Genocide: The concept and its debates from the Holocaust to colonial mass violence

Since their emergence in the 1980s, genocide studies have debated the place of the Holocaust in the concept of genocide. Twenty years later, younger genocide researchers have called for colonial violence to be integrated into the concept—not as a secondary form of “ethnocide,” but as an equivalent form of genocide. This article examines the discussion surrounding the Holocaust and colonial mass violence as genocides in the fields of law, political activism, genocide studies, and official genocide recognition policy by states.

In the first part of this article, I will outline the differences between Raphael Lemkin's concept and the Genocide Convention, thereby demonstrating that international law also needs to be decolonized with regard to the Genocide Convention. The second part highlights the different interpretations of the concept of genocide during the Nuremberg Trials and demonstrates that both interpretations—one narrowly focused on the mass murder of the Jewish group, and one broadly focused on all Nazi crimes of mass violence with the aim of conquering living space—were already present in 1945/1946. The third part illustrates that political activism during the Cold War era employed broader definitions of genocide than those permitted by the Genocide Convention. The fourth part focuses on genocide studies and asks how the Holocaust and colonial mass violence were dealt with in the discipline. The final part examines official genocide recognition policy and highlights that the recognition of colonial genocides remains an exception, while allegedly distinguishable mass violence against national, ethnic, and religious groups remains in the foreground. However, the political interests of states often play a role in this, and genocide recognition policy can also be used by the Global North to discipline and control the Global South.

Lemkin's concept and the genocide convention

The Genocide Convention is inextricably linked to Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. He coined the term and developed the concept based on his analysis of the Nazi regime's occupation policies and laws. In his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin defined genocide as follows:

Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. (Lemkin, 1944: 79)

Lemkin was only marginally involved in the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention. He was not an official member of a delegation but influenced the discussions through his lobbying efforts (Irvin-Erickson, 2017: 152–158). After an initial resolution on genocide in the UN General Assembly in December 1946 and a first draft of the convention by the UN Secretariat in 1947, an ad hoc committee began drafting the convention. Seven states were represented on the committee: the USA, the USSR, France, Poland, Lebanon, Venezuela, and the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek. In addition, the US delegation engaged in intensive discussions with the British, who were thus indirectly involved. The draft version of the Genocide Convention prepared by the state delegates had been purged of all aspects that could compromise state policies in the colonies or toward (indigenous) minorities in their own countries. Social groups had been excluded from the outset as a listed victim group. However, political groups and the expulsion of members of the persecuted group into permanent exile were discussed in detail, as was cultural genocide. It was only in the final version that the latter aspects were omitted (Irvin-Erickson, 2017: 167–189; Morsink, 1999; Weiss-Wendt, 2017: 81–113).

The final version of the Genocide Convention, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948, differed significantly from Lemkin's original draft. Article II defines the elements of genocide:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Convention, 1948)

As an international treaty, the Genocide Convention thus followed the international law of the time, which was a law between “civilized” nations or states (Anghie, 2004; Koskenniemi, 2002). The remaining colonial powers and the old settler colonies, which had provided the majority of the negotiating partners among the state delegates of the ad hoc committee, had drafted the Genocide Convention in such a way that it did not interfere with their own political interests and did not restrict their scope of action in the colonies and their state territory.

The Nuremberg trial

At the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg from 1945 to 1946, the term “genocide” was used, but only descriptively. This is because the offense was only to be created with the Genocide Convention in 1948. The British chief prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, was the most concise in his use of the concept of genocide (Stiller, 2012; Earl, 2013). He understood the Nazi “policy of genocide” to mean a broad spectrum of different measures of persecution and extermination perpetrated against different population groups. Shawcross cited the murder of the Jewish population, the Sinti and Roma, the people with disabilities and the mentally ill, forced sterilizations, forced abortions, the extermination through labor of forced laborers, the marriage bans in occupied Poland and thus the Nazi policy of birth prevention among the Polish civilian population, and, in general, the repressive occupation policy of the Nazi regime in various countries.

Genocide was not restricted to extermination of the Jewish people or of the gypsies. It was applied in different forms to Yugoslavia, to the non-German inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, to the people of the Low Countries and of Norway. The technique varied from nation to nation, from people to people. The long-term aim was the same in all cases. (IMT, 1947–1949: Vol. XIX, 497f.) Their aims went beyond mere Germanization, the imposition of the German cultural pattern upon other peoples. Hitler was resolved to expel non-Germans from the soil he required but that they owned and colonize it by Germans. […] Such were the plans for the Soviet Union, for Poland and for Czechoslovakia. (IMT, 1947–1949: Vol. XIX, 496f.)

The persecution and extermination of European Jews was prosecuted under the charge of crimes against humanity. This offense had even been created specifically for this purpose. Its elements included murder and extermination as well as the persecution of persons on “political, racial, and religious” grounds. Although the offense of crimes against humanity does not require proof of a plan or intent, the US prosecution at the IMT attempted to prove this to the defendants for the persecution and extermination of the Jews. They cited the Nazi party program of 1920, anti-Semitic excerpts from Hitler's book Mein Kampf, and other ideological writings of the individual defendants. In court, a US prosecutor argued that the Europe-wide “annihilation of the Jewish people” had been the “ultimate objective of the Nazi Party” from the outset (IMT, 1947–49: Vol. III, 573). This line of argument did not convince the judges because the evidence that the defendants were anti-Semitic did not prove that they had a common plan to murder the Jewish civilian population of Europe. However, it did not change the fact that the judges recognized the persecution and extermination of the Jews as a crime against humanity.

The two examples of the application of the concept of genocide in the Nuremberg trial of major war criminals show that it was interpreted very differently before the Genocide Convention. The two different interpretations of genocide—the broad functionalist understanding of the persecution and extermination of different groups of people and different acts, and the narrow intentionalist understanding of the mass murder of a single national, ethnic, or religious group—have therefore existed since the early beginnings of the concept of genocide.

The counter-narrative

How has this discourse changed since the Genocide Convention entered into force? I will briefly discuss two cases from the Cold War era. In 1951, the year the convention came into force, political activists invoked it for the first time. The first case was the “We Charge Genocide” petition submitted by the US Civil Rights Congress. The organization appealed to the United Nations, arguing that the government of the United States was responsible for the “genocide” of the African American population through lynchings, discrimination, police brutality, and unequal access to healthcare (Anderson, 2003: 181–201). Lemkin's response to the petition reflected poorly on him. He refused to support the petition and denied that the government was committing genocide against African Americans (Jacobs, 2017: 127). Slavery and its consequences were not recognized as acts of genocide by the US government.

Another prominent example of political activism during the Cold War that employed the Genocide Convention was the 1967 Russell Tribunal on the Vietnam War. British philosopher Bertrand Russell recruited left-wing public intellectuals from around the world to participate in a staged tribunal. The Russell Tribunal found the US government guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in the Vietnam War. During the trial, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and Italian lawyer Lelio Basso described genocide as a technique of colonialism and neocolonialism (Satre, 1968: 614f.; Basso, 1968: 627f.). The example shows that left-wing intellectuals not only integrated historical colonialism, which effectively ended with the independence of many states in the 1960s and 1970s, into the concept of genocide, but also regarded the wars of decolonization or wars of liberation as genocidal; namely, as genocidal on the part of the old colonial powers and the USA in the name of perpetuating structures of dependency and exploitation. Neither the US Civil Rights Congress nor left-wing activists of the 1960s and 1970s gave up on a broader interpretation of the concept of genocide which included structural violence and war violence.

The disputing discipline

The so-called first generation of comparative genocide scholars, who presented their initial studies in the 1970s, followed the interpretation that the mass murder of the Jewish population of Europe could be seen as a separate case of genocide. Other Nazi mass murders, such as those of the Sinti and Roma or of the people with disabilities and mental illnesses, were categorized as parallel genocides. This means that the mass violence of the Nazi regime was not put into context by genocide scholars of the time, but rather examined as individual cases, sorted by national, ethnic, or religious victim groups. They also compared the “Holocaust,” a term that was becoming increasingly prevalent at the time, with other cases of mass violence, in particular the genocide of the Armenians (Fein, 1979). Although they highlighted these two cases as special cases, some researchers adapted Sartre's remarks at the Russell Vietnam Tribunal and understood certain cases of mass violence in colonialism from the conquest of America to the 1970s mass violence against indigenous groups, and other cases, such as the famine in Ukraine in 1932/33, the mass murder of communists in Indonesia 1965/1966, etc., as genocides (Dadrian, 1975; Kuper, 1981; Savon, 1972). The aim was to develop a theory of genocide by comparing individual cases taken out of context. However, the comparison of cases was implicitly hierarchical due to the prominence given to the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews.

Within the “first generation” group, there were various definitions of the concept of genocide, explanations, and schools of thought: some created their own, very broad definitions (Charny, 1994; Kuper, 1982), while others adhered strictly to the definition in the Genocide Convention and emphasized “intent” as the decisive criterion (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990; Fein, 1979; Jonassohn and Chalk, 1987). As a result, functionalist and intentionalist explanations coexisted. A conflict gradually arose over the assessment of the extermination of the Jews during World War II. While most genocide researchers considered it one case among many, albeit a special one, there were also voices that regarded it as the only case of genocide, thus emphasizing its uniqueness (Bauer, 1987; Horowitz, 1981; Katz, 1994). The latter faction split from genocide studies in the 1990s and formed Holocaust studies.

In the 2000s, after the mass violence against the Bosnian Muslim population in Bosnia and Herzegovina and mass murder in Rwanda in 1994, several new comparative studies appeared, each presenting its own definitions of genocide, comparing several cases and proposing its own explanatory models (Kiernan, 2007; Levene, 2005; Mann, 2005; Midlarsky, 2005; Semélin, 2007; Valentino, 2004; Weitz, 2003). These genocide scholars from the 2000s onwards have also been referred to as the “second generation” (Straus, 2007). The only commonality among the studies mentioned was that they all treated the persecution and extermination of European Jews by the Nazi regime as one of the selected cases. However, they came to different conclusions about how the Nazi mass murder of Jews should be situated in relation to the other cases. In the 2000s, Bauer (2001) became the main proponent of the “singularity thesis” of the Holocaust. Bartov (1998), who instead described the extermination of the Jews as only a “paradigmatic” case of genocide, was prominently criticized by the Asian historian Vinay Lal: “From the standpoint of numerous Asian and Third World scholars, the Holocaust, alongside the killings of homosexuals, gypsies, and the purportedly deranged, visited upon the peoples of Europe the violence that colonial powers had routinely inflicted on the ‘natives’ all over the world for nearly five hundred years.” (Lal, 1998: 1188). Lal's criticism came at a time when many genocide scholars were beginning to think similarly.

Some of the younger genocide scholars founded a new association, the European and later International Network of Genocide Scholars (ENoGS/INoGS). The aim of this group was to integrate colonial mass violence and the violence of settler colonialism more strongly into genocide studies (Moses, 2004; Schaller et al., 2004; Zimmerer and Zeiler, 2008). The new network emerged from a conference on the topic of 100 years of genocide against the Herero in the German colony of South West Africa in 1904–1907 (Schaller, 2005). This case has also been referred to as the “first genocide of the twentieth century,” and a causal link to Nazi violence in World War II has been assumed (Mamdani, 2001: 31; Zimmerer, 2019: 29–56). In its definition of genocide, the INoGS network relied more heavily on Lemkin's original definition of genocide from 1944 and less on the Genocide Convention. The younger genocide scholars thus applied a broader definition of genocide that focused not only on mass murder but also encompassed cultural genocide (Schaller and Zimmerer, 2009).

However, this did not resolve the problems with the concept of genocide. Henry Huttenbach, one of the few “first generation” researchers who supported the INoGS split, wrote in 2002, “It is time to de-ethnicize genocide research” (Huttenbach, 2002: 57). The problems with the concept of genocide were repeatedly pointed out by some researchers (Kundrus and Strotbek, 2006; Schaller, 2011), alternative concepts were developed (Gerlach, 2006, 2010), and “critical genocide studies” were proclaimed, which were intended to deal with the genealogy and concepts of the discipline (Hinton, 2012; Moses, 2008). However, no agreement was reached within the already fragmented discipline.

The agenda of younger genocide researchers focused not only more strongly on historical-empirical research, however, but also on the “correlation between memory and genocide” (Hinton, 2012: 9; Hinton and O’Neill, 2009; Zimmerer, 2019: 3–25). In this sense, it can be said that genocide studies underwent a “memory turn” in the 2000s (the same applies to Holocaust studies). As a result, however, the field of research has increasingly become a pillar of transitional justice processes, memory politics, and national and ethnic historical narratives of victimhood. Gerlach (2024: 12) criticizes the fact that the fields of genocide and Holocaust studies increasingly follow “the logic of memorialization and indoctrination rather than inquiry”. The character of genocide studies as a legitimizing science has been clearly recognized and rejected by him and Moses (Gerlach, 2024; Moses, 2021). Other genocide researchers, including parts of the International Association of Genocide Scholars network, have undergone astonishing changes in their views since the Gaza War. It is not yet clear how genocide studies will develop in the future.

Present-day official recognition of genocide

In 2021, the German federal government recognized the genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904–1908) in a bilateral agreement with Namibia, and in 2022, the Canadian House of Commons recognized the residential school system as genocide against the indigenous population. However, compensation payments are voluntary and negotiable for both states––especially in historical cases that occurred before the Genocide Convention came into force in 1951. This is because none of the cases prior to this date can be retroactively determined as genocide by a court. These two cases of official recognition of colonial genocide are exceptions to the policy of genocide recognition, which generally only recognizes cases of mass violence that took place abroad and without the involvement of actors or companies from the recognizing state.

Moses (2021: 482, 492, 496f) proposes the thesis that, after the end of the Cold War, the Holocaust was assigned a central moral function as the “ethical foundation of the West” in the new global order, while the term “genocide” was part of a “civilizing mission” of the Global North towards the Global South. The extent to which this is the case will be examined below. The extermination of European Jews by the Nazi regime is undoubtedly a special case of official recognition of genocide. Due to the shifts in politics of the past caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the convergence of Western and Eastern Europe, it was no longer the war as such and the occupation between 1939 and 1945 that were the focus of a unified commemoration and examination of the Second World War, but increasingly the Holocaust. This is also evidenced by the increasing institutionalization of international education and remembrance policies and national legislative procedures that make Holocaust denial a criminal offense. The UN General Assembly established an International Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Nazi regime in 2005. This day is observed on January 27th of each year, coinciding with the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp (UNGA, 2005). In 2022, the General Assembly adopted a resolution condemning Holocaust denial worldwide (UNGA, 2022).

To date, 20 states (plus six others conditionally) have made Holocaust denial a criminal offense. The criminal prosecution of genocide denial is one form of genocide recognition policy. As an example, I will refer to German legislation. The German Criminal Code, in legal paragraph 130 (“Volksverhetzung,” incitement of the people), has implemented Holocaust denial and, more recently, the “public approval, denial, and trivialization” of genocides, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in general. While the denial of Auschwitz and the Holocaust was criminalized in 1994, the extension to all genocides and international violent crimes dates from 2022 and took place in light of the war in Ukraine. Paragraph 130 was amended for the first time after World War II in 1960. At that time, the Federal Republic of Germany was responding to recent anti-Semitic attacks and judicial scandals involving Nazi perpetrators, which had also been sharply criticized internationally. However, unlike the amendments made in the 1990s, the 1960 amendment did not explicitly refer to incitement to hatred and defamation of population groups in relation to Nazi atrocities. The 2022 amendment increased the penalty for Holocaust denial to up to 5 years (since 1992–2022, up to 3 years). Meanwhile, the maximum prison sentence of 3 years for denying genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity was introduced (Neander, 2006; Ostendorf and Kuhli, 2023). This hierarchy of denial of mass violence is officially explained by Germany's own history and responsibility with regard to the Holocaust.

Generally, it is the respective victim groups who fight for official recognition of the mass violence committed against their group as genocide. The Armenian group's lobbying serves as a successful model for other victim groups, until today, 33 other countries have recognized the Armenian genocide (Armoudian and Smits, 2025; see also Kebranian, 2020). Lobbying by victims’ associations contrasts with the policy of state recognition of genocide pursued mostly by the Global North towards other countries, especially those in the Global South. The United States stands out as the first country to have strategically employed this policy since the 1990s. Official recognition of mass violence as genocide is usually made by the Secretary of State. The following cases have been recognized: Bosnia (1993), Rwanda (1994), Iraq (1995), Darfur (2004), and the persecution of the Yazidis (2016/2017) (Buchwald and Keith, 2019: 3). Parallel to the recognitions in the 1990s, the USA was militarily involved in both the Bosnian War and Iraq. The same was true when the United States recognized the genocide of the Yazidis while fighting ISIS. State recognition of genocide can pursue political and strategic interests, and in some cases, it appears that the concept of genocide is being used to identify the “barbaric” Other, against whom unrestricted military action can then be taken.

Conclusion

The concept of genocide is problematic in several ways. The Genocide Convention is undoubtedly an international agreement that served the interests of the states that created it at the time. The convention defines a specific form of mass violence that exceeds the moral norm on an international scale. Thus, genocidal violence can be attributed to the “barbaric” Other. However, it is only since the 1990s that an international application of the concept of genocide in this way can be identified. Since then, the concept of genocide has become increasingly narrow and politicized in terms of the definition of mass violence. Today, it is not war but genocide that is considered the most serious international crime. But the narrow legal concept of genocide has only led to the delegitimization of a certain form of systematic mass violence. The focus is on ethnicized minorities and ignores the persecution of other groups as well as structural violence and war violence, including so-called “collateral damage” among the civilian population.

As shown, genocide and Holocaust scholars have been debating for decades how to classify the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews within the overall spectrum of genocide. It is unlikely that agreement will be reached in the foreseeable future, as the political interests associated with such a classification are too diverse. Genocide researchers also disagree on many other aspects and cases. Even the definition and attribution of cases of genocide cannot be universally applied. This is due, on the one hand, to the subject matter itself, as mass violence is usually examined in isolation from its overall context, and, on the other hand, to the political interests associated with the discipline.

In order to incorporate other forms of mass violence––structural violence, colonial violence, and war violence––into the concept and to examine mass murders in their historical context, it is necessary to move beyond the concept the concept of genocide, which is associated with the Genocide Convention in the public sphere and in law. Historical research has shown that the dynamics of mass violence can only be understood in their broader context. To analyze mass violence, we need to look at previous and parallel events, actions, interests, and goals of the actors, the agency of the different persecuted groups, existing structures, and contingencies that arise. In my opinion, it is time for the discipline to move forward or, alternatively, for a new field of genocide studies to emerge, namely an analytical expansion through the creation of mass violence studies. The latter must also deal immanently and critically with the fact that it is constantly at risk of becoming a legitimizing academic discipline for political interests at any time.