Murder(ing)
People
Genocidal
Policy Within 20th Century. Description, Analysis, and Prevention.
Armenocide,
Serbocide, Holocaust As Basic Genocidal
Events During the World Wars*)
Richard
Albrecht
(Ernst Bloch)
In this smart piece the author, an
experienced German social psychologist, and political scientist, tries to sum
up the very content of his own approach to genocide, genocidal action,
genocidal policy, and genocidal mentality as a general pattern which was worked
out, at first, in his inaugural lecture February 1st, 1989 (Albrecht 1989), and
which the author recently published in his books on Genocide and Armenocide
when discussing comparative and theoretical aspects of genocidal policy within
20th century (Albrecht 2006); the third volume of the authors
trilogy on genocidal policy within 20th century (“Genozidpolitik
im 20. Jahrhundert”), presenting the first scholarly verification of the
notorious speech Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), as chancellor of the German Reich
and Führer of the German people, delivered to his Supreme Commanders at
Obersalzberg, on August 22nd, 1939 was published actually: the key
sentence can be valued as a sort of “genocidal connection” between Armenocide
and Holocaust:
„Who [the fuck] is, after all,
today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?“[1]
Needlessness to state that the
author, who, as a scholar of genocide[2], recently published a short piece
summing up the second genocide during World War II - named Serbocide[3]
- is by no means one of that dubious guyys self-naming ´genocide scholar´ but,
in fact, either ouvert or covert, proclaiming such cloudy issues like
hierarchies of the three genocidal victim-groups during the two World Wars –
the Ottoman Armenians (1915/16), the European Jews, and the Serbs in “Satellite
Croatia” (1941/45) which the author looks upon as the three basic genocidal
events during the two World Wars.
Whenever
looking on genocide politically, the author feels that the best anti-genocidal
perspective in fact is an anti-fascist and anti-racialist one – although
whenever looked upon the genocidal phenomenon as a scholar that cannot be
regarded as a vital essential condition or conditio sine qua non:
according to the dialectics of general and special features of the genocidal
field and its sufficient condition(s), empirical details, and random aspects, a
society must neither be classified as a ´fascist´ one to be regarded as a ´genocidal´
society: the Italian society between the World Wars indeed was a ´fascist´ but
by no means a genocidal one like the South African, which basically was a
racial one (like some of the Southern US-states were at that time). Any
genocidal society is a racial one but non vice versa: not any racialist society
is a genocidal or a fascist one. Moreover, the German society since 1933 soon
became both a fascist and a racial societal basic structure causing
another Great War (like in 1914) which also belongs to the historical context
in which both the very genocidal crimes committed in Ottoman Turkey (1915/16)
during the First and in Satellite Croatia (1941/45) during the Second World War
– another feature which demonstrates the very meaning of the event Great or
World War within 20th century either caused by a genocidal regime
like the German or actively using the given occasion (in the meaning of
opportunity structure/s) either by Young Turk or by Ustase leadership in 1915
and 1941 under the umbrella of the German Reich as the most powerful ally.
I take the liberty – if I may – and address me
scholarly readers, she or he, that I will, for reasons, not name what happened
in 1915 “the Armenian Genocide” as “the terrible Holocaust” (Bernard Lewis) with about one and half a
million Ottoman Armenians exterminated – “unquestionable the greatest crime of
the First World War” Hirschfeld/Gaspar 1929: 510), and the ultimate human crime
genocide. For I know, of course, that not only in the so called ´scientific
community´ this terrible slang-version is more and more used instead of what
must be precisely indicated, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica does in her
latest CD-Rom version (2004²), “the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915”.
Insofar I agree to distinguished genocidal scholars like Irving Louis Horowitz
and Vahakn N. Dadrian when talking about the “Turkish Genocide” and the
“Genocide against the Armenians”. Moreover, I feel that as rubbish as moronic
talk - “Armenian Genocide” - is, indeed, not only as confusing as cretinous but
also a sort of complete reversal – and perverse reversal, too –
in the very sense of Umwertung aller Werte (Friedrich Nietzsche) under
most relevant moral, intellectual, political, historical, and linguistic
aspects, declaring victims for perpetrators, and perpetrators for victims. I am
not sure but do hope that, three generations later, the linguistic reversal as
expressed in that false metaphor “Armenian Genocide” neither mirrors nor
expresses the victory of the former genocidal violators as another final
solution ... I may also remind me readership of three facts of life the German
poetical playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) had worked out in other
contexts: (i) whenever injustice happens too often it will not become justice
because it happens very often; (ii) in the last instance the truth cannot be
suppressed but must be publicly repeated again and again even after it had been
once recognized as the very truth; (iii) within the intellectual field
democracy indeed means transforming the small circle of connoisseurs towards
the large circle of connoisseurs – a ´sociological experience´ which should
never be forgotten by any genocidal scholar whenever engaged in preventing
genocidal action/s, too, for a basic virtuality must be taken into
consideration: “Human actions are not destined be the very facts but by the
perceptions of the facts acting humans have got.” (Alexander v. Humboldt)
Finally, I will by no means apologize for the very fact that the
following scholarly piece is neither composed nor written due to the Zeitgeist which (to quote a German
´classic´ literary figure) is, as spirit of the age, more or less mirrowing the
very ideology of the masters race (Goethe: Faust I: 577-579) but is partisan in
the sense of saving life-policy (Albrecht 1989) which basically means the very
contrary of genocidal or taking-life-policy (Irving L. Horowitz). Whoever
expects an attitude like that one I have recently named the „wikipedianization of knowledge and cognition“
(Albrecht 2008: 13) claiming the overwhelming NPOV („Neutral Point of View“: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV)
may, please, use that postmodern „open source“ encyclopaedia called wikipedia. For what I am still standing, and working, for as a
scholar is that dedicated anti-genocidal perspective disposing, of once and for
all, every point of origin for genocide and, consequently and in the last
instance, any genocidal research work, too (Albrecht 2006: Armenozid, 3).
*
I. Genocide is
not only mass killing and killing masses as traditionally well-known like
massacres, mass atrocities, pogroms, riots, and slaughter, but ´modern´ serial
killing, strategically planned and organized, not only of masses but of peoples
as entire populations for racial, religious, ethnic, political, and even
ideological reasons: neither traditional massacres and atrocities nor
well-known mass slaughters, pogroms, and riots, and also not only
administrative murder of masses (as a conventional measure applied by absolute
rulership, dictatorship, tyranny, colonialism etc. before World War I.), but of
people. After World War I. traditional „administrative mass-murder” (Al.
Carthill) became modern „administrative mass-murder as organised by a state”
(Hannah Arendt) which later on was described as “policy of extermination”
(Majorie Housepian), and as „organized state murder” (Helen Fein), and defined
as „structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state
bureaucratic apparatus” (Irving Louis Horowitz), indeed, as an outstanding
„crime against mankind and civilisation as planned and organized by a state”
(Richard Albrecht)[4], “the blackest page in history” (H.A. Gibbons). Insofar
any genocidal action may include “ethnic cleansing“ and its violent methods of
ejection, expulsion, and displacement, as applied by the perpetrators – but
genocidal policy has got a pecularity (Albrecht 2006: Völkermord[en], 124-125)
demonstrating that genocide is more than “ethnic cleansing”, “demographical
engineering”, “homogenisation of population” as accompanied by massacres to
fulfil a specific policy to “systematically eliminate another group from a
given territory on the basis of religious, ethnic or national origin.”
(Petrovic 1994)
II. Needlessly
to stress that not only these but all the pieces on genocide worked out and
published by the author within the last two decades are lead by a central
principle according to a grounded problem of any research work on genocide
which the author himself once named, in summer 1989, the urgent „development of
an early warning system against genocidal tendencies” („Entwicklung eines
Frühwarnsystems gegen Völkermordtendenzen. Pilotstudie
zu einem unbearbeiteten Grundproblem einer kultur-, sozial- und
politikwissenschaftlichen Friedensforschung“ 1989, 2 p., not printed [in
German]). Given this setting,
the author emphasizes the very meaning of a basic ´historical memory´ (Jorgé
Semprún) which inevitably also includes „what still is to be done” (Ernst
Bloch) as one of the central presuppositions and conditio sine qua non
for preventing genocide.
III. According to me own research work on
genocide as the most destructive event in the history of mankind and
state-sponsored ´crime against humanity and civilisation´ (as published in
1989) I take the liberty - if I may - and quote the basic definition of
genocide as worked out by Raphael Lemkin:
„In this respect genocide is a
new technique of occupation, aimed at winning the peace even though the war
itself is lost.” (Lemkin 1944: chp. XI: Genocide, 81)
Following this concept means that
within 20th century there do exist until now three outstanding
events, two of them well-documented as genocides and crimes against humanity
and civilisation: ´Armenocide´ (1915/18) and ´Holocaust´ (1941/45), the third,
´Serbocide´ (1941/45), still under-documented. Any specific silence as
practised by German historians traditionally and actually until the first
´colonial genocide´ in German South West Africa (GSWA), 1904-07, is also a relevant
subject: this „smart genocide” (Micha Brumlik) started when the German
representative declared the native ethnic group (Nama) no longer as subjects of
His Majesty, The German Kaiser William II (v. Trotha, October 2nd, 1904):
„The Herero people is no longer
subject of the German crown. They have murdered and stolen […] The Herero
people has to leave this country. If the Herero people will not follow this
order, I will force the Herero people by using my Great Fire Gun.” (Bley
1968, 204)
This specific command, which indeed
did exist, and its consequences, and very meanings express of what can be
regarded as ´genocidal mentality´ due to the mainstream of German colonial and
imperial ideology before
IV. The mass murdering of about
one and half a million Armenians (fifteen hundred thousand humans) in the
Ottoman/Turkish State 1915-1922 was „the first planned and organized genocide
within 20th century” (Edgar Hilsenrath). Without studying this outstanding
destructive event as the most nasty crime a state can ever commit any scholarly
understanding of genocide is hardly possibly. Finally, the Armenocide (in
German: Armenozid) was, in fact, not only an outstanding crime but also
the „essential prototype of genocide in the 20th century” (Irving L. Horowitz)
applying modern techniques, too. The former (West) German Chancellor, Dr.
Helmut Kohl, stressed, in April 1987, the very argument his ghost-writer at
that time, Dr. Klaus Hildebrandt, gave according to the uniqueness of the
Holocaust, his instrumental modernity and economic efficiency, following Hannah
Arendts consideration on the Holocaust as state-sponsored killing:
„The
crime of the Holocaust named genocide is indeed unique within human history whenever
looking on the cold inhuman planning and its lethal efficiency”.
Meanwhile
there does exist a translation of relevant documents of the Turkish post-War
military trials into German, and also into American English. In 1919, the
Stambul Trial condemned to death 17 Young Turk politicians - one of them the
prominent CUP-leader Talaat Pasha, the former Ministry of the Interior
(1913-1918) and a principle architect of the first genocide within the 20th
century - as responsible for the destruction of the Armenian people as
„organised by a united state-power”. Moreover, the genocidal actions followed
the official order as given against „persons acting against the Ottoman government
at war times” (Akcam 2004, 178)
The
Ottoman Ministry of the Interior and member of the most powerful triumvirat,
Talaat Pasha, declared, in August 1915, that the ”Armenian Question” does
not exist any longer (Lepsius 1919, 146):
„La question arménienne n´existe plus.“
In so far Talaat followed Abdul
Hamid II who was as the absolute ruler until the Young Turks overtook political
power in 1908 responsible for two well-know atrocities against and massacres of
Armenians in 1895/96 and in 1903/04. This man publicly stated in 1896 [The Nation,
14th January, 1897]:
„The way to get rid of the
Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians“
The interview
Talaat gave in 1916, two decades later, expresses the specific modernity of the
first genocide within 20th century. In his statement the most prominent CUP-leader
publicly declared on „the Armenian question” (Morgenthau 1918, p. 336)[5]
„We have been reproached for
making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty; but that
was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent today
might be guilty tomorrow”
To quote a legitimate US-scholar
(of religious history) commenting the Talaat-interview (Rubinstein 1983, 19):
„The
Armenians were slaughtered not for what they did but for what the Turks
suspected some of them might do in the future.”
What
Talaat expressed in 1916 when he stresses „that those who were innocent today
might be guilty tomorrow” anticipates possible developments, created (what
Hannah Arendt later on identified as) ´the objective enemy´ (Arendt 1989, 654),
and expresses the modern scientific idea of latent potentiality (as
worked out by theoretical physics, especially the ´quantum theory´). As the
author mentioned when looking on relevant documents according to the Croatian
genocide of the Serbs living in the Ustase state 1941/45 (Albrecht 2006, Völkermord[en]:
71-93), the principal concept of ´the objective enemy´ was also graphically
applied by the murderous perpetrators and Croatian elitist political figures as
a sort of “lumpen-intelligentia” (Yehuda Bauer): on November 26, 1941, the Croatian
government ordered that repressive
measures are to be applied against those “unwanted persons who might threaten
the very achievements of the Croatian Ustase Movement for liberation.” (quoted
in ibid: 89) Given this setting, the concept “objective enemy” as, at first,
scholarly sketched by Hannah Arendt (1951) might serve as a relevant key feature
for scholars whenever analysing ´modern´ genocide under comparative aspects and
perspectives (Albrecht 1989).
V. The
intellectual political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a German emigré
to the United States of America (USA) in the Second World War, sketched her
basic concept of “the objective enemy” (“objektiver Gegner”) as part of her
´diagnosis of our time´ at the beginning of the 1950´s. Every totalitarian
regime applies an ideology due to that leading figure which the author filtered
out of the fascist “juridical” writings highly powerful German politicians like
Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) and Werner Best (1903-1989) did when stigmatizing
humans publicly naming as the “objective enemy” and the very “people´s enemy” –
“an everlasting enemy” of the German people: “the very enemy of the racial,
cultural, and spiritual being, and substance, of our people.” (Heydrich 1936:
121-123) Moreover, it is one of the main tasks of the totalitarian political
police within the nationalsozialistische Führerstaat as a specific institution
“which is thoroughly, and permanently, monitoring the body of the German
people, which is timely detecting every symptom of illness, and her destructive
germs, and which is eliminating all of it totally by applying effective
methods” – “ferretting out and monitoring the enemies of the state for
disposing them of at the right moment – that is the preventive-police task of a
political police.” (Best 1936: 125-128)
Of course those “preventive-police task” does mean the
complete reversal of any rule of law and her leading principles – “nullum
crimen sine lege“ [no crime without law], “nulla poena sine lege”
[without law no punishment], and “nulla poena sine culpa” [no punishment
without guiltiness] – which basically guarantees not only the presumption of
innocence – nobody who is accused has to establish the innocence of the defendant
in general – but also “fair trial” especially. According to the political
system of historical Stalinism in the 1930´s, Susanne Leonhard (1895-1984), in
the end of 1918 a founding mother of the authentic Communist Party in Germany
(SPARTAKUSBUND), who became, as an emigré to the USSR, a political prisoner
from 1935 to 1948, later remembered the way the secret police oppressed its
“presumptive enemies” (Leonhard 1959):
“There was no individual guiltiness at all – on the
contrary: any individual ´crime´ was constructed lateron to that end that the
individual ´case´ could be classified under the given category of political suspect
persons […] That the secret police will arrest somebody because this person
belonged to a specific group whose members are looked upon as potential rebels
by the government was a specific insight” – the author added – “which most of
us unfortunately realised much more later.”
VI. The very ´modernity´ of the Genocide
against the Armenians 1915/16 is also expressed within the forms of genocidal
actions Ottoman Turks really did. Mass killing as serial killing was organised
in an highly efficient manner due to the logic of economic efficiency whenever
executing the genocidal business. When during World War II. in Europe
gas-chambers were economically the most efficient instrument of mass-killing
Jews – mass-killing Armenians during
„As
the Turks themselves boasted they were more economical since they did not involve
the waste of powder and shell.”
In
a specific way the most destructive event during the First World War, the
„administrative holocaust” (Winston Churchill) called Armenocide, which began
in April 24th, 1915, in Constantinople as the first „modern“ genocide within
20th century, expresses, although until now not mentioned at all, what the encyclia
„Evangelium vitae“, eighty years later, emphasised as the very „value and
inviolability of human life“ in general, when characterising any „culture of
death“, whenever „taken as a whole“, as the result of a policy of „the strong“
against the weak who have no choice but
to submit“ (Ioannes Paulus PP. II [Carol Woytila, 1920-2005]: Evangelium vitae
To the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, Men and Women religious lay, Faithful and
all People of Good Will, on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life [March
25th, 1995]), cpt. 19).
VII. In June 2005, the German Federal
Parliament („Bundestag”) made up her mind and decided a modest critique of the
Turkish denial of what happened but neither used the expression „genocide” nor
„Armenocide”. Like all governments of the Turkish Republic since 1923 when at
first a sort of culture of impunity was legally created within ´New Turkey´,
the current one denies not only any Turkish Genocide but also continues that as
official as rubbish talk on „tragic events during the war”. Moreover, and as
far as I know, a chequered group, politically unified under the umbrella that
an Turkish Genocide in 1915/16 is the very fiction of a so-called plot or
conspiracy of the world-wide Armenian community, when organising her „March
Towards Berlin” where the official Turkish community hold a demonstration on
March 18th, 2006, the day Talaat died of an assassination an
Armenian student executed, 85 years ago (in Berlin, 1921), demanding that the
German Federal Parliaments (for one voice) declaration is to cancel
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: February 4th, 2006, 39). Obviously
these daisy bones do not at all know that Kemal Pasha („Atatürk”), the founding
father of the
VIII. One
of the central topics of any profound definition of genocide within 20th century
as crimen magnum and ultimate human crime is not only
the very fact the taking-lives-actor is a state but also that any destructive
acts like expelling, prosecuting, and killing people are undertaken by a the
state as the most powerful national institution executed after a central
governmental plan. Although is was not the main task of the International
Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, in 1945-46, this international court which was
often, and not only by the victims, scorned as the winners tribunal, in fact
did a great juristic job when, in the general field of war of aggression,
proofed, and verified, the central plan of the Nazi figures when attacking
Poland on September 1st, 1939, as a sort of conspiracy against
peace.
Moreover, not
only a central plan guiding the action/s undertaken is basically required, but
at least one command, expressing the destructive will of the Führer and
his intension to kill an entire social group, collective, or people, for
ethnic, religious, political, economic, or ideological reasons structurally belongs to any ´modern´
genocidal business, too.
When looking
on the Armenocide, at first glance a central plan for the total annihilation of
the Ottoman Armenians during World War I seems to exist: the Andonian
documents, published, as evidence of ´The Great Crime´, in Armenian language
under the title Medz Vojeeru (1921), as well as in French (Documents
officiels concernant les massacres arméniens, 1920) and in English (The Memoirs
of Naim Bey, 1920). Some sixty years later, one of the leading scientific
experts, the US-scholar Vahakn N. Dadrian, in 1986, verified the documents as
authentic telegrams send out by the CUP-leader and central figure within the
ruling political elite, the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior, Talat Pasha, in
1915, to instruct his followers within the state bureaucracy in the very
province how to handle their genocidal business in an efficient manner. To sum up basic results of current legitimate
scholarly works (as recently published in “Genocide Studies & Prevention”,
vol. 1 [2006], No. 2, pp. i-iv; 93-226) very briefly - there cannot be any
doubt about the fact that it was Talat Bey (1872-1921), 1913-1917 Home
Secretary of the Interior of the late Ottoman State who applied the
Young-Turks-motto “Only a Dead Armenian is a Good Armenian” and ordered,
commanded, and instructed the genocidal actions against the Ottoman Armenian by
sending various telegrams to his followers down in the very provinces of the
Ottoman Reich. According to genocidal research, the existence of a
central plan whenever expressed in orders, or commands, written down is, in
fact, as conditio sine qua non, not one of various sufficient conditions,
but a necessary condition and insofar essential according to any scientific
definition of genocide as such, it is by no means surprising that ´the other
side´, above all representatives of the Turkish state, her political elite, and
her relevant institutions[6] do not accept this perspective but declare these
documents either at best as “Armenian fiction” (Orel; Yuca 1986) or at worst as
“forgeries” (Ataöv 1984; 1986).
For until now
nobody has seen the original telegrams send out by Talat from Constantinople in
Osmanian language (Osmanli)[7] it is not at all possible either for falsifying
or for verifying: this is, indeed, a heavy problem not only due to any
scholarly work but also opening the road to denial the Armenocide in general,
classifying what happened either as tragic war-events with mutual perpetrators
and victims on both sides or as an effective “Armenian fiction” particularly
created by the world-wide Armenian community plotting against Turkey and the
Turks.
Be it as it
ever may be: first of all for nearly fifty years a central command, or order,
by Adolf Hitler as a necessary condition for recognizing, and accepting, the
historical fact of the Holocaust as the destruction of the entire European
Jewry during World War II with between five and six million humans as empirical
victims has, until now, never scholarly been disputed. Moreover, until now a
written source of evidence produced by Hitler himself could not be found, and
it is, indeed, doubtable whether such a document exist at all. Christian
Gerlach, at that time a German student of the Holocaust, read, however, as the
first historian at all, in 1996/97, two well-known diaries of politically
relevant figures within the German genocidal elite thoroughly, and this enabled
him to work out the meaning of a secret speech Hitler gave, on December 12th,
1941, above all to some of his high-ranked party functionaries proclaiming the
annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe as his basic “political decision”
(Gerlach 1997; 2001³).
The second
argument lies not in the field of comparative genocidal research like the first
one but has to do with the situation of official Ottoman documents and its highly
selective use. Nevertheless another student of genocide in general, and of the
Armenocide 1915/16 especially, found out when investigating the relationship
between the very political centre as represented by the Ottoman Ministry of the
Interior in Constantinople, and his close CUP-follower Dr. Mehmed Resid, in
March 25th, 1915, freshly established as the new regional governor
in Anatolian town Diyarbekir.
Presenting an excellent scholarly
piece when describing what another investigator called the “cumulative
radicalization” within the murderous Armenocidal process itself (Bloxham 2003),
the Dutch junior scholar Ugur Ü. Üngör (2006) not only identifies more than a
dozen official Ottoman documents, most of them produced by Talat and send to
his vicegerent in Diyarbekir (and to the provinces of Erzurum, Bitlis, Van, and
others, too), but also analyses the various steps on the road to Armenocide
identifying both the second half of March, 1915, as the crucial date leading to
a certain ´point of no return´. Finally, after having looked on the special
archive in Istanbul (“Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi“ [Ottoman
Archives under the Prime Ministry]) which has got more than hundred millions of
files[8], Üngör presents the command as given by Talat on May 23rd,
1915, to all the provinces when ordering “the wholesale deportations of all
Armenians to Deyr-ul Zor, starting with the northeastern provinces.”
This official Ottoman document (as
to be found in the Ottoman Archives under BOA, DH.SFR, and not within the
central register BOA, MV) is, as Üngör points out, until now “the single
instance in which the empire-wide nature of the deportations is reflected in
one order at the most central level.” (Üngör 2006, 187; 195, note 131) In the
very meaning of quod-erad-demonstrandum, and even when comparing to the
situation according to the Holocaust in 1941 without any written order from the
very top, any dispute on “the Andonian documents” indeed is a yesterday
discussion (in spite of the fact that the Talat telegrams at first were mentioned
from H.A. Gibbons [1916], 19-23).
In his outlook
U.Ü. Üngör reminds us on the public declaration of the three Entente powers
dated May, 24th, 1915, condemning “these new crimes of Turkey
against humanity and civilization”, promising that “all members of the Ottoman
government and those of her agents who are implicated in such massacres […]
will hold personally responsible.” Having realized their projective fate, “the
CUP leaders, especially Talat, panicked”, creating immediately, for covering
the beginning genocide, an emergency decree on the deportations as a sort of
pseudo-law (May 29th, 1915). Later on , in 1916 and 1917, two
ideological pamphlets above all to be distributed among the diplomats at
Pera([9], [10]), were produced in French, denying that Armenocide had
well-started, using pseudo-arguments picked up by all post-Ottoman
true-believers and fanatics, either militant Kemalists or not, till nowadays.
IX. Whenever
scholarly looking on what could be named Serbocide (“killing Serbes”) as a
specific way of mass killing during World War II as planned and organized
serial killing by the political leadership of “Satellite Croatia” (1941-1945)
which started in summer 1941 it is clear that this was not only mass slaughter
at hardcore-level of cruelty but, in fact, and strictu sensu, another
genocide with about one million victims within nearly four years. What might
appear, at the first glance, as Balkan atrocities - or just another balkanized
massacre happening – was, in fact, the murder of that part of the Serbs as a
people living, in 1941, as citizen in the newly created Croatian state (about
1,5 million humans at all belonged to that ethnic, religious, and cultural
minority). Remembering the very historical context of that specific genocidal
syndrome, above all (i) German military occupation of the Balkan and the crimes
committed by these armed forces, (ii) specific genocidal actions run by SS and
Wehrmacht against Balkan jews, and the Gypsy, and (iii) the graphic, and
active, support the fascist powers Germany, and Italy, gave to the Croatian
Ustase movement - the Croatian genocidal elite figures Jehuda Bauer stigmatized
as “lumpen” intellectuals lead by a fanatic race ideology with “the Serb” as
the deadly enemy caught their chance and overtook not only the state power but
realized the very opportunity and deprived, persecuted, and murdered the bulk
of the members of the Serbian people living within that newly established
Croatian state - all of what happened
under the eyes of the Third Reich as the most relevant protective power the
Ustase state has got. In the end about 100.000 Serbs fled outside the country,
250.000 were forced to become members of the Roman catholic church, and 750.000
were killed within the country.
It is a matter of fact that this
genocide within 20th century is, until now, under-documented
whenever compared with the Holocaust and the Armenocide. Moreover, there do
exist a lot of still unsolved problems to be discussed by further scholarly
work, e.g. the role of the religious ideologies and the catholic church,
priest, clergyman, and the meaning of often barbarian forms of (serial) killing
humans with streams of blood like butchery in a slaughterhouse whenever killing
the slaughter cattle. Nevertheless there is no doubt about the facts (although
daisy bones and true believers like Ustase ideologists deny). Finally, from a
comparative perspective, any genocidal scholar cannot overlook the common
features according to Armenocide and Holocaust: first of all the vital role of
the Croatian Ustase state (NDH) itself as well as the very application of a
destructive racial ideology named “the objective enemy” (Hannah Arendt) leading
to this third European genocide within 20th century under Balkan
circumstances, started, and undertaken, at the same time of the Holocaust,
expressing the equal fascist, racial, annihilating, destructive, and deadly
mentality of the genocidalists.
X. Whereas Raphael Lemkin (1944)
discussed both the historical situation/s -the World War/s- and the destructive
bio-political dimensions of mass slaughter and serial killing a people for
religious, ethnic, and ideological reasons, which is effective over
generations, Hannah Arendt worked out the specific role the state apparatus
played whenever the holocaust (1941-1945) is discussed as a specific form of
„mass murder“ planned and organized by a state (thus being himself subject of a
capital crime). Giving this setting, I will take another special feature of any
genocide, as emphasized by Irving Louis Horowitz (1980), seriously: The very
crime later named genocide implies, from the standpoint of any relevant concept
due to ´sociology of killing´, the basic feature of mass killings as serial
killing not only masses but a defined social group, an entire people, like the
Armenians (1915-1918) during the First World War, the Serbs living in that
separate Ustase state founded in 1941, and the European Jews (1941-1945),
during the Second World War. Whenever looking on both well-documented genocidal
events during the World Wars within 20th century through the eyes of an
experienced social scientist like Irving Horowitz, there is good reason to
argue that the „Armenocide“ (meanwhile discussed as such within the scholarly
community) was not only historically the first modern genocide within 20th
century but also the first, and prior, most outstanding destructive genocidal
event anticipating a specific new quality of lethal policy (which was defined
later on, e.g. by Hannah Arendt, as totalitarianism). Consequently, the
„Armenocide“ as „the essential prototype of genocide in the twentieth century“
(Irving L. Horowitz) and its genocidal totalitarianism, will be the most
relevant matter of future scholarly work on modern genocide within 20th
century, its political sociology, and its social mentality.
XI. The very secret of any
anti-genocidal ´saving-lives´-policy is and means to break down a basically
destructive process before mass killing and murdering people is regarded as a
legitimate method for solving societal problems in the way totalitarian regimes
do, using the state apparatus as a bureaucratic organised administrative
machinery for mass murder producing an empirical „double-bind”-situation
(Gregory Bateson) whenever giving the victims, whatsoever they will do or not
do, not at all a chance to escape, likely to atrocities, riots, pogroms, mass
slaughters, and massacres as pre-totalitarian methods: traditionally those who
did submit and/or revoke could survive and survived, e.g. as religious
convertites.
The most prominent Nazi-ideologist
of the Third Reich, later on as "Reichsminister für die besetzten Ostgebiete"
since July 17, 1941, the most responsible political figure for occupied Eastern
territories - Alfred Rosenberg – crossed, in autumn 1941, the Rubicon of the
perpetrators, when, after a personal meeting with SS-leader Heinrich Himmler (November
18, 1941), commanding "die biologische Ausmerzung des gesamten Judentums
in Europa" [„the biological elimination of the entire European
Jewry"] as an imperative necessity of any as racial as fascist
„eliminationist antisemitism” (Daniel J. Godhagen). At the Main Nuremberg Trial
1945-46, NS-Reichsminister Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) - both as an ideologist
the very creator of "racial hate" and a radical practitioner of what
could be, as a specific manner of genocidal totalitarianism, named genocidal
fascism or fascist genocidality - was accused because of (i)
"participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of
crime against peace", (ii) "planning, initiating and waging wars of
aggression and other crime against peace", (iii) "war crimes",
and (iv) "crimes against humanity", found guilty in all four topics,
condemned to death, and was, consequently, executed October 16th, 1946.
Plainly spoken, this point of no
return, allowing, and managing, the Holocaust as well as the Armenocide and the
Serbocide - all of them ultimate breakdowns of any humanity and civilization
under the shadow and the umbrella of two World Wars - is better never – and
never again - to be reached.
XII. If it is not only true, but
moreover the very truth, and finally nothing but the only truth that genocidal
action/s and genocide policy is a matter of not only one generation, but of
several generations according to both sides of the genocidal coin –perpetrators
and victims – it is, by no means as “the last scene of all, that ends this
strange and eventful history” (William Shakespeare) but as an integrative part
incorporated in the genocidal process itself of extraordinary relevancy how
humans born later (“die Nachgeborenen” [Bertolt Brecht]) are coping with the
most destructive societal event of mankind, especially under the perspective of
preventing that specific collective mass murder.
Decades before
Elie Wiesel publicly mentioned “the holocaust before the holocaust”, Joseph
Guttmann, an exiled European Jew surviving the Holocaust, reminds us, some
sixty years ago, that beyond all “uniqueness” of the Holocaust setting,
especially given with the murderous German industry placed in occupied
´Eastern´ Europe using gas chambers, several common features of Armenocide
and Holocaust as successfully “organized attempt[s] to exterminate a whole
ethnic group” could be detected (Guttmann 1948, 3). Moreover, Guttmann worked
not only out the opportunity structures for genocidal policy as given by the historical
situation/s of World War and also points out the meaning of plundering acts,
robbery of money, goods, property, and fortunes of the (expelled and) murdered
victims for sponsoring the genocidal system and its war machinery, but also
stresses relevant differences between the methods applied: when comparing
genocidal actions and policy – a legitimate method even in the eyes of Daniel
J. Goldhagen (who was wrongly attributed a ´true believer´ of the uniqueness-dogma
for years) - the German genocidal business was valued as ´scientific´ whereas
the Turk one used more primitive, simple methods of traditional slaughter when
executing their mass murder/s – an overwhelming aspect Michael J. Arlen (1975,
243/244) describes as a technological paradigm (Albrecht [2002]):
“Hitler´s
Germany was to perfect the process of railway deportation and to develop the
gas chamber and the crematoria [...] But in virtuality every modern instance of
mass murder, beginning, it appears with the Armenians, the key element – which
has raised the numerical and physic levels of the deed above the classic terms
of massacre – has been the alliance of technology and communication.”
When combined
with a historical view which looks upon the Holocaust as ´the last stage´ of a
process which started with the 30th of January, 1933, when the state
power was given over to the Nazi gang (Wendt 2006), not only the very lethal result
– mass/serial killing in murder-factories down in the “wild” East since the
autumn 1941 – can be of scholarly interest but also alls the steps
foreshadowing and leading to the Holocaust 1941 must be: sterilization under
pressure, killing living human beings (children, oldies, gypsies, and others)
arrested in clinics, and concentration camps, defined as ´not worth´ to live
any longer …
The
German-American Historian of World War II, Gerhard Weinberg, stressed this
aspect as the general one according to the historical situation (Weinberg 1995:
16):
„Der
Zweite Weltkrieg war […] Kampf darum, wer auf dieser Welt leben und über ihre
Ressourcen verfügen sollte. Zugleich sollte entschieden werden, welche Völker
völlig ausgelöscht werden würden, weil die Sieger sie als minderwertig oder
störend ansahen.“ („World War II […] was
the struggle for life in the sense of who should live on this planet and who
should command its very resources. At the same time the decision should be made
which peoples would have been annihilated completely because they were regarded
as inferior and troublesome by the winners.“)
XIII. What the
world-wide Armenian community names “the white massacre” was, for decades,
called “the forgotten genocide”, too. From a certain sociological standpoint
any communication on genocide is formally regarded as a “second order”-phenomenon
(Dammann 2001), basically including relevant communication strategies of either
denial or apologizing genocide as the main forms of defending against any
involvement within genocidal action and policy, and its consequences, applied
by the perpetrator-group. Some twenty years ago, Richard G. Hovannisian (1986,
111-133), a prominent US-scholar of the Armenocide, sketched a historical
five-step-model to describe the efforts of any Turkish state (whosoever may be
her leading political figures), at that time ending with scholarly historian
“revisionism” created for “clouding the past” – a defensive slogan which was in
the last years since the beginning of the 21st century transformed into the
Turkish demand for establishing a committee formed by governmentally selected
Turkish and Armenian historians (of the two states) to detect whether the
Armenocide 1915/16 was genocidal policy as planned and organized by the Ottoman
State - or not … indeed nothing else than an as cretinistic as bullshit idea.
Most recently,
the German researcher Mihran Dabag (2006) publicly accented that one of his own
important – as scholarly as human – tasks as a student of genocide is to counter
any denial of the crime:
“This is a
relevant aspect for developing effective strategies for preventing and blocking
collective violence. Surprisingly, at a first glance, that potential genocidal
actors will not be to deter as perpetrators from committing the crime by legal
consequences. Because the crime of genocide develops its destructive effectiveness
not primarily for the generation of the perpetrators but for the following
generations aiming the societal future of the perpetrator-group.”
Given this
matter of fact, there is still a lot to be done according to Armenocide and Serbocide:
For since the still existing “Türkiye Cumhuriyeti” was founded in
[October 29th] 1923, every Turkish government and her (post-) Kemalistic
policy, and ideology, sustainable denied the Armenocide as genocidal policy[11]
in the sense and meaning of the UN-convention (1948). “Hrvatska”, the
follower state of historical fascist Croatia (1941-45) as founded in [October 8th]
1991, in fact two generations after her predecessor, is also - if not basically
denying the fact of mass-murdered Serbs during World War II in general – particularly
playing down what really happened in a manner of extremely hard-core obscurity.
XIV. Denying genocide is, indeed, not only „a kind of double killing“: „the physical deed“ is „followed by the destruction of remembrance of the deed“ (Smith et.al. 1995) but in a way also the very last stage of any genocidal action and one of its structurally incorporated elements as a policy planned, and organized, by a state and not by true believers and other fanatics, militant liars, cultural desperadoes, psychopathic Lumpenintellektuelle, superfluous Mobführer, political and war criminals, criminal underworld, white trash (with or without cash) self-fancying as Herrenrassse, in short: all of that rabble scum of the earth as more or less small social groups and/or societal organizations belonging to the civil sectors of every - and above all the “hidden” – society[12], but the policy of denial of empirical states like Croatia and Turkey (independently whether classified as potential “failed states” - or not - whenever valued by political sociologists).
Given this
setting, a lot remains to do, above all to make sure that Turkey and Croatia,
both former political allies of Germany 1914-18 and 1941-45, actually knocking
on the EU´s door as potential new members, will accept, acknowledge, and
recognize both crimenis magna - Armenocide and Serbocide -
as genocidal policy planned and organized by their predecessor/s in state: ni
más, ni menos.
*) Enlarged printed version of a
paper of mine which was, under the title Murder(ing) People - Genocidal
Policy Within 20th Century in Europe, prepared for the “Second International
Meeting on Genocidal Social Practices” (November 20-22, 2007), at
Universidad de Tres de Febrero,
[1] Richard Albrecht, „Wer redet heute noch von der
Vernichtung der Armenier ?“ – Adolf Hitler zweite Geheimrede am 22. August 1939 [“Who is, after all, today
speaking about the destruction of the Armenians ?“ – What Hitler really said
when talking to his Supreme Commanders, August 22nd, 1939]: Genozidpolitik
im 20. Jahrhundert, Band 3, 104 p. (Aachen: Shaker, 2007 [= Allgemeine
Rechtswissenschaft]); summary and table of contents -> http://www.shaker.de/shop/978-3-8322-6695-0; short scholarly prospects are to be found as well as
at H-Net: http://www.h-net.msu.edu:80/announce/show.cgi?ID=160809) and
at GRIN publication house: http://www.hausarbeiten.de/faecher/vorschau/76273.html.
– I really don´t want to coin out another
definition of Armenocide (in German: Armenozid) but take the
liberty, however, to use, even in German, that artificial word which at first
was used as Armenocide within the US-Armenian community and her scholars. The
word and its meaning alludes to the fate of the Ottoman Armenians above all in
1915/16, expressing both the victimized group and what happened (cidere
means killing). Neither the word nor the concept Armenocide implies anything about the way of murder(ing), in spite of the
well-known, and as well artificially created, word Holocaust, which
mirrors in its all-around meaning the form of the deliberate extermination of a
people: holokaustos means totally burning humans when still living
(Albrecht 1989, 69). Whenever looking on
the way both genocides were executed, not Jews in 1941/45, but Armenians in
1915/16 were burnt when still living, having fled expecting shelter within
their churches. In September 1922, when Kemalist militia occupied the
[2] The German
sociologist Werner Hofmann (1968, 49-66) had characterized science formally
as „the way of seeking knowledge in a methodical (as systematic as critical)
way“ under two basic aspects: “(i) the general content of science has to be
worked out (by collecting, describing, classifying the subjects, leading to any
morphology, typology etc.); (ii) under theoretical aspects the very context and
meaning of all appearances of the subjects and the underlying basic relations
must be defined as rules belonging to reality. [...] At first comes the image
of the real world as given by her empirical nature founding the empirical
nature of reality. […] Any theoretical work of a scientist expresses the
structural contradictory relationship of
registering and interpreting of reality: reality can be understood without
theory, but without theory sciences is not at all possible.” Whenever looking
at sociology in particular, the sociologist Theodore Geiger (1948/49, 292-302)
stressed: “Sociology cannot restrict her work to pure registration of human
acting but must try to detect the basic underlying subjective processes, and
describe the very meaning of human action.” – According to any scientific
definition of genocide any rational logic has to apply the well-known principle
definitio per
genus proximum et differentiam specificam to differentiating between general
and specific aspects within societal action, or to express the methodological
principle that racism is as conditio sine qua non an essential
precondition for genocide graphically: not every racialist society is essentially
a genocidal society – but, however, every genocidal society is essentially a
racialist society (Barth 2006, 172-199). For meanwhile racism is by no means what it was at first:
methodologically spoken the mechanistic dissolution of the highly contradictory
unit (named dialectics) of the biological and the social for the sole benefit
of the biosphere. Moreover, whenever discussing human action/s and the mentality
of the actors, I may remind my scholarly readership to what William I. Thomas,
with Dorothy S. Thomas (1928², 571/572), accurately formulated as one of the
basic theorems whenever describing human action/s: "If men define
situations as real, they are real in their consequences". Finally, W.I.
Thomas (1967³, 42) later on pointed out: "gradually a whole life-policy
and the personality of the individual himself [...] will be influenced by a
series of definitions the individual is involved in“. According to small social
worlds of every-day life – named intimacy – in particular W.I. Thomas stressed
the very meaning of subjective impressions and feelings leading to definitions
of the situation/s constituting another ´real´ social world of the acting
individual/s: „subjective impressions can be projected onto life and thereby
become real to projectors.” (Volkart 1951, 14)
[3] Richard Albrecht, Serbozid. Über den Dritten
Europäischen Völkermord im 20. Jahrhundert; in: Kultursoziologie, 15 (2006) 2,
37-56; an enlarged version was published under the title: Serbozid, 1941-1945
(Albrecht, Völkermord[en], 2006, 71-93)
[4] In German/y since 1915 until
now typically played down whenever named „Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit”
and not correctly called „Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit” - a sort of Newspeak
which Hannah Arendt reviewed as „the understatement of the 20th
century” at all; a brief case-study gives Albrecht (2004: Verbrechen). - For
good reasons censorious measures as run by military dictatorship in Germany
during World War I – especially when oppressing any facts on what was going on
´backwards down in the very Turkey´ - were of hard-core character and part of a
policy later on named “the crime of silence”. The German churchman Dr
Johannes Lepsius (1858-1926), a prominent so-called “friend of the Armenian
people”, at first in 1916 detected the very character of “these new crimes
against humanity and civilisation” when clearly naming that massacres,
slaughters, and mass murders, as part of the “annihilation of the Armenian
nation” (“Vernichtung der armenischen Nation”), and, finally, “murder of a
nation” (“Völkermord, den die Jungtürken auf dem Gewissen haben.” (Albrecht, Völkermord[en], 2006, 117)
[5] Berliner Tageszeitung und Handelszeitung 4.5.1916:
Wilhelm Feldmann, Unterredung mit Talaat: „Man hat uns vorgeworfen, daß
wir keinen Unterschied zwischen den schuldigen und den unschuldigen Armeniern
gemacht hätten. Daß war unmöglich, da bei der Lage der Dinge morgen schuldig
sein konnte, wer heute vielleicht noch unschuldig war.“ I overtook the wrong German „daß“
of the text-version as an original source.
[6] The Turkish
Historical Society (founded in 1931) does not belong to that in
contemporary
[7] One of the
most relevant political measures to modernize every-day-life in Turkey as run
by early Kemalism was, in 1928, replacing the old Arab way of writing by a new quasi-Latin
alphabet which, however, lead to that bizarre situation that the old
language and writing – Osmanli – meanwhile, in modern Turkey, is in fact a
matter of a few specialists, leading to the well-know situation of a specific
expropriation process the German emigré Ernst Bloch (1939) named “Disrupted Language
– Disrupted Culture”
[8] A short
description in modern Turkish is online: http://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar%C5%9Fiv; an English text placed by the
Turkish Minstry of Culture & Tourism, too:
http://goturkey.turizm.gov.tr/Yonlendir.aspx?17A16AE30572D313D4AF1EF75F7A7968F9F8102006DD7892, but is, for any
student/scholar/researcher, as worthless as that two volumes of “Documents on
Ottoman-Armenians” (n.d., 317 [and] xi/188 p.) Turkish authorities distributed.
An as systematical as critical overview on (after the armistice in 1918
´cleaned´) Ottoman Archives in Turkey, which cleary shows the “genocidal
intention” of the CUP-leadership, gives, most recently, Akcam (2006).
[9] Vérité sur le Movement
Révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales/Journal de guerre
[...]/Notes d´un officier superieur russe [...]. (Constantinople 1916; 1919²,
54 p.)
[10] Aspirations et agissement
révolutionnaires des Comité Arméniens avant et après la proclamation de la
Constitution Ottomane (Istanbul 1917, 290 p.)
[11] Bayraktar & Seibel (2004)
sketched a respectable description of that phenomenon of serial
hard-core-abnegatiation naming both historical facts and ideological fictions
since 1918; a critical view on (Post-) Kemalism gives
[12] Given the actual status of
factual decomposition of (any image/s of) society in her “late
modern age” (Anthony Giddens) - often most superficially described as
´postmodernity´ - as the very age of “individualization” and “globalization”, I
may, as a social scientist and an “old”
European egg-head, emphasize at least three basic topics against such as
bizarre as absurd ideas whenever proclaimed, expressing an terrifying engineer
(mis)understanding not only of society but also of human acting and/or acting
human/s as expressed extremely plastically in a phrase a former British
Prime-Minister affirmed: “There is no such thing as society, only men and women
and their families" (Margaret Thatcher): (i) first, society does exist,
however, “does not exist of individuals but expresses the sum of relationships
[and] conditions that the individual actor is forming” (Marx 1857/58, 176);
(ii) moreover, whenever looking on consciousness, "it is in fact not the consciousness
dominating life but the very life dominating consciousness" (Marx [and]
Engels 1845/46, 27); and (iii) finally, the term technology as sketched
by Carl Marx in his radical critique of the economical anatomy of capitalism in
a footnote (1867) when describing, in his “Capital” (13th chapter:
"Machinery and Great Industry") annotated on both conceptual
and methodological aspects of any critical social science quite sophistically
according to a grounded societal theory, and is by no means expressing mere
(modern, applied etc.) engineering, mechanics, techniques, in short: a
technical dimension, but, as technology, “discloses the active relation of man
towards nature, as well as the direct process of production of his very life,
and thereby the process of production of his basic societal relations, and of
his own mentality and his images of society, too." (Marx 1867, 392/393)
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Beschreibung, Analyse, Verhinderung
Armenozid, Serbozid und Holocaust als entscheidende Völkermorde zweier
Weltkriege
In diesem
englischen Text versucht der Autor als erfahrener Sozialwissenschaftler, Sozialpsychologe
und Politikforscher nicht nur eine Zusammenfassung seiner eigenen Genozid- oder
Völkermordforschungen der letzten zwanzig Jahre, sondern auch eine systematisch-kritische
Übersicht zur vergleichenden Völkermord- oder Genozidforschung in völkermord-aufklärerischer
und genozid-verhindernder Absicht. Ausgangspunkt ist der „Armeniermord“ oder
Armenozid als der historische „Völkermord, den die Jungtürken auf dem Gewissen
haben“ (Johannes Lepsius) und der erste
staatlich „organisierte und
geplante Völkermord des 20. Jahrhunderts“ (Edgar Hilsenrath). Dieser wird im
Anschluß an politiksoziologische Studien von Irving Louis Horowitz als
„Prototyp“ staatlich geplanter und organisierter genozidaler
oder Völkermordhandlungen verstanden.
© by the author (2009)
The
Author
Richard Albrecht is not only a scholar
of the Armenocide but also that
investigative social scientist currently living in Germany who found, verified,
contextualized, discussed, and at first published, in the third volume of his
study “Völkermord(en)” [Murder/ing People. Genocidal Policy Within 20th
Century], the L-3-version of Reichskanzler Hitlers notorious second secret
speech delivered to his High Commanders, August 22, 1939, which includes “The Armenian
Quote”: “Who is, after all, today speaking
about the destruction of the Armenians ?“ (Cutting the Gordian Knot: http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=160809)
The author graduated in social
psychology/sociology (1971), got his first PhD. in Cultural Studies (1976), and
his second one in Political Sociology (1989). 1986/91 an associated professor,
the last two decades Richard Albrecht works as a free-lancer, scholarly
publishing on (i) historical social science, class structure, and societal
theory & methodology1, (ii) genocide/s
& genocidal acting within 20th century2; (iii) the
sociology of our time, esp. the social psychology of current German society and
her development3. - Recent publications: rechtskulturaktuell
(Unabhängiges online-Magazin für Bürgerrechte [2002/07, Editor]: http://www.rechtskulturaktuell.de); moz.art1
(Unabhängiges HalbWochenMagazin [2007/09, Editor]: http://www.mozart1.de). – StaatsRache. Justizkritische Beiträge gegen die Dummheit im deutschen
Recht(ssystem) (2005; ²2007). - Genozidpolitik
im 20. Jahrhundert (2006/07, three vol.es). - Crime/s Against Mankind,
Humanity, and Civilisation (2007). - „Demoskopie als Demagogie“ –
Kritisches aus den achtziger Jahren“ ([incl. CD], 2007) - SUCH LINGE.
Vom Kommunistenprozeß zu Köln zu google.de. Sozialwissenschaftliche Recherchen
zum langen, kurzen und neuen Jahrhundert (2008). – Forthcoming: (2009) Textsoziologie
als praktische JustizKritik – am Beispiel des deutschen Familien- und
Jugendrechts(systems). – (2010) Rosenholtz. Geschichte einer Fälschung4.