Shared Characteristics Between Nazi and Hutu Genocides

Although the two genocides were almost 50 years apart, the mass killings during the Nazi and Hutu regimes have several shared characteristics. Academics Christopher Browning, and Daniel Goldhagen have very strong suggestions as to how the German soldiers became ruthless killers in their essays. Equivalently, historians who have studied the Rwandan genocide have reported that Hutus were also conditioned through a process to transform from victims of colonization to violent murderers. The contemporary genocide in Rwanda is similar to the Holocaust in the way that the dominant party’s government attempted to systematically destroy an enemy by manipulating their population into weapons for implementation of destruction.

Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen were born in the United States, and their works about German Reserve Police Battalion 101’s violence against the Jewish people were written in the 1990s. Goldhagen’s father was a Holocaust survivor, which undoubtedly had an impact on the development of his theories about German anti-Semitism. The historians have conflicting views of the extent to which the soldiers were willing to commit murder, and the role anti-Semitism had in the violence. However, both essays agree in essence that the men of the Battalion became cruel and unforgiving with their actions towards the Jewish people.

The Rwandan genocide took place in 1994, as a result of a conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis; two ethnically different groups who were opposite sides during the Civil War prior to the genocide. Hutus and Tutsis have historically always shared a division whether it was in ethnicity or economic affluence. Tutsis were significantly wealthier in the pre-colonization period whereas the Hutus were...

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