War of extermination

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A war of extermination is a war whose goal is the complete annihilation of a state, a people or an ethnic group and the extinction of this sociopolitical entity through the mass murder of the population or the destruction of their livelihoods. This intention can be directed both externally and against parts of the own population. The goal is not, as in other wars, the implementation of limited political goals, such as the recognition of a legal status (as in a war of independence ), the power of disposal over a disputed area (as in a war of conquest or defense ), or the complete military overthrow of the enemy State .

features

War of extermination is defined as a radicalized form of warfare in which "all physical and psychological limitations" are removed.

The Hamburg social scientist Jan Philipp Reemtsma sees a war "which is waged in order - in the worst case - to annihilate or even to decimate a population" as the core of the annihilation war. The state organization of the enemy is smashed. Another characteristic of a war of extermination is its ideological character and the rejection of negotiations with the enemy, as the historian Andreas Hillgruber demonstrated using the example of the " Operation Barbarossa " in 1941 against " Jewish Bolshevism ". The opponent's right to exist and trustworthy is denied, he is degraded to a total enemy, with whom it is not necessary to come to an understanding, but to whom the own unity “of people, war and politics [as] the triumph of the idea of ​​a war of annihilation” is contrasted.

development

Herero uprising

The social democratic journalism had brought the term "war of extermination" circulated to the crackdown on the rebellious Herero criticize.

In January 1904 the Herero uprising began in what was then the German colony of German South West Africa . With a total of around 15,000 men under Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha , this uprising was suppressed by August 1904. Most of the Herero fled to the almost waterless Omaheke , a branch of the Kalahari . Von Trotha had this cordoned off and the refugees chased away from the few watering holes there, so that thousands of Herero along with their families and herds of cattle died of thirst. Von Trotha had those who were hunted into the desert informed in the so-called extermination order :

“The Herero are no longer German subjects. […] Within the German border every Herero is shot with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, I no longer take women or children, drive them back to their people or have them shot at. "

Trotha's warfare aimed at the complete annihilation of the Herero ("I believe that the nation as such must be annihilated [...]") and was supported in this in particular by von Schlieffen and Kaiser Wilhelm II. His approach is therefore considered the first 20th century genocide . Trotha's actions sparked outrage at home and abroad; at the instigation of Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow , the emperor revoked the extermination order two months after the events in the Omaheke. Trotha's policy remained largely unchanged until his recall in November 1905.

Ludendorff's conception

The war of extermination was a further development of the concept of total war , as designed by the former Imperial Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff in 1935 . According to this, in a coming war, victory must be given unrestricted priority over all other social concerns: All resources must be made usable for the war economy, the will of the nation must be standardized through propaganda and dictatorship before hostilities break out, and all available weapon technologies must be used , whereby no consideration can be given to international law . Total war is also unlimited in its goals, as the experience of the First World War shows :

“It was not only led by the armed forces of the states involved in the war, which mutually strived for their annihilation, the peoples themselves were placed in the service of warfare , the war was also directed against them and drew them deeply [...] to fight against the enemy armed forces on mighty fronts and wide seas, there was a struggle against the psyche and vitality of the enemy peoples with the aim of decomposing and paralyzing them. "

With this conceptual delimitation of the war, Ludendorff was able to draw on the German military-theoretical discourse that had formed in the confrontation with the People's War , the "guerre à outrance" that the Third French Republic had just created in the autumn and winter of 1870 against the Prussian-Germans Had led invading forces .

In addition, Ludendorff dealt with Carl von Clausewitz and his work Vom Kriege , published posthumously in 1832 , which had differentiated between "absolute" and "limited" wars. But Clausewitz's absolute war was also subject to restrictions, such as the distinction between combatants and non-combatants , between military and civil or between public and private. Ludendorff now claimed that total war is no longer about “petty political purposes”, nor about “big [...] national interests”, but about the sheer “preservation of life” of the nation, its identity. This existential threat also justifies the - at least moral, if not physical - destruction of the enemy. Ludendorff's efforts to radicalize the war (for which he was responsible from 1916) encountered social, political and military obstacles. In 1935, as the historian Robert Foley writes, his advice fell "on fertile ground"; The time seemed ripe for the National Socialists to delimit the war even more radically .

National Socialist Warfare

The best-known example of a war of extermination is the German-Soviet War , which began on June 22, 1941 with the attack by the Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union. In 1963, the Berlin historian Ernst Nolte described it in a much-quoted formulation as the “most monstrous war of enslavement and annihilation known to modern history” and distinguished it from a “normal war” such as that which National Socialist Germany waged against France.

In his post- doctoral thesis, Hitler's Strategy , published in 1965, Andreas Hillgruber worked out the Nazi state's motives for destructive warfare against the Soviet Union, based on racial ideology :

  1. the physical obliteration of the country's “ Jewish-Bolshevik ” elite and the Jews themselves as their supposed biological roots
  2. the conquest of colonial and living space for the German Empire and
  3. the subjugation and decimation of the Slavic population.

Hillgruber later described the character of the "Operation Barbarossa" explicitly as an "intended war of race ideology". As a contemporary example of a war of extermination, the “Operation Barbarossa” has also found its way into historical-political lessons at general schools.

The term war of extermination was discussed intensively in the 1990s with reference to the Wehrmacht exhibition of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research , which had the word “War of Extermination” in its title. On March 30, 1941 , Adolf Hitler had openly stated in front of the Wehrmacht generals that "Operation Barbarossa" would be a war of extermination :

“Battle of two worldviews against each other. A crushing verdict on Bolshevism equals anti-social crime. Communism enormous danger for the future. We must move away from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship. The communist is not a comrade beforehand and not a comrade afterwards. It is a battle of annihilation. If we don't take it that way, then we will indeed beat the enemy, but in 30 years we will be faced again with the communist enemy. We are not at war to preserve the enemy. [...] Fight against Russia: Destruction of the Bolshevik commissioners and the communist intelligentsia. [...] The struggle will be very different from the struggle in the West. In the east, hardship is mild for the future. The leaders must ask the sacrifice of themselves to overcome their concerns. "

The orientation of "Operation Barbarossa" as a war of annihilation planned from the outset is proven by Hitler's general guidelines of March 30, 1941, as well as his directive No. 21 issued on December 18, 1940 and the orders drawn up by the Wehrmacht for its execution, such as the decree on the exercise of martial law in the Barbarossa area of May 13, 1941, the guidelines for the conduct of the troops in Russia of May 19, 1941 and the guidelines for the treatment of political commissars of June 6, 1941

The German guidelines for agricultural policy in the Soviet areas to be conquered are one of the most extreme examples of a strategy of robbery and destruction. In a meeting of the State Secretaries on May 2, 1941, the planned starvation of the population was prepared:

"There is no doubt that tens of millions of people will starve to death if we get what we need out of the country."

The invasion of Poland has applied since the work of the German historian Jochen Böhler as a "prelude to war of extermination" against the Soviet Union 1941st

Other examples

In journalism and research, numerous other conflicts are also referred to as wars of extermination.

In 1876 the German writer and historian Felix Dahn used the term for the first time in the modern sense: In his historical novel A Battle for Rome , he lets the Byzantine general Narses aim his campaign against the Goths to completely wipe out this ethnic group in Italy, i.e. a "war of annihilation against it Entire Volkstum "to lead.

Also for the Third Punic War 149–146 BC. BC, the Varus battle or the Indian wars of the North American settlers are evidence that they call wars of extermination.

The ethnologist Otto Stoll wrote in 1888 of a war of extermination by the Spanish conquistadores against the indigenous population.

The former employee of the Military History Research Office Joachim Hoffmann described in his book Stalin's War of Extermination (1995) the Soviet warfare against National Socialist Germany as a "war of extermination". He quotes as the motto a speech by Josef Stalin of November 6, 1941, in which he stated:

“Well, if the Germans want a war of annihilation, they will get it (stormy, long-lasting applause). From now on it will be our task, the task of all the peoples of the Soviet Union, the task of the fighters, the commanders and the political functionaries of our army and our navy , all the Germans who invaded the territory of our homeland as occupiers, except for to crush the last man. No mercy on the German occupiers! "

Other scholars do not follow Hoffmann's interpretation of the speech, but refer to further declarations by Stalin in the following months, according to which the annihilation of Germany was by no means his war goal. The majority of Hoffmann's work as a whole received very critical reviews.

From an "unrestrained war of extermination" ( Norbert Blum ) or its English equivalent war of extermination is mentioned, when the various sides of Israeli action in the Middle East conflict is described. The “ Nazi comparison ” implied in this choice of words is an indication of secondary anti-Semitism .

In a 1998 publication by the University of Potsdam's Human Rights Center , the actions of the Guatemalan military in the civil war are referred to as an “relentless war of annihilation against their own people”.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sven Lindqvist : Through the heart of darkness. An Africa traveler on the trail of the European genocide , Unionsverlag, Zurich 1999, p. 62; Susanne Kuss, Bernd Martin: The German Reich and the Boxer Rebellion . Iudicium, Munich 2002, p. 62.
  2. ↑ Jan Philipp Reemtsma: The idea of ​​the extermination war. Clausewitz - Ludendorff - Hitler . In: Hannes Heer , Klaus Naumann (ed.): War of destruction. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944 . Hamburg 1995, pp. 377-401, here p. 377, cf. also 386-398.
  3. ^ Andreas Hillgruber: The ideological-dogmatic basis of the National Socialist policy of exterminating the Jews in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union and its implementation 1941-1944 . In: German Studies Review 2 (1979), Vol. 3, pp. 263-296.
  4. ↑ Jan Philipp Reemtsma: The idea of ​​the extermination war. Clausewitz - Ludendorff - Hitler , pp. 386–398, quotation p. 397.
  5. ↑ Frank Oliver Sobich: "Black Beasts, Red Danger". Racism and Anti-Socialism in the German Empire . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2006, pp. 301–305.
  6. ↑ Jan-Bart Gewald: The Great General of the Kaiser , in: Botswana Notes and Records. Volume 26, p. 74.
  7. ^ Letter to Chief of Staff Alfred Graf von Schlieffen , October 5, 1904, in: Michael Behnen: Sources on German Foreign Policy in the Age of Imperialism 1890–1911. Darmstadt 1977, p. 292.
  8. ↑ a b Dominik J. Schaller: »I believe that the nation as such must be destroyed: Colonial war and genocide in« German South West Africa »1904–1907«. In: Journal of Genocide Research. 6: 3, p. 398.
  9. ↑ Erich Ludendorff: The total war . Ludendorffs Verlag, Munich 1935, p. 4 f.
  10. ^ A b Robert T. Foley: From People's War to War of Extermination. German Concepts of Warfare, 1871-1935. In: Anja Hartmann, Beatrice Heuser (Eds.): War, Peace, and World Orders in European History . Routledge, London / New York 2001, pp. 215-220.
  11. ^ Wilhelm Janssen: War . In: Reinhart Koselleck , Werner Conze , Otto Brunner (ed.): Basic historical concepts . Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Vol. 3, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1982, p. 613.
  12. ↑ Ernst Nolte: Fascism in its epoch. Action francaise - Italian fascism - National Socialism . Paperback edition, Piper, Munich 1984, p. 451.
  13. ^ Andreas Hillgruber: Hitler's strategy. Politics and warfare 1940–1941. Frankfurt a. M., 2nd edition 1982, p. 519 f.
  14. ↑ Andreas Hillgruber: The Eastern War and the Destruction of the Jews , in: Gerd R. Ueberschär u. Wolfram Wette (Ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union. "Operation Barbarossa" 1941. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt a. M. 1991, pp. 185-206, cited at p. 191.
  15. ^ Wigbert Benz : "Enterprises Barbarossa" 1941. War of extermination and historical-political education . In: Information for history and social studies lessons. Issue 60/2010, pp. 5-33; See also online version ( Memento of the original from June 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / 87.106.4.207
  16. ↑ Hannes Heer u. a. (Ed.): Crimes of the Wehrmacht. Dimensions of the War of Extermination 1941–1944 . Exhibition catalog. Hamburg Institute for Social Research. 1st edition, Hamburger Edition , Hamburg 1996. Johannes Klotz: The exhibition "War of Extermination, Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944". Between historical science and history politics. In: Detlef Bald, Johannes Klotz, Wolfram Wette: Myth of the Wehrmacht. Post-war debates and maintaining tradition . Structure, Berlin 2001.
  17. ^ Franz Halder : War diary. Daily notes of the Chief of the General Staff of the Army 1939–1942, Vol. 2: From the planned landing in England to the beginning of the Eastern campaign . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1963, p. 335 ff .; Christian Hartmann : Halder. Chief of Staff of Hitler 1938–1942 . Schoeningh, Paderborn 1991, p. 241 f.
  18. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller , Gerd R. Ueberschär : Hitler's War in the East 1941–1945. A research report. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2000, p. 226 f.
  19. ↑ note on outcome of today's meeting with state secretaries about Barbarossa from 02.05.1941. In: The Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Nuremberg, October 14, 1945–1. October 1946. 42 vol., Nuremberg 1947 ff., Here volume 31, p. 84 (document 2718-PS); on the destructive character of economic exploitation cf. Rolf-Dieter Müller, Gerd R. Ueberschär: Hitler's War in the East 1941-1945. A research report. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2000, pp. 310–338.
  20. ↑ Jochen Böhler: The destruction of the neighborhood. The beginning of the war of extermination against Poland in 1939 . In: Mike Schmeitzner, Katarzyna Stokłosa (Ed.): Partner or Counterparty? German-Polish neighborhood in the century of dictatorships . Berlin 2008, pp. 77-92; Jochen Böhler: Intention or Situation? Wehrmacht soldiers and the beginnings of the war of annihilation in Poland . In: Timm C. Richter (Ed.): War and crime. Situation and intention. Case studies . Martin Meidenbauer Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich 2006, pp. 165–172; Jochen Böhler: Prelude to the war of extermination. The Wehrmacht in Poland in 1939 . 2nd edition, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2006.
  21. ↑ Felix Dahn: Ein Kampf um Rom , in: Gesammelte Werke , First Series, Volume 2, Leipzig undated, p. 249.
  22. ↑ Werner Huss: The history of the Carthaginians , CH Beck, Munich 1985, p. 343.
  23. ^ Christian Pantle: Annihilation War in Germania , in: Focus , September 3, 2009 ( online , accessed on August 5, 2010).
  24. ↑ Peter Farb: The Indians. Development and destruction of a people . Nymphenburger, Munich 1988.
  25. ↑ Otto Stoll: The Maya languages ​​of the Pokom group. First part: The language of the Pokonchí Indians . Alfred Hölder, Vienna 1888 ( wayeb.org: online PDF file p. 7; accessed on October 18, 2017).
  26. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Stalin's War of Extermination 1941-1945 . Verlag für Wehrwissenschaft, Munich 1995, p. 7.
  27. ↑ Bernd Ulrich : Stalingrad , CH Beck, Munich 2005, p. 33 f .; Jochen Laufer: Pax Sovietica. Stalin, the Western Powers and the German Question 1941–1945 , Böhlau, Köln / Weimar 2009, pp. 205 ff. Cf. also Stalin's much-cited dictum from 1945: “The Hitler come and go, but the German people, the German State endures ". Wolfgang Leonhard : The revolution dismisses its children , p. 424.
  28. ↑ For example, Die Zeit No. 46, 1995 ( online , accessed on August 5, 2010), the daily newspaper , December 27, 1995, Historische Zeitschrift 263, 1996, p. 259 ff., Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 56, 1997, p. 186-189.
  29. ↑ Quotation after the Middle East conflict sparked heated discussion in Germany , in: Die Welt, April 5, 2002; Alan Posener : Where friendship ends. "Nazi methods", "unrestrained war of extermination", "Zionist lobby". How much criticism can the relationship between Germany and Israel take? , in: Die Welt, May 15, 2002, p. 8. Cf. Wolfgang Benz : What is anti-Semitism? , CH Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52212-2 , p. 24 .
  30. ↑ See for example "German soldiers in Israel unthinkable" , in: taz.de , July 26, 2006 (interview with Norman Paech , online , accessed on August 5, 2010). “The accusation of anti-Semitism is also used as a stick” , in: Stern , June 18, 2002 (interview with Norbert Blüm ); Ahdaf Soueif: The Palestinians say: 'This is a war of extermination' , in: The Guardian , January 17, 2009 ( online , accessed August 5, 2010).
  31. ^ Lars Rensmann : Democracy and the image of the Jews. Anti-Semitism in the political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany , VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 215; Norbert Reck: Christian guilt history and hostility to Jews. Reflections on old and new forms of anti-Semitism , in: Hansjörg Schmid / Britta Frede-Wenger (eds.): Neuer Antisemitismus? A challenge for interreligious dialogue , Frank & Timme, Berlin 2006, pp. 41–66, here pp. 50 ff.
  32. ↑ Human Rights Center of the University of Potsdam: publishup.uni-potsdam.de “Human Rights for All”. 50 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . (= Studies on fundamental and human rights 2). Potsdam 1998, p. 46 (accessed October 18, 2017).