After World War II, the genocide of Jews by the Germans across German-occupied territory was on everyone’s minds. Although it was a horrible event in recent history, the Holocaust was not the only genocide of that period. Joseph Stalin ordered 400,000 Chechens and Ingush to be deported to Siberia and central Asia to be put into labor camps on February 23, 1944 (“Greetings from Grozny”). The genocide of the Chechen population has been a terrible event and other genocides around the world should be stopped by efforts of individuals and the United States government.
This area has been subject to genocide since the Second World War. Chechnya is a small region in the Northern Caucasus mountain range in southwest Russia. (“Chechnya”). It is near the Caspian Sea. The genocide of the Chechen people began in 1944 when Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, began “moving whole nationalities like chess pieces on the board” (Pereltsvaig). On November 23, 1990, Chechnya declared itself an independent nation (“Greetings form Grozny”). The reasons Stalin caused this genocide were thus: he needed laborers to extract resources from Siberia, and to grow the economy he needed to move workers to wherever a spot was empty (Pereltsvaig). If Stalin had not started this genocide almost seventy years ago, modern events such as the Boston Marathon Bombing may never have occurred. Over 150,000 Chechens were killed in the 1990s (freechechnya.org). President Yeltsin of Russia declared war on Chechnya and subsequently caused the deaths of 100,000 Chechens and the Chechen president before having Russian forces pushed out of Chechnya (Dupuis). In 1997, Vladmir Putin bombed and destroyed 90% of the capital city of Grozny before invading and captu...
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"Greetings from Grozny." PBS. PBS, 25 July 2002. Web. 11 Nov. 2013. .
Pereltsvaig, Asya. "Stalin's Ethnic Deportations." GeoCurrents. K&J Web Productions, 17 May 2013. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.
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"Stop Russia's Continuing Genocide of the Chechen People and Their Culture." Stop Russia's Continuing Genocide of the Chechen People and Their Culture. American Vietnam Veterans, Web. 11 Nov. 2013.
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“Holocaust, 1933-1945, The” World Without Genocide. William Mitchell College of Law, 2013. Web. 15 Apr. 2014. .
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
Spangenburg, Ray, and Diane Moser. The Crime of Genocide: Terror against Humanity. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2000. Print.
History Place - Genocide in the 20th Century: Stalin's Forced Famine 1932-33. N.p., 2000. Web. 13 Jan. 2014.
...he human depravity one can imagine. Even though Genocide did not begin with the Holocaust, Germany and Adolf Hitlers’ heartless desire for “Aryanization” came at the high cost of human violence, suffering and humiliation towards the Jewish race. These warning signs during the Holocaust, such as Anti-Semitism, Hitler Youth, Racial profiling, the Ghettos, Lodz, Crystal Night, Pogroms, and Deportation unraveled too late for the world to figure out what was going on and help prevent the horrors that came to pass. The lessons learned from all of this provide a better understanding of all the scars genocide leaves behind past and present. In spite the ongoing research in all of these areas today, we continue to learn new details and accounts. By exploring the various warning signs that pointed toward genocide, valuable knowledge was gained on how not to let it happen again.
In this paper, I’ll be focusing on the Holocaust and the genocide in Ukraine, spearheaded by Stalin. The Holocaust is one of the most significant genocides in the history of mankind. (Berger 2007:1). It was significant because it was one of the most organized and systematic genocides ever. The Holocaust also wasn’t limited to only one group of people. It included a whole variety of different races, ethnicities, and cultures. The genocide in Ukraine was led by Stalin, and focused on starving out the Ukrainian people during a time where nationalistic pride was running high. The number of deaths accumulated in the Ukrainian genocide is said to amount from any...
History aims to examine the actions and legacy of mankind. The past is filled with the achievements that humans have reached, however, history also shows us the evil that man is capable of. No atrocity against mankind is more heinous than the act of genocide. Genocide is the aim to destroy all (or part of) of a racial, religious, ethnic, or national group of people. This paper will examine two famous cases of genocide in history: The holocaust of Jews and other groups in Nazi Germany, and the destruction of the Congolese people under Belgian colonialism. The Holocaust remains as one of the main legacies of Hitler and the Nazi party, who claimed an estimated 11 million victims, 6 million of which were Jews. Comparatively, the Congolese Genocide
"When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics"-these are the words of Joseph Stalin, a man who understood that "killing was a tool; properly used it could eliminate enemies, terrorize survivors into submission, and overwhelm outsiders beyond their ability to intervene" (Altman 41). The Soviet government claims that the famine of 1932-1933 was due to "conditions beyond human control," that it was an unfortunate but unintended consequence of the collectivization effort (Altman 47). The reality is that this disaster was not the result of inflation, crop failure, natural disasters, nor war. The shocking truth, which has been buried under sixty-five years of Soviet propaganda and Western corruption, is that the famine was engineered by Stalin and used as a weapon to annihilate between seven and ten million Ukrainians.
The crime of genocide is one of the most devastating human tragedies throughout the history. And the word genocide refers to an organised destruction to a specific group of people who belongs to the same culture, ethnic, racial, religious, or national group often in a war situation. Similar to mass killing, where anyone who is related to the particular group regardless their age, gender and ethnic background becomes the killing targets, genocide involves in more depth towards destroying people’s identity and it usually consists a fine thorough plan prearranged in order to demolish the unwanted group due to political reasons mostly. While the term genocide had only been created recently in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, from the ancient Greek word “genos” meaning race and the Latin word “cide” meaning killing , there are many examples of genocide like events that occurred before the twentieth century. And this new term brings up the question as whether genocide is a contemporary description defined through current perspectives towards the crime act or is it just a part of the inevitable human evolutionary progress caused by modernity.
There are many ideas of what genocide is, but, according to Webster’s Dictionary, the official definition of genocide is “The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group”. However, the more realistic and practical definition is “The unnecessary and unjustified killings of tens of thousands of innocent people all because of hate”. This was most defiantly the case in the Kurdish Genocide, which took place between 1986 and 1989. The result of this mass murdering left thousands of people without loved ones, and even more wondering why it had to happen.
There is no doubt that the Holocaust is one of the best remembered and most studied genocides in human history. There are very few who would be puzzled by the mention of the Holocaust in today’s world as it’s impacts have been immense and lasting. Many lives were lost during this time, and many atrocities occurred- torture and persecution were pushed past the boundaries of most people’s imaginations. Throughout modern history, the Holocaust has been documented over and over again as the worst genocide- and perhaps even the worst crime- in human history. Many historians have even said it was a unique occurrence that is unparalleled by other crimes in human history. This being said, it is not difficult to argue this statement when observing and analyzing the many components of the Holocaust and of other horrible crimes that have happened.
Paradigms of Genocide: The Holocaust, The Armenian genocide, and Contemporary Mass Destructions, 156-168. Sage Publications Inc., 1996. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1048550
Every Armenian remembers the date which he/she lost a family member. On April 24, 1.5 million Armenians were systematically massacred in western Armenia during the years of 1915 to 1923. Turkish governments always denied the charges, historians and government officials relied on undeniable documents and eyewitnesses that Turkey is responsible for the crimes it committed to the Armenian people. Not very many countries recognize the massacre as a genocide, but France, Russia, Sweden, Greece, Argentina, and many others recognize the massacre as a genocide. The Armenian genocide became the primary Genocide of the twentieth century. Who are the Armenians and why was their destiny so tragic? The Armenians are an ancient nation with a very wealthy
This war has given rise to a huge influx of racial hatred that has again helped Putin. Because the majority of the Chechen’s are Muslim, and not of the same ethnic background as Russians, racial discrimination has helped to boost the wars popularity and subsequently Putins. The security of oil in the southern Caucasus states and its transportation routes are the main influential factors in the...
One day a girl named Clara Grossman witnessed her life broken into shambles. She possessed the freedom she wished for, but it was seized out of her hands by Adolf Hitler. She witnessed her own journey first through a ghetto and then the most notorious death camp, Auschwitz. Horrifying scenes and exhausting work left her as a mess. If you were thrown into Clara’s shoes, how would you respond? In 1940, ten years after the Nazis gained authority of Hungary; Hungary established anti-Jewish laws. But four years later, Germany decided to invade Hungary to deplete the last remaining Jewish population in Europe, the Hungarian Jews. At the same time, Auschwitz was becoming an infamous camp where death was a common occurrence. 1.1 million Jews in total were efficiently killed during the Holocaust at Auschwitz. Soon, you will learn the preparations made by Germans to commit genocide and a Hungarian Jew’s experience of the Holocaust.