The Holocaust and Other Genocides

Graph courtesy UN Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Genocide is the systematic and purposeful destruction of a racial, political, religious, or cultural group.

During the buildup to WWII, Adolph Hitler and the Nazis exploited anti-Semitic sentiment which had existed in Europe and Russia for centuries by scapegoating Jews for the country's economic problems and defeat in World War I. By combining an extremist nationalist ideology that promoted the idea of the Germans as a master race with a totalitarian state that permitted no opposition, the Nazis created a climate which made possible their Final Solution - to kill the Jews and other undesirables in the gas chambers. As the war went on, the Final Solution became a reality responsible for the deaths of over 10,000 people a day at its maximum, resulting in the murder of six million Jews and millions of others.

Various other instances of genocide occurred throughout the twentieth century. The leaders of the Ottoman Empire targeted the Armenian Christian population during World War I. Joseph Stalin killed millions of peasants, government and military leaders, and members of the elite in the Soviet Union. Pol Pot in Cambodia attempted to create an agrarian utopia and killed many of the artists, technicians, former government officials, monks, minorities, and other educated individuals which he believed were an impediment to his goal. The most recent example was Rwanda where the majority Hutus viciously killed the minority Tutsi ethnic group while the world did little to stop the brutality.

The United Nations Genocide Convention was signed in 1948 after WWII, and is currently supported by 160 member countries. As we saw with Rwanda, it's often difficult to get world leaders to agree genocide is happening and to send in U.N. troops to try and stop it. For example, news reports about killings in the Darfur province in Sudan in the first decade of the 21st century suggested that that the government was targeting certain ethnic groups. As of 2012, after several years of reports and investigations, it's unlikely that the U.N. will ever declare that genocide took place.

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