, the next waves of extermination of the Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltic states during the fall of 1941 and in summer and fall of 1942 have been supposedly motivated by the extreme scarcity of food. The context for the important food argument is that before the beginning of the invasion, the German Army had received the order from Berlin to live off the land,so that during the war all other food could serve to feed the population in Germany proper. This order was supposed to avoid the repetition of the starvation at the home front during World War One, which have been seen as weakened the German war effort.

However, the new war plan did not play out well, since the German invasion starting in June of 1941 took longer than expected, long into the fall and thus disrupted the harvest. As a result, the occupied territories did not produce enough food to feed both: the German occupants and the indigenous population. This unexpected situation of tremendous shortage provided an additional reason to kill the Jews: as sub-humans and unnecessary eaters.

Similarly, the 16. Division of the Japanese army in China wrote in a report on the conditions on 24 December 1937, “We made it a rule for men and horses to live off the land on this operation.” Thus, 200,000 Japanese men invading Nanjing County were forced to find alimentation. This situation led to systematic looting and burning of villages by the Japanese army on its way to Nanjing until the city fell on 13 December 1937. Parts of the population became homeless and vagabond, and hence a target for the Japanese army. Countless smaller massacres, thus, took place outside of the city in Nanjing’s special administrative district. They lasted from 4 December 1937 until 28 March 1938 and were part of a wider Japanese policy.

Another aspect for potential comparison between the Nazi and Japanese invasion policies could be the treatment of the prisoners of war. Japan saw no need to respect international law towards China. The emperor army’s open policy was not to accept prisoners. Troop commanders even received orders from above to kill POW’s. This criminal treatment of enemy POW’s constituted a part of Japans view to perceive this invasion not as a declared war, but rather conflict or an violent incident. Thus, on 16 and 17 December 1937 alone, Japanese military shot 17,000-18,000 Chinese prisoners on orders at the Yangtze River near Mufashan,

During the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans did not kill all Soviet captured soldiers immediately. However, many soldiers died. First, security forces went into the POW camps. They singled out and killed so called communist commissars as well as Jews among the captured troops. This policy cost over a hundred thousand men’s lives. Later, the Germans held millions of Soviet POW’s in open-air camps. The lack of shelter and food led to the deaths of 2 million men within 6 months.

The mass murder and looting campaign perpetrated by the Japanese army in the Nanjing area included also the mass rape of women. The Allied indictments after the war talked about 20-80,000 rapes in addition to the 200,000 to 300,000 deaths of civilians in Nanjing. For the Holocaust, only recently scholarly research started to discuss rape during the German occupation of the East. Previously, it was not even thought of, because of the alleged racial taboo for the German soldiers. However, in his posthumously published book on the final solution the late British scholar David Cesarani provides us in pioneering fashion with ample evidence that rape by Germans and Non Germans, was a frequent occurrence in the occupied East esp. in occupied countries and territories in the east, as Ukraine, Poland, Rumania, Soviet Union.

The victims of sexual violence were often shot to get rid of the evidence of the rape crime. This policy resembles the actions of many Japanese soldiers. While we do not know yet the actual scale of mass rape under the Nazi’s a better studied case for comparison regarding the Japanese rape crimes we might find in Guatemala or Rwanda during the genocides of 1980-1982 and 1994, where cases of sexual violence and rape count by the tens of thousands. Again, often the victims were also murdered after the rape committed.

In sum, while there are various avenues for future comparison, between the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing and vicinity and other genocidal events in history, we need to do more work on the general reasons for key decisions for mass murder and rape as well as on the actual motives for the participants in these genocidal crimes.

Conclusion

Systematic mass violence against a certain people is a recurrent in world’s history and needs to be included as such in historical dictionaries. Contradicting the idea of the Holocaust as an isolated or unique phenomenon in the 20th century, research has demonstrated again and again that that similar instances of mass violence happened on different scales in many countries during the 19^th and 20^th century: from the colonial extermination of the indigenous populations in Tasmania and California to the genocides in the Ottoman empire or post-colonial countries like Cambodia and Rwanda.

For these reasons, Mark Levene suggested that we should not think about genocide as abnormal, but rather see its historic roots in the nation-state model, which aims to maximize its resource potential in the quest for development. Moreover, he even painted a dark world of future violent scenarios driven by environmental and economic crises. If systematic mass violence against a certain people is a pattern of world history, we need, thus, to study its conditions, developments and outcomes thoroughly in a comparative way.

The study of the history and memory of the Holocaust as well as other genocides, has taken a twisted path, however. While at the beginning, a simplistic perception of the Holocaust served as colonizing blueprint for other genocides and often restricted the academic discussion to the sole aim to find similar strands in taking other cases of mass violence seriously. Later, the extensive research into the former led to a more complex comprehension of the motives, interest and processes involved, thus Holocaust research recently became a more nuanced and sophisticated model for genocide studies.

Instead of the still overwhelming focus on mass killing as the field for study, which does not explain much, why these killings happened, genocide research should rather emphasize the careful examination of the specific historical conditions as well as the interests and motives, the political alternatives and individual responsibilities of the perpetrators.

History needs to be perceived as an open development driven by humans who act on diverse and often conflicting interests. The latter heavily impacts, which one of the existing historical alternatives are chosen by the people, hence, which path the society is following and why. Such an approach may shed equally light onto hitherto neglected cases not currently included in the Genocide canon, as the Nanjing atrocities committed by the Japanese army.

My preliminary research unearthed several interesting parallels between other events of genocide. First, the similarities between the mass killings perpetrated by the Japanese army in the Nanjing area in 1937/38, and the Armenian genocide in 1915/16 committed by the Young Turks are obvious when we look at such questions as memory and denial. Secondly, one notes unexpected parallels between the Japanese imperial invasion of China and the Nazi colonialization of the European East in 1941. Important features are for example, the policy of conquest and its tights connection to maintain security via mass violence by battling real and imagined resistance, the policy to demand from the invading army to live off the occupied land, both led to systematic mass looting, arsoning, pillaging and murder. And last but not least, the policy of mass rape can be an open avenue for comparison.

Future research might provide us with even more ways to establish comparable elements of the Nanking atrocities to other instance of mass violence and genocides in world history. Yet,, this is for others to explore

英文载于《日本侵华南京大屠杀研究》英文刊2020年第二期，注释从略。

中文载于《日本侵华南京大屠杀研究》中文刊2019年第一期。