Genocide
Senior 6 · General and Religious Studies
Genocide
Lesson 2 of 5
25 min
On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior officials of the Nazi Party and the German government met at a villa beside Lake Wannsee, outside Berlin. Reinhard Heydrich of the SS chaired the meeting. In about ninety minutes they agreed how the ministries and the SS would cooperate in the "Final Solution": the murder of all the Jews of Europe.
The meeting did not start the Holocaust. Mass shootings of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union had already begun in the summer of 1941. And behind those shootings lay nine years of steps, each of which made the next one easier: laws, labels, propaganda, militias. Genocide is not a sudden explosion of hatred. It is built.
Definition
Stages of genocide: the processes through which a society moves towards genocide, from dividing people into "us" and "them" to mass killing and its denial. Example: Gregory Stanton's model of ten stages, used by teachers, researchers and early-warning organisations.
Othering: treating a group as alien and outside the community. In Stanton's model it is the combined result of the first four stages.
Incitement: urging others, especially in public, to commit a crime. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide is itself a crime under Article III of the Genocide Convention.
Early warning: spotting the signs that a society is moving towards mass atrocity in time to act. Example: the UN Office on Genocide Prevention's Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes (2014).
Gregory H. Stanton, an American lawyer and anthropologist who founded the organisation Genocide Watch, compared the Holocaust with the Armenian and Cambodian genocides and found the same processes in each. He presented the model as "The Eight Stages of Genocide" at the US State Department in 1996 and later added two stages, discrimination and persecution, to make ten. Stanton himself warns that the "stages" are not a ladder: they overlap, several run at the same time, and every one of them continues to the end. He calls them "predictable but not inexorable", which means they can be seen coming and they can be stopped.
| Stage | What happens | Nazi Germany and occupied Europe, 1933 to 1945 | What can stop it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Classification | People are divided into "us" and "them" by ethnicity, race, religion or nationality | A decree of 14 November 1935 defined who counted as a Jew by the religion of his or her grandparents | Institutions, schools and an identity that cross group lines |
| 2. Symbolization | Names, signs or clothing mark the group | From 19 September 1941, Jews in the Reich aged six and over had to wear a yellow star marked "Jude" | Banning hate symbols; refusing to use the labels |
| 3. Discrimination | Laws or customs deny the group its rights | The Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 removed Jews' citizenship and banned their marriage to other Germans | Equal citizenship in law, and courts that protect it |
| 4. Dehumanization | The group is called vermin, insects or disease | Propaganda papers such as Der Stürmer, and the 1940 film Der ewige Jude, which compared Jews to rats | Prosecuting incitement; answering hate speech in the media |
| 5. Organization | Armies, militias or special units are formed to commit the crimes | The SS and its police organs; the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units, followed the army into the Soviet Union in 1941 | Banning militias; arms embargoes; investigating hate groups |
| 6. Polarization | Moderates, often from the perpetrators' own group, are silenced, arrested or killed | Political opponents were sent to Dachau and other camps from March 1933; Germans were told not to buy from Jewish shops (boycott of 1 April 1933) | Protecting moderate leaders and human-rights defenders |
| 7. Preparation | Leaders plan the killing; perpetrators are trained and armed | The Wannsee Conference, 20 January 1942; the building of killing centres | Early warning; UN Security Council action; prosecuting conspiracy |
| 8. Persecution | Victims are identified, separated, robbed, deported and concentrated | The Kristallnacht attacks of 9 and 10 November 1938; ghettos in occupied Poland from 1939; deportations | Sanctions, humanitarian aid, help for refugees, a prepared intervention force |
| 9. Extermination | Mass killing with intent to destroy the group | About six million Jews murdered, two out of every three Jews in Europe | Rapid armed protection of the victims |
| 10. Denial | Perpetrators hide evidence and deny the crime, during and after it | Officials tried to destroy evidence of the killings before the Allied armies arrived; Holocaust denial continues today | Trials, memorials, archives and education |
Warning
A model, not a checklist. Do not write that a society "is at stage 6" as if the earlier stages had ended. Stanton stresses that the processes overlap and continue together. And do not call every insult or unfair law "genocide": the stages describe risk. Only stage 9, with the special intent you met in Lesson 1, is the crime itself.
The same processes can be traced in Rwanda before 1994: identity cards that from the 1930s recorded every Rwandan's "ethnic" category; quotas that limited the places open to Tutsi in schools and public jobs; propaganda that called Tutsi inyenzi ("cockroaches"); militias such as the Interahamwe, trained and armed; and the murder of Hutu politicians who opposed the plan. The practice exercises below ask you to classify some of this evidence. Notice how many of the signs were public. Warnings were given, and the world did not act on them in time.
Tip
Name, explain, illustrate, prevent. For "describe the stages of genocide", the best answers do four things for each stage: name it, explain it in one sentence, give a dated example from a real genocide, and say how it could be stopped. Choosing four stages and doing all four things well scores better than listing ten names.
Important
Discuss. Stanton says that ordinary people can act at every stage, not only governments. Choose two stages. For each, what could a student, a journalist or a religious leader do to stop the process?
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (United Kingdom): "The 10 stages of genocide", about two minutes. Watch for the example the narrator gives for each stage, and compare it with the table above.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: Figure 2, the table, the analysis and the exercises.
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
