For some examples of alternative definitions, please see the accompanying document Defining genocide. However, during the Nuremberg trials in the immediate post-war period, perpetrators were not indicted for the crime of genocide but instead for aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other offences the reason being that the crime of genocide was not introduced into international law until the UN Genocide Convention of The Holocaust is often called the paradigmatic genocide.
In a number of ways, the Holocaust functions as a benchmark for other genocides. Some reasons for this are:. How do these terms relate to each other? In international law, crimes against humanity can be seen as an umbrella category of international crimes.
The following fall under this category:. Genocide differs from other crimes against humanity by the intention to completely or partly destroy a certain group of people.
Other crimes against humanity do not require this specific intent to destroy a group. Some crimes against humanity — such as the use of forced labour, the mass killing of civilians, the confiscation of property and deportation — may be a prelude to genocide or part of its execution.
However, these crimes against humanity do not always lead to genocide, nor are they all always a part of genocide. The Holocaust is the name given to one specific case of genocide: the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to destroy the Jewish people.
All were attempts to destroy a group of people, and all were accompanied by mass murder. However, the genocide of the Jewish people was unprecedented in its totality: in the Nazi's attempt to murder every last Jewish man, woman and child.
While this attempt at total murder was a distinctive feature of the Holocaust, it is important to note that it does not constitute part of the definition of genocide.
Genocide is defined as intent to destroy a group, not necessarily to kill every member of that group. So, while the Holocaust is an extreme example of genocide it should not be taken as a threshold in defining genocide: other crimes do not need to have reached this extreme in order to be defined, and punished, as genocide under international law.
Defining genocide : Some examples of how genocide has been defined The term "genocide" was coined during the Second World War by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin to mean the intentional destruction of national groups on the basis of their collective identity.
Lemkin's purpose was to use this term to bring about a framework of international law with which to prevent and punish what the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had described as "a crime without a name". In this, Lemkin was extraordinarily successful: by the new United Nations had been persuaded to draft the UN Convention on Genocide. The international legal definition of the crime of genocide is found in Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: a Killing members of the group; b Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
While it must be stressed that this remains as the only legal definition of genocide, still it should also be noted that many scholars disagree with this definition, finding the list of possible victim groups too narrow or that the need to prove intent is too demanding. A number of alternative definitions that have been offered are given below. Adam Jones, in his Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction has compiled the following selection of scholarly definitions of genocide, which may be useful for educators and students to reflect upon.
Some scholars appear more than once, an indication of the development of ideas over time in this ongoing debate. Peter Drost Genocide is the deliberate destruction of physical life of individual human beings by reason of their membership of any human collectivity as such. Irving Louis Horowitz [Genocide is] a structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatus. Genocide represents a systematic effort over time to liquidate a national population, usually a minority.
This is not to say that I agree with the definition. On the contrary, I believe a major omission to be in the exclusion of political groups from the list of groups protected. In the contemporary world, political differences are at the very least as significant a basis for massacre and annihilation as racial, national, ethnic or religious differences.
Then too, the genocides against racial, national, ethnic or religious groups are generally a consequence of, or intimately related to, political conflict. However, I do not think it helpful to create new definitions of genocide, when there is an internationally recognized definition and a Genocide Convention which might become the basis for some effective action, however limited the underlying conception. But since it would vitiate the analysis to exclude political groups, I shall refer freely.
Jack Nusan Porter Genocide is the deliberate destruction, in whole or in part, by a government or its agents, of a racial, sexual, religious, tribal or political minority. It can involve not only mass murder, but also starvation, forced deportation, and political, economic and biological subjugation. Yehuda Bauer [Genocide is] the planned destruction, since the mid-nineteenth century, of a racial, national, or ethnic group as such, by the following means: a selective mass murder of elites or parts of the population; b elimination of national racial, ethnic culture and religious life with the intent of "denationalization"; c enslavement, with the same intent; d destruction of national racial, ethnic economic life, with the same intent; e biological decimation through the kidnapping of children, or the prevention of normal family life, with the same intent.
John L. Thompson and Gail A. Quets Genocide is the extent of destruction of a social collectivity by whatever agents, with whatever intentions, by purposive actions which fall outside the recognized conventions of legitimate warfare. Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski Genocide is the deliberate, organized destruction, in whole or in large part, of racial or ethnic groups by a government or its agents. It can involve not only mass murder, but also forced deportation ethnic cleansing , systematic rape, and economic and biological subjugation.
Henry Huttenbach Genocide is any act that puts the very existence of a group in jeopardy. Helen Fein Genocide is a series of purposeful actions by a perpetrator s to destroy a collectivity through mass or selective murders of group members and suppressing the biological and social reproduction of the collectivity. This can be accomplished through the imposed proscription or restriction of reproduction of group members, increasing infant mortality, and breaking the linkage between reproduction and socialization of children in the family or group of origin.
The perpetrator may represent the state of the victim, another state, or another collectivity. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator. Helen Fein Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim.
Steven T. Katz [Genocide is] the actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in its totality any national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender or economic group, as these groups are defined by the perpetrator, by whatever means.
Israel Charny Genocide in the generic sense means the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defencelessness of the victim.
Irving Louis Horowitz Genocide is herein defined as a structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatus Genocide means the physical dismemberment and liquidation of people on large scales, an attempt by those who rule to achieve the total elimination of a subject people.
Preventing and Punishing Crimes Against Humanity The punishment of Nazi crimes — a watershed in international criminal law The foundations for the development of international criminal law were laid by the trials and judgments of the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo after the Second World War.
However, at the Original trial in the early interwar years, offenders were charged with aggressiveness, war crimes, atrocities, and other offenses rather than genocide. The situation of the holocaust was controlled directly by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. As anti-Semitism grew in Germany, a proper term of a Jewish, as well as an Aryan, became necessary. The Nuremberg Laws—the Legislation also for Security of European Blood and German honor and the Legislation of the Fuehrer Citizen—became the cornerstone of anti-Jewish regulations and a justification for describing and categorizing Jews in all German-controlled lands after being codified on September 15, , at the biennial Nazi Party meeting in Nuremberg.
Many people are still terrified by these words, and the cinders of genocide slaughter and gas cell corpses still send out terrifying fumes.
Both the terms deal with human mass extermination and are quite crucial. One is a broader and un-segregated term whereas the other being a strong scenario that once blew away humanity amongst humans. Skip to content The vibes created by the two terms genocide and holocaust are pretty much scary and disturbing, but these terms have been frequently executed throughout human history.
A general term for mass destruction and absolute carnage. On May 8, , the war was over but the aftermath of the events that took place continues to affect the present. This is especially the case as scholars and people continue to struggle with how this could have taken place and how the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators have been repeated through acts of mass violence and other genocides throughout the world. The Jewish population of Germany prior to WWII as of was , people out of a total population of 67 million, making them less than 0.
By the end of the Holocaust, six million European Jews were murdered. In addition to the murder of European Jews, the Nazi government was responsible for the persecution of several other groups of people. Poles, Sinti, and Roma were viewed as racially inferior to the Aryans and were subjected to death and labor camps. Homosexuals, specifically men, were viewed as a hindrance to the preservation of the German nation and were therefore subjected to concentration camps.
In total, five million non-Jews were killed. The first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis, who utilized veiled language, secret operations, and covered up their mass murders by burning bodies and destroying evidence. Their main purpose was to keep victims in the dark for fear of revolt and other factors that would hinder their goals for annihilation.
We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race… This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written. Holocaust deniers maintain that events did not take place as they were written, and that Jews have propagated the myth in order to advance Jewish interests. In other words, Holocaust denial is a form of antisemitism as much as it is a part of the genocidal process—to deny the deaths of those murdered acts as a double-dying, as it seeks to erase the victims from history.
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