Eighty years ago, on January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers stumbled upon the barbed wire surrounding Auschwitz-Birkenau. Inside they found 8,000 emaciated prisoners, along with 44,000 pairs of shoes, piles of spectacles, and mounds of cooking utensils. This was all that remained of the approximately 1.1 million people, mainly European Jews, who were killed at Auschwitz. As the retreating Nazis destroyed their meticulous records along with much evidence of the brutally efficient killing operation, a precise figure is not available. This year, on the anniversary of the liberation, the few remaining survivors and world leaders have been invited to remember the dead and to renew the international community’s pledge of never again allowing genocide to take place.
A stain in human history
As the Genocide Convention of 1948 recognises, the crime of genocide — ‘acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ — has stained human history down the ages. The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, said on December 9, 2020, on the international day to commemorate victims of genocide, ‘Genocide always has multiple clear warning signs.’
The Soviet soldiers who liberated Auschwitz later said they were wholly unprepared for what they found. However, while the industrial scale of the killing that would eventually claim six million Jewish lives, in addition to tens of thousands of Roma, Sinti, and other people deemed inferior or political opponents, was not known in its entirety, the Allies were not entirely unaware.
On assuming power in 1933, the Nazis codified the persecution of Jews in hundreds of laws, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that took away German citizenship from Jews and others considered ‘non Aryan’. Yet, when those Jews who could overcome restrictive German emigration laws tried to leave (until 1941, when Germany forbade Jewish emigration), they encountered bureaucratic obstacles, xenophobia and antisemitism.
Following the 1929 Stock Market Crash, the United States tightened already restrictive immigration quotas. The United Kingdom required those entering until 1938 to be self-supporting or sponsored; after the Anschluss it introduced a visa system. Neither made provisions for refugees. After 1938, Britain also restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine, then a British mandate. Some Jews moved to neighbouring European countries, only to be caught in Hitler’s net as German tanks rolled over Europe. France, Belgium and the Netherlands were particularly assiduous in following Nazi orders to round up Jews for concentration camps.
The reality of ‘Never again’
The Allies responded to the growing refugee problem by gathering at Evian in July 1938; apart from sympathetic statements, the 32 delegates offered little else. By the time the U.K. and the United States met at the Bermuda Conference of April 1943, reports of mass Jewish killings were unambiguous. The World Jewish Congress had submitted a report outlining Hitler’s plans that Jews, ‘after deportation and concentration in the East, be at one blow exterminated’ (Riegner telegram, December 1942). The Polish Government-in-Exile in London published a pamphlet in December 1942 titled ‘The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland.’ Escapees from the concentration camps brought their own harrowing stories. The evidence for genocide was mounting, but the Allies would not, or could not, look too closely.
Never again, they declared in 1945. And yet, between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia are estimated to have killed over two million people by execution, starvation, disease and exhaustion as they sought to recreate Cambodian society in some communist ideal. As refugees fled to neighbouring countries and a new regime was installed in Phnom Penh after Vietnam’s invasion, the international community’s responses were conditioned by Cold War calculations: China and the West supported the fleeing Khmer Rouge while Vietnam and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) supported the newly installed communist government.
Never again. And yet, in Rwanda, in 1994, between 8,00,000 to 10,00,000 people, mostly minority Tutsi with some moderate Hutu, were murdered over 100 days while UN peacekeepers watched helplessly. In July 1995, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were herded from a UN compound in Srebrenica — a place declared a safe zone (it is inescapable that safe zones were also created to prevent refugees flooding out of the former Yugoslavia) — and executed, as part of a careful campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Dutch UN commander requested reinforcements from both the UN and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which never arrived. It was the culmination of three years of indecision by Europe and America on how to respond. This year is the 30th anniversary of Srebrenica (July 11).
Never again. Less than a decade later, violence broke out in Darfur, Sudan. Approximately 2,00,000 people were killed in 2003-05 in what the International Criminal Court (ICC) and some states have recognised as genocide. The violence in Sudan continues and there are renewed fears of genocide occurring now while the international community’s attention is focussed on Ukraine and Gaza.
In Gaza
Then there is Gaza. As world leaders gather at Auschwitz on January 27 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of its liberation, Gazans will attempt returning to the rubble of their homes. Some will be sifting through the debris to locate the remains of family still buried underneath, part of the 10,000 estimated to be missing. The International Court of Justice is examining whether Israel is guilty of genocide under a case brought by South Africa. The ICC has issued arrest warrants for the Israel Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the former Israel Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza in response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks. There are arrest warrants for Hamas leaders too.
And, yet, America’s and western Europe’s response was to criticise the ICC, expressing outrage that there should be any semblance of equivalence in the arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and Israel. In some perversion of international norms, there seems to be an acceptance of a hierarchy of suffering. Arms have continued to flow to Israel, even as the death toll in Gaza crosses 47,000, mostly women and children. The UN estimates that 92% of all homes have been destroyed, health-care infrastructure and 87% of schools destroyed, and entire populations forcibly displaced multiple times. All this happened while Gaza was under siege, the foreign press was barred from entering, and the world acquiesced in looking away.
Israel has a right to defend itself, and Hamas’ actions in October 2023 are completely indefensible. Yet, when does self-defence cross over into genocide? Where is that line? Arguably, that line is where we avert our gaze.
Priyanjali Malik writes on international affairs, security and defence, with a special focus on nuclear politics
Published – January 27, 2025 12:16 am IST
