Genocides in history (World War I through World War II)
[13] On 24 May 1915, the Allied Powers (Britain, France, and Russia) jointly issued a statement which for the first time ever explicitly charged a government, the Ottoman Empire, with committing a "crime against humanity" in reference to that regime's persecution of its Christian minorities, including Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks.
"[52] The late Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, notes that "hundreds of thousands of Cossacks were killed".
[56] Research by Pavel Polian from the Russian Academy of Sciences on the subject of forced migrations in Russia shows that more than 45,000 Cossacks were deported from the Terek province to Ukraine.
[69][70] Several scholars have disputed the belief that the famine was a genocidal act which was committed by the Soviet government, including J. Arch Getty,[71] Stephen G. Wheatcroft,[72] R. W. Davies,[73] and Mark Tauger.
[79] According to some scholars, collectivization in the Soviet Union and the lack of favored industries were the primary contributors to famine mortality (52% of excess deaths), and some evidence shows that ethnic Ukrainians and Germans were discriminated against.
[82] The collectivization and high procurement quota explanation for the famine is somewhat called into question by the fact that the oblasts of Ukraine with the highest losses being Kyiv and Kharkiv which produced far lower amounts of grain than other sections of the country.
A Ukrainian court found Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Genrikh Yagoda, Yakov Yakovlev, Stanislav Kosior, Pavel Postyshev, Vlas Chubar and Mendel Khatayevich posthumously guilty of genocide on 13 January 2010.
[86] A ruling of 12 January 2010 by Kyiv's Court of Appeal declared the Soviet leaders guilty of "genocide against the Ukrainian national group in 1932–33 through the artificial creation of living conditions intended for its partial physical destruction.
[95] Historian Stephen Wheatcroft criticizes this view because he believed that the high expectations of central planners were sufficient to demonstrate their ignorance of the ultimate consequences of their actions.
[113] The event began on 23 February 1944, when the entire population of Checheno-Ingushetia was summoned to local party buildings where they were told they were to be deported as punishment for their alleged collaboration with the Germans.
Added to the killing of the Forest Brethren and the renewed Dekulakization which followed the Soviet reconquest of the Baltic states at the end of World War II, the total number of people who were deported to Siberia consisted of 118,559 Lithuanians, 52,541 Latvians, and 32,540 Estonians.
[121] The high death rate of the deportees during their first few years in exile, caused by the failure of the Soviet authorities to provide them with suitable clothing and housing after they reached their destination, led some sources to label the affair an act of genocide.
[130] The ethnic cleansing[131][132][133] and deportation of the Crimean Tatars from Crimea was ordered by Joseph Stalin as a form of collective punishment for alleged collaboration with the Nazi occupation regime in Taurida Subdistrict during 1942–1943.
[154][155][156] Bradley Campbell described the Nanjing Massacre as a genocide, because the Chinese were unilaterally killed en masse by the Japanese during the aftermath of the battle for the city, despite its successful and certain outcome.
[157] However, Jean-Louis Margolin does not believe that the Nanjing atrocities should be considered a genocide because only prisoners of war were executed in a systematic manner and the targeting of civilians was sporadic and done without orders by individual actors.
The event was triggered by the Japanese expulsion of Chinese residents from Japanese-occupied Hong Kong in 1942, which resulted in refugees crowding into the city of Guangzhou by ferry along the Pearl River.
The aim of the project was to assimilate the itinerant Yenish people in Switzerland by institutionalizing the parents and forcibly removing their children and placing them in orphanages or foster homes.
[189] La Matanza (Spanish for 'The Massacre') refers to a large scale government killings in western El Salvador[190][191][192] following a communist-indigenous rebellion that took place between 22 and 25 January 1932.
[199] In the 1930s, the Kuomintang's Republic of China government supported Muslim warlord Ma Bufang when he launched seven expeditions into Golog, causing the deaths of thousands of Tibetans.
Count three of the indictment stated that all of the defendants had "conducted deliberate and systematic genocide – namely, the extermination of racial and national groups...."[205] The term "Holocaust" (derived from the Greek words hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt") is often used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews, as part of a program of deliberate extermination which was planned and executed by the National Socialist German Workers Party in Germany, which was led by Adolf Hitler.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, writes that there is no precise figure for the number of murdered Jews,[221] but it has been able to find documentation of more than three million names of Jewish victims,[222][better source needed] which it displays at its visitors center.
To these numbers must be added all those killed in the pogroms and massacres in Romania and Transitrien (over 200,000) and the deported and murdered Jews from Albania and Norway, Denmark and Italy, from Luxembourg and Bulgaria.Some scholars broaden the definition of the Holocaust by including other German killing policies which were carried out during the war, including the mistreatment of Soviet POWs, crimes against ethnic Poles, the mass murder of mentally and physically disabled Germans (which the Nazi authorities framed as "euthanasia"),[247] persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses, the genocide of Romani, and other crimes which the Nazis committed against ethnic, sexual, and political minorities.
Holocaust Memorial Museum, calculated at least 220,000 and possibly closer to 500,000 victims, but this study explicitly excluded the Roma who were murdered in Romania and Yugoslavia (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia) where the genocide of Romanies was intense.
Philimoshin cited sources from the Soviet era to support his figures, he used the terms "genocide" and "premeditated extermination" when he referred to the deaths of 7.4 million civilians in the occupied USSR which were caused by the direct, intentional actions of violence.
Thus, for the time being only in the east, I put ready my Death's Head units, with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language... Adolf Hitler, Obersalzberg Speech, given on 22 August 1939, a week before the invasionThe massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were part of an ethnic cleansing operation carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) West in the Nazi-occupied regions of Eastern Galicia (Nazi created Distrikt Galizien in General Government), and UPA North in Volhynia (in Nazi created Reichskommissariat Ukraine), from March 1943 until the end of 1944.
"[291] Historian Michael Phayer explained that the Nazis' decision to murder all of Europe's Jews is estimated by some to have begun in the latter half of 1941, specifically in late June, which, if correct, would mean that the genocide in Croatia began before the Final Solution.
[301][300] The mass-killings which were committed against non-Serbs by members of the Chetniks, a Yugoslav Royalist and Serbian nationalist movement and guerrilla force, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Sandžak constituted a genocide, according to some historians.
[302][303] This can be seen through the mass-killings of ethnic Croats and Muslims that conformed to the Moljević plan ("On Our State and Its Borders") and the 1941 'Instructions' which were issued by the Chetnik leader, Draža Mihailović, concerning the cleansing of non-Serbs on the basis of creating a post-war Greater Serbia.
[309] Outside the mental health institutions, the figures are estimated to number 20,000 (according to Dr. Georg Renno, the deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the killing facilities known as "euthanasia" centers) or 400,000 (according to Franz Ziereis, the commandant of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp).
[311] Despite not being formally ordered to take part, psychiatrists and psychiatric institutions were at the center of justifying, planning and carrying out the atrocities at every stage, and "constituted the connection" to the later annihilation of Jews and other "undesirables" in the Holocaust.
