Annihilation: The European Rimlands 1939-1953 (The Crisis of Genocide, Volume II)

554 Pages·2014·2.911 MB·English

by  Mark Levene

THE CRISIS OF GENOCIDE

THE CRISIS OF GENOCIDE · VOLUME TWO
Annihilation
The European Rimlands 1939–1953
MARK LEVENE
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1
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For
Daniel, Adam, and Karen

‘In the end moral and political truths have to be proved on the body, because
this mass of nerve and muscle and blood is what we are.’
Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door

Contents
List of Maps xi
A Brief Note on Languages and Transliteration xiii
Introduction 1
PART ONE: RENEWED EUROPEAN CATACLYSM
1. The Second Crisis of the Rimlands 9
Setting the scene 9
National politics, geopolitics, and the growing incidence of
rimlands’ violence 12
Liquidating Poland 24
Experiments in population reordering 45
Agents of destruction 55
The insoluble problem: getting rid of the Jews 66
2. The Nazi Wars of Jewish—and Roma—Extermination 76
Setting the scene 76
Balkan prelude 81
A conscious if limited genocide by way of Operation Barbarossa 86
The shift to total genocide 98
Genocide as ‘system’ 114
The Roma: an additional complication? 132
Denouement by way of geopolitics 139
3. Other Europeans and the Destruction of the Jews 152
Setting the scene 152
Tolerable Jews and irredeemable Jews 156
Collaborationist states with ambivalent records 162
The Balkan arena—exterminators and protectors 178
Non-German perpetrators in the Nazi-occupied rimlands 184
A state which killed—Rumania 206
Hungary: from collaborative genocide to last-ditch
autonomous massacre 221
4. Wars of All against All 234
Setting the scene 234
A clash of titans: the Soviet–German War and its
genocidal potential 240
The war in the rear 246