On 15 April 1945, British troops fighting in the last weeks of the war in Europe liberated the Belsen concentration camp. When the Soviet Red Army occupied the ruined streets of Berlin a few weeks later and brought defeat to Nazi Germany, whatever relief people may have felt about the conquest of the Third Reich was already coming undone. The Allied Armies that were liberating camps like Belsen and Dachau had discovered one of the greatest âcrimes against humanityâ of the twentieth century. One famous photograph records a plainly distraught German woman, a handkerchief clutched to her face as she staggers past a long row of emaciated corpses laid out in the grounds of the Dachau camp. In the background, American troops have lined up a crowd of other German civilians, presumably requiring them to confront the enormity of the crimes of the Nazi state.
However, precisely what had been âdiscoveredâ was never clear, with effects that continue into our own time. For one thing neither Belsen nor Dachau were death camps and telling a clear story about who had been detained in camps like these and why, has proved no easy task (Wachsmann 2015). Though the discovery of Belsen and Dachau provided palpable evidence of crimes against humanity, a lot of the other physical evidence of the Nazi stateâs policies had already disappeared by April 1945. The Nazi state had gone to considerable lengths to try to obliterate any physical evidence of the five main death camps devoted to killing Jews, namely Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Madjanek, along with a lot of the paper trail recording its crimes.
One consequence was that half a century later, historians and other expert witnesses would be required to provide evidence in a London courtroom to âproveâ that the murder of millions of Jews and other peoples had actually taken place (Evans 2001). This court case was a consequence of libel proceedings initiated by the historian and âHolocaust denierâ David Irving against another historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin Books. Irving was doubtless exercising his lawful right to freedom of speech when he wrote his books, and when he initiated libel proceedings against Lipstadt (1993) who had called his historical scholarship into question. Equally one can only imagine the anguish and anger of those survivors who had experienced the death camps or the concentration camps. Yet being indignant about Irving is to miss the larger significance of a more general and troubling pattern of memory, denial and forgetting.
If only because of films like Schindlerâs List (1993) many ordinary people now have some inkling of what is popularly referred to as the Holocaust. This term has been applied to what German policy-makers and officials between 1941 and 1945 called Die Endlosungâor the âFinal Solutionâ. The Final Solution of the âJewish Problemâ meant that in excess of three million Jews were gathered up after 1941 from all over occupied Europe and killed in a number of purpose-built death camps. Millions more Jews had already been killed, especially in Poland and Russia after 1939, mostly by mass shootings carried out in the wake of the invading German armies. It is now generally agreed that at least 5.7 million Jews were killed by German personnel and their allies after 1939 (Niewyk and Nicosia 2000: 45).
What has been less well understood is how the Final Solution was just one part of an even larger policy exercise designed to create a German âracial stateâ. Historians like Burleigh (1994, 2000) and Browning and MatthĂ€us (2004) have pointed to a huge death toll of civilians and non-combatants including children and adults with physical and mental disabilities, psychiatric patients, Russians, Poles and Sinti, homosexuals, and people with âanti-social tendenciesâ who were also swept up into prisons, camps and clinics.1 Apart from those killed, others were sterilized, subjected to medical experiments or torture or forcibly âresettledâ after 1939.
Apart from the tendency to forget the non-Jewish victims of the Nazi state, it has also been a convention to treat the Holocaust as a unique historical event. This has had certain effects.2 One has been to treat the Naziâs as âabjectsâ, i.e. as uniquely âdisgustingâ, âevilâ, even psychotic brutes acting out some particular German disposition to âeliminationist anti-Semitismâ (Dawidowicz [1975] 1986; Goldhagen 1996; Bendersky 2007). Equally, it has led other writers to declare the Holocaust so unique or horrible an event as to defy human understanding (Bauer 1990). Finally, there has been a tendency to treat the Holocaust as a benchmark when assessing claims that later events like the mass murder of its citizens by the Cambodian government led by Pol Pot, or the Hutu in Rwanda in 1994 areâor are notâinstances of genocide (Shaw 2007).
The way many ordinary people and even some scholars have understood the Nazi exercise in state-sponsored murder is part of what Paul Ricoeur was getting at when he suggested that we live in a time marked by official exercises in public memorials and historical ceremonies constituting what he calls âan excess of memoryâ paralleled by âan excess of forgettingâ (2004: xv). If there is value in promoting what Ricoeur conceived of as a âcivic policy of the just allotment of memoryâ, then it behoves us to remember all of the victims of state-sponsored violence. This book is best read as a modest contribution to developing or enlarging such a civic capacity especially, though not exclusively, on the part of criminology and those sociologists interested in crime.
The Questions Outlined: Crimes of the State and Criminology
Though I will elaborate on the kinds of questions I address shortly there are some simple areas of investigation that animate the book. How have criminology and those sociologists interested in crime dealt with crimes of the state? What does the relative invisibility of state crime say about these disciplines? How should we think about or begin to understand the problem of state crime and can we do so in ways that are in some sense âcriminologicalâ?
Before I say more about these questions let me spell out what is meant by crimes of the state and briefly indicate how criminology has responded to this. If we accept that a certain abstractness is unavoidable here, let me propose a provisional way of thinking about crimes of the state. Friedrichs (1998) makes a useful start when he says âcrimes of the stateâ refers to âharmful acts carried out on behalf of the state, as well as harmful or illegal acts carried out by state officials for their own benefit or the benefit of their partyâ. If we push a bit harder we will quickly establish that central to these âharmful actsâ are many kinds of violence.
Violence itself as Eller (2010: 12) notes is hardly a simple or clear category: it refers to too many non-synonymous categories like âaggressionâ, âhostilityâ or âconflictâ to be a âsimpleâ idea. Equally as Riches points out âviolenceâ serves as both a name and as a judgement:
Though this needs to be discussed in more detail later, Richesâ discussion reveals the irreducibly perspectival as well as the ethical and political character both of violence and the language we use to name its parts. In both our language and the âstuffâ that is violence, we confront a complex interplay of intellectual cognitions, emotional responses and ethical ideas, many of them contested making sense of manifestations of physical violence and broken bodies that viscerally is often both shocking and overwhelming.through it, the unacceptable and illegitimate harming behaviour is conveyed ⊠not only is the name invoked as a commentary on the act, the perspective on this act is unequivocally twisted from performer to observer. For their part perpetratorsâdistancing themselves from the act are reluctant to concede that what they have done is violence ⊠it was âself-defenceâ, âunavoidable forceâ, âfreedom fightingâ, âsocial controlâ and so on. (Riches 1991: 285)
What of Friedrichsâ reference to âillegal actsâ? On the one hand there are no especially difficult conceptual issues that make it all that difficult to work out what crimes of the state look like, including what we call crimes against humanity and genocide. These activities involve gross violations of human rights and clear breaches of international law, forbidding genocide, torture, people-trafficking, detention without trial and the like. The difficulties here are less conceptual and have more to do with the capacity of international law and agencies like the United Nations or the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court to regulate and sanction sovereign states when they start to behave badly. Among the most obvious of crimes against humanity are genocide and mass atrocities.
State-Sponsored Homicide
The most evident and chilling face of the radical evil wrought by governments is state-sponsored homicide (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990). The twentieth century deserves to be remembered in some special Book of the Dead. Just before the end of the twentieth century Saul estimated that since 1945 some 40 million people had been killed, at the rate of 5000 civilians a day, every day of every year (1995: 11). Rummel, who has proved if nothing else to be a persistent cliometrician, claims that the great âdeka-megaâ state murderers have killed some 170 million people, noting that 151 million of these were victims of fifteen regimes that murdered a million people or more (1994: 3â4).3
Not surprisingly genocide has featured as a key category in the twentieth century.4 Chalk and Jonassohn (1990) pointed to nine clear cases of state-sponsored genocide in the twentieth century to which can be added several additional cases since then as military, paramilitary and militia groups have murdered large numbers of people in places like Afghanistan, Kosovo, Rwanda, Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Syria and Zimbabwe (Amnesty International 1993: 5; Power 2002; Evans 2008). In just two years since 2004 between 240,000 and 400,000 people died in Darfur in the south of Sudan as a result of military killings, famine and disease. Whether genocide is the term we use to name this phenomenon or mass atrocity seems less important than trying to understand better why this happens and what we might do to prevent or ameliorate these appalling cycles of violence when they have got under way.
However, as Karstedt has pointed out genocides âare rare events and mass atrocities are notâ (2013: 383). Although it is not clear on what basis she makes the distinction between genocide and mass atrocities, Karstedt is pointing to something important when she notes that since 1945 we have seen many instances of mass atrocities in which the trajectory of violence runs across decades, and victims and perpetrators change sides and mass atrocities target successive groups: good examples of this include the HutuâTutsi conflict in Rwanda and Burundi which has been running since the 1980s into our time (Autesserre 2010) or the ongoing crisis in Darfur (see also de Waal 2007; Flint and de Waal 2008).
State-Sponsored Crimes of Violence
Though a lot more needs to be said about how we might think about genocide a...