Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons^™

Book Review: Derviš M. Korkut: A Biography—Rescuer Of The Sarajevo Haggadah, Ehlimana Memišević

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

At the beginning of 2020, the Sarajevo-based publishing house El-Kalem, released a biography of Derviš M. Korkut, a Bosniak hero, to whom Yad Vashem posthumously awarded Righteous among the Nations on December 14, 1994.

Winston Churchill's words, with which the author begins the biography—that the Balkans produce more history than they can handle—best describe the difficult times in which Korkut lived. For Korkut and his fellow Bosnians, these difficult times lasted from the beginning of the 20th century to its very end.

The book is based on exhaustive archival research and reconstructs Korkut’s life very precisely, while the concise overview …

The Restitution Of Nazi-Looted Art In The United States: A Legal And Policy Analysis, Katharine J. Namon

Senior Theses and Projects

Restitution of Nazi-looted art in the United States is a complicated legal and policy issue. Victims and their heirs seeking restitution of their stolen art frequently encounter inconsistent legal standards at the state, federal, and international levels. Moreover, there are many different parties involved in these cases, including countries, museums, private collections, auction houses, heirs, and individuals who may have an interest in the particular work of art. Ethics must also be considered, and in the past, international principles for nations have been established to guide the process of delivering victims of wartime looting justice. Unfortunately, the current legal framework …

Johnson V. M'Intosh: Christianity, Genocide, And The Dispossession Of Indigenous Peoples, Cynthia J. Boshell

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Using hermeneutical methodology, this paper examines some of the legal fictions that form the foundation of Federal Indian Law. The text of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1823 Johnson v. M’Intosh opinion is evaluated through the lens of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to determine the extent to which the Supreme Court incorporated genocidal principles into United States common law. The genealogy of M’Intosh is examined to identify influences that are not fully apparent on the face of the case. International jurisprudential interpretations of the legal definition of genocide are summarized and used as …

Never Again? The United Nations And Genocide: A Doomed Mission?, Maria Terrinoni

Capstone Showcase

Despite their commitment to international peace and security and to the concept of “never again,” the United Nations has failed to end the many genocides of the late 20th century. In this thesis, I use the genocides in Rwanda (1994) and in the Yugoslav Wars (1991-1999) as case studies to understand the UN’s response to genocide and to attempt to understand why the UN cannot effectively respond to and end genocide. I discover that issues such as the limitations of the Genocide Convention, the importance of state sovereignty, and overall institutional failures of the United Nation make any attempt to …

"A Hussy Who Rode On Horseback In Sexy Underwear In Front Of The Prisoners": The Trials Of Buchenwald’S Ilse Koch, Mark A. Drumbl, Solange Mouthaan

Scholarly Articles

Ilse Koch’s trials for her role in atrocities at the Nazi Buchenwald concentration camp served as visual spectacles and primed her portrayal in media and public spaces. Koch’s conduct was credibly rumored to be one of frequent affairs, simultaneous lovers, and the sexual humiliation of prisoners. The gendered construction of her sexual identity played a distortive role in her intersections with law and with post-conflict Germany. Koch’s trials revealed two different dynamics. Koch’s actions were refracted through a patriarchal lens which spectacularized female violence and served as an optical space to (re)establish appropriate feminine mores. Feminist critiques of Koch’s trials …

Making The Case For Genocide, The Forced Sterilization Of Indigenous Peoples Of Peru, Ñusta P. Carranza Ko

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Peru’s national health program Programa de Salud Reproductiva y Planificación Familiar (PSRPF) aimed to uphold women’s reproductive rights and address the scarcity in maternity related services. Despite these objectives, during PSRPF’s implementation the respect for women’s rights were undermined with the forced sterilization of women predominantly of indigenous, poor, and rural backgrounds. This study considers the forced sterilization of indigenous women as a genocide. Making the case for genocide has not been done previously with this particular case. Using the normative markers of the Genocide Convention, this study categorically sets forced sterilization victims from the state-led-policy as victims of genocide, …

Nazi-Confiscated Art: Eliminating Legal Barriers To Returning Stolen Treasures, Stephanie J. Beach

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

World War II ended over three-quarters of a century ago, but there still remain prisoners of war. Before and during the war, the Nazis confiscated approximately 650,000 works of art—an “art theft” orchestrated by Adolf Hitler to rid society of Jewish art and artists and to collect worthy works to build his own art capital. Seventy-five years later, looted Holocaust-era artworks are still either undiscovered or in the possession of museums across the globe without proper ownership attribution or payment to Holocaust survivors or their heirs. There are modern remedies, such as the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, …

Complicity In The Perversion Of Justice: The Role Of Lawyers In Eroding The Rule Of Law In The Third Reich, Cynthia Fountaine

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

A fundamental tenet of the legal profession is that lawyers and judges are uniquely responsible—individually and collectively—for protecting the Rule of Law. This Article considers the failings of the legal profession in living up to that responsibility during Germany’s Third Reich. The incremental steps used by the Nazis to gain control of the German legal system—beginning as early as 1920 when the Nazi Party adopted a party platform that included a plan for a new legal system—turned the legal system on its head and destroyed the Rule of Law. By failing to uphold the integrity and independence of the profession, …

Persistence Of Jewish-Muslim Reconciliatory Activism In The Face Of Threats And “Terrorism” (Real And Perceived) From All Sides, Micah B.D.C. Naziri

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation concerns how Jewish-Muslim and Israel-Palestine grassroots activism can persist in the face of threats to the safety, freedom, lives, or even simply the income and employment of those engaged in acts of sustained resistance. At the heart of the study are the experiences of participants in the Hashlamah Project, an inter-religious collaboration project, involving Jews and Muslims. Across chapters and even nations, chapters of this organization faced similar threats and found universally-applicable solutions emerging for confronting those threats and persisting in the face of them. This raised the question of whether revolutionaries and activists in general can persevere …

Film Review: Operation Finale, Melanie O'Brien

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

In 1960, the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, undertook an operation in Argentina to capture the architect of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, and bring him to Israel to stand trial. Operation Finale [Chris Weitz, 2018] tells the story of this intelligence operation: the actions of and challenges for the agents involved, in a way that captures the banality of Eichmann’s personality before it was put on show for the world to see in his televised trial. Operation Finale is available on Netflix, rendering it a Holocaust film with an extraordinarily large reach.

The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act's Evolving Genocide Exception, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) was passed by Congress as a comprehensive statute to cover all instances when foreign states are to be immune from suit in the courts of the United States, as well as when foreign state immunity is to be limited. Judicial interpretation of one of the FSIA’s exceptions to immunity has undergone significant evolution over the years with respect to foreign state property expropriations committed in violation of international law. U.S. courts initially construed this FSIA exception by denying immunity only if the defendant state had expropriated property of a citizen of a nation other …

Stepping Beyond Nuremberg’S Halo: The Legacy Of The Supreme National Tribunal Of Poland, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

The Supreme National Tribunal of Poland (Najwyzszy Trybunal Narodowy (Tribunal)) operated from 1946 to 1948. It implemented the 1943 Moscow Declaration in the case of suspected Nazi war criminals. This article unpacks two of the Tribunal’s trials, that of Rudolph Hoess (Kommandant of Auschwitz (Oswiecim) and Amon Goeth (commander of the Krakow-Plaszow labour camp). Following an introduction, the article proceeds in four sections. Section 2 sets out the Tribunal’s provenance and background, offering a flavour of the politics and pressures that contoured (and co-opted) its activities so as to recover its place within the imagined spaces of international criminal accountability. …

Guy Lancaster On Genocide: A Normative Account. By Larry May. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 283 Pp., Guy Lancaster

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Genocide: A Normative Account. By Larry May. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 283 pp.

Security Now: Addressing The Needs Of Darfur’S Children, Nicole Judd

Human Rights & Human Welfare

In the Darfur region of Sudan, over 2.3 million children have been affected by the ongoing genocide (UNICEF 2008). Unlike their adult counterparts, children are impacted more severely by the consequences of warfare as they are undergoing a fragile developmental process. While each one of the affected children has had their basic human rights violated in some form, the narrative of trauma differs between groups. Sexually-exploited girls, boy soldiers, unaccompanied children, and those who remain in under-resourced camps have experienced the protracted violence in unique ways. To mitigate the effects of war, each group should receive individualized humanitarian assistance as …

April Roundtable: Genocide And Us National Interests Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“How Genocide Became a National Security Threat” by Michael Abramowitz & Lawrence Woocher. Foreign Policy. February 26, 2010.

Germany, Afterwards, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America. By Heide Fehrenbach. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

and

The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany. By Suzanne Brown-Fleming. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

and

A Woman in Berlin. By Anonymous. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.

and

Johanna Krause, Twice Persecuted: Surviving in Nazi Germany and Communist East Germany. By Carolyn Gammon and Christiane Hemker. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007.

Debra L. Delaet On War Crimes And Genocide, Debra L. Delaet

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder by Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley. Princeton University Press, 2006. 288 pp.

and

The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda by Scott Straus. Cornell University Press, 2006. 273 pp.

and

The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in the Hague by Eric Stover. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 252 pp.

May Roundtable: Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency” by Mahmood Mamdani. London Review of Books. March 8, 2007.

Politics Of Naming And Politics Of Responsibility, Rhoda Howard-Hassmann

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Mahmood Mamdani is right to complain that the American—and international—public is unaware of the political complexity of the Darfur conflict. He is also right to point out that selective or inconsistent uses of the terms “genocide,” “civil war,” and “insurgency” can mask covert, or even overt, political agendas. His comparison of Darfur to Iraq is telling. And he is right to point out that even with the best of humanitarian intentions, the presentation of a simplified version of Darfur, in which “Arabs” persecute “Africans,” can play into the “war on terror,” insofar as, in the minds of at least some …

The Return Of Moral Equivalence, J. Peter Pham

Human Rights & Human Welfare

During the latter stages of the Cold War, one school of ethical analysis, ultimately labeled as “moral equivalence” by the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, measured Western liberal democracies against utopian standards in a radical critique which redefined the political discourse, erasing distinctions between the Soviet Union and its satellites on the one hand and the United States and its allies on the other.

Missing The Point, Colin Thomas-Jensen

Human Rights & Human Welfare

“What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics—a messy politics of insurgency and counterinsurgency?” (§4). This is the most telling question posed by Professor Mahmood Mamdani in “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency.” The implication is that the growing public demand for strong international action—military or otherwise—to halt the atrocities in Darfur is somehow unwarranted because people have failed to understand that the systematic crimes against humanity committed against civilians in Darfur (and indeed Iraq) are an inevitability of “the messy politics of insurgency and …

The Moral Vocabulary Of Violence, David L. G. Rice

Human Rights & Human Welfare

What is at stake in labeling a particular incidence of large-scale violence “genocide”? Mahmood Mamdani rightly argues that “genocide” is an insufficient description of the conflict in Darfur. I would suggest that the problematic nature of that terminology goes back to its inception after World War II. Activists have inherited the concept of “genocide” from a particular historical moment. Now, “ genocide” carries unique moral weight in the discourse of international politics. When violence against civilians has been widely accepted as a necessary outcome of the preservation of peace, activists find it necessary to imagine a worse evil than the …

Adolf Eichmann: Understanding Evil In Form And Content, Matthew S. Weinert

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Criminal Case 40/61, the Trial of Adolf Eichmann by Harry Mulisch. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Magdalena A. Zolkos On Rethinking The Holocaust By Yehuda Bauer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 335pp., Magdalena A. Zolkos

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Rethinking the Holocaust by Yehuda Bauer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 335pp.

Politicizing The Crime Against Humanity: The French Example, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

The advantages of world adherence to universally acceptable standards of law and fundamental rights seemed apparent after the Second World War, as they had after the First. Their appeal seems ever greater and their advocates ever more persuasive today. The history of law provides evidence that caution may be in order, however, and that the human propensity to ignore what transpires under the surface of law threatens to dull and silence the ongoing self-examination and self-criticism required in perpetuity by the law if it is to be correlated with justice.

This Essay presents one side, the dark side, of the …

Competing Frameworks For Assessing Contemporary Holocaust-Era Claims, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

There are many angles from which to perceive the contemporary holocaust-era claims. In 1997, Time magazine quoted Elie Wiesel as saying that, [i]f all the money in all the Swiss banks were turned over, it would not bring back the life of one Jewish child. But the money is a symbol. It is part of the story. If you suppress any part of the story, it comes back later, with force and violence.

Wiesel touches on two perspectives: first, what has been described as litigating the holocaust, with all that that implies about the law's questionable capacity to adjudicate issues …

Secret Knowledge Of Genocide: British Failure To Disclose The Killing Of Jews In 1941, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In the late summer and early autumn of 1941, the British military intercepted coded German radio messages that revealed that German troops were killing large numbers of Jewish civilians in German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union. The British did not make this knowledge public at that time, nor did they use their still classified records during the war crimes trials after the end of World War II.

Commentators more expert than I have addressed themselves to the question of whether the British had a legal obligation to disclose the information from the coded messages. These remarks concentrate on the possible …