Genocidal Conscription: Drafting Victims and Perpetrators under the Guise of War 1666925675, 9781666925678

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Abstract
Acknowledgments
PART I: GENOCIDE, CONSCRIPTION, AND THE WASTAGE OF WAR
1. Conscription for War and Genocide?
2. Historical Developments of Modern Conscripted Warfare
PART II: GENOCIDAL CONSCRIPTION
3. Genocide by Wastage
4. Conscription by the Ottoman Empire in World War I
5. Axis-Era Hungary’s Conscripts of World War II
PART III: ANALYSIS, CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS, AND CONCLUSIONS
6. Comparative Findings
7. Potential Cases Today and Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Genocidal Conscription

Genocidal Conscription Drafting Victims and Perpetrators under the Guise of War Christopher Harrison

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harrison, Christopher, 1981- author.   Title: Genocidal conscription : drafting victims and perpetrators under the guise of war / Christopher Harrison.   Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023006957 (print) | LCCN 2023006958 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666925678 (cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781666925685 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Draft--Moral and ethical aspects--Case studies. | Genocide--History-20th century--Case studies. | Draft--Turkey--History--20th century. | Draft-Hungary--History--20th century. | World War, 1914-1918--Atrocities--Turkey. | World War, 1914-1918--Atrocities--Hungary. | Turkey--Armed Forces--History--World War, 1914-1918. | Hungary--Armed Forces--History--World War, 1939-1945. | Military art and science--Moral and ethical aspects--Case studies.  Classification: LCC UB340 .H377 2023  (print) | LCC UB340  (ebook) | DDC 355.2/2363--dc23/eng/20230407  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006957 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006958 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

I dedicate this work to the memories of the victims and the survivors of genocide and war, to those who live under oppressive authoritarian regimes today, and to the generations of liberators that are yet to be. Lest we forget, never again.

Contents

Illustrations ix Tables xi Abstract xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction

1

PART I: GENOCIDE, CONSCRIPTION, AND THE WASTAGE OF WAR Chapter 1: Conscription for War and Genocide?

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Chapter 2: Historical Developments of Modern Conscripted Warfare

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PART II: GENOCIDAL CONSCRIPTION

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Chapter 3: Genocide by Wastage





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Chapter 4: Conscription by the Ottoman Empire in World War I Chapter 5: Axis-Era Hungary’s Conscripts of World War II



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PART III: ANALYSIS, CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS, AND CONCLUSIONS

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Chapter 6: Comparative Findings

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Chapter 7: Potential Cases Today and Conclusions

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149

viii

Contents

Bibliography Index

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183

About the Author



187

Illustrations

Figure 3.1: Framework of Genocidal Conscription by Wastage Figure 3.2: Framework of Genocidal Conscription by Massacre Figure 4.1: The Ottoman Empire in 1914



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150

Figure 7.3: Conscription in Not Free Coercive Territories



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Figure 7.2: Conscription in Partly Free Territories Figure 7.4: Eight States of Most Concern

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Figure 5.1: Axis-Era Hungary, 1938 to 1941 Figure 7.1: Conscription in Free Territories



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152 156

Tables

Table 3.1: Variables of Genocidal Conscription



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Table 6.1: Conscripts Across Case One



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Table 6.2: Conscripts Across Case Two



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Table 7.1: States and Territories of Concern by Region and Conscription Type

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Table 7.2: Eight States of Most Concern

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Abstract

Genocidal Conscription examines how some states have employed mandatory military service as a tool to capture and destroy victims while also recruiting perpetrators of genocide. This contribution to military history and genocide studies illustrates several unique intersections of war and genocide. I trace and compare policies of military service enacted by two genocidal regimes at war. The book details an original framework that encompasses intentions and outcomes of wartime casualties, Clausewitzian wastage, and massacres. Following a discussion on findings from the Ottoman Empire in World War I and Axis-era Hungary in World War II, I summarize relevant implications and ongoing concerns. While difficult and unlikely due to political disincentives, the conclusion considers reforms that may prevent states from repeating similar policies and actions again.

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Acknowledgments

The challenge of researching tragedy is both a burden and a privilege. As something of a fair warning for those readers who are not familiar with the trauma that cases of mass destruction entail, I note here that the task of seeking out causes of mass death has something of an attritional impact upon those who delve into such emotive topics. The reality of all societies is that many carry on throughout life battling private afflictions that manifest from the scarring damage caused by historical atrocities, wars, and genocides. Discovering some form of preventative suggestion provided me with glimmers of hope that fueled my investigations of these catastrophes. The seed of what became this book first entered my imagination as a seven-year-old boy in what is my first memory of war’s painful legacies. Sometime in November 1988 during the memorials that take place annually in remembrance of the losses incurred by Britain’s military in World War I, my father unexpectantly burst into tears. My mother consoled him. It was the first time I saw him cry. The reason for this uncharacteristic display of vulnerability from dear old dad was a soul wound that multiple generations of my family had carried for decades. Over seventy years before that day, my ancestors received the news of the death of a soldier. Charles Harrison fell on July 1, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme during the Great War. Seeing my father cry all those years after the passing of a man he never met was something of a puzzle. Why did the memorial make my dad so sad? My father taught me that the damage the war had caused our family was both the loss of Charles and his absence from his family. As a schoolboy, I would regularly argue with my teachers about how our history classes failed to discuss or explain the personal and social costs of war. Instead, British educators treated events of mass death as something distant and abstract. For us, it was not. Thanks to my first teachers, my parents Peter and Mary, I have done my part to heal one soul wound. As a graduate student initially of history, I formally began the earliest drafts of what became this book by seeking to explain the details of the trauma that xv

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lingers across multiple generations impacted by mass death. These research avenues led me to examine the influence of eugenicists that became integrally involved in constructing conscription policies for the United Kingdom during World War I. Their purposes sent many conscripts to die so that others may live during a historic junction that, over a century after those events took place, still provokes unanswered questions on why and how the carnage carried on for so long. The insights I discovered about British government officials that sought out and recruited certain men under the auspices that many of those soldiers and draftees would soon die led me to form the concept of genocidal conscription. I was able to complete this book due to the dedicated professionalism of several advisors and colleagues. Those who helped me through my studies at Florida Gulf Coast University and Northern Arizona University (NAU) include Alex Alvarez, Paul “Doc” Bartrop, Nicola Foote, Paul E. Lenze Jr., Maiah Jaskoski, and Eric Strahorn. I also thank Adam Jones, Björn Krondorfer, Stefanie Kunze, Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, and the various readers who provided helpful feedback at the International Holocaust Studies Conference at Middle Tennessee State University, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Society for Military History. I thank NAU’s Martin-Springer Institute, Department of Politics and International Affairs, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Graduate College, and the instructional classes hosted by Joyce Apsel, Stephan Astourian, Herbert Hirsch, William Schabas, Roger W. Smith, and many others at the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and the Zoryan Institute at the University of Toronto. I thank the staff, trustees, supporters, and interviewers of the University of California’s Visual History Archive, the Shoah Foundation, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Thank you to all at Arizona State University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the National Archives of the United Kingdom (UK), the Parliamentary Archives of the UK, the National Archives of the United States, the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation Institute at the University of Southern California, University College London, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and the University of Toronto. This book was made possible with thanks to the support received from the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. My gratitude goes to my editor Joseph Parry, the reviewers, and the team at Lexington Books. I am grateful to Amanda, Griffin, and Phoenix for their patience while I toiled away at this labor of loss. Last, I give thanks to the survivors, witnesses, interviewees, and the families of those who shared their memories and experiences.

Introduction

Genocidal Conscription identifies a previously underexamined method by which two states, the Ottoman Empire in World War I and Axis-era Hungary during World War II, used conscription—mandatory military service—to commit genocide under the guise of war. As with every scholarly work on genocide, it is helpful to note the origin of the word. In 1944, Raphael Lemkin established the word “genocide” to refer to “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.”1 Because Lemkin’s term encompassed national enemies, many have argued that some wars are inherently genocidal. Others view modern warfare as ordinarily existing outside of the context of genocide. In support of the first of these two viewpoints, the perspective of Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz highlights the intersections of these two modes of destruction. For Clausewitz, the “impulse to destroy the enemy” is “central to the very idea of war.”2 The discussion of destruction in Lemkin’s and Clausewitz’s works shows how some wars are fundamentally connected to certain genocides. A number of challenging questions emerge from recognizing the overlapping concepts of war and genocide. First, what makes modern warfare so distinct from other eras of genocidal events? The ancient practice of destroying a group during or beyond war is well known. As Adam Jones described, genocide has “afflicted humanity since the dawn of recorded history, and probably long before.”3 When considering the mass death events of recent centuries, the highly destructive outcomes of modern wars unfolded due to states that nationalized and mobilized millions of conscripts to face the wrath of increasingly more deadly mechanical and industrialized weapons. Curiously, the role that conscription has played in these modern catastrophes is well known but has remained largely missing from studies on genocide. What can be noted about the many cases of mass destruction that ravaged civilians that states turned into conscripts? Is there any relevance in the fact that the vast majority of such conscripts were most often men removed from their communities by governing officials and military authorities? These questions identify an ongoing need to address many of the unresolved concerns that exist in somewhat jingoistic historical explanations that largely skip over 1

2

Introduction

the losses of war. To counter the blasé acceptance of mass death, this book documents and discusses the targets of genocidal conscription of the past and of today by using information from the world wars to identify preconditions and variables that exist in several parts of the world right now. What is it that makes the two cases detailed in this book so central for not only detailing the existence of genocidal conscription but also how their events reveal similar risks present elsewhere now? I begin to answer some parts of these questions by outlining the key definition of the crime of genocide. In 1948, the United Nations established what many scholars have since described as being a distinctly limited alternative to Lemkin’s original broad definition of genocide. Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) redefined the term to mean: 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.4 The UNCG explained that perpetrators commit genocide through a variety of direct and indirect means. The text also noted that the crime includes any destruction of a part of a group that a perpetrator intends to destroy. What might constitute a part of a group? One answer to this question would note any identified targeted part of society that the state defines as exhibiting racial, ethnic, national, or religious characteristics. In cases of genocidal conscription, evidence would need to indicate that a state conscripted and deployed parts of groups identified by one or more of the four categorizations in wartime operations that resulted in any of the five acts whether or not those conscripts died on the battlefield or not. The remaining qualifier for such evidence to indicate a case of genocide is the presence of what the UNCG called a perpetrator’s intent to destroy identified members of the group. Therefore policies and orders issued prior to the deployment of certain conscripts that died would need to clearly document the state’s intent to kill or kill off those members of a targeted group. By using the term “kill off” here, I refer to the deadly and intentionally destructive acts of genocide described in clauses (b) and (c) of Article II of the UNCG. Such genocidal orders would starkly contrast with a state’s intent to only send such conscripts to fight in a war in which they may die.

Introduction

3

The UNCG only briefly mentioned the concept of intent to destroy and did not define or explain the application of this term. This fact results in the need to outline several legal standards and terms. The intent to commit a crime exists in four distinct types. They are general, specific, transferred, and constructive.5 Each term relies on distinct and varying levels of a suspect’s culpability and the evidence that supports the charge made against the accused. Considering different types of intent is a centrally important task for courts that discern judgments in trials that result in guilty verdicts. The type of intent that the court determines an offender acted upon often informs the level of severity of a subsequent punishment after prosecution. The four types of criminal intent form the basis of many judicial proceedings. For example, according to criminologist and scholar of genocide Alex Alvarez, general intent describes a person’s conscious choice to plan to carry out a criminal act.6 By this standard of intent, legally charging a perpetrator with the crime of genocide requires a high burden of evidence. Another position explained by historian Paul R. Bartrop is that constructive intent, when evidenced by a suspect’s actions, can often be influential upon the deliberations made by judges in cases of criminal law.7 Because so many criminal prosecutions accept that action equals intent in the context of constructive intent, how is it that so many suspects of genocide rarely face any court proceedings, never mind a conviction for having committed genocide? The answer to this perplexing puzzle can be found from studying the trials held in the immediate aftermath of World War II. By enforcing the justice of the victors, American, British, French, and Soviet allies prosecuted and punished Nazis of war crimes that centered on Germany’s launch of a war of aggression. Contrary to what might be something of an intuitive assumption, none of the charges issued at Nuremburg claimed that perpetrators had committed genocide because the crime had not yet become accepted into law. From a total of twenty-two defendants, the court of the International Military Tribunal found nineteen individuals guilty of charges brought against them and convicted three out of six indicted institutions.8 Despite these convictions, the state of Germany did not face prosecution and the court also explicitly exculpated the general ranks of the German military from any suggestion that these soldiers had committed or abetted war crimes. Even though the facts of the cases implicated many millions of Germans who had served in the ranks of the Nazi regime’s armed forces, the impracticalities of charging, prosecuting, and punishing so many millions of soldiers led the tribunal to focus on leaders rather than on the entirety of the state or its Axis proxies.9 This compromise produced an array of confusing and inconsistent long-term outcomes. For instance, in 1950 the United Nations declared that crimes against international law could only be committed by people who courts would then hold accountable and not by

4

Introduction

abstract entities such as states in name only.10 Despite what appears to be a straightforward explanation of identifying who it is that commits genocide, the concept of a perpetrator is not as simple as the position taken by the United Nations in 1950 suggested. In the unclear explanation within the text of the UNCG of what exactly the intent to destroy could mean, the definition from 1948 did not include states as potential suspects that could face a charge of perpetrating genocide. Article IV of the UNCG notes that “persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”11 Because of this focus on individuals, no state faced a charge of genocide until the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina versus Serbia and Montenegro went before the International Court of Justice in 2006.12 As one might expect from such mixed messaging from this founding legal document, scholars have sought to explain many of the unclear aspects included in the genocide convention. As a result of the unclear and unexplained language in the UNCG definition, many studies have provided different interpretations of what genocide means and how perpetrators carry out the acts listed in the text penned in 1948. The divergence of the original debates and classifications of what Lemkin defined in 1944 and that of the crime of genocide as expressed by the UNCG has caused dozens of disparities. As a result there are now a multitude of explanations of the word “genocide” and just as many interpretations of how perpetrators have carried out their crimes. A consensus present in many works acknowledges moments when genocide and war overlap, intersect, and interact. The contribution I present here offers more specific explanations of how some genocides take place because certain states utilized conscription as a tool to purge members of societies killed and killed off through the deadly actions of modern warfare. This work attempts to go some way in acknowledging the losses of groups of wartime casualties previously uncounted as also being victims of genocide. My argument, findings, and discussion commemorate the memories of victims and survivors while also offering several scholarly aspects for academic debate. Following part I’s outline of key concepts, I present my argument and cases in part II, before detailing a comparison of my findings in part III. The notion that required military service by authoritarian states is somehow a thing of the past, a curiosity reserved for military historians that focus on conflicts of the twentieth century and before, is definitively rejected here. As I began to research this topic, I considered whether to include the Soviet Union’s recruitment system in contrast to the Ottoman Empire and Axis-era Hungary. Assessing the very limited set of available evidence, I initially rejected the possibility of analyzing the USSR. While assessing contemporary mandatory military service requirements for combat, reserve, and

Introduction

5

other uses in 2017, I soon realized that Russia’s conscription policies were of notable historic and contemporary significance. Since early 2022, more than seventy-five years after the end of World War II, Russia is under suspicion of deploying conscripts to commit atrocities against Ukrainian civilians. It is also very likely that Russia has conscripted members of historically discriminated communities for deployment into frontline combat zones. I probe the question of Moscow’s likeliness of possessing the ability to utilize conscription’s genocidal capabilities in part III. Such ongoing concerns, while beyond the central focus of this book, spotlight the continuing relevance of Lemkin’s and Clausewitz’s insights into war and genocide. Over three million refugees fled the war-torn devastation of Ukraine in the days and weeks of the conflict’s outbreak. The crisis, one that has raged for several years, is one of the largest humanitarian disasters to hit European societies since World War II. The refugees and the international community know that Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022, is the primary cause of this mass displacement. At the time of writing in early 2023, this ongoing war includes reports of atrocities committed by military forces against civilians, an issue that emerges again and again, instead of never again. In the framework of the current third wave of genocide research, today’s emerging scholars have no reason to doubt the correlations and causal inferences that connect contemporary political violence, war, and genocide. Following in the footsteps of those initial pioneers who studied the Holocaust, and later works produced with more international comparative perspectives during the decade after the end of the Cold War, today’s observers and experts readily accept that multiple governments and militaries carry out war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide under auspices of their supposedly legitimate wartime powers. Noting how militaries kill civilians within enemy populations is a foundational aspect of genocide studies and is therefore nothing new. Instead of further recounting such tragedies, this book presents evidence that governments have used militaries, some members of which were themselves conscripts, by enacting conscription policies to capture civilian targets and intentionally kill and kill off these victims under the guise of war. Part I sets out the concept of the wastage of war. Chapter 1 examines the premise of mass death in modern warfare and genocide. The second chapter traces the development of modern conscripted warfare and the concept of Clausewitzian wastage, which refers to the calculated losses of life and resources through attrition. This critical precondition for genocidal conscription informs my argument and contextualizes the cases in part II. Chapter 3 documents the application of genocidal conscription and the outcome of genocide by wastage. In chapter 4, I trace the policies of conscription in the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1917. Chapter 5 presents evidence of the policies of conscription

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as part of the Hungarian Holocaust from 1942 to 1945.13 In part III, I summarize my findings and consider contemporary implications. In chapter 6, I discuss comparative aspects of these two genocidal states. By analyzing recent recruitment practices employed by authoritarian regimes in chapter 7, I assess how genocidal conscription continues to threaten multiple social groups living in several regions of the world today. My conclusion situates the study by considering scholarly and contemporary policy implications, potential preventative approaches, and the role of major powers including the United States. The norm that accepts that sovereign states hold an irrefutable right to exert their authority by exploiting civilians even unto death is a relationship that the international community, the United Nations, and the United States tolerate. They do so while also ignoring the many violations of human rights that endanger millions of conscripts alive today. In contrast to these governing bodies, humanitarian institutions can help to avoid such outcomes by supporting asylum-seeking refugees who desert authoritarian militaries. NOTES 1. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79. 2. Carl von Clausewitz, Michael Howard, and Peter Paret, On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 76. 3. Adam Jones, The Scourge of Genocide: Essays and Reflections (New York: Routledge, 2013), 13. 4. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 1. 5. Alex Alvarez, Governments, Citizens and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 52. 6. Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide, 52. 7. Paul R. Bartrop, “‘Action Equals Intent’: The Equation of Criminal Actions with the Issue of Intention, An Historical Perspective” (“A Contextual View of Genocidal Intent” Conference, University of Leicester; Leicester, United Kingdom, 2011), 1–22. 8. Harold Leventhal et al., “The Nuernberg Verdict,” Harvard Law Review 60, no. 6 (1947): 857. 9. Kim C. Priemel and Alexa Stiller, Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: Transitional Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography (New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), 194–95. 10. United Nations, “Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, with Commentaries” (United Nations, 1950), 374. 11. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 2.

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12. Marko Milanović, “State Responsibility for Genocide,” European Journal of International Law 17, no. 3 (2006): 553–54. 13. Note that this case extends the time period of the Holocaust in Hungary from the accepted date of 1944 when the Nazi occupation of Hungary deported the vast majority of Jewish Hungarians out of the country and into the concentration camp system. This extension of the time period includes unarmed conscripts that the state sent into combat against the Soviet Union, deployments that began in 1942.

PART I

Genocide, Conscription, and the Wastage of War

9

Chapter 1

Conscription for War and Genocide?

By what processes would a government employ its authority during wartime not simply to conscript soldiers but to also capture targets and empower perpetrators of genocide? The argument I present here and expand upon in chapter 3 contends that some genocidal states have used what is otherwise a legitimate security policy—conscription—to commit genocide by sending its targets to die in war or by massacring them. Additionally, by controlling different groups within a society such genocidal regimes have tasked conscripted perpetrators to carry out orders to kill and kill off their victims. In part II, I document two cases by focusing on states, militaries, warfare, victims, and perpetrators in the Ottoman Empire in World War I and Axis-era Hungary in World War II. Before proceeding to the argument and cases, I first explore the intersections of war, conscription, and genocide and then trace the development of modern conscripted warfare in chapter 2. Many previous works have considered the vast array of complexities that relate to victims and perpetrators. In offering a novel viewpoint, this work identifies and explains the existence of a type of genocide that has previously received fleeting and indefinite attention. The work contributes new insights into the issues of war, genocide, conscription, security strategies, human rights violations, and the politics of conflict. The argument also calls attention to a need to reassess some of the assumptions held by scholars that compare modes of mass destruction. In light of the precedent set by the International Military Tribunal that followed World War II, that charged and prosecuted leaders while holding no infantry or mid-level commanders accountable for their crimes, much scholarship has followed this pattern of top-tier analysis. A problem arises when attempting to research ground-level troop activities and the verbal orders issued by their immediate field superiors because of either a tendency to keep such orders secret or a lack of reliable record keeping of any 11

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evidence of criminal actions. Reversing this trend in more recent decades, the International Criminal Court has prosecuted several cases against individuals who operated as unit commanders during genocides. This development portrays the integral link that exists between multiple genocidal regimes and their militaries which include soldiers and perpetrators. The result of this shift broadened perspectives from concentrating only on upper administrators in a government to include any level of authority within a genocidal regime. This development has over the past few decades set a new standard for scholars who research war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The established guard of researchers that wrote those many famous man-on-the-horse histories has come to acknowledge how only looking upward in hierarchies can often result in producing a somewhat blinkered view. The current school of thought that is prevalent in both military history and in genocide studies recognizes the need to avoid ignoring what takes place after a leader issues a policy to their subordinates. For instance, immediately prior to the end of the Cold War scholar of genocide Ervin Staub declared that states do not call up regular conscripts to carry out genocide.1 Although Staub’s analysis was accurate for many cases in which states have used conscripts for warfare, the fact remains that certain genocidal states have committed genocide while also mandatorily recruiting and deploying police and military forces. One popular work first published soon after the fall of the Soviet Union that included evidence to counter Staub’s assertion was Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men in which the author refers to the actions of conscripted perpetrators.2 While respecting the nuance of Staub’s view—that the reason to initiate a call of conscripted recruitment is ordinarily for war and not genocide—this book broadens the scope to highlight the exceptional circumstances of many people who served in uniforms during wartime. I illustrate that genocide has taken place at multiple levels across governments, within militaries, and throughout societies in events that include conscription for war and genocide. Before proceeding further, it is important to define and introduce conscription by clarifying the various ways this institution has served political leaders and states. Examining both ancient and modern forms of conscription helps to draw the line between functional legitimate service requirements and the genocidal applications that some regimes have employed. Broadly, conscription refers to compulsory military service. Beyond this initial explanation, multiple states have used the draft throughout several millennia to compel civilian recruits to serve in roles of civic duty for national defense. According to Reta Simon and Mohamed Abdel-Moneim, the word “conscription” originated from Rome in the Latin term conscribere milites, meaning to enroll or register men that the state chose to serve the legion.3 While registering men in preparation for combat was the first type of formal

Conscription for War and Genocide?

13

conscription, states have developed several other methods to conscript laborers to supplement military forces. The ways that different states have adopted and also adapted conscription practices has depended on the threats they faced, the weapons available in multiple eras, and in the geopolitical circumstances that defined both internal and international relations. A notable difference exists between ancient and modern forms of conscription pertaining to scales of magnitude. In Greek and Roman imperial states, conscription extended from mobilizing in preparation for combat into a form of social control. Both of these empires applied their drafts as a way to restrain and inculcate the young men of conquered societies into military ranks.4 Compelling service from among the survivors of defeated enemies is an ancient adaptation that has lasted into the modern age. Since the emergence of the modern state in the French Revolution, several governments have adapted conscription from its original form of a limited drafting of selected members of society into the mass mobilization of many thousands and at times even millions of civilians. The French state’s practice of gearing up and transforming the social ordering of a population by issuing conscripted mobilization extends to all types of modern regimes both democratic and authoritarian alike. Rather than examine the more subtle variations of required service here, I address the long and winding road marched along by multiple types of conscripts and the states that created and changed conscription practices in chapter 2. In what became one of the preconditions for conscripting for genocide rather than for war alone, mass conscription that mobilized entire nations helped to define modern states. This nationwide practice, especially for universal conscription of every able-bodied man, required centralized governance, necessary resources, and efficient modes of authority to mobilize much of a country’s population. These processes of modernity needed substantial preparations in both the states and the societies that sought to build industrialized civil orders. In short, the goal of the modern state was to employ society to provide sufficient military defensive and counteroffensive capabilities. Many modern states have followed suit by mimicking this pattern of centralization first developed in the late 1700s and early 1800s in France. This template of the modern state’s reliance on conscription culminated with Napoleonic France, itself a somewhat reactionary national project built after the modeling of Frederick the Great’s Prussia.5 In short, states have used conscription to change the characteristics of a country’s population since the earliest times of the modern era. Following the trend set by those famous men on horses, many governments of modern countries have coerced civilians to take part in wars. Over time, increasingly industrialized forms of conflict established the acceptance of conscripted mass losses. On this concept of the changing relationships that

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Chapter 1

connect war, conscripts, and the pervasive loss of life, Eric Markusen noted that mass conscription by industrialized powers altered the nature of warfare itself.6 Margaret Levi dated the moment of this change as taking place during the Great War of 1914 to 1918. During what has since become known as World War I and the First World War, the institution of conscription radically extended the obligations of male citizens and the influence of the state over civilians.7 This war was the pivot point at which mass destruction became a new normalized aspect of combat. World War I was not just a critical juncture for forms of conflict but also provided for and resulted in new modes of genocide that perpetrators committed simultaneously during wartime. By placing heavier burdens of responsibility upon male citizens, policies enacted by states during World War I expanded political power by reordering civil-military relationships. Before the war, conscription that resulted in mass death was finite, whereas during the conflict the status quo among belligerents influenced each major force to totally mobilize society. In a reversal of the civil liberties won by taxpaying workers in the latter half of the 1800s throughout Europe, the war decimated the continent by insisting that millions of men die in the often vain hopes of preserving these modern states and their empires. So long as their states survived the war, governments benefited at the deadly expense of many men and their families. The conclusion that World War I was a fundamental turning point in the history of warfare is well known and accepted by military historians. What is of more interest here are the works of several scholars that have also examined the role that this war played in changing the ways perpetrators committed genocide. Several questions emerge from the viewpoint that some states conscripted for both war and for genocide. How precisely do such modes of destruction simultaneously take place? How, amid a costly conflict that caused the deaths of many combatants, can scholars illustrate a state’s criminal intent to destroy a targeted group? What types of evidence would demonstrate how a state conscripted some members of such groups? What ways would regular deployment duties differ from those delegated to draftees captured not to fight but to die as victims of a genocide committed during a war? In answering these questions, I start by reviewing several observations made by Raphael Lemkin. LEMKIN ON CONSCRIPTION DURING WAR AND GENOCIDE Raphael Lemkin introduced the original definition of genocide in 1944 to describe “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” by connecting the Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin term cide (killing).8 This

Conscription for War and Genocide?

15

definition first appeared in print in Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in which he documented criminal acts committed by Nazi Germany during World War II. This work is one of the founding documents within the fields of Holocaust and genocide studies. The word “holocaust” originally referred to the Judeo-Christian concept of offering a burned sacrifice to divinity in an act of devotion. The capitalized version of the word refers to the mass killings that perpetrators carried out in the middle of the twentieth century. These deaths are notable for many reasons including that the people died outside of the battlefield losses incurred throughout World War II. In the context of Jewish victims, many scholars refer to these events as the Shoah, a Hebrew word that translates into English as catastrophe. Other groups use other terms such as the Romani word porrajmos, meaning devouring, to describe the genocide against Roma and Sinti populations in Europe. Lemkin’s work has generated countless studies but has resulted in almost no consideration of the relevance of conscription policies in occupied Europe or across cases of genocide. One notable exception that examined the issue of forced labor conscription as a form of economic exploitation and racial dominance was completed in 2006 by Wolf Gruner.9 Other than this work, the topic of conscription during the Holocaust or other genocides beyond Europe during World War II has received no systematic examination. Returning to the original source on genocide, what did Lemkin have to say about mandatory service during Nazi Germany’s peak years of conquest? Given that Lemkin’s report is a touchstone work for anyone who seeks to comprehend genocide, and that so few works have considered the functions of mandatory military service as a factor of episodes of planned destruction, it is somewhat surprising that Axis Rule in Occupied Europe made numerous references to conscripts and conscription policies affiliated with Nazi Germany during World War II and the Holocaust. For instance, Lemkin detailed a variety of different examples of military and labor conscription.10 He noted the widescale presence of compulsory service across Nazi- and Axis-occupied Europe.11 Examples included the forced employment of civilians with groups often selected and segregated by sex and deployed to complete compulsory service duties.12 One case was that of the Belgian government that conscripted men aged eighteen to fifty and women aged twenty-one to thirty-five to serve as laborers, some of whom officials exported to Germany by what Lemkin called labor conscription.13 He detailed the importance of this institution through the contributions laborers made to wartime production. Many of these practices radically altered social organization throughout Germany, its occupied lands, and other Axis territories. Lemkin’s study also discussed cases of military conscription. He observed how Nazi officials enforced military conscription of men in Poland from 1940

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on and of males in the disputed Franco-Germanic regions of Alsace-Lorraine in 1942.14 A common pattern in these policies first segregated civilian groups by sex and then selected conscripts for different auxiliary roles that supported military services. Lemkin’s work highlights the integral nature of conscription within the Nazi project to occupy and control European territories and populations. His analysis stops there, but, as history has since made clear, Nazi Germany conquered many of these lands specifically to carry out genocides against Jewish, Roma, and other minority communities across the continent. The power to use conscription to control a person and a population went far beyond the ordinary wartime politics of the time. I complement Lemkin’s work by showing how conscription served as a crucible that fused some parts of war to certain aspects of genocide. Having established the importance of conscripts to Nazi Germany’s Third Reich, Lemkin also explained how perpetrators commit genocide. Beyond the definition of what the word “genocide” means, he also described two specific phases that connect and take place in a sequenced process. Lemkin posited that a perpetrator first destroys those parts of its targeted enemy that may pose a threat to the conqueror’s occupation. Then, according to his explanation of the process of genocide, a perpetrator dominates any surviving members of the partially destroyed community by condemning them to a life of subservience. This phase of occupation took place when perpetrators placed a variety of impositions upon their targeted group.15 In Lemkin’s view, the enslavement of survivors is just as much an act of genocide as any initial killing spree because these impositions, such as a captive’s completion of arduous hard labor duties, kill off remnants of the enemy without the need for any further large and costly military actions. This latter aspect of the original concept of genocide, one that includes not only the destruction of a population group but also the oppressive subservience of its survivors, points out the importance of acts that impose mandatory burdens of servitude upon victimized groups of civilians.16 This burdening is one of the ways that the Nazi regime employed the institution of conscription to capture millions of civilians who then died in labor camps, or in gas chambers, or in the mass shootings committed by perpetrators that killed approximately 1.5 million victims of the Holocaust when Nazi and Axis forces marched into eastern Europe during World War II.17 Because Lemkin did not explicitly describe examples of conscription policies as impositions, the absence of any explanatory connection between such burdens in the abstract sense and obligations imposed on victims of genocide during World War II has resulted in the omission of the topic of mandatory service from most studies on the Holocaust. This absence is understandable in part due to the faulty assumption held by some that this institution only refers to the recruitment of conscripted soldiers and their deployment into active combat operations.

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As a result of many works that have overlooked the widescale utilization of conscription policies during the Holocaust in favor of analyzing other valid and important concerns, it is apt here to note how the intentional deadly burdens placed upon conscripts taken from captured communities meet Lemkin’s concept of genocide by destructive acts and impositions. The sequence of killing and then subservience is crucial to comprehend. On this topic, a number of works have taken notice of the existence of sequenced phases. For example, Markusen detailed patterns that he called genocidal mechanisms.18 Complementing Lemkin’s concepts, and building upon Markusen’s template that connects incremental steps that take place across several different cases, I identify five phases of genocidal conscription in part II. Given that Lemkin’s work opened the debate on what exactly genocide means and how perpetrators carry it out, it is important to examine the role of militaries in wars and during genocides. SOLDIERS, CIVILIANS, CONSCRIPTS, AND GENOCIDAL STATES AT WAR Understandably, historical narratives of war emote feelings and memories of loyalty in veterans, their families, and the relatives of those who sacrificed their lives for the safety of others. Given these reactions to any discussion of war and genocide, I recognize the important task of clearly differentiating soldiers from civilians in the context of conscription. As John Keegan and Richard Holmes defined, soldiers are warriors fighting for pay. Their entrance into military histories date them as comparative latecomers to the battlefields of war.19 Keegan and Holmes also noted that desertion of duty has resulted in the state executing soldiers to provide an object lesson for other recruits to ponder as they consider fleeing the dangers of combat. An example of this command and control concept is that of Prussia’s Frederick the Great who insisted that common soldiers should fear their own officers more than any enemy.20 So what happens when a state that follows these approaches, that instills fear of itself in its own subordinate ranks, that devalues the worthiness of life, that selectively conscripts civilians from certain parts of a society, and that sees those civilians as little more than some form of future cannon fodder begins to fight in a war that results in mass casualties? Why might such an oppressive regime conscript some members of ostracized, even despised, domestic communities into its military? How would those conscripts then die during war? In contrast to genocidal and totalitarian states, it is important to explain that many states have employed functional and legitimate forms of conscription that operate under different political systems. Leaving the details of

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what valid drafting might look like until chapter 2, it is of fundamental significance to note that orders that require mandatory military service seek to transform civilians into soldiers. This transformative process depends on the way that states treat conscripts taken from different groups. A simple way to distinguish unfair or even potentially genocidal applications of conscription lies in whether civilians have any say in providing their willing consent to perform a range of various tasks including those that exist outside of combat zones. The consent of the conscript to perform any particular duty is often only available in more democratic societies. Upon induction and throughout the entirety of their terms of service, a conscript of such societies can opt out of active combat. Most often these alternative service practices become available due to religious and moral objections that a conscript has to taking a person’s life. Only in more liberal democracies have states considered and honored the ethical standpoint of civilians that seek to avoid killing an enemy of the state, the consequences of which have led to alternative forms of conscription for noncombatant service. When examined in illiberal and authoritarian contexts, doubts arise as to how such regimes acknowledge and treat people drafted into militarized institutions either as soldiers, imprisoned civilians, or conscripts that might serve an oppressive state under the deadly duress unleashed during times of both peace and war. Who is a casualty of a war and who is a victim of a genocide carried out during a war? A review of different types of casualties provides some insights into this puzzling distinction. When framed as an extension of a functional military that becomes a vehicle to kill and kill off unwanted men, it should be of no surprise that examples of such machinations existed in communist Russia. As with many concepts of mass death noted from Stalin’s rule, the idea to sacrifice lives to advance the state’s war aims originated with Vladimir Lenin who, in 1919, deployed penal battalions composed of bourgeois men from Petrograd. Lenin then sent these conscripts into the fray against White Russians, while lining up his own troops armed with machine guns behind what the state called enemies of the people. The Bolsheviks captured and then deployed these conscripts so that they would die in frontline combat.21 This historical anecdote from the Soviet Union represents a part of the havoc its leaders wreaked. Because Lenin’s successor Stalin built a state upon widespread suspicions and purges, one that targeted so many millions of people deemed as potentially holding disloyal views, it is unsurprising that most works that mention penal battalions discuss the latter leader’s military.22 For instance, Nikolai Tolstoy’s discussion of the Soviet Union’s use of prisoner soldiers during World War II included the deadly tactic of blending these troops in with regular soldiers. The prisoners, the majority of whom were unarmed, then advanced together with regular military units even while the former lacked camouflaged clothing. The commanders that carried out

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these operations sacrificed the lives of penal conscripts in maneuvers that attracted the enemy’s fire and in turn gave away the opponent’s position in a ruse that initiated counterattacks by hidden Soviet infantry.23 If such events had been circumstantial or even randomly mentioned in passing, then the concept of states that sacrifice the lives of men deemed lesser could be justifiably shrugged off as just another odd peculiarity of pariah tyrants and their militaries at war. Statistical records downplay suggestions that Soviet deployments of conscripted human bait were merely anecdotal anomalies of World War II. Instead, the state’s strategy of recruiting conscripts specifically to then sacrifice them in war provided the bodies necessary to carry out ordinary operational procedures. By regularly sacrificing captured conscripts, the state deliberately deployed these men to their deaths in what became routine forms of bloodletting. For instance, Tolstoy reported that approximately 500 out of 1,500 members of a penal battalion died in one assault launched against German troops. In the advance, three men shared one rifle as they rushed the opponent’s lines. Only after contemplating that many of those who had initially been wounded died from bullets fired by their own comrades positioned at their rear does the concept of advancing with a one-in-three chance of carrying a weapon make any sense. The point of these charges were not to gain ground but to create carnage. It may even be argued that the slaughter of penal battalions was yet another method of Stalin’s notorious purges. When considering the total number of penal rank members killed from firepower sent from both front and rear throughout World War II, these practices likely destroyed hundreds of thousands of imprisoned conscripts.24 Despite these graphic accounts, some details of this deadly guise employed during wartime have become muddled through artistic interpretations in movies and television programs. Although informative and indicative, Lenin’s Russia and Stalin’s Soviet Union lie out at the periphery beyond the widely acknowledged core set of cases in which states definitively carried out genocides. The case of the Soviet Union’s genocide against Ukraine during the Holodomor, for instance, is compelling but still remains open for debate by some that see an ambiguous lack of intent to destroy specific targets that meet the definitions detailed in the UNCG. I return to the case of the Holodomor in part III. Returning to the issue of penal battalions used as disposable forces during war, many states have fought by deploying such conscripts in several places at different times. These include Napoleon’s régiment penal, Stalin’s Shtrafbat, and Hitler’s Strafbataillon. The pattern that emerges here outlines the fact that multiple governments that managed mass armies have tended to seek ways to simultaneously punish and utilize unto death men who state authorities have deemed as being worth less than the average infantry recruit.

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Of growing interest in what may be an emerging paradigm that reassesses the countless lives of men thrown into the carnage of modern war, a revival of the use of penal battalions emerged in 2022. Within four days of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine released prisoners with combat experience to serve in the nation’s defensive forces.25 Such insights of the alternative ways that some militaries have dispensed of certain types of men in particularly brutal societies at war, the evidence of these contemporary events falls far short of any support for a claim that would suspect Ukraine as having any motive other than to find veterans with military experience that could serve in the defense of the country. The example here is simply an indication of the ongoing use of penal battalions in active contemporary conflicts and makes no attempt to claim that Ukraine seeks to sacrifice men somehow deemed as lesser. In fact, the emerging evidence appears to suggest that something like this type of intentional sacrificing of troops is a process that Vladimir Putin has, as of July 2022, carried out. I examine these topics in more detail in chapter 7. Whether new evidence might someday document the deployment of certain penal battalions as more than simply an inevitable part of the losses of warfare remains an avenue I leave for a different time. With the interest that such concerns generate, Bolshevik, Soviet, and Russian recruits exist at the edges rather than at the core of my central focus but remain significant and indicative of the way that states dispose of unwanted groups by deploying and even attacking them in their own combat operations. Questioning the ways in which certain states treat conscripts taken from historically disenfranchised groups is a topic of paramount interest. Given that a general assumption of war asserts that such conflicts involve mutual combatants, a government’s own investigating into how they treated its own soldiers could result in an analysis absent of any critical or substantive assessments. For some more patriotic observers, the idea that a state would destroy its own men in uniform is simply preposterous and beyond any possibility. As the cases of the willful destruction of penal battalions indicate, this is not always the reality of war. Dissimilar from conventional forms of war, cases of genocide often consist of states that seek to destroy enemies whether they are in uniform, or exist within the state’s own boundaries, or not. Such states have deployed their militaries to destroy unarmed and largely defenseless groups of their own civilian populations.26 Put differently, it can be argued that the conflict of war usually consists of soldiers fighting soldiers, whereas many, but not all, types of genocide involve soldiers killing civilians. The main puzzle I present here considers how a state conscripts certain selected parts of a targeted group that officials seek to intentionally destroy by deploying those recruits in wartime events that result in the deaths of draftees who become victims of genocide and not casualties of war. In such events, the state commits genocide under the guise of recruiting civilians taken from

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targeted groups so that they would become soldiers who, although appearing as fighting and dying in a war, are in fact sent to die by their own ruling authorities with the intent that the conscript is killed or killed off by perpetrators of genocidal orders. As traced in chapters 4 and 5, evidence exists that some perpetrators killed victims who were originally on the same side of an interstate war. At some point in each of these wars, the states decided to target groups that they each deemed to be enemies and proceeded to utilize the war to dispose of many thousands of conscripted victims. In many instances, death took place in skirmishes against the declared foreign enemy of the state, whereas in other circumstances the lack of adequate supplies resulted in conscripts dying. Also, and in events that point to the intent to destroy as being present in both cases, military and police officials murdered conscripts. In both circumstances, these modes of mass destruction provided the perpetrating states with the same inherent excuse that explained away these many deaths as nothing more than the casualties lost from fighting in modern industrialized war. I suggest that a review is necessary to note an exception to the more traditional position that defines civilians as victims and conscripts as casualties. This compartmentalization has eroded somewhat thanks to the realization that an oversimplified conceptual binary has unduly separated genocide as somehow being unrelated to war. One work that demonstrates the complexities and regularity of such interactions is that of Martin Shaw’s explanation that modern states have at times viewed civilians as enemies in a similar category as rival combatants. In cases where states have categorized civilians as legitimate targets for destruction in war, Shaw argued that genocide can be seen as a degenerative form of war in which the security institutions of one belligerent force deliberately targets and destroys the civilian population of their enemy.27 The result of recategorizing deaths of unarmed groups as somehow being legitimate military targets that states then tally as casualties reconceptualizes the costs of warfare in a way that avoids any discussion of criminal responsibility and rebuffs any consideration that a state which kills and kills off civilians has in fact carried out either a form of genocide, a war crime, or a crime against humanity. Agreeing with Shaw that states have viewed civilians as enemies, the challenging topic of intent requires further discussion. DOCUMENTING THE INTENT OF GENOCIDAL CONSCRIPTION Providing evidence that a suspect meant to destroy members of a group is a prerequisite to any claim that a perpetrator committed genocide. This evidence does not only illustrate events but also documents a prior intent,

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the mens rea, of actions that result in destruction. Such legal deliberations seek to ascertain a suspect’s general intent that requires a higher threshold of evidence to convict a suspect than that which shows a suspect’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This former standard is one used in trials with indictments of genocide even while the latter often results in a guilty verdict for many other types of crimes. Regarding genocidal intent, Markos Milanović explained that such cases must consist of evidence that documents genocide beyond a reasonable doubt by showing the perpetrator’s intent and the resulting actions of their intentions in accordance with Article II of the UNCG.28 What other views help to explain the ways in which it may be possible to document the intent of genocidal conscription? As Alvarez noted, special intent or dolus specialis refers to the evidence used in trials of the crime of genocide as defined by the UNCG.29 Such evidence needs to explicitly show the perpetrator’s intent to destroy a group, that they committed destructive acts against their intended targets, that those outcomes meet the terminology included in the UNCG, and that victims belonged to a group identified by perpetrators through categorizations of nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. Alternatively, by what Alvarez explained as constructive intent, a prosecutor could argue beyond a reasonable doubt that a suspect intended a destructive outcome by illustrating logical cause and effect relationships present in the actions of the accused.30 This view meets a convention held in many courts that often concludes that action equals intent unless valid evidence demonstrates an alternative intention other than destruction.31 This focus on actions appropriately assesses that events result in genocide only when the act and actor targeted a part of a population group for destruction because those members belonged to one of the four identity categorizations listed by the UNCG.32 Therefore, for the purposes of documenting a constructive intent to destroy, evidence of genocidal conscription would need to demonstrate a suspected state’s plan to capture and destroy conscripted members of a targeted population group along with actions that deployed them to their deaths or resulted in their killings. Remaining sensitive to the issue of intentionality, the argument made here requires substantial evidence to reject the view of denialists who would have observers believe the deaths of such conscripts should be excused by explanations other than genocide such as through the incidental but deadly consequences of war.33 Rejecting such denialist viewpoints, the argument I present in chapter 3 is supported by qualitative and empirical findings of chapters 4 and 5. Of particular interest here are clauses (b) and (c) of Article II of the UNCG.34 Examples of these acts include policies that address the killing and killing off of members of minority communities present within military institutions, of conscripts sent to labor camps in which they wasted away to

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their deaths, of orders that insisted unarmed conscripts carry out human-wave marches into enemy lines, of operations that sent men to clear paths through minefields, and of commandments that instructed perpetrators to murder those conscripts that the state had place under their control. Other examples of deadly conditions that claimed the lives of victims killed off while serving as conscripts include beatings, starvation, being left without water to suffer dehydration, receiving no medical treatment after being injured by physical abuse or through arduous workloads, and by exposure to extreme heat and cold. The issue of massacres meets clause (a) of Article II, which defines killing members of the group as an act of genocide.35 Given these preliminary details, there is no doubt that certain states have used conscription for both war and genocide. NOTES 1. Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 76. 2. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 221. 3. Rita J. Simon and Mohamed Alaa Abdel-Moneim, A Handbook of Military Conscription and Composition the World Over (Lexington Books, 2011), 7. 4. Simon and Abdel-Moneim, A Handbook of Military Conscription and Composition the World Over, 7. 5. Margaret Levi, “The Institution of Conscription,” Social Science History 20, no. 1 (1996): 162n1. 6. Eric Markusen, “Genocide and Total War: A Preliminary Comparison,” in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 103–4. 7. Levi, “The Institution of Conscription,” 133. 8. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79. 9. Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims 1938–1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 10. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 14, 69, 508. 11. Lemkin, xiv, 69, 116. 12. Lemkin, 67–69. 13. Lemkin, 69. 14. Lemkin, 14, 508. 15. Lemkin, 79–81. 16. Lemkin, 79–80. 17. Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 18. Eric Markusen, “Mechanisms of Genocide,” in Will Genocide Ever End? (St. Paul, MN: Aegis, Paragon House, 2002), 83.

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19. John Keegan and Richard Holmes, Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle (New York: Viking, 1986), 11. 20. Keegan and Holmes, Soldiers, 55–56. 21. Nikolai Tolstoy, Stalin’s Secret War (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982), 281. 22. For instance, see Igor Mangazeev, “A ‘Penal’ Corps on the Kalinin Front,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 15, no. 3 (2002): 115–45; or Viktor Suvorov, Inside the Soviet Army (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982). 23. Tolstoy, Stalin’s Secret War, 435. 24. Tolstoy, 282. 25. Lamiat Sabin, “Ukraine Prisoners with Combat Experience Will Be Released from Jail to Help Defend against Russia,” The Independent, February 28, 2022. 26. Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide, 41. 27. Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 44–45. 28. Milanović, “State Responsibility for Genocide,” 558, 592. 29. Alex Alvarez, Native America and the Question of Genocide (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015), 28. 30. Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide, 52. 31. Bartrop, “‘Action Equals Intent,’” 3–4. 32. Bartrop, 19. 33. Bartrop, Genocide, 37–38; Samuel Totten and Paul R. Bartrop, Dictionary of Genocide. K–Z Vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 214. 34. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 1. 35. United Nations, 1.

Chapter 2

Historical Developments of Modern Conscripted Warfare

Few histories or political analyses have examined the ways that states have exploited soldiers, often unto death. The concept of troops marching to their deaths who lay down their lives in defense of their families and countries as willing sacrifices supersedes many rudimentary discussions in academia and popular culture. Of the studies that have ventured forward in the vanguard of critical security studies, several works have focused on the role of penal battalions. Such units, as discussed in chapter 1, are composed of convicted criminals taken to war by alternative policies that supplemented the operations of combat soldiers while also eliminating the need to financially support these inmates in prisons that strained the material resources of a state at war. Most of these works, the total of which amount to fewer than a dozen studies, discuss the punitive aspects of penal battalions formed to utilize the manpower of civilians that their states perceived as being disobedient, dissident, or dysgenic. This latter term emerged from the era of eugenics in the late 1800s and early 1900s and would go on to found a part of the ideology of Nazi Germany. The term “eugenic” means good birth. This movement’s idealistic proponents espoused a range of popular pseudoscientific dogmas and policies throughout Britain, the United States, Germany, and many other countries associated with the Third Reich. The views of eugenicists rested upon the assumption that many men, women, and children were simply worth less than other members of society and therefore collectively represented a degenerative, dysgenic influence upon a given nation-state’s population. Many leaders that emerged during the era of eugenics wholeheartedly believed in the right of the state to prune and cull those parts of society that did not keep up with modernization and industrial forms of productivity. Many of these same proponents of modernization also considered the impacts of mandatory military service and implemented its use in a number of different ways. By first recognizing conventional forms 25

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and adaptations of conscription throughout the histories of modern states, I show in part II how certain states subverted the draft to commit genocide. Identifying modern forms of conscription starts by acknowledging the defensive needs of political leaders that view other states as security threats. The requirement to provide a functional defensive force developed conscripted recruitment into a security norm. This process first emerged with the formal use of conscripts in ancient militaries and since developed in modern times to expansive wars that caused massive numbers of casualties. In modern wars, states have anticipated that conflict would incur mass losses of a significant portion of their recruits. Notably, conscripted warfare during the twentieth century radically transformed politics, economics, and warfare in ways that relegated all former versions as being outdated. Simply put, with the outbreak of World War I, civil-military relations changed first in Europe and later in multiple other regions of the world in the context of the scale of destructive events. These changes impacted societies in ways from which they could not retreat. By reviewing several cases of modern nation-states that used conscription in different ways from before and then during the French Revolution, throughout significant wars of the 1800s, and into World War I, it is clear that many states have used the security norm of conscription to recruit and deploy conscripts for legitimate defensive reasons but also for divergent purposes that resulted in the accepted and expected mass waste of life during war. THE POLITICS OF CONSCRIPTION BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Over many centuries of recorded history, whether citing Fabius, Sun Tzu, or Carl von Clausewitz, scholars have recognized and documented the central importance of recruiting and deploying mass armies for attritional forms of warfare. The ways that these records have noted the actions of political leaders, militaries, and inductees have varied. Some followed the tried and tested honorific glosses of the paid scribe. Others attempted to put down on paper the resistance that accompanies a state’s attempts to destructively utilize a society in pursuit of accumulating power and resources. Members of this latter group often received far less material support than the court lackeys of corrupt governments. In the midst of these two extremes sits the main body of work on recruitment, deployment, justifications, and questionable civil-military practices. The role and development of modern conscription policies spans each of these three categories. Reviewing the histories of prominent militaries illustrates these changes and helps to distinguish the lines that separate functional and genocidal forms of conscripted warfare.

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Following the example of an effective strategy of attrition set by Roman dictator Fabius, military commanders throughout and connected to Europe have studied the use of defensive practices as a useful way to avoid unnecessary losses while also eroding an enemy’s resources. In contrast to the study of martial disciplines, in what is a remarkable acknowledgment of the contentious nature of discussing war and politics, remanences of anticonscription sentiments echo from before Rome’s empire, from Athens in 200 BCE. Through sculpture and earthenware methods of narrative, Athenians told heroic and distinctly scathing fables that criticized the government of the previous generation. Artists working several years after the costly battles at Marathon and Salamis portrayed a society scarred by its bloodied past.1 These exceptional examples of public critique have lasted through to today in works that heralded the arrival of peace as a counter to tyrannical forms of state-mandated service and sacrifice. On the more contrived and glorifying end of the spectrum of historical records, readers can learn how Charlemagne put forth his imperial summons in 806 CE. He called upon his nobles, knights, and their men to muster in arms and armor through an edict that insisted that even the poorest of warriors should arrive with something other than a club as a weapon of war.2 Given that these works are solely one-sided and presented in incomplete limited forms, worn down by the passage of time, the facts that remain offer only partial details on the needs to conscript and a leader’s adaptation of mandatory service practices. In contrast to the somewhat shadowy and triumphantly constructed imagery of warfare in ancient and middle ages, the notable thinker Niccolò Machiavelli provided more insights into conscripted military options than many of his predecessors. For Machiavelli, advocating conscription served a political purpose beyond defense or offense. He insisted that much of the public should serve the state to provide a way for political leaders to deflect the increasing influence of mercenaries who had begun to take control of sections of the countryside around Venice, Milan, and Florence in the late 1400s.3 In what is arguably a forerunner to the highly disciplined and professional characteristics of Clausewitzian military organization, Frederick II’s leadership of Catholic Austria in the 1700s included policies of limited conscription designed to instill militarist values throughout both the armed forces and the society at large. A slew of reports from the time concluded that this army’s recruitment and training practices were tantamount to torture. Framing this military as having employed punitive measures does not begin to describe the hardships endured by Frederick’s infantry ranks. The only reliable ways out of such cruel and unusual living conditions as a musket-bearer was to have been born into privilege or to have learned a trade in one of Austria’s market towns, fields, or farmyards.4 Everyone else who was caught slipping through

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society’s cracks became fodder for the military. Some of these conscripts rose to command by inflicting disciplinary measures onto the flesh of their peers and subordinates. Although its fruits have sown many trees of modern liberty, conscription’s original ancient roots reach back further than recorded history can ascertain. While having existed in some form since the earliest of human settlements, conscription for military service has galvanized state-building initiatives in a consistent and wide array of examples since the practice became integrated into the political system of ancient Athens. Many centuries later, their citizenry-soldier model inspired French revolutionaries to reintroduce the nationalizing form of the institution in the 1790s.5 In discussions about the political applications of conscription, some favor the idea that the institution has effectively defended democracy in specific states. Antonis Adam, for example, argued that raising a conscripted armed force fosters a sense of loyalty that can limit the capacity for military leaders to overthrow governments.6 Contrasting the perspective that sees conscription as a bulwark against coups, Herman Beukema documented how multiple democratic, state-centric despotic and autocratic governments have all employed conscripts. He concluded that the evidence contradicts widely held beliefs that conscription is somehow a pillar of democratic politics.7 These many varied applications illustrate the multiple political applications that conscription has provided to states in ways that exist beyond conventional military uses. Some significant political consequences befell states that conducted modern conscripted warfare. These examples begin with conscripts recruited and deployed by revolutionary and Napoleonic France. CONSCRIPTION BY FRANCE AND NAPOLEON The French Revolution was the dawn of the modern era. The centralized state exemplified revolutionaries who fought to overthrow feudal power in Paris. When consolidating their rule they nationalized different groups and regions of what became a new nation-state with sovereign authority across the land. The revolutionaries defended what they envisioned as the republic by waging war on Austria. These sequential political processes replaced the old regime, formed a radical governing order, and rallied potential local rivals to defend the new rulers against a distant enemy. This playbook portrays a series of patterns repeated countless times in revolutions, the founding of authoritarian regimes, and in the shared aims of democratic elections ever since. Without revolutionary and then Napoleonic France, the modern era would have unfolded in drastically alternative ways, many of which would have maintained feudal ordering in Europe and beyond.

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The revolutionaries in conflict against Habsburg forces demanded that a massive number of troops defend France. The need for such a large army resulted in the state initiating the levée en masse for military purposes. Prior to August 1793, conscription was not yet a normal part of everyday life. Once the government ordered its emergency initiative in response to quell public disorder, the state regularly used conscription. The levée en masse demanded the loyal service of all Frenchmen in subordination to the state until the political crisis and the threats to public order had passed. The state took control of many young men by ordering them to go into combat against Austria.8 This policy sought to counter the chaos of national crisis by successfully raising and mobilizing recruits for a large national army that served the state by fighting the war against a foreign enemy. Through this mass levy, the state rounded up many young men living across regions that existed prior to the revolution as semi-autonomous societies ruled by local feudal leaders. These men, nationalized by way of military induction, received food, clothes, shelter, and weapons in preparation for their deployment to the frontlines. The orders transformed rural and urban civilians alike into combatants deployed to protect the fledgling republic. Conscription provided France’s leaders with novel political tools in addition to its security purposes. French revolutionaries utilized the original combat recruitment option of conscription to amass, train, and then deploy to the frontlines persons who politicians deemed fit for the purposes of defending the state’s borders against Austria and later also Prussia. The state’s capacity to order society expanded through its utilization of civilians deployed to their deaths within the ranks of mass armies. In addition to the functional application of conscription for national defense, one high-ranking government official suggested an adaptation to mandatory induction that would either destroy or subdue suspected domestic enemies. The suggestion made by Jacobin Claude Royer accompanied the republic’s debate on its first conscripted call to arms. According to military historian Scott Lytle, in preparing for the levée en masse that came into force on August 23, 1793, Royer speculated on August 6 whether the government should extend conscription to serve as a weapon against other French men. He explained how revolutionaries could capture, convert, or destroy aristocrats loyal to the former regime.9 Royer outlined a plan to initiate an exceptional levée against former feudal leaders, their heirs, and followers. If the state suspected anyone of undermining the revolution by pining for a return of the Ancien Régime, then officials would soon provide them with one last chance to prove their loyalty by enlisting and deploying the potential traitors into combat. Royer envisioned their bodies serving as ramparts for the sans-culottes. Aristocrat conscripts would, according to this plan, serve the revolutionary cause by acting as a buffering force in the front ranks. Such recruits would either combat, conquer, or die.10

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Revolutionary France illustrates the significance of the institution of conscription in transforming formerly agrarian and feudal societies into cogs in a modern state’s reordered political system. Such civil-military-social reorganization projects shaped civilians into orderly servants under the command of the armed forces that were themselves obedient to a political ruling order. Whenever the state deemed it necessary and possible, these rulers then utilized forms of political violence to undermine and destroy both domestic and foreign rivals, threats, and unwanted groups of people. For instance, the proposal of the levée against suspects entered debate of the convention of the revolutionary government on August 14, 1793, as officials considered how aristocrats, six at a time, would be dragged in chains to the war’s frontline.11 Proceeding with a political agenda under the guise of war is nothing new and might well be as old as the institution of conscription itself, but the mass scale of such intrigues was an innovative aspect that only became available to states since the advent of mass mobilization in the 1790s. After mobilizing 300,000 men in 1793, by the following year the levée en masse had allowed the state to abandon relying on the paper strength of its national guard and soon commanded a force of approximately 770,000 conscripted troops.12 Conscripts deployed within the borders of France include those involved in the case of genocidal violence carried out by the blue uniformed republican troops of the 1790s against the Vendée inhabitants of the coastal region west of Paris. The Vendée hosted a rebellious uprising of its own between 1793 and 1796, which the Parisian regime crushed along with vast swathes of local civilians. The wrath of the revolutionaries who marched from Paris to the coastal region in and around the city of Nantes destroyed villagers and townspeople alike including many local republicans who the state simply counted as collateral damage. In what has been well explained as a system of internal colonization, republican armed forces committed a wide array of atrocities. By today’s standards, observers would have no problem in defining these acts as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and at least arguably also genocide. The evidence of this case includes the government’s policy for Vendeans to be exterminated to the last.13 Horrific examples of the extreme and disproportionate force that conscripts in uniform used against civilians have survived the test of time and government censorship to tell at least some of the brutal tactics employed by France’s national guard against other French men, women, and children. The crimes include multiple attacks and oppressive occupation methods. Troops killed as many as 200,000 locals considered loyal to the former royal and Catholic order.14 Estimates suggest that perhaps as many as 100,000 to 120,000 unarmed Vendean civilians died in what the state called a war. Mass slaughter, rape, kidnap, internment, torture, and murder by cannon fire, drowning, burning, stabbing, or guillotine blades were the tactics of this war.

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Raids and sieges against targets lasted several months. Those who survived massacres commonly bore witness to the sights of gore-strewn processions in which soldiers carried dismembered limbs as trophies. Marching by their side, other troops held the corpses of infants, some of whom had been cut from wombs that same day, aloft upon bayonets.15 Taking a step back from the grim realities of industrialized warfare on the ground, the patterns of political reordering that leaders ushered in that included conscription built the French state through revolution, regional oppression, republican rule, and then empire in a series of rapid and radical measures. The result of these blood-soaked foundations can be seen as a manifestation of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. For a state to have the capacity to provide deadly protection against both internal and external threats, Hobbes explained that individual members and groups in society must hand over their political sovereignty and entrust the power of life and death to the hands of government leaders. When such trust is not forthcoming or the public simply rejects the authority of such governors, then the state applies the immense and disproportionate levers of power inherent within the institution of conscription to bring order. Hobbes described the circumstances of England during its own revolutionary era in the century before that of republican France. The lessons of modern politics had by the 1790s provided French leaders with examples for what was necessary to mandate civil order in times of crisis. In the Hobbesian Leviathan sense, an unrivaled and powerful state is one that exists in part because of the priority that continues its survival at the mortal expense of certain strategically less important members of the civilian population.16 Through its multiple uses of conscripted warfare including combat against foreign armies, executing suspected traitors, and putting down internal rebellion, France established this security institution as a vital part of its political interests to repel and then defeat rivals both within and beyond its borders. By the early 1800s, the state’s multiple uses of conscription brought a significant part of the French population under its control in ways that extended from defending the government against enemies to capturing anyone suspected of holding disloyal political opinions. In the years that followed the Jourdan Law of 1798, state and regional political authorities instigated an annual cycle of drafted recruitment. Within two decades of what had initially been an emergency defensive measure, conscription had become institutionalized into a political tool with which the state could alter society at both national and regional levels. At any moment, the state had the power to gather and remove young men and insist by government decree that older men, women, and children work to produce the materials required by the military. The state expected society to hand over as many men and materials as national leaders required without question.

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Thanks in part to the power gained from applying the malleable levies of conscription upon a variety of Gallic regions, the initial French republic and then Napoleonic France was anything but a liberal democracy. If these events were to happen today, then such political ordering—minus the ideologies espoused by the people who run such systems—would look nothing like a functioning democracy but instead might evoke something closer to the electoral authoritarianism of Russia in the 1990s before moving into an autocratic authoritarian state as is the case with Putin’s regime. Not surprisingly, having ended World War II on the winning collective side of states and surviving as a permanent veto-wielding power of the United Nations Security Council, Russia as well as its close ally China both use conscription for reasons beyond that of purely defensive purposes today. Returning to the task of tracing the development of the draft in the modern age, how else did France use conscripted warfare to impact politics? Once Napoleon abandoned all pretense of constructing a government built upon public liberty, a feat he completed by returning French leadership in the 1810s to the same absolute power system wielded for centuries by a parade of various European monarchs, conscription became a central tenet of the state’s ability to suppress dissent against the government and habituate obedience throughout society.17 This case illustrates the colossal power that mandatory service and at times servitude to the modern state holds. Conscription became intrinsically connected to projects of modern state building. Civic support for such projects was no longer up for debate. The events plot a framework that positioned the survival of the state as a priority interest that came well ahead of any concerns for the safety of certain targeted citizens, primarily young men. This is not to say that the young men that spoke French and its affiliate Gallic languages were the only targets of the centralized state’s use of conscription. When considering the production quotas required for older men, women, and children to meet, it is not unreasonable to speculate as to the likelihood of abuses prevalent within the interactions between civilian producers and state policy enforcers throughout the many regions of the French republic in the early 1800s. Because no researchers have published any findings on such possibilities, and considering who it was that controlled all written works at what was an increasingly censorious time, I doubt that it would be possible to validate or refute such conjecture. Expanding beyond the remits of domestic consequences, conscription at this time also impacted modernization processes in other parts of Europe. By 1812, the year that saw Napoleon’s march toward Russia, the policy to insist that certain civilians must serve the state’s security interests altered the fates of Prussian conscripts who had been ordered to join the ranks under the French emperor’s command.18 One military leader who rejected this call to fight for France and its allies was none other than Carl von Clausewitz. The

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Prussian veteran, who had previously experienced defeat to and capture by French forces several years earlier at Jena in 1806, learned to incorporate the successes of his enemies to conceptualize his military strategy based on attrition through the concept he described as wastage. CLAUSEWITZIAN WASTAGE Recognizing the ways in which modern militaries avoided or incurred costly losses begins with an analysis of Clausewitz’s views on casualties, attrition, and the wastage—otherwise known as the expected and calculated loss of life and resources—of war. The universal influence of this strategist of modern warfare helped to develop the state security norms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Widely read and applied as a modernizing process of militaries across much of the industrializing world for over two centuries, the Clausewitzian approach is one that accepts and expects mass losses of military personnel. These norms first emerged in any discernable sense with the mass mobilization of modern warfare immediately prior to and during Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign over revolutionary, republican, and then imperial France. Even though Clausewitz had not yet written his main thesis on war at the time of the revolution, he learned much of what he later described in his systematic analyses during his time opposing Napoleon’s army. The use of attrition had existed for many thousands of years prior to the 1800s. The study of this strategy includes works by military theorists and practitioners such as Sun Tzu and Fabius, among others. The difference that Clausewitz introduced in the early 1800s was his integration of mass armies and industrial weaponry in the context of attrition. In what became the first comprehensive analysis of modern warfare, Clausewitz identified a leader’s need to mobilize both deployed and reserve capacities of manpower and economic resources. He carefully considered the new factors of nationalized conscripted armies and the firepower of mechanized combustible weaponry made newly available by some of the earliest assembly lines. Although many of these weapons, such as the cheaper mass-produced and more deadly cannons of Britain’s Royal Navy that arose during the reign of Henry VIII, had adorned the decks of warships for nearly three hundred years, the ability to transport and deploy such arsenals across land and sea transformed the new mass armies of the late 1700s and early 1800s.19 The advancement of these technologies allowed states at war to increasingly draw upon the resources of society to renew the fight against an enemy. In addition to noting ways to maintain a modern war, Clausewitz also detailed how a leader could defeat a similarly manned and armed enemy. The effort, he explained, to prevent defeat while advancing toward victory depended on the ability to waste an

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enemy’s resources. This highly influential strategist of modern war highlighted the need to wear out an enemy by calculating the capacities of mass armies, reserve forces, and modern weapons. Clausewitz implored commanders to make two distinct estimations to calculate the amounts of resources, the men and the materials, available for their own mass recruitment and deployment options along with an estimate of an enemy’s equivalent scale of military force. Estimating the range of total available forces that each belligerent could accumulate informed a commander as to the number of troops and weapons that each side could accept, expect, and endure as potential losses up to the threshold at which the collapse of a regime would likely take place. By applying these estimates in hypothetical scenarios prior to any combat, Clausewitz noted how an effective commander would then prepare to induct the adequate number of supplies, fighting men, and materials required to not just wage but to win a war. He acknowledged several of the challenges and opportunities that leaders faced when preparing to amass the resources needed to overwhelm a modern enemy’s capacity to stay in a war fought through the strategy of attrition. An attack on a nationalized modern state could only successfully take place if a commander also avoided the unnecessary losses of their own forces, which, if not prevented, could in turn lead to the downfall of that leader’s own defensive forces by way of an enemy’s effective and well-timed counterattack. In short, Clausewitz characterized the calculations of factors that depleted a commander’s forces in a single word: wastage.20 Clausewitz’s descriptions of the loss of an enemy’s resources detailed the core goal of modern warfare. As explained in his classic work on military strategy, On War, the “wastage of his forces—our destruction of them; and in his loss of territory—our conquest” summarized each successful phase of a commander’s campaign against an enemy.21 Three steps would lead to victory. First, wear down an enemy’s capacity to fight. Second, destroy their troops and weapons. Third, take enough territory from them that would otherwise supply the enemy with additional troops and weapons. The calculation necessary to assess when an opportune moment to advance may emerge, the third of these steps, depended on a commander’s ability to complete the first two steps, each of which would only become possible by determining wastage on the battlefield and the total amount of reserves available to both sides for deployment in the future. Anticipating, calculating, accepting, and then adjusting for the wastage of the enemy’s forces in comparison to a leader’s own losses and reserves would determine which side faced defeat and subsequently who would claim victory. Clausewitz’s succinct description on the difference between defense and offense explained that holding ground is easier than taking it.22 His analysis of war understood that to press an attack encompassed an increased risk of

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incurring more losses than would be reasonably expected by defending a logistically significant position. The ability to accumulate mass resources, as demonstrated by France, meant that modern states in Europe now fought war in an expanded theater of conflict. Instead of fighting on a few isolated fields, or laying siege to a handful of strategically viable cities, or claiming trade routes on the open seas by way of naval shows of force, Clausewitz explained the need to hold ground while the government accumulated reserves of troops and weapons that would then maintain a commander’s defensive position prior to any offensive move against enemy positions. The expansion of mobilization now available to modern states meant that entire nations could become embroiled in a new form of siege warfare that pitted each country’s resources, troops, and weapons against their foreign enemies. The damage that modern industrial weapons wrought in war provides a vivid illustration of the outcomes of the expansion of conflict throughout the 1800s. Winning one or several battles fought across open fields or waters by two declared enemies were no longer the only viable options due to the capacity to raise national mass armies and launch assaults from beyond the reach of rifles and other smaller caliber weapons. Mass-produced heavy cannons, artillery firepower with increasingly further range, mechanized guns, and the means to transport and post a massive number of these weapons along the borders of nation-states meant that many of the former patterns of warfare became obsolete. One long-standing method that diminished in effectiveness was that of the combined cavalry and infantry charges of the middle ages. With their to and fro ebbs and flows, such attacks had sought to either capture, kill, or force the retreat or surrender of an enemy’s leader. After France demonstrated how to amass a nationalized army equipped with modern weapons and maintain a consistent supply chain for replacements of men and materials, the aim of war changed from seeking to attack and defeat an enemy to the expanded and inverted aim of avoiding defeat for longer than the enemy’s resources could last. War changed from a sprint relay race run by a few types of troops into a marathon in which commanders waited patiently until their enemy’s professional soldiers, conscripted civilians, or their capacity to produce the resources needed to conduct modern war ran out. Using Clausewitz’s concept of wastage, a general could set out a pathway to win a successful battle and move closer to ending a war by destroying the enemy’s resources on the battlefield and in the locations from where the enemy produced and transported materials. With this advanced scaling up of battlegrounds to engulf entire nations and states, the need to avoid overextending and leaving an opportunity to counterattack meant that the most astute course of action called for highly defensive and conservative movements. Clausewitz called for protracted encounters that gradually eroded the enemy’s total capacity to continue in a conflict. Instead of rushing to gain

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relatively worthless territory in pursuit of a leader who was safely out of the reach of any advance, the Clausewitzian application of attrition as a strategy sought to launch attacks that would draw upon the opponent’s reserves through reactionary maneuvers. The aim was no longer simply focused on the enemy’s leader and their combat lines in the field or on ocean waves. The goal instead became one that attempted to overcome the challenge of moving from defensive preservation to offensive victory. An effective general would look to pull an enemy’s men and material resources away from across rear-line, reserve, and civilian supplies. At some breaking point, the enemy would have lost enough of their reserve force to undermine any continued attempt to defend the ruler’s lands in a conclusive moment that would result in either the opponent suing for peace in an attempt to hold onto some form of diminished power in defeat or risk being destroyed in the oncoming advance of a victorious conquering adversary. Clausewitz noted that incremental and widescale destruction depended upon a commander’s calculation of the risks and rewards of any change of operations from defense to offense. In the hopes of modernizing Prussia’s military and state, Clausewitz began to press for a reform agenda that would come to reshape both the theory and practice of martial strategy in fundamental ways. He combined his view of attrition, the wearing down of large bodies of armed forces, with a vision that sought to spark valiant patriotism in men and boys. In the decades after Clausewitz made this appeal, modern nationalism eventually became synonymous with the fusion of both objective civil-military relations and the rise of the subjective mass armies embodied by self-interested citizen soldiers.23 Leaving this somewhat contradictory aspect of modern wars that fostered neutrality in leaders and passion in followers aside for further discussion in part III, a few more details of conscripted warfare in the Clausewitzian context remain necessary to explain. Prussia, caught in the middle of a Europe dominated by French and Russian armed forces, each of which resembled juggernauts, would require a mass conscripted army if it held any genuine hopes to secure independence as a new nation-state. Within three generations, his call had inspired the birth of Germany through Otto von Bismarck’s careful practice of attrition and avoidance of Clausewitzian wastage. Within a century, Clausewitz’s visionary theories on amassed armed forces resolutely sitting on the borders of their own state territories resulted in the industrialized wastage of warfare that cost millions of lives during World War I. This war’s unparalleled levels of carnage continued and then increased in near-countless episodes of bloodshed that defined much of the twentieth century in Europe and across much of the world. Clausewitz’s influence on how states go to war continues to impact combatants and civilians today. Despite Napoleon’s reign having ended in defeat, his regime’s experimentations and later also Clausewitz’s systematic

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analysis of mass conscripted modern warfare established this institution as a norm of modernization. Following Clausewitz, several European powers and other notable examples took up the task of modernizing societies by politically reordering young men into roles of subservience to national rather than regional authorities. Following the fall of Napoleon’s empire, the use of conscription as a tool for modernization soon spread to other states. The opportunity to centralize power, subordinate regional population groups, and rule over formerly autonomous societies repeatedly became reality when states drafted young men from periphery and annexed communities. The establishment of multiple borders and capital cities took place not only because of natural barriers or historic seats of power but also because of the capacity of those societies to provide the necessary bodies and weapons needed to secure these territories. Mandatory national service, or what may be more aptly described here as little more than forced servitude, required civilians to complete different duties within and on behalf of the militaries of these newly formed states. The consequence of the way that modern political leaders established many of the norms of what can be summarized as civil-military-social ordering nationalized male citizens, their families, and the regions in which their inductions took place. Beyond the social impacts, Clausewitz’s influential work has informed multiple generations of military practitioners and historians. One example is his explanation of how attacks can not only win battles but can also result in rapidly draining a commander’s own forces and subsequently lead to defeat. His concept of war as a struggle that seeks to break the will of an opponent in an extension of politics is perhaps his most popular contribution.24 Wars in which political willpower played a role alongside military prowess include all successful guerrilla forces that patiently wear down and wait for the retreat of a more powerful enemy. The British Empire’s defeat to the Continental Army, the US defeat to communist Vietnam, and both the Soviet Union’s and the United States’s respective eventual withdrawals from Afghanistan each show the influence of wastage in asymmetrical warfare in addition to those wars fought between more conventionally matched opponents. The issue of wastage in the context of committing to an expanded forward press that initiates a switch from defense to offense is one of Clausewitz’s central contributions to the strategy of warfare. If launched without accurately estimating an opponent’s active forces and reserve capacities, the move from defense to offense risked precipitating a commander’s own defeat. The pathway to victory would instead pursue incremental engagements that caused greater amounts of wastage in an opponent’s ranks when compared to the amounts of casualties incurred in a commander’s own military. Given the risk that any change from a position that guards against losses to an assault

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that seeks to destroy an enemy, such an advance simultaneously removes the defensive cover for those troops that proceed into combat engagements. The ability to accurately calculate an estimate of expected relative potential losses defined a leader’s level of professionalism when planning for war. In short, a commander’s sense of the numbers and types of troops and weapons needed to also include the reserve capacities that both sides could call upon to replace wastage losses incurred in combat. In what may first appear as something of an exception to the Clausewitzian strategy of attrition, Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg attack against Paris in 1941 exemplifies the risk-reward challenge and success embodied by the rapid shift from defense to offense. The conquest of Paris illustrates the effort to overcome prolonged incremental engagements and proceed to the third stage of modern warfare, that which claimed victory in the advance that disabled the enemy’s ability to continue to wage war. It is worth reemphasizing here that prior to taking this risk that could end in either victory or the severe depletion of a commander’s own forces, Clausewitz detailed a way to mitigate the risk of overextending an attack by explaining a part of the strategies that became definitive in the total warfare eras of the twentieth century. To avoid defeat, modern states needed to further recruit massive numbers of soldiers and produce additional supplies to the extent that the enemy could not keep pace with a commander’s rates of reinforcement and the sustainable accumulation of reserve capacities. CONSCRIPTION AFTER CLAUSEWITZ Following Clausewitz’s analysis and before the normalization of mass wastage during the world wars, several modern states used conscription for conventional combat purposes and in alternative forms throughout the 1800s. For instance, several industrializing nations including the United States provided citizens with multiple exemptions from military conscription to avoid the wastage of economically successful sectors of society. The commonality of finding ways to prevent conscription from ruining the creation of products and wealth had led by 1860 to the reduction of the continental mass army into relatively small professional forces supplemented by reserves of trained citizens.25 The era of smaller modern armies drastically ended in the American Civil War. In 1862, the Confederate States of America began universal mass conscription in response to the inadequacies of the militia system, which fell well short of the needs of modern industrialized warfare. In March of the following year, the Union responded by enacting its own version of mandated service. Its military service bill resulted in widespread condemnation across New York in anticonscription riots that resulted in over one thousand injured

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or dead civilians.26 In other scenarios, such as for the thousands of Irish immigrants who landed on the Union’s eastern coastline at this time, American military service has provided many with a pathway toward earning citizenship. Only after Congress passed the Lodge Act of 1950 during the Cold War did this exceptional route into the citizenry of the United States become more common.27 Although a useful indicator of the potential positive aspects that the institution of conscription can play, such histories and cases exist beyond the central focus here. Despite the Union’s law that called for nationalized military service, exemptions continued to uphold social inequalities even in this bastion of democracy. One method of exemption relied upon assessing the economic considerations of a potential draftee. According to T. J. Perri, during the American Civil War, federal enlistment officers extended an option to male citizens to pay the cost to bring in a substitute who would then take the original draftee’s place in the army. Economic substitution meant that the payee provided the state with a fee in exchange for commutation.28 The practice raised funds from well-financed citizens who could afford the fee, which could reach as high as $300, the equivalent amount of an average laborer’s annual income. The government presented the policy of commutation as necessary to avoid the removal of economically successful persons from their communities. The policy meant that the state kept economic production stable, raised funds, and also inducted less-wealthy recruits.29 In short, substitution embodied the state’s adaption of conscription for economic purposes in addition to purely defensive reasons. Soon after the Union defeated Confederate forces and on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, conscription played a variety of roles before, during, and after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Mobilization efforts brought reactions from the public that confirmed both scorn for a failing leader and an acceptance of nationalizing security measures for common defense. In 1866, Napoleon III’s heavily compromised form of mandatory service faced bitter opposition from the French people only a few years before Otto Von Bismarck’s Prussian troops occupied Paris. Once foreign forces patrolled French lands and streets, the call made in 1872 for a conscripted army produced a force of two million trained Frenchmen in arms and just as many more reserves waiting for their induction into the ranks.30 The stark differences in how the same population responded to the state’s policy of mandatory service instilled useful lessons about the timing of mobilization. The threat had to not only be real but also near enough for the public to respond positively to a call to arms. These insights informed French, German, and British leaders who fed the lines of the Western front in World War I and other commanders within and beyond Europe.

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The role of mass conscription as an integral part of nationalizing projects became global in reach when the Japanese government instigated its modernization programs in the late 1800s. For several decades, government leaders had acknowledged the immensely transformative capacity of modern weapons that American military and diplomatic contacts had shipped in and placed on display in Japan. Alongside these advancements in industrial technologies, Japan’s government also recognized that the draft and subsequent indoctrinated forms of militarized education programs were not simply useful but also necessary to effectively build a society that held loyal to national goals.31 These developments, largely influenced by the advice and instruction provided by American Civil War veterans, in turn then impacted the Russian military system as a result of Japan’s surprising victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. With the to and fro of the security dilemma building one nation-state’s modern security infrastructure and then another’s, the unexpected losses by Britain, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire in different wars during the early years of the twentieth century spurned reforms that considered both Clausewitzian wastage and the total mobilization of societies during wartime. The example of Russia’s loss to Japan unfolded a few years after the British lost ground to Boer forces in southern Africa and shortly before the Ottoman Empire withdrew from lands lost in the Balkan Wars immediately prior to the outbreak of World War I. I cover this last development in more detail in chapter 4 and examine the causal precondition that can emerge in states that unexpectantly lose territory in chapters 6 and 7. Surprisingly, given the privilege of hindsight, few analyses have focused on how states anticipated and designed policies for mitigating the predictable wastage of war. These forms of mass carnage, that by 1914 such mobilization schemes fed, unleashed mass destruction when nationalized armies faced industrialized weapons. Acknowledging such policies is integral to defining and then reconciling the puzzle that, when pieced together, reveals how processes of mass death that devasted so much of humanity during the twentieth century became normalized. The concept of the wastage of war remains all too often downplayed in favor of perspectives that argue how governments failed to imagine such devastation or, to use an anathema from the early 2000s, simply did not know what they did not know. In what is perhaps one of the most hallowed myths in the histories of World War I, perspectives that espouse narratives that sustain excuses made by regimes that participated in the slaughtering of valiant volunteers and coerced conscripts of all sides, the idea that governments could not foresee mass death is simply an insupportable view. Some apologists still make this faultless shrug on behalf of leaders who somehow also became entrenched in the inevitability of what unfolded during this war. More accurately, and fleetingly stated in the historical record,

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George F. Kennan, David Reynolds, A. J. P. Taylor, and C. E. Carrington all described these many catastrophic mass death events as holocausts.32 In the bloodletting of the twentieth century, it is clear that political and military leaders who had studied Clausewitz added to the mass wastage of lives. Instead of finding ways to not participate, several major powers that included the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and the United Kingdom all increased their recruitment of every type of troop available including conscripts to meet the demands of a war based on annihilating both the enemy’s manpower and their reserves. NORMALIZING WASTAGE IN THE WORLD WARS For much of the 1800s, states altered their uses of conscription in preparation for deployment in both form and in scale. Whether constructing mass armies or assembling relatively minor security details, conscription infrequently raised forces equivalent to the size of France’s revolutionary national guard or Napoleon’s Grande Armée until the outbreak of World War I. One result of modernization policies that instigated multiple social pressures, military programs, and civil-military reforms during the late 1800s and early 1900s was the voluntarily enlistment of many young male civilians at and immediately following the start of the war in August 1914. Another point beyond that of mandatory service, one that explains the reasoning why waves of enlistees signed up of their own accord in those first few months, was the widely held belief and inaccurate assumption that the conflict between Europe’s major powers would only last until Christmas of that year at the latest.33 Common knowledge and experience from recent multiple cases of transient warfare on the continent provided people with faith in their diplomatic leaders who would surely resolve the territorial bickering in short order. This view did not account for grand strategies of global political economy or military subjugation of industrialized rivals. As such, those initial waves of volunteers could not foresee any reason why a modern nation-state, let alone one’s own, would continue to expend the lives of their civilians into the harsh winter conditions never mind for several more years of brutal carnage. Unexpectantly, at least from the perspective of the impassioned volunteer, the fight became drawn out for more than four years and took with it an unprecedented number of lives through the normalization of mass wastage. Given that the power to raise and deploy a military for the purposes of national defense is a widely accepted right of the modern state, it is imperative to consider how the leaders of major nation-states employed this power to the devastating lengths experienced in the twentieth century. Multiple societies accepted and expected that

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the state would continue to expend massive numbers of civilian lives under the justification of conducting war for the common good. The expansion of losses in World War I incurred by states including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom has received a range of explanations that often include concepts of the failure to predict such devastation.34 More explanatory and less apologetic assessments have taken account of the foreknowledge that states and militaries had when they engaged in the tragic repetitions of mass casualties through this modern war of attritional destruction.35 From August 1914 to November 1918, the politics of conflict changed due to the deadly combination of massive military forces and industrialized warfare. Noting the introduction of effective industrial weaponry explains many of the details of how this war took so many lives. New mechanized weaponry increased the deadliness of modern armies both for and against the mass ranks filled by millions of volunteers and conscripts deployed across Europe, western Asia, and north Africa. These trends, in part set in motion by the recruitment practices of Napoleonic France and Clausewitz’s theories on war, produced the most destructive outcomes in all of humanity’s existence up to that time. The increasingly efficient forms of killing, such as by machine guns, chemical weapons, and a spate of advanced artillery munitions, strained several governments to meet the demands of war as they pondered how to supply the men and materials necessary to stay in the fight. Mass mobilization by conscription was a common method used by these states to recruit and then deploy millions of soldiers, especially after initial waves of volunteers had faced the devastation of modern war. What met the millions of volunteers and conscripts at the front entailed a deadly strategy to hold territory at the expense of ending massive numbers of human lives. While new weapons took more lives in a shorter amount of time than in previous conflicts, it is crucial to acknowledge how the carnage led to several political crises that impacted all sides. Russia’s role in the war would break the Romanov empire and culminate later with the Soviet Union’s terms of withdrawal. German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires also collapsed under the efforts to keep pace with the devastation called for by supplying resources to fight this modern war. To stay in the fight often came down to a state’s capacity to unleash some new technological edge that might undermine an opponent’s arsenal or by deploying fresh waves of sacrifices that would overwhelm an enemy’s defensive reserves. An example of such devastating weaponry includes the first use of aircraft to unleash strategic bombardments onto enemy ranks. According to Alex Axelrod, air superiority entered military lexicon during the Battle of Verdun in 1916.36 This crucially important battle, fought primarily by French and German conscripted mass armies, is also famous for the entry of attrition in the Great War. War by attrition, meaning the gradual reduction of an enemy’s

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capacity to fight at the front through losses that weaken the reserve forces of a country, even to the extent of wearing down those belligerent parties that totally mobilize society to recruit fighters and produce wartime resources, encapsulates Verdun and consequently also summarizes the strategies deployed throughout much of World War I.37 Even though attrition is a known entity in scholarly analyses, the acceptance and expectation of the wastage of war in the context of recruiting and deploying conscripts that states understood would soon die en masse remains underrepresented in explanations about these losses. Returning to the nationalization of modern war that defined earlier depictions of the state’s perception of losses paid through civic duty, the French government began to frame attrition at Verdun and at the war’s many other battlefields as symbolic of the citizen soldier’s willing sacrifice in pursuit of victory. Putting aside the rhetorical apologetics that avoid any genuine explanation of or accountability for such massive loss of life, the military reality of attrition did not depend on any goal to win territory but instead sought to kill and kill off as many casualties within the enemy’s ranks as possible. In describing attrition, Axelrod detailed one reason why governments continued unabated in meeting the higher demands of recruiting and deploying soldiers to war even though they knew that to do so would substantially increase losses on both sides of the frontline. According to Axelrod, a report sent by German commander Erich von Falkenhayn included the aim of bleeding out the enemy’s forces, a term that has since developed into the paraphrased misquote that Falkenhayn hoped to bleed France white.38 The plan expected the battle to produce mass casualties among French defensive forces. As a result of the intensified losses brought on by the application of attrition, the effort to avoid losing Verdun set German aggression against French resistance in ways that assumed significance far beyond any practical value of the territory itself.39 The enormous cost of lives spent at Verdun throughout most of 1916 instigated the French government to issue a clarion call to recruit even more volunteers and conscripts. The attacks and counterattacks added to the mass death inflicted by and upon the Central Powers and the Entente Powers in what military historian William J. Philpott called a war of attrition. Philpott succinctly concluded that a common strategy used in World War I depended largely on a belligerent’s capacity to sustain heavy losses, the results of which decided either their victory or defeat.40 The cost of staying in the war meant that each state knowingly accepted and intentionally expected to contribute to and continue the mass carnage. Intensifying the rate at which modern nation-states expended the lives of conscripted soldiers across multiple battlefields, France and Germany had mutually modernized the attritional wastage of war in events that updated this strategy from Clausewitz’s earlier

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theoretical evaluations and the intermittent episodes of mass slaughter that conscripted modern warfare had caused in the decades prior to World War I. Nearly a century following Clausewitz’s time in active service and some eight decades after he described the wastage of war, military and government officials in Europe during World War I reframed the “relentless slaughter” that befell volunteer and conscripted casualties by using his less graphic term of “wastage.”41 The use of this word by government officials, especially for instance in the United Kingdom, denotes the direct impact of Clausewitz’s explanations of wastage upon the practice of leaders who chose to continue to fight in what was by then the most deadly of wars. Describing the casualties of war in this way, as was first used by Clausewitz and then by multiple governments during the twentieth century, is not to be misunderstood as somehow dishonoring the deaths of those casualties who fell in times of war. To be clear, the term in no way includes some disrespectful connotation. Strewn in coded language across many cabled telegraphs, military reports, and official government policy publications, wastage was the shorthand term used to represent the attrition of losses incurred at the frontlines, those lives lost some time after engaging in combat through the injuries from which soldiers could not recover to return to active deployment, and also the calculated expectations of the losses that a battle would likely sustain in the future. This last sum of anticipated losses then led governments to assess how many battle-aged men existed within the societies that they ruled over, a realization that prolonged the carnage for years. The high costs incurred by holding territory at Verdun substantially changed the way states drafted civilians for military purposes during and after World War I. From this point in the war, states once again adapted conscription, this time to meet the accepted and expected wastage of war. Because the task of counting losses is what Clausewitz described as wastage, it is important to examine the case of one government involved in World War I that adapted the use of the term to report not only the number of soldiers killed or injured but also in its estimations of the number of troops that would likely die in forthcoming battles. This type of estimation is important because it was from this calculation that one of the belligerents of World War I, the United Kingdom, began to actively pursue the recruitment of conscripts and the deployment of men into combat with the anticipation that many of those sent would die in the wastage of war. By 1916, only the remnants of volunteer forces remained as conscription policies sought to maintain the capacity to fight. Even in the United Kingdom, the exception that did not have a long-standing history of employing a continental-styled mass army in the 1800s due mostly to its imperial naval prowess, the government passed a series of military service laws beginning in January and May 1916.42 This system of universal conscription

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followed the many inconsistent attempts to inspire and compel volunteers to leave civilian society and join the army. The new laws meant that all soldiers who served in uniform were technically obeying mandatory service requirements even if they had voluntarily registered in preparation for mobilization and had already been deployed in their units. This distinction, as to who counted as being a conscript and who maintained their status as a volunteer, is moot when the military began to enforce martial law through the authority provided to it by this state’s conscription policies. A historical debate, one that somewhat continues to today, includes some who view all who registered and served before the passing of these acts as somehow counting only as volunteers even after the laws came into effect in 1916. The law enacted in May 1916 categorically rejects this somewhat apologetic umbrella interpretation that only volunteers advanced on some days in the battles that followed the government’s mandatory service requirements. While the induction process of conscription began to register, enlist, train, and then deploy conscripted soldiers for battles that they joined en masse by November 1916, evidence exists that territorial forces included conscripts who met the parameters of the military service bill from May onward. These territorial forces, compulsorily deployed abroad in a reversal of their original purpose for home defense, fought in the summer campaigns. These territorial units included seven divisions within the Third and Forth Armies that advanced during the first day of infantry attacks launched by the United Kingdom on July 1, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme in what remains as the costliest day in the history of Britain’s armed forces.43 The state transitioned its entirely volunteer army of 1914 and 1915 to one that included conscripts in 1916 in part because of its strategic switch from defense to offense in the latter of these years. The state’s change from one that sought to hold its position to one that actively advanced against German forces along the Western front in part relied upon the government’s calculations of wastage in 1915 and its projections of further losses that leaders expected attacks would incur in the future during battles waged throughout 1916. The government of the United Kingdom was one example that applied conscription during the Great War by using an adapted form of Clausewitzian wastage. Having inducted many volunteers at the onset of the war, the state faced a recruitment crisis shortly into the conflict before introducing conscription to supply civilians, many of whom fought in 1916 through to the end of the war. Before these events, increased wastage at the front led government officials to consider how to free up more working-class men for military service in a series of policy initiatives that began in 1915. The search for increasing numbers of available men started when Secretary of State for War H. H. Kitchener began to plan for the change in military strategy from defense to offense. This process required the state to seek out and then sacrifice massive

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numbers of wastage conscripts. Kitchener insisted by way of the Committee of Imperial Defense that the United Kingdom would have to obtain men required to meet the anticipated battlefield wastage scheduled to occur in the spring and summer of 1916.44 The state primarily targeted working-class men to fill the new roles of recruitment in anticipation of the wastage the officials expected the military to incur in its upcoming battles. Given these distinct class categories, it is important to note that many middle-class and upperclass British men served and died in the war. I do not argue that the state only sacrificed or just conscripted working-class men. Instead, I argue that the state specifically targeted working men, who they replaced with women workers in a gradual process, to meet the increasing wastage demands in combat. Men who could access legal, employment, and educational deferments and exemptions after the government passed its conscription laws were able to avoid wastage in the state’s costly frontline combat operations, an option that did not exist for many thousands of conscripts. Throughout 1915, in preparation for the implementation of conscription the following year, state officials counted the number of men who could theoretically be replaced in the workshops and farmyards throughout British society. Once identified, the state could then recruit and deploy these men to the battlefields of the war. The assessment of the number of fighting-aged men judged by their employers as substitutable with alternative employees including older men, women, and children and were therefore considered available for military service totaled 1,413,900.45 In this case, the state piloted a scheme to bring in women laborers alongside men in factories and on farms to then push out many of the original workers who very quickly became the targets of social shaming campaigns and other compelling mechanisms if they chose not to immediately volunteer for the army following their dismissal from employment. The pilot, one that operated at the same time as many other recruitment schemes, sought to funnel manpower into the military. Fully aware of the costs of wastage in the future, the United Kingdom began in 1915 to prepare how it would implement compulsory military service.46 Surmising the price of victory in World War I, the government of the United Kingdom thought that the accepted and expected conscripted loss of life was worth the cost of scaling up its substitution scheme at the end of 1915 and throughout 1916 when it enacted conscription as the way to formally insist that men pushed out of their workplaces had no choice but to join the fight. Only those working-class men who met the stipulations for exemption, and also completed the required legal processes for the state to identify them as working in jobs deemed of national importance, could expect to avoid being made jobless before being enlisted and deployed. The calculation that identified over 1.4 million British men as potentially available for military service in 1915, one that catalyzed the effort to bring

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in women workers across the nation before the bulk of British men went to war, is one that has become shrouded in a myth that women stepped in to fill the gap left behind by gallant male volunteers. Without doubt, many women filled employment opportunities created by volunteers in minor and anecdotal ways at the start of the war. By the years of 1915 and 1916, it is more accurate to represent the introduction of women workers as a policy embroiled within the needs that the state had in requiring more men to leave their communities and die fighting across the English Channel. The filling-the-gap myth is a long outdated misinterpretation of what the government launched; namely, the substitution scheme.47 This policy accelerated coerced and then conscripted inductions by establishing a program of employment that brought young women into workplaces alongside their male colleagues, trained them to work the same jobs, and upgraded facilities with mechanical production tools that aimed at closing the physical capacity gaps that existed between all-male work crews and mixed cohorts of employees. The processes of substitution then extracted and inducted many thousands of men who rapidly became surplus to economic requirements. The substitution scheme allowed the United Kingdom to remain in the conflict by empowering the state to prepare, count, train replacements, and extract enough socially compelled civilians and later conscripts to meet the new and increasingly deadlier demands of modern warfare. Officials implemented their policies while being fully aware that many of the newly conscripted recruits would soon die after their deployment. In terms of the decisions made by a high command, losses in war are not a surprise, but the difference here is that the state orchestrated its use of conscription to extract recruits who it had calculated as being relatively less crucial to the overall economic and military strength of the country at war. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith explained in April 1916 that the government needed to produce great reserves of men as wastage recruits for the ever-increasing armies in the field.48 Selective conscription of working-class men, substituted in their civilian workplaces with women, was the method by which the state produced what the prime minister defined as wastage recruits: civilians taken by the state out of society and deployed to deadly and dangerous combat roles. In anticipating how many losses its engagements throughout 1916 would incur, the United Kingdom actively sought out, conscripted, and then deployed recruits that it deemed as being more valuable to the cause by becoming wastage casualties. This example is informative for the study of genocidal conscription in part because the United Kingdom’s policies during World War I signaled a new and radical departure, one that introduced mandatory service during the war specifically to meet the unique demands of this exceedingly deadly conflict. Other states had practiced some form of conscription ahead of the violence

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and, in some cases, for generations within the normative political structural milieu established by revolutionary France. What made Britain different to most other European powers is that it repeatedly rejected the centralized models crafted from 1789 on and, instead, had grown much of its empire by way of a decentralized semi-autonomous imperial system that heavily relied on volunteers in its army and the dominance of its navy throughout the world’s oceans. The calculation of the number of men who would need to leave the workforce and die in war to cancel out the opponent’s own reserve capacity to stay in the fight led the United Kingdom to mimic its European allies and rivals by installing a modernized Clausewitzian military order. When Britain’s leadership realized that the battles planned for in the forthcoming summer of 1916 would cost many more lives than in previous campaigns, the state mobilized the nation by implementing conscription at the beginning of that year.49 By the end of that year, the British military had phased out its remaining volunteer recruits and had built the capacity to match its enemies by constructing a conscript army on the field, a force that the government buttressed by establishing substantial and replenishable reserves. These military, political, social, and economic reforms ushered the United Kingdom into an era of total warfare for the first time. Conscription in World War I set a deadly pattern of recurring cycles of recruitment, deployment, and wastage. After over a century since its end, this war remains as a major historical event that consisted of multiple critical junctures.50 That several governments normalized the wastage of so many lives is irrefutable and centers an investigation into the role of wartime conscription in cases of genocide. Wastage is an underexamined concept in studies on warfare, let alone those that consider cases of genocide. Speculating as to why, perhaps, it is that the normalized accepted losses in war have not received much attention could be due in part to the fact that the acceptance of casualties in warfare is an assumption that informs different academic literatures including civil-military relations and military history. Given this compartmentalization through specialization, the issue of recruiting for the purposes of wastage in future conflict requires further explanation to contextualize its presence in modern wars and genocides. Of crucial significance here is the recognition that the normalization of mass losses in World War I set a threshold by which genocidal states realized how modern warfare could serve as a veneer that would cover the tracks of perpetrators that captured, killed, and killed off members of targeted population groups. This connection between war and genocide is a reasonable interpretation of how states have destroyed targets other than their declared foreign enemies while also conducting activities in a war. Upon this foundation, I argue that wastage is the method by which government and military leaders in genocidal states have sought out and then destroyed recruits who embodied a racial, ethnic,

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national, or religious group identity. For genocidal states, such recruits were little more than suspected enemies rather than soldiers. In what was a pinnacle expression of Hobbes’s Leviathan approach to civil-military relations, states fighting World War I not only accepted mass loss of life but also expected an estimated number of casualties to die in forthcoming battles. In the context of normalization, military historian Hew Strachan noted the importance of Clausewitz as an influential figure on the attritional strategies deployed during World War I and throughout both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.51 In what was at the time a new factor of mass destruction that extended beyond the deployment of recruits already available in armed forces, governments began in World War I to survey societies to consider which groups could provide more recruits through social compulsion and by way of direct conscription so that those states could then continue to participate in the carnage that maintained these wartime efforts. It should be noted at this point that even though such planning included an intent that many of these volunteers and conscripts would die as a result of filling the demand for the continued wastage of war, the primary intent of governments making these decisions was to stay in the war at any and all costs. This complexity helps to delineate the divide between the accepted and expected conscripted wastage of war and genocide by wastage. The latter of these two circumstances includes not just the intent to send conscripts to die but also the intent to conscript them for the purpose that they would die under the guise of war. The influence of the events that unfolded from 1914 to 1918 cannot be overestimated in terms of their impacts on the development of Europe before and during World War II. By acknowledging the importance of these events, it is clear how the power of states rose during World War I so that they could insist that civilians join mass armies and then advance into the carnage of industrialized warfare made possible in part by the technological advances in mechanized weaponry. These factors, not least of all conscripting for what governments deemed as acceptable mass losses, contributed in intentional and causal ways to what became an unprecedented number of wartime casualties. These influential precedents of the international conflicts of 1939 to 1945 are well understood by scholars who cite either punitive measures within the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, the contradictions of the League of Nations, the omission of major powers including the United States and the Soviet Union from leading diplomatic venues, the claims of independence made by multiple ethnonationalist groups, the rise of fascism, a combination of these causal factors, or other issues that describe events leading up to Nazi Germany’s aggressive intrusions and invasions into other European lands that began in the 1930s. Despite the many millions of words that have explained much of these wars, very few mention the central role that conscription

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played in the development of states that managed the wastage of war and simultaneously carried out genocides during these conflicts. The new normal of mass death soon informed genocidal leaders and their followers of the capacity for conscription to take advantage of the normative assumption that civilians should not just come to the aid of the state during war but should then also expect to die for a national cause. Through the institution of wartime conscription, one of deadly forces that can both protect and destroy, genocidal leaders quickly adapted the capacity to recruit into one that captured targets deemed disloyal enemies. An obvious and important issue to note here is that the ordinary purpose of conscription has functioned as a security norm used by numerous governments for national defense at many times in a variety of legitimate and diverse ways. These reasonable applications of the security norm of the institution of conscription is not to be confused with any broad assertion of the intent by a state to destroy members of its own military. Instead, as made clear here, the acceptance of massive losses incurred by states involved in World War I that employed this security norm for defensive purposes created the opportunity by which some genocidal states have used conscription to commit genocide beginning with the Ottoman Empire as I explain in chapter 4. NOTES 1. Lynn Montross, War through the Ages (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 14. 2. Montross, 95–96. 3. Montross, 202. 4. Montross, 375. 5. Matthew R. Christ, “Conscription of Hoplites in Classical Athens,” The Classical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2001): 398–422; Scott Lytle, “Robespierre, Danton, and the Levée En Masse,” The Journal of Modern History 30, no. 4 (1958): 325; Samuel P. Huntington, “Armed Forces and Democracy: Reforming Civil-Military Relations,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 4 (1995): 17. 6. Antonis Adam, “Military Conscription as a Means of Stabilizing Democratic Regimes,” Public Choice 150, no. 3 (2012): 716. 7. Herman Beukema, “Social and Political Aspects of Conscription: Europe’s Experience,” Military Affairs 5, no. 1 (1941): 21. 8. Lytle, “Robespierre, Danton, and the Levée En Masse,” 325, 328n14. 9. Lytle, 329. 10. Lytle, 330. 11. Lytle, 333. 12. Montross, War through the Ages, 451–452, 455, 478. 13. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 2011), 6.

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14. David A. Bell, “The French Revolution, the Vendée, and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 22, no. 1 (2020): 19–25. 15. Jones, Genocide, 6–7, 66. 16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), 139. 17. Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 34–35, 219. 18. Dierk Walter, “Meeting the French Challenge: Conscription in Prussia 1807– 1815,” in Conscription in Napoleonic Era: A Revolution in Military Affairs? (London: Routledge, 2009), 33–35. 19. Bryan Ranft, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 20–25; Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato, Kenneth Scheve, and David Stasavage, “Technology and the Era of the Mass Army,” The Journal of Economic History 74, no. 2 (2014): 449–81. 20. Clausewitz, Howard, and Paret, On War, 93, 527. 21. Clausewitz, Howard, and Paret, 93. 22. Clausewitz, Howard, and Paret, 357. 23. John Binkley, “Clausewitz and Subjective Civilian Control: An Analysis of Clausewitz’s Views on the Role of the Military Advisor in the Development of National Policy,” Armed Forces & Society 42, no. 2 (2016): 251–75. 24. Clausewitz, Howard, and Paret, On War, 69. 25. Montross, War through the Ages, 590. 26. Montross, 611. 27. Brad Hardy, “Citizen Candidates: Cold War Naturalization, Military Service, and the Lodge Act of 1950,” The Journal of Military History 87, no. 1 (2023): 169–73. 28. T. J. Perri, “The Economics of US Civil War Conscription,” American Law and Economics Review 10, no. 2 (2008): 424–53. 29. William Marvel, “A Poor Man’s Fight: National Park Civil War Series, The Civil War’s Common Soldier,” National Park Service, no date. 30. Montross, War through the Ages, 644, 656. 31. Richard J. Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 5. 32. C. E. Carrington, “Kitchener’s Army: The Somme and After,” The RUSI Journal 123, no. 1 (1978): 15; George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 3; and A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 157. Taylor inferred that both of the twentieth century’s global wars were holocausts. The expression “holocaust” as pertinent to World War I remains an accepted term today. See David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014), xviii. 33. Peter Hart, The Great War a Combat History of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 155. 34. See, for example, Christopher M. Clark, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Harper, 2013). 35. William J. Philpott, War of Attrition: Fighting the First World War (New York: Overlook Press, 2014).

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36. Alan Axelrod, The Battle of Verdun (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 41. 37. Philpott, War of Attrition, 114; William J. Philpott, “Attrition: How the War Was Fought and Won,” in The Greater War: Other Combatants and Other Fronts, 1914–1918 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 235–54. 38. Axelrod, The Battle of Verdun, 20. 39. Axelrod, 13. 40. Philpott, War of Attrition, 114; Philpott, “Attrition.” 41. Axelrod, The Battle of Verdun, 49. 42. United Kingdom, “Military Service Act, 1916” (London: King’s Printer of Acts of Parliament, January 27, 1916); United Kingdom, “Military Service Act, 1916 (Session 2)” (London: King’s Printer of Acts of Parliament, May 25, 1916). 43. See clauses 14 to 16 in United Kingdom, “Military Service Act, 1916 (Session 2),” 7–8; Andrew Rawson, Somme Campaign (Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military, 2014), 30, 33; Chris McCarthy, The Somme: The Day-by-Day Account (London: The Caxton Publishing Group, 1998), 8, 31–3; K. W. Mitchinson, The Territorial Force at War, 1914–1916 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 192–93; William J. Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century (London: Abacus, 2010), 8. 44. For the United Kingdom’s wastage recruitment strategy in World War I, see “III. Numbers and Wastage” and “IV. Recruitment,” 295–325, in Committee of Imperial Defence, “War Policy: Report and Supplementary Memoranda of a Cabinet Committee,” CID, 1915 to 1916, United Kingdom National Archives. 45. Bernard Mallet et al., “Men Available for Military Service in England and Wales,” National Register Committee, October 5, 1915, 1–2, RG 28/11, United Kingdom National Archives. 46. War Office, “Preparation for Compulsory Service,” May 19, 1915, WO 159/3, United Kingdom National Archives. 47. See National Register Committee, “Substitution of Women for Men in Industry,” October 1915, RG 28/10, UK National Archives, United Kingdom. 48. Herbert H. Asquith, “Prime Minister’s Secret Session Speech, 25 April 1916,” MS. Asquith 49 (Papers of Herbert H. Asquith. University of Oxford, United Kingdom), 10, 27–31, 38; Herbert H. Asquith, “Conference between the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for War, the Secretary of State for the Colonies and the Representatives of Trades Unions, 26 April 1916,” MS. Asquith 90 (Papers of Herbert H. Asquith, University of Oxford, United Kingdom), 3, 6–7. 49. R. J. Q. Adams, “Asquith’s Choice: The May Coalition and the Coming of Conscription, 1915–1916,” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 3 (1986): 243. 50. In comparative political studies, a critical juncture is a moment when irreversible change takes place and results in unexpected political consequences. For the methodological origin of observing critical junctures in historical cases, see Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).

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51. Hew Strachan, Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 17, 18, 137–38; Hew Strachan, “The 2010 George C. Marshall Lecture in Military History: Clausewitz and the First World War,” Journal of Military History 75, no. 2 (2011): 367–92; Hew Strachan, The First World War (London: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

PART II

Genocidal Conscription

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Chapter 3

Genocide by Wastage

For much of the twentieth century, modern industrialized states owed their existence to their capacities to recruit and deploy mass armies. These powers included the acceptance and expectation of mass losses. The argument I make requires a clear delineation of the closely related but ultimately different concepts of the wastage of war and genocide by wastage. First, I define and explain genocidal conscription by outlining the process of genocide by commanders that murdered certain groups of their own state’s conscripted troops and by intentionally subjecting other conscripts to the wastage of war. Then, in chapters 4 and 5, I provide evidence from two cases before examining comparative aspects in part III. I recognize that many scholars of military history would reasonably suggest that no army seeks to sacrifice its soldiers as part of a deliberate strategy and that scholars of genocide are similarly aware of several genocidal states that have put the urgency of destroying a targeted population group ahead of any needs of their armed forces. This overarching debate of whether a state waged war or committed genocide is one that provides insight into the fact that governments at war have also committed genocide at the same time. The new concept that I contribute here systematically traces the ways certain states have used war as a guise under which they committed genocide against several targets including conscripts inducted into the militaries of those states. Throughout the many histories that have documented multiple wars, commanders of large standing armies have expected many volunteers and conscripts to die as the consequence of a decision to advance against enemy forces. Considering this position that judges heavy costs as worthy losses in pursuit of victory, the reality of warfare cannot be said to ordinarily include armies that seek to wipe out any section within their own ranks. Despite this conventional perspective, a problem of this logical position arises when the focus shifts to assess the issue of expected losses and to examine political leaders in charge of military institutions within genocidal states. While it is reasonable to hold a viewpoint that argues that no functional military would 57

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deliberately cause the death of a recruit when assessing motives of defense and survival, the reality of genocidal states centers upon the destruction of a group deemed as unwanted or as some type of perceived internal enemy and precipitates the pursuit of an array of destructive methods and operations. Having made clear the history and development of modern conscription in several significant cases in chapter 2, this section of the book proceeds to answer the following question. How may it be possible to precisely ascertain genocide by wastage? This term explains the intentionally destructive result of a genocidal state that implements genocidal conscription to kill and kill off certain recruits in operations that it then excuses those deaths as simply having resulted from the inevitable losses of war. In short, the following definitions distinguish two separate alternative applications of wastage: 1.  The wastage of war records accepted casualties lost in attritional battles and refers to the calculated losses that a state expects to suffer in a forthcoming military operation. 2.  Genocide by wastage notes a state’s intent and actions to destroy members of an identified national, ethnic, racial, or religious group by placing them into deadly wartime environments in which those targets die. Demonstrating the difference of these two closely related aspects of wastage relies on the evidence of a state’s intent regarding the fate of conscripts drafted from targeted population groups. Given the overlapping aspects of deadly outcomes of these two distinct forms of wastage, it is important to clearly explain how a state may only intend to fight a war rather than commit genocide by wastage. How does the demarcation of the two outcomes of wastage during war inform the argument of genocidal conscription? In short, once wastage became so commonplace for societies ensnared in total warfare, those populations began to accept government attempts to normalize mass carnage. Societies and states rationalized the unprecedented loss of life in and after World War I by normalizing the apparently inevitable and unstoppable continuation of mass attrition in warfare. The politics of modern war opened up a new capacity to genocidal states that could from then on utilize conscription to capture and destroy their targets while claiming that these operations were a part of some legitimate form of security practices. Perpetrators that sent such victims to die under these conditions then reported losses by counting deaths as being casualties of war so that these victims of genocide went unnoticed amid so many episodes of industrialized slaughter. Such processes may have taken place on smaller scales before the normalization of mass wastage, but this assertion is beyond my central focus. Given that, by World War I, leaders accepted and expected wastage losses and so recruited massive numbers of

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men in anticipation that many of them would soon die, the issue of genocide becomes relevant to how such rationalizations normalized mass death. By explaining an underexamined tactic of genocide, this book traces the processes by which two genocidal states developed discriminatory selective conscription policies to kill and kill off targets, report these deaths as casualties of the wastage of war, and obfuscate the intent and actions to instigate and carry out genocide by wastage. It is important to note that by using this term “wastage,” no intention exists here to diminish the sacrifices that soldiers have themselves willingly made by serving states at war. Instead of perhaps being misinterpreted as some attempt to besmirch any fallen soldier, the work initially applies the term “wastage” here in the original Clausewitzian sense. For Clausewitz, wastage referred to the casualties of war.1 Over the years since Clausewitz introduced this concept in the early 1800s, the term “wastage” has changed throughout the twentieth century. The methods by which I argue that a state uses conscription as a tactic of genocide are by entrapping victims, placing them under the command of personnel that include perpetrators, some of whom may or may not themselves be conscripts, and deploying those targets to their deaths in war. After tracing the evidence present in two cases of genocide, I then analyze comparative aspects in chapter 6. I examine the differences and note similarities of the unique circumstances during which perpetrators carried out genocides across the Ottoman Empire during World War I and in the military actions of Axis-era Hungary in World War II. The focus of the comparison details historic preconditions and phases through which states progressed their policies and actions of genocidal conscription. These phases are division, isolation, subordination, relocation, and destruction. Focusing on these five phases provides a structure to how I trace events throughout both cases. For the purpose of noting what is new about this contribution, I include a few details on what other works have mentioned regarding the overlapping topics of genocide and conscription. GENOCIDE OF CONSCRIPTS? Since the UNCG omitted a detailed explanation of how perpetrators would commit genocide, and given that Lemkin’s concept of impositions extends to include conscription that resulted in the deaths of some victims burdened by such levies, several works have documented the existence of conscripts in cases that may be viewed as genocidal. For example, R. J. Rummel coined the term “democide” to describe governments that have targeted and killed groups of civilians including conscripts.2 Rummel’s term helped to describe the deadly power of governments that sustained their rule at the cost of

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expending the lives of civilians. Rummel’s examples of democide included forced labor conscripts who died en masse in German colonies and in Cambodia.3 Other estimates made by Rummel in two other cases summarized that over three million conscripted Chinese men and 145,000 Mexican male conscripts died not in combat but because of democidal government actions.4 Despite the deaths of millions of conscripts, Rummel ruled out conscription as a part of his concept of democide due to the idea that such people may have had the option to be armed and as such he did not consider them as victims. However, Rummel made this claim without much clarification, which resulted in his inclusion of certain possible conscripted victims of democide. The problem with Rummel’s term is that his work was largely descriptive and not causally explanatory. Forced labor is an economic form of at times deadly conscription used by states at war and during peacetime. One example of the latter form is that of Turkey’s enlistment and deployment practices during its neutral role throughout World War II. This case notes the application of such policies based on the selection of conscripts taken from different ethnic minority communities. Turkey targeted and selected many thousands of conscripts and then exploited their labor by burdening them with arduous duties. According to Sait Çetinoğlu, Turkey organized many of these work battalions known as amele taburlari in Turkish from 1941 to 1944. This policy specifically captured Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, and Jewish men. The state then offered these civilians one of two choices. They could either pay a tax or work in labor camps in which they received only the basic minimum subsistence for survival.5 Once interned in these camps, commanders ruled over these battalions of conscripted forced laborers by imposing severe working conditions. These economic conscripts completed physically exhausting tasks for no pay.6 Exploiting the labor of such conscripts was not the only way that Turkey burdened members of these minority communities during this time. Levying further economic hardships, Turkey imposed a tax from 1942 to 1944 with the intention of financially ruining selected individuals. Those who could not make these payments faced imprisonment. The policy resulted in as many as 1,869 men serving out spuriously unjust sentences in forced labor camps.7 Çetinoğlu has argued that these economic conscripts suffered from terrorization and financial ruin at the hands of the Turkish state.8 In the context of eliminating unwanted peoples by designing environments that would reduce their access to the means necessary to live, a phrase that connects to genocide by wastage is that of genocide by attrition. This concept explains how a perpetrator eventually wears away members of a targeted population group. First defined by Helen Fein, genocide by attrition describes a perpetrator’s actions that strip away the political, civil, and economic rights of their victims. The outcome of these restrictions leads to organized,

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indirect, and intentional destruction through the “deprivation of conditions essential for maintaining health.”9 Such deprivations include the denial of access to adequate food, water, housing, and medical services by officials who impose policies that then lead to deaths caused by starvation, dehydration, exposure, and disease.10 In light of the organized way by which certain states have caused the gradual erosion of specific targeted population groups, it is important to recognize that the term “attrition” has historically referred to wartime casualties. Complementing Fein’s work, I suggest that it is necessary to recalibrate and expand upon the concept of genocide by attrition to acknowledge this phrase’s original context as referring to losses of military personnel in warfare. The argument, evidence, and comparison of the existence of genocidal conscription that I document by process tracing events in two cases track three categories that either point to or indicate the absence of 1.  exploitative and destructive intentions of conscription policies; 2.  five distinct phases that outline a state’s implementation of genocidal conscription; and 3.  outcomes of genocide by wastage that kill off conscripts through attritional forms of destruction that take place during wartime and of genocidal massacres that kill conscripts. The presence of evidence of such events having taken place under similar conditions and in different unique circumstances provide the basis for the comparative assessment in chapter 6.11 Table 3.1 outlines the main variables of genocidal conscription. As noted in the table, exploitation incorporates the first three phases by dividing a society along discriminatory lines, isolating conscripts within ranks that segregate members defined by their national, ethnic, racial, or Table 3.1: Variables of Genocidal Conscription Intent of Genocidal State’s Conscription Policy

Phases

Outcome

Exploit

Division

Discriminatory Selective Conscription Placed in Segregated Ranks Placed under the Control of State

Isolation Subordination Destroy

Relocation Destruction

Sent to Deadly Wartime Environments Genocide by Wastage or Massacre

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religious outgroup, and by subordinating those conscripts under the control of state security forces.12 With no clear intent to destroy conscripts who belonged to at least one of the four protected groups of genocide as defined by the United Nations in 1948, these three initial phases can be argued as deeply discriminatory and unjust but not genocidal. Evidence that illustrates the state’s intent to destroy members of such groups is required to make any argument of genocide. Also, such claims would require documented intentions and outcomes of genocide. Such events would recognize how a state intended and then sent targeted conscripts to die either by being killed off as losses incurred in the attritional wastage during a war, as victims of massacres committed while under the control of commanders from the same state, or by both. The motive of such states would be to fulfill a genocidal policy instead of, and perhaps even in spite of, allocating wartime forces and resources that would otherwise assist the state’s ordinary wartime goal to seek victory against a declared opponent. The evidence of a commander directly being involved in massacres of such captured conscripts of their own military would significantly and definitively indicate the existence of genocidal conscription as no alternative explanation would suffice to assuage the charge that the state sought to destroy conscripts taken from targeted groups. Such outcomes of both forms of destruction, of genocide by wastage and massacres, lie beyond the exceptional circumstances of a rogue general and would therefore lead to the only conclusion that such deaths took place as a result of the institutionalization of conscription as a tactic of genocide. Demonstrating how the last two phases unfolded in cases requires a substantial burden of evidence that the state committed these actions beyond a reasonable doubt and relies on presenting findings that document constructive intent of perpetrators that preplanned and then carried out the genocidal destruction of conscripts. How would a genocidal state subvert the institution of conscription into a tactic to intentionally capture, massacre, and carry out the genocide by wastage of conscripts? To answer this question, the cases focus on demonstrating two aspects: 1.  Documenting events that explain how a state at war treated conscripts taken into military service from different national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups. 2.  The inclusion of evidence that points to a genocidal state’s use of conscription as a tactic to kill off conscripts by carrying out genocide by wastage and committing massacres. On the issue of a state’s selectively different treatment of multiple groups, the research presented in chapters 4 and 5 includes findings that illustrate how

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these two regimes held distinctly contrasting attitudes toward conscripts taken from communities of which the civilian population has since been identified as having suffered as victims of genocide. Again, the issue of intent sits as a paramount concern in distinguishing the difference in outcomes experienced by various communities from which a state procured conscripts. INTENDING THE WASTAGE OF WAR The issue of intent parses the difference between the norm of wastage that states incur during war and the tactic of genocide by wastage implemented by perpetrators. So what were the impacts that followed on from the normalization of mass wastage in the early twentieth century? By increasing what Alex Alvarez called the body count of war, and by normalizing the widescale expendability of certain population groups, World War I ushered in an era of political violence that helped to make the Holocaust possible.13 Alvarez also noted the capacity of modern states to operate as killing machines.14 Certainly, World War I set the stage on which génocidaires, those who commit genocide, later carried out their crimes.15 While these inferences are clear, the task of making a causal connection between mass death in war and the outcome of genocide remains. Wastage fills the gap. Wastage, as translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, describes casualties, loss of life, and injuries suffered in attritional battle.16 The term “wastage” in the English language refers to the reduction of a military force. The original German term—Verbrauch—that Clausewitz used means reduction, consumption, expenditure, and wastage.17 Wearing the enemy down over time describes the reduction of their resources such as the loss of combatants, supplies, reserves, and the state’s means to provide reinforcements. Clausewitz explained his strategy on how a commander could either prevent their own wastage of war or generate it within the enemy’s ranks. These principles explained 1.  that decisions should avoid actions that waste one’s own forces by expending them against positions that would lead to a protracted and costly conflict, and 2.  that a commander should try to increase the wearing down of the enemy’s resources by taking their lives and locations.18 Clausewitz advised that the astute commander should be aware of any risk that would lead to the reduction—the wastage—of their own forces and those of their enemy.19 Remaining distant and objective to assess all identifiable factors of force, a good commander could calculate the total capacity to

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wage war, the relative strengths of each side, and any losses that have already taken place or may take place throughout the course of a battle. Armed with this information, a commander could strategically plan to erode their enemy’s resources and simultaneously avoid incurring relatively higher losses of their own military personnel and equipment.20 Referencing how Clausewitz predicted the end of a modern war, William J. Philpott highlighted the decisive factor of eradicating an enemy’s manpower reserves as being centrally influential to the conclusion of World War I.21 In this context of Clausewitz’s and Philpott’s explanation of how militaries at war strategized to defeat their enemies, the issue here examines how two genocidal states pursued the wastage of targeted groups by implementing genocidal conscription, capturing many of the battle-aged males of those groups, and then carrying out genocide by wastage.22 Of no surprise to civil-military relations scholars, with the advent of mass mobilization for modern warfare many of these inductees often did not meet existing standards that a candidate needed to pass to join the ranks of multiple armed forces. For example, military historian Sanders Marble explained how several states made recruitment changes so that they could then accept men who had previously been deemed by existing military norms as being of “substandard” quality. Such value judgments held by militaries mirrored certain societal norms that characterized different racial and ethnic groups as “lesser.”23 Marble’s edited collection included works by multiple scholars who focused on military and disability histories to document cases in which states recruited and deployed men who, in different circumstances, otherwise would not have met the requirements needed to complete basic training. A need to review the intentions of government officials and military commanders arises when assessing the losses of certain conscripts. This assessment is particularly important when explaining how purportedly substandard young men served in different militaries. As a general rule, many observers would not expect a general to ask for, as Marble put it, second-rate troops.24 To avoid any misrepresentation of these scholars, or take such induction practices of recruits with some form of physical or mental disability out of context, the work here respectfully complements the point that some militaries have opened their ranks to include people who have ordinarily been judged as having lesser value than the average recruit. As an exception to the conventional wisdom that accepts that a general would not ask to utilize a group of recruits considered as being lower than the average inductee, or of the averages found within a nation’s general population, I argue that certain genocidal states have delivered members of targeted population groups to the military with the intent that those recruits would die in war. To help further clarify what is a complex delineation, the following example outlined by political scientist Adam Jones cited a case of military recruits

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and casualties that he deemed as not emphasizing genocide but instead as resulting in gendercide, meaning the destructive outcome that impacted members of a group identified by sex.25 Jones documented Ethiopia’s use of conscripts that the military ordered to advance to their deaths. These sacrificed soldiers marched forward to detonate explosives strewn across a minefield. The operation sought to waste the opponent’s resources during the Eritrean-Ethiopian War of 1998 to 2000 at the accepted and expected cost of the lives of those draftees. Ethiopian military commanders repeatedly ordered waves of conscripts to proceed into the battlefield despite the assaults resulting in multiple casualties on the frontline. In an eerily rhyming form of Stalin’s use of penal battalions, an eyewitness female Eritrean combatant also saw how some officers even shot conscripts of their own forces who attempted to flee.26 The evidence of the wastage of war does not alone account for any of the intentions held by Ethiopian military commanders or political leaders. Likewise, as insightful as the example from the Eritrean-Ethiopian War is, the testimony does not explain any specific conscription processes implemented by Ethiopia. Therefore, as graphic as the outcomes were, without any critical assessment of the validity of the report by corroboration with other documented accounts and relevant events, any discussion of the state’s intentions would by definition lead to an inconclusive assessment and as such does not merit any speculative evaluations here. Despite lacking a conclusive explanation, this example further illustrates how a state may use conscripts in modern military operations that result in the accepted and expected wastage of war. GENOCIDE BY WASTAGE Claiming that a state prioritizes the destruction of some of its own conscripts ahead of a motive to fight a wartime enemy requires evidence that delineates intentions and outcomes that identify either the wastage of war or genocide by wastage. If no evidence points out a state’s intent to destroy those recruits or other civilians of the same group, then the claim of genocide is unsupported. Examples that help to illustrate the concept of genocide by wastage exist within Lemkin’s historical observations. He analyzed the eyewitness accounts of Mongol raids that rampaged through Hungary in 1241. Records from the time explicitly report how occupiers captured and then deployed a portion of the subdued population. Scholar of genocide Steven Leonard Jacobs published Lemkin’s research notes, which described the enslavement of captured Hungarians, Russians, and Turkish Kumans that Mongol occupiers then forced into their military ranks.27 Lemkin considered that the capture

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of civilians into roles of conscripted servitude was a form of slavery that resulted in a physically destructive genocide. Mongolian commanders used battles to kill off the conscripts that they had previously seized. Evidence provided by Archdeacon Roger of Wardein detailed the massacre of subordinated troops and the genocide by wastage of soldiers killed off through their deployments into frontline advances. Commanders forcibly deployed as many as 100,000 conscripts who died by being killed in action.28 The Archdeacon’s account from the 1200s also explained how Mongol troops cut down captive conscripts who wavered in fulfilling their orders or abandoned their duties. Once battle began, such as for example at the Hungarian city of Pecska, Mongolian leaders laughed from the rear as they witnessed the “slaughter between countrymen.”29 To be clear, I do not suggest that these exceptional examples were somehow common practices used by multiple armed forces but rather that Lemkin’s work documents a precedence of genocide by wastage. Not entirely incidental to what I detail in chapter 5, these events provide insights into the histories of conscripted warfare, foreign invasion, and nationalism in Hungary. Consistent with the view that notes how some authorities have culled certain targeted groups, historian Richard L. Rubenstein’s view, one that I unreservedly agree with, explained that in some instances states had abandoned certain people they deemed as having little to no value. Rubenstein concluded that these states judged their victims as nothing more than “surplus” populations.30 Rubenstein’s argument posits that certain officials set in motion policies that sought to cull and reduce undesirable parts of society. Building on the premise of social Darwinism, the concept that rulers and officials weed out unwanted people and then plant the seeds to grow more desirable groups, like some type of master gardener, Rubenstein’s view framed some wars as an inversion of combat against a foreign enemy. Instead, in wars against an unwanted surplus population a government enacts some wartime policies not to target an aggressive foreign enemy but instead, at least in part, to implement an effort to eliminate those that the state counted as lesser and beyond the core group’s immediate interests. Despite the fact that Rubenstein did not examine conscription, the concept of surplus peoples nonetheless helps to situate the study of policies that resulted in conscripted mass losses in cases of genocide. In support of a part of my argument, Richard L. Rubenstein inferred in The Cunning of History how some commanders planned to destroy their own soldiers en masse. His controversial claim considered whether British General Douglas Haig and German General Erich von Falkenhayn deliberately increased the carnage of their own troops during World War I.31 While Rubenstein did not explicitly argue that World War I losses were all genocidal, he did question why the governments that empowered these particular

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commanders did not immediately relieve them of their authority once their escalations had rapidly increased mass death. Rather than make a claim, Rubenstein asked a question. If mass losses were not a part of a plan, then why did those responsible for deploying so many men to their deaths not lose their positions in command? The point Rubenstein suggested was that certain governments have deemed many groups as being expendable as acceptable casualties of war. Rubenstein expanded upon this point in The Age of Triage by examining the concept that governments, especially in times of war, abandon and manipulate surplus-to-requirement groups of people.32 Building on Rubenstein’s views, figure 3.1 outlines the phases that leads from conscription to genocide by wastage. The framework illustrates how a state divides, isolates, subordinates, relocates, and destroys conscripts when the military either deploys them to their deaths in wartime operations or denies conscripts access to the resources necessary for life. Such actions result in genocide by wastage. A state that assigns conscripts that leaders intend to kill or kill off into roles in which they die meets the definition of genocide as documented in Article II of the UNCG of 1948. Such actions result in clause (b) when conscripted members of a targeted group experience serious bodily or mental harm and clause (c) when a state deliberately inflicts on conscripted members of a targeted group conditions of life that commanders calculate will bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. The wastage of war provides a guise in the form of the assumption that operations such as combat or the construction of defensive outposts inevitably result in unavoidable losses. To avoid alerting the wider community of the state’s actions against conscripts taken from a target group, genocidal commanders report the deaths of conscripted victims as casualties, losses, wastage, or in some other way that obfuscates and deflects any suggestion that the state intended to kill and kill off those conscripts. Conclusive evidence that would document a state’s prior constructive intent to destroy members of the group, beyond that of any genocidal act that killed or killed off civilians who remained outside of military forces, would include the state’s participation in massacres of conscripts. This evidence would demonstrate genocide as defined by Article II clause (a): killing members of the

Figure 3.1 Framework of Genocidal Conscription by Wastage Source: Author’s credit. Harrison, Genocidal Conscription, 95.

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group.33 Figure 3.2 illustrates how a state carries out genocide by capturing and then massacring conscripted members of a targeted population group.

Figure 3.2 Framework of Genocidal Conscription by Massacre Source: Author’s credit. Harrison, Genocidal Conscription, 101.

Evidence that meets Article II clauses (a), (b), and (c) supports the argument that a state used conscription as a tactic of genocide by wastage and by massacres. Although a lack of evidence would not necessarily determine that political leaders and military generals did not commit genocide by wastage, documentation of such events would significantly strengthen such claims. GENOCIDAL CONSCRIPTION, WASTAGE, AND MASSACRES The Leviathan-like tendencies of a genocidal regime can rapidly expand once leaders initiate the mass mobilization of society in support of the military. National and international conflict allows such genocidal states to gather large swathes of targeted groups and send them to die under the guise of legitimate policies that appear, at face value, to defend the nation-state through the tragic costs of self-sacrificing troops. Detailing the events of cases requires a brief overview of how some scholars have explained the complexities that exist in genocides that perpetrators commit during times of war. Conceptualizing trends across cases is possible by identifying phases that have existed in multiple genocides. For example, Gregory Stanton called such signals the stages of genocide.34 Further examples exist within the works of Father Patrick Desbois and Yahad-In Unum. Their research has documented five steps repeated with commonality and occasional variation throughout the Holocaust, the Guatemalan genocide of the Maya, and the genocide of the Yazidi in Iraq and Syria.35 Identifying the patterns illustrates the methods that perpetrators used to committed certain types of genocide. Whether by implementing specific mechanisms, stages, steps, or phases, a comparison can inform a broader aim that seeks to recommend some way to avoid comparatively similar events from happening again.

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By synthesizing Lemkin’s sequenced interactions of destruction and subordination, Eric Markusen’s concept of mechanisms that explained connective steps in an incremental process, and Gregory Stanton’s theme of the stages of genocide, I trace cases of genocidal conscription by observing five phases of acts carried out by perpetrators and inflicted upon victims.36 Certain states commit genocidal conscription by 1.  dividing targeted civilians from the general population by conscripting groups based on a racial, ethnic, national, or religious identity; 2.  isolating targeted conscripts into organized battalions segregated by identity; 3.  subordinating targeted battalions by placing them under the command of a perpetrating group; 4.  relocating targeted conscripts into deadly environments of war; and 5.  destroying targeted conscripts by committing genocide by wastage or massacres. Examples of acts of genocide would include, but not be limited to, sending such conscripts into war zones after having stripped them of their weapons and depriving targeted conscripts of the means with which they could survive during war. Any additional evidence of perpetrators participating in a massacre of conscripts taken from a targeted group lends further credence to the argument of genocide by wastage. Committing genocide by wastage and by massacre meets Article II sections (a), (b), and (c) of the UNCG.37 The perpetrating state initially divides society by using the institution of conscription to select and recruit members of a targeted community for mandatory service. This is not to say that the state does not also utilize conscription for other purposes or to influence other groups, complexities that likely exist in all cases where a society consists of more than one group. These divides can be interpreted as a direct way to produce outgroups as explained by Ervin Staub.38 One exemplary instance that illustrates social division beyond policies of conscription is the Nazi state’s separation of Jewish communities and several ethnic groups from its imaginary Aryan identity of central Europe in the mid-1900s. Once Adolf Hitler began to retool Germany’s military in 1935, conscription accelerated the division of society along these lines.39 In a different case, colonizers and then perpetrators used similarly divisive measures through the ascribed ethnic identities of Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda.40 In the context of obligatory service to the state, social division takes place through policies of selective conscription. According to military analyst Christopher Jehn and political scientist Zachary Selden, selective conscription implements unequal choices made by a state to coercively levy alternative

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tasks upon diverse groups.41 The example of the Ottoman Empire in World War I is one that insisted Arab, Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, Turkish, and men of other distinct ethnic identities serve in segregated divisions of the military. The practice of selective conscription not only divides but also isolates members of minority communities into groups ordered according to their nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. For instance, a practice of the Ottoman Empire that began in the 1300s and lasted several centuries took Christian Janissaries from Adriatic nations to serve its military in a form of tribute.42 Although no evidence exists to suggest that this practice may have resulted in cases of genocide, it may be possible to examine the policy’s potential negative impact on the cultural endurance of specific groups in southeastern Europe. In chapter 4, I document how this same empire’s actions during World War I carried out all five phases. In the next phase of genocidal conscription, the state subordinates targeted conscripts by situating their units under the direct control of commanders that belong to a perpetrator group. Subordination signals direct exploitation of conscripts but does not necessarily point to any intent to destroy those members of a targeted group. It is worth noting here how subordination can manifest in transitionary and flexible ways. Focusing on the example of the many Janissaries taken by the Ottoman Empire, the framing of subordination is a perspective that few soldiers would have recognized even while serving as enslaved recruits. The norm during these centuries accepted slavery as a ubiquitous practice, the absence of which only existed in a handful of Christian kingdoms scattered throughout Europe. The most common response to becoming one of these conscripts was a sense of duty. Recruits recognized the position as an honor because this corps had a reputation for elite soldiering. Reports also state how multiple Janissaries became the personal guards of the empire’s sultans and caliphs over an elongated period of time during the height of Ottoman rule.43 In the context of genocidal conscription, a more apt example is the divisive aspects of the state that conscripted Jewish Hungarian civilians in the escalation toward and during World War II, a case that I document in chapter 5 that also included the conscription of Roma groups in the latter years of the war. In the case of the Janissaries, subordination into the empire’s ranks resulted in relatively positive outcomes whereas in some cases the results was only negative as evidenced throughout the Holocaust during World War II. These variable outcomes point to a preventative opportunity to avoid genocidal conscription in ongoing and future events that I explore further in part III. At this juncture, a threshold exists that separates the phases of subordination and relocation. Even after dividing, isolating, and subordinating, the argument of an intentional plan to destroy those conscripts remains unsubstantiated. Only with evidence of a perpetrator’s prior intent to destroy those

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conscripts, and after the state then carries out actions described in phases four and five would a case result in genocidal conscription. Phase four, relocation, authorizes the military, a militarized policing force, or an armed auxiliary outfit to transfer targeted conscripts into deadly wartime environments. The creation of labor battalions noted in chapters 4 and 5 describes the critical phase of relocation into destructive environments of war that perpetrators undertook while holding conscripts under armed guard.44 Phase five documents the ways that a perpetrator state and its participating forces intentionally deploys conscripts to die, not in pursuit of victory in war but as a part of a genocidal campaign pursued to destroy conscripted members of a targeted group. Evidence of civilians who became subject to genocidal violence in different ways, who belonged to the same identified group as conscripts, lends weight to the argument that those recruits taken from those communities were also victims of genocide. Counterarguments that claim that a state killed and killed off civilians in the general population but then did not have any similar genocidal intent toward conscripts taken from that community make no logical sense. VICTIMS, NOT CASUALTIES On occasion, states have disarmed certain conscripts and then deployed them to combat duties and in supporting auxiliary divisions without the adequate means to either attack an enemy or defend themselves. Additionally, some states have inducted certain conscripts from groups within which civilians have been recognized as victims of genocide carried out by the same perpetrating authority. Which status, of casualty or victim, more accurately explains the fate of a conscript taken from a community that suffered as victims of genocide by the same state that deployed that soldier to die in war? A conscripted combatant, a laborer, or a service member assigned to roles of logistical support can be a victim of genocide. One of the most highly respected scholars of genocide, Israel W. Charny, provided a general definition of genocide in contrast to my position. Charny considered that the mass killing of many defenseless and helpless victims could not take place through military actions pursued against an enemy.45 By removing those who face the risk of death through military activities, Charny’s view suggested that the mass destruction of people deployed in an armed force cannot result in victims of genocide within those ranks. Put simply, Charny argued that perpetrators destroy defenseless victims and that because soldiers with weapons can defend themselves in battle they cannot therefore be counted as victims. Conceding the point here that soldiers are most often casualties of war, and

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not victims of genocide, several aspects highlight an exception to Charny’s assessment. Charny’s general definition of genocide would have included those conscripts of central focus here if not for the exception that removed military personnel as potential victims. Interestingly, in Charny’s other writings he argued that scholars must count all members of targeted communities as victims. Recalling a time when he addressed an audience, he sought to demonstrate the disconnect that can take place once an observer feels no sense of shared belonging with an identified group of victims. In describing the moment when Charny changed his focus from one case to another, the mood in the room shifted from emanating a collective sense of grief to one that had little empathy with the tragedy he next discussed.46 He hoped that one day humanity might develop an optimal psychological outlook that would oppose the mass destruction of any people regardless of their identity.47 In this more inclusive context, the argument made here supports the second of Charny’s points: that all the people of a group killed and killed off by a genocidal state’s intent and actions to destroy them for belonging to an identifiable ethnicity, race, nationality, or religion should be counted as victims of genocide including targets who died while serving under military command. Complementing Charny’s call to count all victims, the evidence presented here respectfully suggests that conscripted soldiers and laborers who belonged to a targeted population group and died under the command of a genocidal state were victims of genocide. Given that Charny framed combatants as casualties and not as victims because an opponent of a state took those lives, the recognition I make here brings attention to those exceptional times when a genocidal state placed such conscripts into the deadly environments of war while undertaking other actions to destroy the communities from which a state had taken draftees. Evidence of events in support of my argument exists in descriptive works such as in studies on the Ottoman Empire. In his historical analysis of genocide, Stephan Astourian explained how this state targeted young Armenian men first by rounding up entire villages and then by removing males from crowds of civilians specifically to kill them at locations nearby from where officials had gathered their families, friends, and relatives.48 In identifying this early phase of this genocide, Astourian’s work is one of only a handful to identify the use of conscription by a genocidal regime. What other cases might include events that could explain such outcomes and perhaps also indicate a potential way to avoid genocidal conscription and genocide by wastage in war?

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COMPARABLE CASES OF GENOCIDAL CONSCRIPTION When considering similarities and differences present among cases of genocide, the issues of honoring victims and of avoiding trivialization become paramount. The traumatic events that survivors and descendants of people directly involved require a researcher to approach such study with compassion for and acknowledgment of the traumas victims experienced, the ongoing unresolved challenges faced by unreconciled cases from the past, and the sensitivities that accompany current examples of political violence. To compare cases like for like in a superficial survey would risk dishonoring the unique aspects of people’s lives and deaths. Consequentially, the comparison I apply in chapter 6 seeks to recognize the events lived by victims and survivors in a way that illustrates their differences while simultaneously noting similar actions committed by perpetrators. The study pursues a way to prohibit states from utilizing genocidal conscription again by identifying commonalities across cases. The focus of the comparison centers on conscripted members of targeted population groups taken by what appeared at the time to be a state invoking the security norm of raising and mobilizing an armed force for defensive purposes. The cases examined here existed at separate times in various places and included similar variable preconditions and phases. Analyzing these factors in a consistent manner offers an informative way to demonstrate the parallel existence of genocidal conscription in these cases. I identify related aspects and then assess contrasting circumstances in each set of unique events. Tracing precisely how certain states divided, isolated, subordinated, relocated, and destroyed their targets, I consider the extent to which these phases contributed to the Armenian genocide and the Hungarian Holocaust. While I do not attempt to explain all aspects of the two cases, it is important to note that many minorities became targets beyond the groups examined in detail in chapters 4 and 5. For instance, during the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust several distinct perpetrators targeted and destroyed multiple different groups of victims. I acknowledge the losses suffered by these diverse targeted populations. They include the Anatolian Greek, Assyrian, Pontic Greek, Seyfo, and other genocides of Christians that perpetrators simultaneously carried out alongside the events that killed and killed off Armenians.49 In acknowledging these complexities, I also recognize other parallel activities of perpetrators who committed genocide against victims concurrent to the Holocaust against Jewish Hungarians. For example, Nazi and Axis genocidal actions targeted multiple Romani groups.50 Such complicated overlapping

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events, diverse groups, and interacting policies generate the need to carefully trace events in specific cases. NOTES 1. Clausewitz, Howard, and Paret, On War, 93. 2. R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 1. 3. Rummel, Death by Government, 36–38, 383, 201. 4. Rummel, 129–31, 392–94. 5. Sait Çetinoğlu, “The Mechanisms for Terrorizing Minorities: The Capital Tax and Work Battalions in Turkey during the Second World War,” Mediterranean Quarterly 23, no. 2 (2012): 14–19. 6. Çetinoğlu, “The Mechanisms for Terrorizing Minorities,” 17–19. 7. Çetinoğlu, 27. 8. Çetinoğlu, 14. 9. Helen Fein, “Genocide by Attrition 1939–1993: The Warsaw Ghetto, Cambodia, and Sudan, Links between Human Rights, Health, and Mass Death,” Health and Human Rights 22 (1997): 10. 10. Fein, “Genocide by Attrition 1939–1993,” 12, 24; Samuel Totten, Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015). 11. Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 6. 12. For an example of the importance of process tracing in a comparative study, see Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, “The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 2 (1980): 181–85. 13. Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide, 32. 14. Alvarez, 59. 15. Alvarez, 32–33. 16. Clausewitz, Howard, and Paret, On War, 93. 17. The original in German reads, “Der Kraftaufwand des Gegners liegt in dem Verbrauch seiner Streitkräfte, also in der Zerstörung derselben von unserer Seite; in dem Verlust von Provinzen, also in der Eroberung derselben durch uns,” Carl von Clausewitz, “Vom Kriege. Book 1, Chapter Two (1832),” clausewitz.com, 2020; Paul Hemetsberger, “Verbrauch,” dict.cc, 2020. 18. Clausewitz, Howard, and Paret, On War, 93, 97, 469–70. 19. Clausewitz, Howard, and Paret, 93. 20. Clausewitz, Howard, and Paret, 529. 21. Philpott, War of Attrition, 114. 22. Adam Jones, Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 3, 6. 23. Sanders Marble, Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Substandard Manpower, 1860–1960 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 1.

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24. Marble, Scraping the Barrel, 271. 25. Jones, Gendercide and Genocide, 13–14. 26. Jones, 14. 27. Steven Leonard Jacobs, Lemkin on Genocide (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 327. 28. Jacobs, Lemkin on Genocide, 321. 29. Jacobs, 326–27. 30. Richard L. Rubenstein, The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983), 222–23. 31. Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Perennial, Harper Collins, 2001), 10. 32. Rubenstein, The Age of Triage, 3–4, 124, 222–23. 33. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 1. 34. Stanton listed ten processes common to several cases of genocide. See Gregory Stanton, “Genocide Watch—Ten Stages of Genocide.” Genocide Watch, 1996. 35. Yahad-In Unum, “Study Guide: Investigate the Holocaust by Bullets” (Saint-Ouen, France: Yahad-In Unum, 2018), 1, 14–15. 36. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79–80; Markusen, “Mechanisms of Genocide,” 83; Stanton, “Genocide Watch.” 37. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 1. 38. Staub, The Roots of Evil, 17, 58–59. 39. Adolf Hitler, “Defense Law 21 May 1935,” German Archives, May 21, 1935. 40. Gerald Caplan, “The 1994 Genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda,” in Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York: Routledge, 2013), 447–70. 41. Christopher Jehn and Zachary Selden, “The End of Conscription in Europe?” Contemporary Economic Policy 20, no. 2 (2002): 96. 42. Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam the Genesis of a Military System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 49, 58. 43. Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam the Genesis of a Military System, 49, 58. 44. Stephan Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation,” The History Teacher 23, no. 2 (1990): 113. 45. Israel W. Charny, Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 75. 46. Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), xiv. 47. Totten, Parsons, and Charny, Century of Genocide, xviii. 48. Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide,” 114. 49. Bartrop, Genocide, 34–36. 50. Bartrop, 49.

Chapter 4

Conscription by the Ottoman Empire in World War I

Figure 4.1 The Ottoman Empire in 1914 Source: Map derived from author’s adaption of original Public Domain file: DragonTiger23, “Ottoman Empire 1914,” Wikimedia, 2011.

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The day that marks the beginning of the Armenian genocide is April 24, 1915. This date memorializes the arrest of Armenian community leaders. Much scholarship notes the end of the genocide in 1922 with the collapse of the empire and emergence of the state of Turkey.1 Because so much is already known on many aspects of the genocide of civilians beyond the crucible of war, my focus centers on Ottoman government and military officials who deliberately caused wastage losses and massacred conscripted Armenians during World War I. How did the Ottoman Empire use mandatory military service as a tactic of genocide? This history reveals the ways that conscripts taken from different groups died in the Ottoman military. Beyond Turkish soldiers who lost their lives because of the wastage of war, the state killed and killed off Armenian conscripts as part of the Armenian genocide. These men and adolescent boys who lost their lives from 1915 to 1917 are counted here as victims and not casualties. Tasks that captured and destroyed Armenian men, along with those who faced similar forms of deadly discrimination from other communities, represent the actions of a state at war against much of its own society while at the same time seeking victory over its enemy on the battlefield. This inversion of modern warfare attacked targets from within and simultaneously empowered certain conscripts to carry out the state’s genocidal plans. The state sought to destroy its targets by treating the various groups of conscripts that it took into service differently. Authorities based the different ways that they behaved toward conscripts upon military and explicitly genocidal orders that the state issued. In addition to this divide among draftees, the state also inducted some conscripts that perpetrated massacres during this genocide. Historically significant preconditions in the Ottoman Empire outline how the state had utilized discriminatory selective conscription to burden some groups and show preference to others. Drawing upon the state’s policies from earlier eras helps to contextualize events and patterns before and during World War I. Selective applications of conscription maintained divisions for many generations prior to this war. The state set different ethnic groups apart from each other. In what may be seen as a recursive relationship, social divisions influenced the state’s militant ordering of different groups and, as a consequence, the military buttressed society’s preexisting prejudices between these groups. OTTOMAN CONSCRIPTION AND WASTAGE BEFORE WORLD WAR I Avoiding an overly simplistic misrepresentation of conscription requires explanations of how the state utilized the draft to induct groups in similar

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functions, different contexts, and in multiple locations of the empire throughout various eras. Tracking forced military service over time provides insights into how policies changed to benefit the modern state. These changes highlight the contrasting fates of conscripts and the unexpected forms of honor that mandatory service derived. For example, a practice of Ottoman conscription that lasted several centuries and impacted multiple premodern generations developed in the fourteenth century through what historian Daniel Pipes called military slavery.2 Pipes detailed how members of non-Turkish ethnic minorities situated their place and signaled their importance within the empire through their service as conscripts.3 One of these groups, recruits known as the new soldiers, formed the empire’s Janissary divisions that consisted of Christian men and teenaged boys. These draftees left their Adriatic communities across southeastern Europe to serve the security needs at distant trading outposts and in the core cities of Ottoman lands. Beginning their service as conscripts in the lower tiers of Ottoman military ranks, these new soldiers developed into an elite corps that also fulfilled a variety of roles within the imperial court.4 Over the centuries, the state crafted and changed the institution of conscription to both maintain this form of regional fealty and alter the social relations of certain groups present in the empire. By the 1800s, conscription accompanied a variety of modernization processes instigated by the state. As Mehmet Hacisalihoğlu explained, obligatory service developed in five stages from 1839 to World War I. These changes culminated when the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) introduced universal male conscription in 1909.5 Before this new regime came to power, the imperial government repeatedly attempted to instigate changes within certain groups as part of its mission to modernize non-Turkish populations. The process of nationalizing by way of military induction is one that evokes comparisons with the tradition of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. An important example that shows how the state viewed conscripts who belonged to different population groups during the 1800s illustrates how officials viewed Armenians with suspicion. The authorities of the empire became increasingly convinced of the disloyalty of Armenian communities that held historic and ancestral ties to lands that at that time fell within Russia’s political borders. Throughout the 1800s and during World War I, the Ottoman state considered Armenian communities as not just untrustworthy but also enemies of the state through a suspected informal alliance to Russia. This concern centered on conjecture into how the empire’s rival, and at times opponent, might seek to transcend its borders. As a result, many Muslim Ottoman leaders, along with Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, and other Islamic communities, perceived Christians as enemies. For example, one contention held that Christian Ottomans had joined forces with the empire’s Russian foes during the Crimean War of 1853 to 1855.6 The suspicion of disloyal Armenians

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led many officials to suspect that inhabitants in eastern Anatolian cities and villages had sheltered and enlisted internally produced enemies of the state. Subsequently, this claim expanded into a commonly held view whereby many Muslims considered all Christians to be enemies of the state. Several episodes of political violence targeted Armenians prior to World War I. For instance, Vahakn Dadrian noted how aspects of this interethnic violence took the form of retribution in response to Serb and Slav uprisings beginning in the 1850s, both of which received support from several Russian interventions throughout the Balkans.7 Furthering these deadly divides, evidence identifies Kurdish irregular forces that massacred Armenian Ottomans in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. These crimes illustrate the ways by which violent ethnonationalism became entrenched along religious divides. Loyalist Muslims committed atrocities against Christian and Armenian targets because they judged these groups as being disloyal outsiders.8 In a pattern of behavior repeated in World War I, the Russo-Turkish War empowered the state through its use of conscription when officials drafted as many as 800,000 Muslim soldiers.9 Consequently, the empire indoctrinated multiple generations of Muslims to perceive Christian Armenians as being untrustworthy inhabitants of Ottoman lands. At the end of the 1800s and into the early 1900s, conscription assisted the rising ethnonational Turkish movement by discriminating against several minority groups including Armenian and Greek communities. For generations, military-aged Greek Ottoman males suffered oppressive forced-labor conscription by serving in roles designed to limit this community’s demographic growth. The state initiated oppressive policies of forced labor with the intention that their targets would choose to self-deport their Greek Ottoman communities by leaving western Ottoman territories and relocating to other Adriatic settlements beyond the state’s lands.10 This practice used conscription in punitive ways to wear down, harass, and cajole targets that lived along several coastlines both around and beyond Anatolia. Many of the origins of the ethnonationalist movement that culminated in the founding of Turkey can be traced back to 1876 with the crowning of another famous man on his horse, Sultan Abdul Hamid II. By implementing what turned out to be a failed attempt at multiethnic integration, this ruler of the Ottoman Caliphate set about reordering Kurdish and Arab groups into more prominent roles within the Turkish-led state.11 One of Hamid II’s reform initiatives from 1892 founded a military academy that trained members inducted from various tribal communities to become cavalry commanders.12 Instead of bolstering cohesion as hoped, one unexpected result brought divisive competition to several of the empire’s divergent ethnonationalist sections. Military specialization for some led to increased social fragmentation

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for all. This increase in what may be seen as sectarian rivalries added justification to the call for a revolution based on Turkification. Throughout the last sultan’s rule, the state initiated several operations in which it inflicted force against civilians in bouts of widescale violence. Although these mobilizations did not formally send out any official call to arms during wartime, such force further divided different population groups into two distinct categories as the state increasingly empowered Muslims to inflict harm upon non-Muslims. For instance, the Ottoman military shut down several political attempts made to bring about greater equality and political representation for Armenians in the 1890s. The pursuit of advancing civil liberties represented what European powers called the Armenian Reform Program.13 Such reforms sent out requests for the state to acknowledge and protect Armenian civil liberties. Instead, the government attacked protestors and framed the reform agenda as one led by disloyal rebels. Europe’s major powers chose not to come to the defense of Armenian civilians.14 The subsequent violence, known as the Hamidian massacres of 1894 to 1896, repeatedly attacked many Armenian civilians with severely deadly results. Ottoman military units, mobs of Kurdish and Turkish bandits, and armed civilians slaughtered and then robbed thousands of Armenians in massacres, some of which lasted for up to six hours. The organized pattern of these attacks started and ended with perpetrators sounding bugles. Afterward, participants in the massacres stole land and property left behind by victims.15 Because the Hamidian massacres set into action several of the preconditions upon which the CUP later committed the Armenian genocide, significant events resulted in the wastage of those that died due to being left destitute within an environment devoid of the resources necessary for life. This wastage of civilian lives began in events of the mid-1890s and reemerged as a process repeated in multiple episodes during World War I. Evidence of the massacres, their repercussions, and the wastage of civilians exists in statistical data recorded by eyewitness Johannes Lepsius. Lepsius calculated figures that German and other sources subsequently listed, which estimated as many as 546,000 Armenians became impoverished following the Hamidian massacres.16 The figure, which totaled over one-fifth of an approximate population of 2.4 million Armenians, becomes more significant when compared to the official figure of the number of victims who died during those massacres.17 Lepsius totaled a number of 88,243 victims killed.18 French and British reports suggested between 100,000 and 200,000 people died, whereas the patriarchate of Armenians noted 300,000 victims.19 The inconsistency of these reports may be due to the wastage of civilians left destitute who died after the initial direct assaults that directly killed victims in massacres. Speculation of the likely wastage of civilians, while inconclusive, merits further research into states that wear down civilian populations outside of wartime.

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Lepsius documented his eyewitness account on the conditions of life and death for Armenians who survived the massacres. From March 1896 in Urfa, which is in today’s southern Turkey, in scenes reminiscent of cases of genocide, shops lay abandoned and empty with their windows and doors smashed inward. Episodes of political violence left almost no adult males alive and only starving women and children survivors who attempted to make it through the day living on dry bread and makeshift bedding. Lepsius noted that the town had been ruined and laid waste by some “scourge more terrible than any war or siege.”20 By including his observation of the disappearance of men and the severe lack of subsistence that risked the survival of the women and children who remained alive after these attacks, the evidence supports the view that these civilians suffered the wastage of an informal war carried out on their communities by the general Ottoman society that had been empowered by government and military authorities. Political violence meted out against Armenians sought to destroy targets and reward groups deemed loyal to the sultan and his pan-Islamic vision for the empire. For participation in committing acts of violence against minority communities, the perpetrators of massacres received material resources taken from non-Muslims.21 Given that several other issues contributed to the Armenian genocide, such as for instance Turkish ethnonationalism, it is important to discuss the losses incurred during warfare in the early 1900s alongside the devaluing of civilian life that had become normalized across much of the empire. This pattern of destructive behavior continued as anti-Armenian mobs participated in the Adana massacre in April 1909 that killed between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians.22 Elevating the careers of some while punitively discriminating against others fomented the divisions that accelerated the end of the empire. The Turkish ethnonationalist movement became increasingly more organized through the formation of the Young Turks of the CUP in 1889.23 Because modernization developed in part by way of military reforms, state institutions became filled by ranks of officials who owed their seniority to a series of ethnocentric policies. Muslim Ottomans took up the central spaces in the administrative bureaucracies of the state, further dividing Muslims from non-Muslims throughout the empire. These divisions segregated the adult male population when the CUP introduced universal conscription in 1909, a policy first called for on August 8, 1908, in what Hacisalihoğlu explained as the “centerpiece of the Young Turks’ political agenda.”24 As soon as the CUP had gained control of the state, obligatory military service became the duty of every male citizen. Observing the nationalist militarism of other rival modernizing nation-states, the internal colonization process used elsewhere convinced the CUP that the army could modernize and segregate specific relationships among different

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groups within society. The order sought to halt a trend that had seen years of decline and political deterioration that continued into the 1910s. In lockstep with the shift from large, unequal, diverse empires to the trend that favored ethnonational politics in the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire’s power eroded from incursions at the edge of its boundaries and from the advance of discriminatory politics from within its territories. The decline before the CUP’s rule took place in part due to the incursions of British and French settlements and military excursions into regions that bordered the empire’s periphery in the late 1800s. These changes were noted by Arnold Toynbee at the time and have since been detailed in works published by multiple scholars including Stephan Astourian.25 After the rise of the CUP, the Ottoman Empire suffered further territorial setbacks by conceding those same regions of southeastern Europe from which the new soldiers had originated. The losses were the results of defeat in the Balkan Wars in 1913. With the outbreak of World War I only one year after these losses, the compounding challenges that state leaders faced soon developed into opportunities to advance their nationalization mission. The CUP manipulated mandatory military service to control different population groups in a variety of ways. Once Ottoman losses in the Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913 reduced the state’s territory, the CUP added further fuel to what was already an increasingly violent response from Turkish ethnonationalists to the empire’s decline. Conscription played a central role in the administration throughout the final catastrophic years of the empire. Turkification, in part through the institution of conscription, began in the generations prior to and in the years during the Armenian genocide. Political violence committed against civilians, such as the Hamidian and Adana massacres, connected directly to the ethnonationalist politics of Ottomans who sought to create a Turkish-led state. Due to the decline in territory over the early years of the CUP reign, some Turks viewed other Ottoman ethnic communities as parasites that undermined the empire. Both the earlier Hamidian and Young Turk regimes believed that only Islamic Ottomans should hold any legitimate role in Ottoman society. The proponents of this form of divisive political organization based their views on the shared cultural norms of Muslims rather than on the goal of upholding some form of dedication to the religion. The political party of the CUP planned for a new Turkish state by anticipating what was to become a necessary transfer and reduction of non-Turkish communities to locations outside of Turkish Ottoman regions across Anatolia.26 Carrying these internal divisions into what would become the Ottoman Empire’s last war, this ally of imperial Germany soon entered the carnage of World War I. At the onset of the war, the Ottoman government and military leaders overwhelmingly supported the ethnonationalist Turkish movement. As a result of its losing streak in southeastern Europe, the state

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viewed non-Muslim Ottomans as burdens that required shedding so that the empire could emerge as a new nation-state with Turkish leaders. In several communications, this intent of Turkish Ottoman officials included the hope to cull minority communities, shrink the expansive multiethnic empire, and establish a modern ethnonationalist country.27 At the heart of this movement lay the Ittihad (union) group that controlled much of the CUP political organization. Its aim was to bring about not just a new Muslim state led by Turks but to create an entirely Turkish nation-state.28 Divisions orchestrated by government authorities and supported by the majority Muslim sections of society outcast Armenians and other Christian Ottomans including Pontic and Adriatic Greeks along with other minority groups. By the outbreak of World War I, these national, religious, and ethnic divides created a political landscape dominated by Turks who viewed themselves as superior, Muslims who the state vouched for as being loyal to the Ottoman Empire, and several non-Muslim groups that the general public increasingly viewed with suspicion and derision.29 As a consequence of the state’s judgments that such minorities existed beyond the reach of its modernization efforts and its ethnonationalist agenda, the institution of conscription began to selectively burden the men of these communities with deadly discriminatory service requirements. DIVIDING, ISOLATING, AND SUBORDINATING TARGETS Repeating the unequal burdening of the past, the Ottoman state subverted conscription to exploit members of minority communities during World War I. In the days prior to the conflict, the CUP ordered all able-bodied men to report for military service on August 2, 1914.30 As violence escalated with Britain officially declaring war on the German Empire on August 4, Ottoman leaders claimed neutrality by temporarily staying out of the dispute. During the several weeks that followed, the state identified Armenians as Christians, separated their communities from among the general population, and conscripted Armenian men before deploying them to work in labor battalions. These units, known in Turkish as amele taburlari, began to round up Armenians on August 10, 1914.31 Within months, Ottoman leaders declared support for the German Empire by entering the war as its ally in October. Because the use of labor conscripts was nothing new in Ottoman lands, the reintroduction of the policy of askere alma, which translates from Turkish into English as taking for military service, had intermittently impacted generations and included labor conscripts who served under military command. Records show its use in the 1830s during the reign of Sultan Mahmud II.32

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Askere alma had even resulted in punitive implementations that imprisoned and transferred Muslims throughout the 1800s. As historian James J. Reid concluded, this form of conscription formed the model by which the state divided different groups to take control of many men including Armenians in the lead up to and during Ottoman operations during World War I. These conscripts soon became some of the first victims of the genocide.33 Preexisting social divisions that multiple regimes had paired with selective conscription practices set into motion the state’s destructive use of its draft. The state implemented forced conscription, by which I refer to an organization’s policy that requires an individual to serve without alternative options under penalty of physical punishment, drafted men and teenaged boys to toil in labor battalions. The policy rapidly segregated targeted members of certain Ottoman communities and placed them under the control of the state. These selective conscription policies targeted Armenian communities and members of other ethnic minorities. One of several similar orders that the CUP issued from October 16, 1914, instructed the Ottoman military to form work battalions by separating Armenian and Greek Ottoman men from their communities.34 By April 1915, conscription had emptied many Armenian villages of its men in operations, which appeared to have deployed all of these draftees into labor battalions. Preexisting social divisions set apart selected conscripts into ranks according to their ethnicities and religions. The actual relocations and deployments of labor conscripts includes mixed outcomes such as the formation of work battalions for some, the immediate execution of others, and the eventual destruction of those initially sent to work in these units. These different actions are made clear through the testimonies provided by eyewitnesses. The account given by survivor Karnig Panian explained how his father left one day in the summer of 1915, never to return. Panian recounted that one day, when he was five years old, the state took conscripts in what marked the moment that sealed the fates of so many households throughout the village of Gurin. Ottoman officials did not provide any information about their orders or their locations of deployment.35 From the official viewpoint, it was as if these men had never existed. The immediate and long-lasting impact of this form of conscription upon Armenians cannot be underestimated. The testimony portrays the sense of loss that Karnig felt because the state separated and removed adult men from the community. Another way in which the state used mandatory service to divide their targets from among the general population took place through dismantling professional systems. One example of this segregating practice comes from Aram Boghosian’s testimony. He explained how military officials used force to capture and remove men that guards caught by surprise as they busied themselves at work in their schools. The order issued by the director

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of public education who governed colleges across the empire insisted that all Turkish instructors should arrive in Beirut to attend a training program. After relocating and then waiting for two days for the seminar to begin, Boghosian witnessed state officials post a notice throughout the headquarters that ordered men of a certain age group to report for military service.36 His testimony named teachers as the group that the state required to answer the call. Segregation through selective conscription extracted different parts of Ottoman society in these divergent ways. The difference in the ways that the state treated Turkish and Armenian conscripts became more apparent through policies and actions that isolated and subordinated certain groups under the command of others. One of several such orders issued on September 6, 1914, directed Ottoman security personnel to surveille Armenian political and community leaders.37 Rather than recruit for what would become the state’s first major military operations against Russian seaports and ships in the Black Sea in November 1914, the order to monitor influential Armenians shifted to a subordinate form of conscription that increasingly isolated educated Armenians.38 One subject of this punitive segregation was Eflatoon Elmajian, an Armenian teacher who survived both war and genocide. When explaining his conscription experiences, he described how two policemen informed him that he needed to register for the army. He wondered if the men were playing some type of trick on him because induction did not ordinarily happen through such direct measures but instead took place through communications posted in public spaces. They came into his workplace, physically took hold of him, and then put him in jail.39 Following a pattern of arrests in the early part of the genocide, influential and educated Armenians faced unjust imprisonment through these contrived entrapping induction practices. Officials targeted and ostracized many Armenian men through haphazard ways in World War I. Commencing with the mobilization order of August 1914, call after call placed Armenians across the empire under a variety of different forms of military command through to the spring of 1915.40 Because of the expansive territory of the empire, disorganized inconsistencies developed as local and national authorities attempted to enforce different conscription policies. For instance, Turkish administrators who suspected some Armenians of plotting a form of revolution to overthrow the state responded to anyone refusing to obey a government order to report for military service as if they had already committed an act of treason.41 Many officials conflated a refusal to serve with disloyalty and insurrection. This reaction culminated in targeting groups of young Armenian men and several community leaders who had publicly denounced the policy of askere alma. By March 1915, reports from officials stationed by the state’s ally Germany insisted that civil unrest had nothing to do with some form of civil uprising but instead resulted

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from the fallout caused by announcements made in Adana and Aleppo that opposed military conscription.42 At this point, the opportunity to severely crush internal groups that the state viewed as sewing widespread discontent emerged. On April 24, 1915, the state misrepresented public protests and rejection of mandatory service by claiming that such declarations amounted to anti-Ittihadist behavior. The task of conscripting for military service switched to using the same power to arrest and isolate Armenians who officials slandered with unfounded charges of being traitors at large among the general population.43 After capturing many Armenian men in this way, the state then began to reorganize its militant ordering of society by subordinating targeted groups of conscripts. In alternative events to those that inducted men from civilian life into labor battalions, the Ottoman Army deployed many Armenians who served as soldiers in combat during the first several months of the war. Soon after CUP leader Ismail Enver Pasha’s disastrous defeats in the Caucasus campaign during those months, the status of these soldiers switched from combatant to unarmed subordinate. Enver’s move to push forward in an attempted encirclement press against Russian forces, enemies that held higher ground throughout the mountainous territory, caused a series of heavy losses in the early skirmishes of the war. To avoid responsibility and place blame elsewhere, Enver scapegoated his Christian soldiers by spreading the false claim that they had not committed to the advance against Russian troops.44 Adding his authority to the charge, Enver ordered the military to punish Armenian combat battalions by disarming those soldiers and transferring them to serve in labor battalions. Once in these new units, commanders worked conscripts to death as a retaliatory measure for their imagined disloyalty. He placed the blame on Armenian soldiers, many of whom had fought and died with honor in defense of the Ottoman Empire against its Russian foes.45 Beginning in February 1915 and following Enver’s lead, many other commanders subordinated Armenians by disarming them. These practices included the state’s authorization of Ottoman officers to use deadly force against Armenian soldiers when those conscripts disobeyed, or appeared to disobey, any order given by a commander of higher rank.46 Throughout May and into July 1915, the enforcement of martial law led to the divide of Muslim and non-Muslim populations, the isolation of Armenian civilians branded as seditious rebels, and the subordination of Armenians throughout the military. Evidence that supports the reports submitted by German officials, which viewed Armenian dissent as not existing as some form of insurrection but as protests that questioned the legitimacy of selective conscription, comes from the case of Armenian leaders in the eastern city of Van. They resisted orders first issued in April 1915 that required local community leaders to gather and then hand over several thousand young Armenian men.

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Because the state claimed the right to insist these men report for mandatory duties, and local leaders rejected the validity of these orders, the politics of conscription opened a pathway along which genocidal leaders could proceed to destroy their civilian targets. According to Richard L. Rubenstein, the response given in Van on April 20, 1915, detailed the community’s realization that to obey would be akin to condemning these men to death, whereas to reject the order would be seen by Turkish authorities as an act of revolution.47 These local leaders chose the latter, with full awareness of the consequences of their actions rather than assist in sending young men to their deaths as conscripts under the command of a genocidal regime. In a pivotal moment in Armenian history, the rejection of subordination attempts that sought to capture 4,000 men in Van marked the end of the expectation that Armenians would serve unto death under the command of Turkish authorities. From April 1915 onward, Armenian civilians would no longer continue to uphold the assumption that their communities would pay the sacrificial costs of war for the benefit of the CUP.48 At the same time, Turkish forces at Gallipoli began to calculate how attrition would cost many lives to the war there and across the empire’s territories.49 Several of the state’s selective conscription practices resulted in different genocides carried out by Ottoman forces under the guise of this same war. For example, scholar Uğur Ü. Üngör documented an eyewitness account of a conscripted Christian Assyrian Syriac who officials had forced to serve in a labor battalion. The Syriac worked between Urfa and Diyarbakir at the time of the conflict and later talked of his experiences to the Swiss missionary Jacob Künzler. One night during the war, a large crowd of heavily armed gendarmes arrived at the village in which the work crew battalion billeted. They immediately segregated Syriacs from Armenians, tied the latter group together, and then marched their captives away from the camp. Approximately fifteen minutes after, he then heard many gunshots, at which point he realized that the police had slaughtered their Armenian comrades. Later, the gendarmes returned to the village and he and his fellow Syriacs believed that they would soon be next. Instead, the Ottoman officials provided the laborers with lanterns and ordered them to go to the location of the massacre. Given that the state had declared martial law, the gendarmes would have almost certainly have been Muslim conscripts or officers conscripted into their wartime duties after having previously served as volunteers in the police force. They ordered the Syriacs to throw the murdered Armenians down a deep well. Among the bodies piled together in the hole, several victims who had lived on after the shooting gasped their final breaths. One man who could still walk dove into the well. After the work crew had placed all the dead and dying in the well, the eyewitness helped to seal off its entrance before the laborers heaped earth and ashes on top of the site.50 The state used conscription in different ways

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to capture its Christian Armenian targets, to order perpetrators from among the pan-Islamic communities viewed as loyal to the empire to kill those conscripts, and to command other draftees who were at risk of becoming victims themselves to assist in covering up the tracks of these crimes. In addition to this massacre, the state also murdered Syriac and other Armenian conscripts.51 Beyond massacres, conscripts died because the state also carried out genocide by wastage. The state segregated several population groups along religious and ethnic lines, many members of which died either in the defense of the empire or became victims by being deployed into environments designed to waste away their lives. Alongside Armenian conscripts, a report from the war noted how many Greek conscripts died because of the punitive and depriving behaviors of their commanders. Christian soldiers taken from Greek communities died in similar ways as Armenians through dehydration, starvation, exposure, and untreated diseases in organized operations that killed off many thousands of enlisted men.52 Given the consistency and corroborating culmination of evidence, it is reasonable to conclude that the CUP and military leadership orchestrated amele tabulari for the purposes of indirectly destroying Armenian men through attritional processes of wastage and directly in massacres. Sources that combine the ethnic groups of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks into the same category of Christian conscripts estimate that across several years of its use, from the end of the Balkan Wars to the emergence of the state of Turkey, the death rate of labor battalions could have resulted in as many as 80 to 90 percent of those men taken by force to serve in these units.53 GENOCIDAL CONSCRIPTION BY THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE The capture, formation, deployment, and destruction of Armenian labor battalions provided the Ottoman Empire with two deadly resources. First, they supplied the government with enslaved laborers. These conscripts did not receive the same necessary provisions that sustained Muslim soldiers. An immediate benefit of this unequal treatment is how the state used Christian Armenian men to construct buildings and encampments that provided Turkish soldiers with shelter. Organizing groups along these segregated lines freed up Turkish soldiers that would have otherwise been required to complete those labor tasks that Christian Armenians fulfilled. This also increased the availability of more troops that the state armed and deployed into combat. The second broader relevance of these events is that in forming these labor battalions the state had deprived Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek communities of the fighting-aged men who could have taken up arms in resistance to

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the genocidal actions of Ittihadists and other perpetrators.54 In short, the labor battalions systematically destroyed Armenian men placed under Muslim Ottoman military command. In the first months of the war, officials conscripted men aged between twenty and forty-five years old. Later, after the rejection of the draft at Van, Ottoman authorities gathered every Armenian male they could find aged between fifteen and sixty.55 The state relocated these men and teenaged boys to the sites of their destruction by issuing and fulfilling orders. Perpetrators massacred many and killed off other conscripted victims by committing acts upon the latter group that I explain as resulting in genocide by wastage. Relocation practices targeted the empire’s Armenian population beginning at the end of 1914. Mass deportations targeted several ethnic minority groups including Armenians in several major cities.56 Perpetrators committed massacres during and after deportation. In his historical analysis of the genocide, Astourian noticed a relevant pattern of events repeated throughout the empire. Armed military and police personnel drove Armenians from their homes, separated adult and teenaged males out of the deportation caravans, and then killed them within a few kilometers of the larger groups.57 Contrasting Astourian’s emphasis on these male victims, G. S. Graber detailed the devastating events experienced by women and children during deportations.58 Graber’s work infers the absence of men and adolescent males in these caravans. The CUP’s systemic unequal implementation of selective conscription included the outcome of genocide by wastage of many targeted men during World War I. By 1915, the state’s purpose for gathering men from Armenian and other non-Muslim communities to form labor battalions aimed at depriving Christian conscripts of their vital daily needs of food, water, shelter, and medical supplies while also inflicting brutal work conditions and punishments that resulted in injuries that went untreated and often resulted in the conscript’s death. Along with killings through massacres, commanders killed off many thousands of victims by working them to death without the resources necessary to sustain life. Repeated thousands of times, Muslim commanders forced unarmed Christian conscripts to construct military earthworks, dig trenches, and transport logistical supplies throughout the heat of summer and across snow-covered mountainous terrains during winter without providing them with the food, water, adequate clothing, shelter, or effective medical care needed to recover from and survive the impositions of their arduous duties.59 Once in control of these groups, the state implemented the mechanisms of relocation and destruction. Given that evidence of genocide requires the presence of a preexisting intent to destroy members of a targeted group, the issue of destruction by wastage and massacres points to the ways in which the CUP used the war

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as a pretext for killing and killing off victims. Such evidence includes an order issued prior to the state’s wartime operations. On September 23 and 24, 1914, the state authorized commanders to execute any enlisted Armenian man deemed as holding an “audacious” attitude toward the Turkish Ottoman CUP regime.60 This evidence illustrates how the CUP planned to target and kill Armenian conscripts while also preparing for war. Over the winter months, the permission to execute a soldier as punishment for a charge of military insubordination expanded throughout the armed forces. This unit-level discretion of deadly authority then began to carry out the state’s explicitly genocidal orders. From December 1914 to January 1915, the CUP clarified instructions of martial law by issuing the “Ten Commandments” to its Muslim and Turkish commanders in the military. Wastage and massacres fulfilled the army’s obligation to carry out order number eight of these instructions.61 These orders document the state’s intention to commit genocide against Armenians in a national campaign that targeted civilians and conscripts. CUP orders two, five, and eight explained the destructive methods that instructed commanders to kill Armenian men within the Ottoman military and throughout the general Ottoman population: 1.  Collect arms; [order 2] 2.  apply measures to exterminate all males under fifty, priests and teachers, leave girls and children to be Islamized; and [order 5] 3.  kill off in an appropriate manner all Armenians in the army—this to be left to the military to do. [order 8]62 Order two instructed commanders, officers, and police gendarmes to disarm all Armenian male civilians including conscripts and volunteers in the military. Commanders and police officers then confiscated these weapons. Order five documents the state’s targeting of educated professionals, girls, and younger boys. This order led to the deaths of many Armenian civilians who perpetrators forced to march in caravans into the deserts of and around Anatolia. During many of these forced marches, Ottoman Teshkilati Mahsusa (Special Organization, SO) units and armed raiders known as Çete bandits assaulted, raped, and killed many thousands of Armenian victims.63 Order eight explicitly provides the directive from the state to the army to carry out genocide against Armenian conscripts. In order that this evidence is not misconstrued, it is important to note here that genocidal conscription and its outcomes of genocide by wastage and massacres are only a part of the broader ways by which the Ottoman Empire killed and killed off its targets in Armenian communities and other groups. The significance of conscription as a policy that empowered perpetrators to carry out these specific parts of this genocide is of central importance in

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this case. Many works consider that the genocide began on the nights of April 24 and 25, 1915, with the arrests of several hundred Armenian political, financial, and intellectual figures in Constantinople and their deportations to Anatolia where officials then murdered them. In support of the view of Astrourian, the findings of this research conclude that the genocide of conscripts began earlier when the state disarmed Armenian soldiers, transferred them, enlisted others in labor battalions, forced them to work like beasts of burden until dead, killed off some by withdrawing the resources needed for them to live, and killed others in organized massacres in events that began at the end of January 1915 and continued for several years under the guise of war.64 Seconding the credence of Astourian’s view, a perspective with which I agree, Vahakn Dadrian also explained how conscription became inverted from a policy that should have protected all Ottomans into one that intentionally destroyed Armenians.65 The military’s systematic deprivations and massacres produced the mass destruction ordered by state in the “Ten Commandments.” Military guards regularly forced Armenian conscripts to carry loads, some as heavy as 55 kilograms or approximately 120 pounds, as they worked to complete construction projects. The laborers toiled through exhausting conditions including both hot and freezing days while attempting to survive cold nights with little to no shelter or sustenance. Commanders restricted access to resources such as food, water, clothing, medicine, bedding, and housing.66 Mutilation, beatings, and a form of torture in which commanders whipped the feet of their victims in a practice commonly called bastinado killed off those victims who did not receive adequate medical attention of the injuries sustained while undergoing these attacks. By March 1915, such brutal mistreatments became commonplace in addition to the many massacres of Armenian men who the state had killed in previously existing units of the army and in those columns of newly inducted draftees that died at and near the sites of enlistment.67 By May 1915, the military had even disarmed Armenian gendarmes who the state had previously honored for their dutiful service in places like Diyarbakir.68 Confronting the complexities of the Armenian genocide requires acknowledging the many ways in which the Ottoman state destroyed its targets including conscripts who perpetrators killed and killed off. One account given by survivor Richard Ashton explained in detail the experience lived through by an Armenian inducted into a forced labor battalion unit. As the Russian Army advanced westward toward Van, Turkish authorities conscripted Armenians who had maritime and fishing skills. The military then set them to the task of moving Turkish families to a secure shoreline on the coast of Lake Van. Ashton’s father was one of these men. At the conclusion of the transfer, Turkish commanders ordered the Armenians to dig large rectangular holes before shooting the conscripts. Between fifteen and twenty laborers

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fell dead into each of the mass graves. Believing that they had killed all the Armenian men, the Turkish forces then buried the bodies with a thin covering of earth. Despite the atrocity, and in what was a very rare outcome, one man who had laid still within one of the mass graves climbed out after the killers had withdrawn from the site. Though badly wounded, he fled the scene that night and moved under the cover of darkness while hiding in the daytime until he reached a safe haven some eighty miles to the northeast in Yerevan.69 In scenes repeated throughout this case of genocidal conscription, commanders massacred many other labor battalions immediately after they completed their unit’s assigned tasks.70 Many conscripted men became victims of other massacres as the genocide continued to claim more lives throughout 1915.71 Amid the haphazard patterns of a failing empire fighting a modern war, genocidal conscription catalyzed the ethnonationalist effort that hoped to shed non-Muslim groups from the general population. Over the course of the war, three major shifts encapsulated the different ways that the state took advantage of the institution of conscription to commit genocide. Orders beginning in August 1914 of general mobilization for amele taburlari placed conscripted Armenians into work battalions. Regional disarming and killing of Armenian men then followed in December 1914 due to the state’s genocidal directives of the “Ten Commandments.” Sporadically inconsistent actions began across the empire soon after in January 1915. Because of the challenges faced by a state in decline that attempted to wage a modern war against several major military powers, its leaders clarified the goal to totally exterminate Armenians throughout Ottoman territories. Mehmet Taalat Pasha made this decree on September 15, 1915.72 The result of this order led to a more organized nationalized third phase that, by the latter part of the summer of 1916, had inculcated a routine by which commanders either left labor conscripts to die from thirst, exposure, disease, or untreated injuries or massacred the conscripts under their command in mass killings. One estimation of the number of victims in this case of genocide suggests that as many as 1.2 million people died from the approximate 2.2 million Armenian Ottoman population.73 To provide concise and conclusive figures on how many of these victims died as conscripts under the command of military officers through genocide by wastage or by massacres lies beyond what the evidence can precisely reveal. However, an estimate range that counts the number of captured men and teenaged boys of fifteen through to sixty years old at between 30 and 40 percent of the overall Armenian population leads to a reasonable estimation that between 360,000 and 480,000 Armenian victims died because of the Ottoman Empire’s use of genocidal conscription. These victims were not casualties as they died as part of the state’s systematic pattern that the military repeated across every province of the empire.74

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NOTES 1. Many organizations annually commemorate the events of the genocide to remember April 24, 1915; Jones, Genocide, 155–56. 2. Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam the Genesis of a Military System, 49. 3. Pipes, 87, 142, 144. 4. Pipes, 49, 58. 5. Mehmet Hacisalihoğlu, “Inclusion and Exclusion: Conscription in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Modern European History 5, no. 2 (2007): 264–65. 6. Stephan Astourian, “On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict, Sultan Abdulhamid, and the Armenian Massacres,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 21 (2012): 174–75. 7. Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, RI; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 7–20. 8. Astourian, “On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict,” 175. 9. Hacisalihoğlu, “Inclusion and Exclusion,” 275. 10. Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 69. 11. Hacisalihoğlu, “Inclusion and Exclusion,” 277–78. 12. Hacisalihoğlu, 278. 13. Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963), 126–28. 14. Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 127. 15. Astourian, “On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict,” 198–99, 204. 16. Johannes Lepsius, Armenia and Europe: An Indictment (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1897), 331. 17. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 267–70. 18. Lepsius, Armenia and Europe, 330. 19. Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007), 42. 20. Lepsius, Armenia and Europe, 154. 21. Astourian, “On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict,” 198, 205. 22. Astourian, “On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict,” 201–3; Christopher Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 182–88. 23. Hacisalihoğlu, “Inclusion and Exclusion,” 277. 24. Hacisalihoğlu, 265, 277. 25. Arnold Toynbee, Turkey: A Past and a Future (New York: George H. Doran, 1917); Stephan Astourian, Modern Turkish Identity and the Armenian Genocide: From Prejudice to Racist Nationalism (Yerevan: Museum-Institute of the Armenian Genocide, 2004).

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26. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, xiv. 27. Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times: Vol. 2, From Dominion to Statehood; The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 232–33. 28. Hovannisian, The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, 229, 242; Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, xv, xxiv–xxvi. 29. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 121, 135, 138–39. 30. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 166. 31. Akçam, 150–52, 152n85. 32. James J. Reid, “Total War, the Annihilation Ethic, and the Armenian Genocide, 1870–1918,” in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 41. 33. Reid, “Total War,” 42. 34. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 152. 35. Karnig Panian et al., Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 23. 36. Aram Boghosian, “Interview 53225,” February 8, 1984, Segment 9, 08:08– 08:48, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, University of Southern California. VHA interviews accessed from June 2018 to December 2020. 37. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 221. 38. Dadrian, 221. 39. Eflatoon Elmajian, “Interview 53409,” March 8, 1984, Segment 18, 17:28– 19:45, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, University of Southern California. 40. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 183. 41. Akçam, 175. 42. Akçam, 178–79. 43. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 221. 44. Andrew Basso, “‘All Four Seasons and I Will Die’: A Typology of Displacement Atrocities” (Dissertation, University of Calgary, 2019), 279–81; Edward J. Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 51–118. 45. Uğur Ü. Üngör, “When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder: The Processive Nature of Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, no. 2 (2006): 180. 46. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 150, 152, 159. 47. Richard L. Rubenstein, Jihad and Genocide (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 51. 48. Rubenstein, Jihad and Genocide, 51. 49. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 157. 50. Üngör, “When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder,” 147; Jakob Künzler, Im Lande Des Blutes Und Der Tränen Erlebnisse in Mesopotamien Während Des Weltkrieges (1914–1918) (Zürich: Chronos-Verl., 1999), 47–48. 51. Üngör, “When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder,” 146–47.

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52. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1918), 324–25. 53. Stavros T. Stavridis, “International Red Cross: A Mission to Nowhere,” in The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks: Studies on the State-Sponsored Campaign of Extermination of the Christians of Asia Minor (1912–1922) and Its Aftermath: History, Law, Memory (Scarsdale, NY: Melissa International Ltd, 2011), 278; Tessa Hofmann, “Cumulative Genocide: The Massacres and Deportations of the Greek Population of the Ottoman Empire (1912–1923),” in The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks, 64, 74; Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 95–96. 54. Basso, “‘All Four Seasons and I Will Die,’” 281. 55. Erickson, Ordered to Die, 103–6; Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 221; Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, 302; Basso, “‘All Four Seasons and I Will Die,’” 279. 56. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 188, 193. 57. Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide,” 114. 58. G. S. Graber, Caravans to Oblivion: The Armenian Genocide, 1915 (New York; Chichester: Wiley, 1996), 5. 59. Basso, “‘All Four Seasons and I Will Die,’” 280. 60. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 149–50. 61. Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 159–60. 62. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, 159–60. 63. Graber, Caravans to Oblivion, 64; Katharine Derderian, “Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender-Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 6. 64. Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide,” 113. 65. Vahakn N. Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 119–20. 66. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 221. 67. Üngör, “When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder,” 180. 68. Üngör, 185–86. 69. Richard Ashton, “Interview 53314,” August 14, 1977, Segment 20, 19:30– 20:12, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, University of California. 70. Hofmann, “Cumulative Genocide,” 64. 71. Reid, “Total War,” 43–45. 72. Rubenstein, Jihad and Genocide, 52–53. 73. Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide,” 114. 74. Akçam, A Shameful Act, 159–68.

Chapter 5

Axis-Era Hungary’s Conscripts of World War II

The case of genocidal conscription in Axis-era Hungary includes the intersectional topics of international cooperation, wars, and genocides. On the topic of partners that transcend borders, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum noted how European Nazi collaborators included the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Ustasa in Croatia, and the Arrow Cross in Hungary. Each of these political authorities were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews in and across multiple national territories.1 From among these examples, the history of Hungary is important to consider for

Figure 5.1 Axis-Era Hungary, 1938 to 1941 Source: Map derived from author’s adaption of original Public Domain file: Jxxy, “Territorial gains of Hungary 1938–41,” Wikimedia, 2019.

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several reasons. This state formed an alliance with Germany in World War II as a member of the Axis powers. The relationship of this partnership relied heavily on the previous generation’s participation as a member nation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that itself fought alongside imperial Germany and the Ottoman Empire in World War I. These long-standing ties and shared experiences of sacrifice, loss of lives in a massively destructive war, and the territorial costs that all three of these empires faced due to their defeats highlights the significance of the Hungarian Holocaust. Many previously published works have focused on the timeline of events to pinpoint the moment when Nazis took charge of Hungary. Some observers including deniers and apologists continue to insist that the governments that ruled Hungary throughout the 1930s and 1940s did not commit or contribute to genocide of any group but simply stood aside when Nazi Germany unleashed the Hungarian Holocaust in 1944. In the context of Nazi wartime operations, its occupation of Hungary in 1944 bolstered the Axis eastern front against the Soviet Union’s advance toward central Europe. Much research accurately explains that from this time the fascist collaborators within the newly formed Hungarian government then assisted Nazi officials in carrying out genocide against Jewish Hungarian civilians. In contrast to these views, I respectfully disagree that this is the definitive moment of genocide in this case. By explaining Axis-era Hungary’s use of genocidal conscription, I reject suggestions that this state had little to do with the Holocaust until Nazi Germany coerced some and empowered others to deport civilians to death camps in the latter part of World War II. Survivor testimonies and government orders that document events earlier in the war provide insights into how the state used selective conscription to discriminate against, capture, and then destroy Jewish Hungarian conscripts. Thousands of these draftees died as victims of genocide by wastage and in massacres. Due to the overlapping simultaneous conditions of genocide and war in this case, I argue that genocidal conscription marks the opening of the Hungarian Holocaust against several groups from August 1942 until the end of the Arrow Cross regime and Hungary’s surrender to Soviet forces in February 1945. Hungarian government and military officials deliberately caused wastage losses and collaborated in massacres of conscripted Jewish Hungarians who perpetrators killed and killed off during World War II. Acknowledging the monumental mass of volumes that have informed humanity of the exceptional levels of destruction that culminated later into the single word Holocaust, it is necessary to introduce and unravel several complex issues. Of those who care to look at this tragic era, many observers have recognized that the Holocaust is a uniquely multifaceted series of events that can be viewed as having consisted of multiple genocides. Studies that seek to explain these events in the attempt to understand and prevent a repeat of the crimes

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committed by Nazis and their collaborators diligently express that each single factor is complicated by local, regional, national, and international actions and reactions. When seen however clearly or indistinctly together, each of these events encompass parts of the Holocaust. Researchers have studied this topic for more than seventy years. Their published works utilize a multitude of archives and exist in multiple languages. One of the reasons why so much work continues to pursue the facts of what happened, beyond honoring the memories of victims and survivors, is the issue of denial that often accompanies genocides that perpetrators commit under the guise of war. The lengths to which perpetrators went to cover up their tracks at the time, and the deflection of claims of criminal activities including genocide that several political heirs have made following the end of Nazi Germany’s Third Reich, require scholars to approach these events by using careful and precise language. To do otherwise would potentially add to the incorrect histories of World War II that misrepresent and diminish the significance of the Holocaust. Because no solitary study can comprehensively explain the historically unique and divergent sets of events of the Holocaust, I focus on the ways that Hungary took the lives of several different conscripted groups. As Paul R. Bartrop noted, these extermination programs pursued several ethnic groups from within minority communities including Jews, Roma, and Romani Sinti.2 This single factor, of identifying groups of victims, provides a sense of the immense task that confronts anyone who researches the many cases of genocides that perpetrators committed during World War II. Leaving issues of international politics that connected Nazi Germany to several Axis powers in central and eastern Europe for further discussion in chapter 6, I include here the policies and outcomes of Hungarian conscription in the 1930s and 1940s. Why might conscription have been a factor of any genocide of the Holocaust? Why focus on conscription in the case of Axis-era Hungary? This state is significant because the case incorporates the last major international program of extermination perpetrated by the Nazis when Germany took over this territory in March 1944. Prior to this event, the state managed its own wartime policies when unoccupied as an autonomous Axis ally of Germany. Unfolding in a parallel development alongside the Nazi plan distributed at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 known as the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage), Hungary initiated genocidal conscription as one of its own methods to carry out this part of the Holocaust.3 Given that the text of the orders distributed at Wannsee explicitly stated that German officials should provide Hungary with the opportunity to explore its own initiatives, this ally’s actions are highly significant when assessing events prior to March 1944. Collaboration in the following final months of the war inextricably connected Hungary’s Arrow Cross to Germany’s Nazi Party. I posit that the generational alliances of Hungary with Germany and

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Austria manifested this state’s fascist politics and its genocidal warfare strategy prior to the advance of Nazi troops over its borders. To better understand how and why the Hungarian government conscripted Jewish men into the military of a state allied with Nazi Germany requires a review of the record of service provided by generations of Jewish Hungarian men. It is from this history that the state then turned away from an inclusive form of military organization to then conscript many thousands of men not to serve and fight in combat but to exploit and then destroy them in the years prior to the Nazi and Arrow Cross actions of 1944. JEWISH EUROPEAN AND HUNGARIAN CONSCRIPTION BEFORE WORLD WAR II Beginning in the mid-1600s, Jewish Europeans reliably and loyally served in multiple militaries as volunteers and conscripts for several empires and nations.4 Such service nurtured complicated reciprocal relationships that promoted Jewish emancipation, equal protection of civil rights, and the enfranchisement of Jewish communities. An example of these complex interactions is the exchange that several states made through first enlisting Jews in national militaries to later recognize Jewish citizenship and legal emancipation.5 A primary source written by Professor Johann David Michaelis of the University of Gottingen in 1783, in today’s southern Germany, claimed that equality could only be achieved through military service, but because Jews obeyed religious observances such as the Sabbath, high feast days, and other obligations, the state would consider Jewish communities as having unreliable service records. Political and legal equality would remain unattainable unless Jewish Europeans adapted some of their religious practices.6 Through incorporation within the broader nationalist modernization programs of the 1800s, such changes took place in part because of conscription. Jewish leaders either supported or rejected the emancipatory hopes that conscripted service encompassed throughout the modernizing era of the 1800s. In contrast to Michaelis, several community members did not view conscription as a pathway that led to any meaningful successes toward reaching equality under the law. The debate impacted Judaism and exacerbated the division between orthodox and liberal expressions of the faith across minority Jewish communities that lived within many largely homogeneous Christian countries.7 The call to adapt the religious practice to rest on certain days in favor of working in public service roles including within the military developed within more liberal Jewish enclaves. The relationships of states and Jewish communities changed in response to the political and military demands of the age. For instance, during the

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conservative reaction of the early and mid-1800s that followed the chaos of the French Revolution, governments and Jewish Europeans developed strong national bonds through joint military service. Similarly, these same bonds also deteriorated at times due in part to the political instability caused by several European revolutions in the mid-1800s.8 Upheavals in France, Germany, and Italy brought mixed political and civil results. The last two cases of the Springtime of Nations in 1848 initially failed in their attempts to form new ethnonationalist states before completing these missions in the decades that followed. The independence movement of Hungary likewise hoped to bring together different local communities and join them in its nationalist project to break away from the government’s imperial partners in Austria. Hungarian leaders had to wait until after World War I to gain independence. Despite the numerous men who provided honorable and loyal military service as volunteers and conscripts throughout these decades, many members of Jewish communities continued to experience several civil and social inequalities in multiple countries during the nineteenth century. Throughout the 1800s, while nationalist bonds waxed and waned across Europe, Jewish Hungarians participated in significant military actions for Hungary. For instance, from the 1830s onward, laymen Jewish chaplains voluntarily enlisted so regularly that the military acknowledged their rank as Feldrabbiner, which in English translates as Field Rabbi. Evidence points to one Jewish chaplain’s support of the nationalist struggle for Hungarian independence from Austria in the revolution of 1848.9 Such contributions made to the empire by Jewish volunteers and conscripts impacted Hungarian society into the late 1800s. These valiant forms of service promoted such affinity among Christian and Jewish Hungarians that, by the end of nineteenth century, Jewish communities lived through a time in Hungary known by historians as a golden age. Hungary arguably became the most hospitable European country toward Jewish immigration and assimilation. The positive steps taken by the government to integrate Jewish communities into mainstream Hungarian culture won tremendous national support from Jews living throughout the kingdom.10 The trail toward parity, blazed in part by the service of Jewish soldiers, volunteers, conscripts, enlisted rabbis, and military chaplains, led the Hungarian state to politically accept Jews as equals. The government instigated several institutional changes that sought to establish equality among the different population groups of the country. One such landmark measure from 1895 was the Law of Reception, which viewed the religious observances of Judaism as equal to those of Christianity.11 This growing sense of diverse inclusion through national unity programs continued into the early 1900s. Many Jewish conscripts fought in World War I alongside their Christian Hungarian comrades. Both perception and legal standing changed after the territorial losses

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incurred by Hungary through its defeat and the subsequent terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Despite the honorable service of Jewish Hungarians, the fallout from having lost the Great War included a reaction by ethnic Hungarians, known as Magyars, that launched a sinister ethnonationalist agenda. These reactionaries blamed Jews for the defeat of Hungary, a scapegoating that similar groups repeated in parallel moves made across central Europe. The Jewish Hungarian golden age had lasted for little more than a single generation. The national unity project was over. In its place came wider political instability as characterized by the rise of ethnonationalist fascism from the 1920s to the 1940s. A series of reversals in fortune inverted the golden age and began to hamper Jewish Hungarian communities in the aftermath of the Great War. Jews became targets in the White Terror of 1919 to 1920, which followed Béla Kun’s temporary communist Hungarian republic.12 At the end of this phase of political violence, Hungary ratified the Numerus Clausus Act in 1920. The law formally established limits on Jewish admissions into colleges and universities by what Randolph L. Braham, a survivor and later scholar of the Holocaust, described as the first major antisemitic law in postwar Europe.13 As a consequence to the terms declared at Versailles, Hungary lost two-thirds of historic Magyar territories and three-fifths of its population. The socioeconomic fallout that followed, and in large part defined much of the 1920s and early 1930s, came about in direct response to losing the war and living with the terms of peace. Hungary struggled with its decline. Because it was no longer a major member nation of an empire, the state had to reconcile with the reality that the country had become a comparatively less powerful independent political entity. Political leaders and the majority Magyar public became accustomed to blaming the minority Jewish population for the young nation-state’s ills.14 With forlorn hindsight, many Christian Magyar Hungarians resented the new normal and mourned the shattered remains of the empire. Scapegoated Jews, previously honored for their patriotism and respected for industrious contributions to the emerging capitalism of Budapest, became soft targets for antisemitic prejudice, discrimination, and violence. By the 1930s, the institution of military service that had helped bond so much of the cohesiveness and goodwill among the various ethnic communities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire quickly developed into the catalyst for an antisemitic brand of Christian Magyar Hungarian ethnonationalist politics. The defeat in World War I and the resulting collapse of the empire also ushered in a prohibition of conscription as mandated in a provision of the Treaty of Versailles.15 Because conscription for military service was outlawed to restrict any attempt to rebuild Hungary’s armed forces, the state supported voluntary labor service initiatives. This program reestablished a practice that

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had previously allowed enlisted personnel to provide their service through alternatives to combat during wartime. These camps, initiated as an employment scheme in response to the Great Depression, indoctrinated young adult men and teenaged boys to follow an ethnonationalist right-wing ideology. By the mid-1930s, this movement had developed direct political connections to the Hitler Youth.16 Older Christian Magyars, mentors and coaches who had nurtured their misunderstanding of how the Jewish golden age in Hungary had changed their country for the worse, taught their warped perspectives to the next generation of Magyar males. By the time Hungary joined Nazi Germany’s Axis alliance in World War II, this movement had become the foundation of a genocidal regime. Alongside legislative activities of the state, the freedoms and rights of Jewish Hungarians became targets of the reactionary right-wing element of Magyar society that organized within labor service camps in the years following World War I. Skirting the terms of the Versailles agreement to demobilize and dismantle its armed forces, the training provided in these camps closely imitated recruitment and preparation for national defense. Magyar participants reorganized the wartime powers that recruited and trained men for military service into demilitarized campsites at which instructors taught orienteering and survival skills to boys, teenaged males, and young men. Coaches and guides formed these programs, often only open to middle-class right-wing Christians, with the aim of training their volunteer recruits to adhere to the ethnonationalist principles of Hungarian fascism.17 In shaping the characters of so many younger Christian Magyar males, the camp leaders taught a discriminatory worldview that rejected Jewish communities as holding any legitimate role in politics, commerce, or society. This ethnonationalist agenda spread throughout the camps and ingrained antisemitism into the susceptible postwar Hungarian generation. Although these camps did not insist that people served them or the state, these grassroots initiatives of fascism did receive public funding. For instance, a labor service youth program that reserved membership for the Turul student union, a group that had excluded Jews from participation for several years, received financial support from the government in 1937.18 With many similar private clubs receiving government subsidies, the training camps served to educate the young Christian men of Hungary and demonstrates the political acceptance of these active fascist elements across the country. In short, the camps received financial, legal, and political support to set in motion a part of the movement that empowered fascist Magyars and ostracized Jewish Hungarians. In the years prior to the outbreak of World War II, a cadre of young men had been brought up through childhoods in which ethnonationalist segregation and fascist ideology instructed them to reject Jews as a part of their postwar Magyar identity. This social movement directly connected to government

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policies throughout the 1930s. Once Hungary reneged on its duties to uphold the Treaty of Versailles, the camps of the voluntary labor service system made segregated remobilization possible. The state violated the prohibitions placed upon it by rearming the military in the late 1930s, a move that coincided with an important change in the camps in the context of conscription. The government made training for Magyar youth mandatory in a nationalized program established in 1939.19 The junior version of the university training programs indoctrinated adolescents in camps and clubs known as Levente, a phrase that translates in English as meaning knight. Demonstrating the government’s continued commitment to formally prepare these boys and young men to become the future reserves and recruits of a distinctly ethnonationalist military, the attendance by Magyar males aged twelve to twenty-one at Levente clubs became mandatory in 1939.20 To summarize the influence of these camps, the Hungarian government established a system of military training that misinformed many of Hungary’s Magyars that they were superior to Jewish Hungarians for years prior to the war.21 Segregation policies implemented across the country in these camps also upheld several of the government’s antisemitic laws. The state enacted three anti-Jewish laws between 1938 and 1941 that restricted Jewish Hungarians from forms of trade, education, and marriage. The first two of these legislative acts became law prior to the direct participation of Hungary’s military forces in World War II. The last of these dictates, issued on August 2, 1941, mirrored several of the rules that Nazi Germany had previously legislated in the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws of 1935.22 After the war began, the state implemented unequal forms of selective mandatory duties that culminated in genocidal conscription. DIVIDING, ISOLATING, AND SUBORDINATING TARGETS In the lead up to Hungary’s entrance into World War II, the state’s discriminatory actions empowered antisemitic fascists and violated Jewish Hungarian rights. Preparation and alliance with Nazi allies in war caused Hungary to adapt its conscription policies. For generations, mandatory service provided Jewish Hungarian soldiers with an avenue toward full citizenship and legal equality with their Magyar peers. Because Magyar relations created increasingly closer ties with Nazi Germany, conscription changed from inclusion to one that extracted fighting-aged Jewish men from their communities before mandating that they obey antisemitic fascist military commanders. This civil-military ordering followed the antisemitic assumptions of ethnonationalist political leaders who shared their views with those in command of Nazi

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Germany. Once soldiers marched to war, Axis-era Hungary had segregated its military to assert Magyar superiority and institutionalize Jewish subordination, a functional and performative process that attempted to present the latter group as inferiors of the former. On the topic of relevant international interactions among Hungarian and German leaders, it is useful to note the importance of Nazi Germany’s conscription policies in the development of the Third Reich in the 1930s. The fascist order led by Adolf Hitler controlled the Wehrmacht (military) that consisted of conscripts in the army, navy, and air force. These recruits then carried out both warfare and genocide during World War II. In the case of Nazi Germany, the Heer, the Kriegsmarine, and the Luftwaffe implemented selective conscription of draftees that mimicked the social divisions of the Third Reich. Given that Hitler initiated selective conscription processes in 1935, he likely anticipated that another war would soon engulf Europe. On May 21, 1935, Hitler and his political and military leaders reintroduced compulsory military service for some and compulsory service to the state for others. By doing so, he also institutionalized Nazi ideas of German supremacy and relative perceptions of ethnic inferiority. This recursive relationship set the military into motion to apply the ideology of Nazism that had begun to produce both formal and informal social divisions across Germany. Hitler declared a call for obligatory military service that required recruits for the armed forces to show papers documenting their Aryan ancestry. This bureaucratic requirement predated and in some ways accelerated the administration’s implementation of the Nuremberg race laws later that same year in September 1935. The conscription order of May empowered the Wehrmacht to take possession of any non-Aryan civilian for service duties in “special” wartime regulations.23 To establish the ethnically segregated hierarchy of the military, Hitler commanded that only Aryan officers could hold a superior commanding rank.24 Given the significance of the 1935 Defense Law for what would later take place in warfare and genocides, the importance of how conscription enabled these institutions to segregate German Aryans and people supposedly of non-Aryan groups is clear. Many similar subversive practices that divided Jews from the general population developed in Germany also became law in Axis-era Hungary due to the close relationship of these regimes both before and during World War II. From 1938 to 1945, several heads of government ran the daily operations of politics in Hungary under the regency of Miklós Horthy. For example, on April 8, 1938, Prime Minister Kálmán Darányi implemented antisemitic legislation that attempted to balance social and economic life for Hungarians by barring Jews from working in newspaper, magazine, publishing, and other print media industries.25 Officials decided to draw divides based on the pseudo racialized concepts of the time. These included an overly broad

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definition of Jewish Hungarians that identified common names that the state assumed originated from Jewish heritage. The government codified superficial and spurious antisemitic rhetoric into law and even went as far as to dismantle any legal standing of Christian Hungarians who had previously converted from Judaism.26 The state based its divisive practices on stereotypical ethnic characteristics and generalized racial assumptions in the hope of elevating ethnic Magyars at the expense of Jewish Hungarians regardless of whether or not a targeted individual identified as belonging to the former group through any formal religious or traditional cultural practices. Not to be outdone by his predecessor’s antisemitic measures, Hungarian Premier Béla Imrédy announced the state’s new selective conscription policies after meeting with German chancellor Hitler. His plans reintroduced compulsory military service on September 5, 1938, in part by formally establishing antisemitic restrictions in the military.27 Conscription allowed Imrédy to radically transform the state’s military capacity along ethnonationalist divisions. From then on, Magyar Hungarians would be in command of Jewish Hungarians in a near-identical structure to the German Defense Law of 1935. The informal social aspects of segregation in labor camps became the official position of the Hungarian government. In the months leading up to World War II, Hungary began to construct a modern army with two tiers that cemented its fascist ethnonationalist divide. Imrédy’s move to reintroduce conscription in September 1938 overturned the peace terms that ended World War I. At the same time, the state began to subjugate Jewish participation in its reforming security institutions.28 The reintroduction of mandatory military training also placed specific restrictions on Jewish men. Remilitarization formalized the division of Jewish Hungarians from among the country’s general population, a process that rapidly isolated Jewish male conscripts. In the months prior to World War II, Hungary situated its international position in line with the Axis powers of Germany and Italy by appropriating several regions that it had previously lost through defeat in World War I. It annexed several other territories that had large proportions of Magyar populations. The expansion of fascist states across central Europe gained political and popular momentum throughout the 1930s until, by the end of that decade, its leaders began to formalize majoritarian ethnonationalism at the expense of minority communities. One expansion in November 1938 placed lands formerly under the authority of Czechoslovakian governance within Hungary’s enlarged borders due to a coercive dictate issued by Germany. In a move that garnered public support from Italy, Hungary redrew its boundaries in what was yet another violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.29 These precedents further isolated Jewish groups in Hungary.

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In lockstep with the antisemitic policies of Nazi Germany, officials who ruled the enlarged Hungarian state ordered its military to extract Jewish Hungarian men from their communities. In the first half of 1939, and before the outbreak of World War II, the Hungarian government established multiple labor units composed through forced conscription. Authorities falsely promoted the labor service as an alternative form of military service for recruits who did not qualify to serve in Imrédy’s ethnonationalist army. Beyond the rhetoric, draftees into the Munkaszolgálat (Labor Service) had no choice but to obey the state or face severe punishments. On March 11, 1939, Act II on Defense ordered the separation of Jewish and other selected men from the general population and obligated that they serve as unarmed laborers in the Hungarian Army.30 Jewish Hungarians, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other targets manned labor battalions that supported their military attachments by completing agricultural, construction, and industrial duties. At the outbreak of World War II, Hungary held back from immediately joining the conflict alongside its fascist allies Germany, Austria, and Italy. Sitting on the sidelines next to two immense active armies composed of Nazi and Soviet troops, and having reincorporated territories lost from the Great War, Hungary had no reason to join the fight other than to uphold its strategic international relations. After having agreed to join the Axis alliance on November 20, 1940, the state took on the significant official military obligation of joint defense. By partnering with the fascist pact originally formed by Germany, Italy, and Japan, Hungary became responsible for their mutual security.31 In doing so, any attack on one of its new allies, or if one ally attacked another state, then that third party would then also become an enemy of Hungary. Because its allies were already at war in multiple theaters against several enemies, Hungary had signed up to join the combat of World War II. During the months in which Hungary trained, organized, and assigned troops in its preparations for combat, the government added to its discriminatory policies that targeted Jewish communities. One of the very first initiatives that the state implemented within the first two weeks of incoming Prime Minister László Bárdossy’s term ordered the military to disarm all Jewish soldiers. Decree no. 2870/1941 of April 16, 1941, barred all Jewish Hungarians who served in the armed forces from carrying weapons.32 This act disarmed Jewish Hungarian soldiers and transformed these men into isolated conscripts who the state then reassigned to forced labor battalions. The government had fully subordinated Jewish Hungarian conscripts under the control of Magyar Hungarian military commanders. Hungary’s supporting role to Germany’s advances into Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union impacted Jewish Hungarian conscripts in several ways. For example, in the year following the initial advance of Axis forces into the Soviet Union, Hungary’s political leaders explicitly identified specific and

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unique requirements for Jewish conscripts. In the spring of 1942, the military created a quota to supply a minimum number of Jewish Hungarian conscripts in the state’s deployed forced labor units. In March, Hungarian minister of defense Károly Bartha set the allocation that 10 to 15 percent of active personnel had to consist of Jewish conscripts. The state identified these men by assuming their Jewish identity based on their last names and employment sectors. The policy ensured the consistent flow of conscripts for deployment to any commander who demanded more men including at the frontlines in combat against the Soviet Union. Once conscripted, the military deployed these draftees into war zones while upholding the order that had previously disarmed Jewish Hungarian soldiers and laborers.33 The establishment of this quota enabled the government to manage the subordinated forced enlistment and deployment of an increased number of Jewish Hungarian men. These draftees ultimately served unarmed along and near combat lines in labor battalions with no alternative options to commute, defer, or exempt their enlistments or deployments. Until 1942, Hungary’s ethnonationalist fascist leaders had extended an option to most men to contribute to the war effort by working in industries and paying taxes. Once Bartha removed this informal exemption by ushering in the quota system, the state systematically targeted Jewish Hungarians from across the adult population. For instance, limits that the state had used to select and deploy conscripts changed in April 1942 when the law expanded the age range of draftees. On April 22, 1942, Bartha informed his ministerial administrators and military officials that they did not need to observe the upper age limit of forty-two years when sending Jewish conscripts to the frontlines.34 By design, more and more unarmed Jewish Hungarian conscripts served across multiple combat zones in World War II. From July 31, 1942, the process of wartime subordination became irreversible. Orders came down from the ministry that the military would no longer recognize any rank of a Jewish soldier. The total eradication of service histories even stripped away the prestige of those who had previously earned records of distinction in their earlier tours of duty. The state’s official demotion of all Jewish soldiers included the much admired veterans of World War I.35 Whether a soldier had served for several years or for only a few days, the government viewed the entirety of Jewish Hungarian servicemen as expendable auxiliaries without rank. Subsequently, the military assigned and reassigned these conscripts and those who had volunteered at some earlier date to mandatorily fulfill duties in labor battalions.

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GENOCIDAL CONSCRIPTION BY AXIS-ERA HUNGARY Examining the conflict on the eastern front of World War II in Europe from August 1942 onward provides an explanation of a type of genocide perpetrators committed while the state was at war. The conflict in the east opened the largest continuous combat frontline in human history. Countless options to deploy Jewish Hungarian conscripts emerged. From this time, a moment that marks the start of genocidal conscription in this case, almost all these subordinated conscripts had little to no chance of surviving this genocide carried out under the guise of war. Before inverting the institution of conscription, Hungary assisted Hitler and Nazi Germany in pursuit of conquering and clearing out several military enemies and ethnic minority civilian communities throughout eastern Europe. In June 1941, Axis militaries mobilized soldiers and deployed a force that would eventually total over a million troops. The largest offensive military campaign in history began when Axis armies crossed into Soviet-occupied territories.36 Operation Barbarossa marked an initial invasion phase of Hitler’s plan to conquer lands to the east of German-occupied Poland.37 The long-term goal pursued a vision that these lands would provide the living space (Lebensraum) for newly established colonies of ethnonationalist fascist Europeans.38 Many of these men were conscripts taken from Germany and multiple Axis nations. Soon after the initial launch of the conflict against the Soviet Union, these divisions included both volunteers and draftees from Hungary’s military. The offensive resulted in the waves of mass shootings that followed after the initial bouts of combat. These acts of genocide killed perhaps as many as 1.5 million civilians during the initial Axis push eastward in what Father Patrick Desbois called the Holocaust by bullets.39 By December 1941, even though Hitler’s attempt to capture Moscow failed, the war in the east continued to take lives and required the enlistment and deployment of more conscripts.40 Due in part to the eventual failure of Operation Barbarossa and the stalled advance of Axis forces throughout the winter of 1941, the priority of the war turned from conquest to genocide. The initial intent to systematically destroy European Jewry formed outside of Hungary. In part because of the setbacks against the Soviet Union and the expense in time and bullets that mass shootings cost the Axis powers, Nazi Germany developed a plan with continental-wide ambitions to rid these countries of groups that perpetrators had deemed unwanted. Due to the complexities of these multiple histories, I discuss relevant comparative topics in chapter 6. Given that any historical analysis of the Holocaust must stress the influence of Nazi German perpetrators upon Axis collaborators and perpetrators, it is important to discuss Hungary’s role in both genocide and

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war. The secretive Wannsee Conference of January 1942 in Berlin brought together the highest-ranking deputies of Hitler’s own Nazi leadership. At this time, these commanders and bureaucrats administered most of the populations throughout central and western Europe. The purpose of the meeting sought to organize the destruction of millions of Jewish Europeans, including those in Hungary.41 To be clear, the Wannsee Conference was not where the Final Solution was decided or planned. Instead of deciding whether to commit genocide or not, the meeting focused on the methods to command and control the genocide against European Jewish communities and other populations deemed by the regime as unworthy of life. The recorded minutes of the Wannsee Conference explain that Germany’s Nazi government had already committed to their plan to commit these genocides prior to the gathering. The agenda at Wannsee organized, disseminated, and managed the ways that perpetrators would then carry out the Final Solution. The extent to which Hungarian government officials understood Hitler’s genocidal agenda at this time remains unknown. However, the minutes reveal that Hungary was to be given some liberty in how it would achieve the same goal as their Nazi allies in destroying Jewish and other communities. The minutes taken at Wannsee by Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann of the Schutzstaffel (SS), who held a rank equivalent to a lieutenant colonel, explicitly stated that Nazi Germany would at some point need to install an adviser within the government of its Axis ally Hungary.42 Several weeks after the meeting, the new pro-German prime minister Miklós Kállay publicly reaffirmed Hungary’s close relationship with the Nazi Reich in March 1942.43 Kállay’s pro-Nazi position bought his country some time. His reassurances to stay in the war and thus also follow along with whatever aspects of the Final Solution German leaders declared to their Axis allies deferred the installment of a Nazi Party official in the Hungarian government. A few months after the Third Reich issued its policy to destroy all Jewish Europeans, the Hungarian state stripped all Jewish Hungarian members draftees of both rank and arms while insisting that these men serve under the command of many ethnonationalist fascist Magyar officers.44 During the summer campaigns of 1942, Kállay’s administration sent unarmed Jewish Hungarian conscripts into the deadly environments of the eastern front. From August 1942, the Hungarian state carried out the destruction of unarmed conscripts by insisting that they served in the deadly conditions of labor camps, by completing lethal assignments designed to erode the enemy’s resources in terms of detonating mines, and by initiating skirmishes to flush out opponent positions across frontlines. How is it possible to understand what the war looked like for Jewish Hungarian conscripts of the Labor Service? Listening to survivors is one important way to acknowledge the genocide of conscripted Jewish Hungarians.

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In addition to official government records that document conscription policies from administrative and legal viewpoints, multiple survivor testimonies of Jewish Hungarian conscripts illustrate the ways that the military implemented its orders. Because so few survivors lived to explain the events they experienced, the scarcity of on-the-record eyewitness accounts include unique insights that are unavailable elsewhere. Several parts of different testimonies note how the state used conscription to commit genocide. For instance, survivor Edmund Mandel explained in his autobiography how conscription contributed to the Hungarian Holocaust. Mandel survived both war and genocide as a conscript of the Jewish Hungarian Labor Service battalions that the state deployed along with armed Magyar units to fight against the Soviet Union. In 1942, Mandel’s unit five per two viewed the Soviet Army as their enemy. After deployment, he spoke with his fellow conscripts as to whether the Soviets might one day arrive as their liberators. Mandel quickly realized that his commanders in the Hungarian Army were deadlier threats to his life than the risks posed by opposition forces.45 What may have previously blurred the lines of war and genocide became clear when commanders took advantage of the opportunities to increase deaths in war by committing genocide. Mandel’s testimony describes how Hungarian commanders ordered Jewish Hungarian Labor Service conscripts to serve in ways that directly resulted in wastage casualties. For instance, the Hungarian Army ordered unarmed Jewish men to advance into combat frontlines to detonate landmines.46 Mandel witnessed how the sight of a conscript setting off a mine pleased his officers. He even overheard several Magyar commanders joke that these duties led to fewer mines and many fewer Jews.47 The unnamed officers who at that time consisted only of commanders of Christian Magyar communities perpetrated genocide in the Hungarian military. Taken out of context and on its own merits, it is possible that denialists could make the bogus argument that antisemitic commanders who sent Jewish conscripts to die were an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of warfare that incurred losses. Such claims would suggest that the army simply required some personnel within its ranks to advance and clear pathways through the minefields of regions across the war’s frontlines. Those who might posit such conclusions would assert that sending these men, being of lower strategic importance and costing less in terms of equipment and trained personnel, to their deaths provided a logical option to commanders who could not overturn the unfortunate and fatal realities of modern war. Such erroneous views might suggest that to send unarmed men, some of whom happened to be Jewish, to carve out passageways through these deadly obstacles was an unpleasant yet necessary duty. Someone, such an argument may well go, had to clear those mines. Without corroboration, Mandel’s anecdotal account

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would not meet the burden of evidence required to convincingly conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the Hungarian military carried out genocide against its own conscripts. If this was a one-off exception, or even a strategic process that did not identify and deploy members of a specific group, then the evidence would not adequately demonstrate a general or constructive intent to commit genocide. Denialists and apologists would then likely defend these death-inducing orders and actions by relying on the excuse that war claims casualties and, therefore, any charge of genocide by wastage stretches the evidence too far. Given this need for additional corroboration, it is necessary to examine the state’s motives in how it identified this group and document the events detailed in other testimonial accounts. Corroborating evidence exists in a policy of the state and in the words of survivors. During his deployment with Jewish Hungarian Labor Service battalion ten per two of Nagybánya, Randolph L. Braham witnessed several events that convinced him of the genocidal intentions of several officers in the Hungarian Army. Braham recalled one remarkable order given by the commander of the Nagykáta battalion to his Magyar officers who were to take Jews to Ukraine and not bring any of them back alive.48 The intent here could not be more explicit. No counterargument that centers on the use of conscripts to fight a war can explain this order. An attempt to maintain a denialist stance could argue here that this is just a few evil men occupying some positions of relative power. Braham’s words do not exist in isolation. Taken in the context along with Mandel’s testimony, the case includes corroboration of the intentions of suspected perpetrators to destroy members of a targeted group. These accounts document how higher-ranking officials took advantage of the deadly conflict to carry out orders to kill off Jewish Hungarian conscripts instead of issuing orders that these same men should fight as soldiers or safely provide labor service support to Axis combatants. In terms of policy, one aspect illustrates the genocidal intent of the Hungarian state to destroy Jewish conscripts under the guise of war. Beginning in 1942, government officials instructed military commanders in charge of Labor Service battalions to bring conscripts back from the front in an attaché case.49 At face value, the orders do not make much sense. How could anyone fit a person into a briefcase, never mind thousands of conscripts? The point of the policy becomes clear after contextualizing the civil-military relations of the time. When the government deployed a higher-ranking Magyar commander, he then mobilized his officers who in turn would move out the soldiers and laborers immediately under their authority. The hierarchy of military ordering, once put into action by the government, then accessed various equipment, weapons, and transport necessary to fulfill those instructions to the best of the commander’s abilities. After engaging an enemy and incurring losses, the commander in charge filled out paperwork explaining any gains

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and all losses incurred during an exchange. Referencing the list of casualties that commanders would in the future have to report on after they returned from combat zones explains the need to bring back Labor Service conscripts in, as the order instructed, an attaché case. Perpetrators killed and killed off their targets so that the names of these victims could go into the record as casualties who died in the wastage of war. The state did not set the incentive for commanders in charge of Jewish Hungarian conscripts to fight in pursuit of victory in a war but instead indirectly and perhaps unintentionally rewarded commanders and officers for incurring specific losses that resulted in their return to a base, a command post, or even to take a journey to the ministry itself in Budapest, locations that existed in much safer places away from active combat zones and frontlines. Given the number of conscripts who died in the advances against the Soviet Union, this method is likely the most widespread way that the state transformed the recruitment and deployment of Jewish Hungarian conscripts into a tactic of genocide. While the striking evidence of the attaché case order is remarkable to say the least, its secrecy could make tracing its origin something of an impossible task. Because the order’s legacy within the Ministry of Defense would likely include Nazi collaboration, if not direct involvement by Hitler’s officials, this evidence may lead historians of the Hungarian Holocaust to someday reveal further significant research findings to explain these processes of genocidal conscription in World War II. The existence of the order clearly illustrates how the lists of names that the state later used to record conscripted casualties became performative institutional excuses made to disguise genocidal victims killed off by their Magyar commanders in a bureaucratic process that misreported the mass deaths of victims as losses sustained in war. Parallel in importance alongside the evidence of orders and from survivors, it is crucial to note the different outcomes that depended upon the behaviors and actions of individual officers in charge of certain Jewish Hungarian Labor Service battalions. For instance, Braham’s eyewitness testimony on perpetrators and the fates of conscripts includes the concept of a commander’s moral compass regarding their treatment of a particular company. According to Braham, some officers decided to not follow along and intervened to avoid the wastage of their conscripted units. The most consequential person that existed regarding the fate of each individual Labor Service conscript was the authority figure that held charge over the battalion.50 Inconsistencies transpired with respect to the completion of genocidal orders, the dissemination of which led some commanders, officers, and guards to act differently from those pleased with the mass deaths of Jewish Hungarian conscripts. Without doubt, these officials directly controlled the fates of individual labor conscripts.

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In support of the conclusion that orders from above became subject to interpretation at and immediately behind frontlines, testimonies provided by survivors include accounts of how certain commanders treated conscripts under their control in cruel ways that extended to beatings and killings. One survivor aged twenty-one at the time, George Meles, avoided such deadly abuse by remaining silent as he carried out his orders. Other conscripts were not as fortunate as Meles. In his testimony, he explained how many of his fellow laborers suffered violent reprimands that several commanders, officers, and guards inconsistently handed out.51 Multiple Magyar troops inflicted severe physical abuse on Jewish men without cause or due process. These torturous and deadly methods of corporal and capital punishments fulfilled their intended purposes of incurring physical pain, often permanent injury, and even death. One excruciating form of maltreatment repeatedly inflicted throughout the war suspended conscripts off the ground for hours at a time. Magyar troops first wrapped and tied a conscript’s hands and wrists behind their back before hanging them in the air from either a beam or a tree branch.52 Suspended for several hours, the troops then lowered and untied the conscript who was then immediately ordered to return to work without any provisions of medical attention, rest, food, or water. If these cruelties had taken place in incidental and isolated events then the conclusion would clearly be very different from any argument of intentional destruction. In contrast, the fact is that troops repeatedly imposed these forms of physical harm upon conscripts while simultaneously prohibiting access to the resources that would have served as provisions necessary to sustain life. The omission of adequate supplies documents that perpetrators had marked these conscripts for death. Because the evidence is clear that many people died in this subversion of conscription, it is important to determine an estimated number of conscripts who lost their lives. The state’s involvement in the war eastward lasted from June 1941 until May 1943 when the remnants of the Second Army, 40,000 out of an initial 200,000 strong force, retreated back across Hungary’s borders.53 By 1942, the state deployed approximately 100,000 men in labor units sent to the Soviet Union. The majority of these conscripts was Jewish. Following the reports of heavy losses, the Ministry of Defense established the Labor Organization for National Defense (Honvedelmi Munkaszervezet) in 1943. The bureaucracy centralized the administration of the labor service that, by then, included as many as 800,000 conscripts assigned mostly within Hungary’s borders. These enlistees remained under the control of the Ministry of Defense.54 The quota of 10 to 15 percent issued by Bartha in March 1942 had been met by that year’s summer, the same time when the state disarmed all remaining Jewish soldiers and demoted them from their ranks by reassigning them into labor units. The lowest estimate of the number

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of Jewish Hungarian men killed in these units while deployed in the war in the east is 50,000 whereas the highest is 70,000.55 As the number of losses increased in 1942 and continued until May 1943, so too did the number of Jewish Hungarians that the state conscripted and deployed in what has been noted as the Hungarian government’s disposal process of Jewish conscripts.56 Many other Jewish Hungarians died during the retreat. Attacked, robbed, and killed, these men continued to suffer throughout the country’s collapsing defenses throughout 1944.57 To suggest that the deaths of these unarmed Jewish Hungarian conscripts were somehow incidental and at the same time also unavoidable due to the demands required to fight in a modern war is invalid. Other acts of genocidal violence began in June 1943 when Nazi German guards killed off approximately 6,000 forced laborers who died after being sent from Hungary to work as miners under their supervision at Bor in Serbia.58 At least some of these deaths were the result of a combination of the lack of protection to ensure safe working conditions and to provide adequate food, water, shelter, and medical care. It is not unreasonable to speculate here that at least some proportion of these victims also died as a result of massacres committed by troops during the retreats from the eastern theater later in the war. In addition to acts of genocide by wastage across frontlines and during retreats, this case includes the massacre of victims of mass shootings. One claimed the lives of 680 conscripts on October 8, 1944, at Cservenka, a town in today’s Serbia. The massacre corroborates the systematic destruction of Jewish Hungarian conscripts during retreats from Soviet advances.59 Survivor Yehuda Deutsch explained in his autobiography that German SS and SS-auxiliary Bosnian-Croat Handschar troops, in direct cooperation with Hungarian commanders, killed these Jewish Hungarian conscripts.60 These perpetrators, who at this late point in the war would very likely have themselves been conscripted soldiers, massacred these victims in a near-identical way that Einsatzgruppen, operational strike forces, repeated in countless acts of genocidal violence committed during the initial Axis advances eastward during World War II and the Holocaust. Victims at Cservenka dug their own mass grave and stood at the edge of the pit before German and Bosnian-Croat troops killed them by machine gun fire.61 Taken as a single event, the massacre that Deutsch reported during a forced retreat could be construed as unique and unrepresentative except for the fact that there exists further corroborating evidence. Meles described a forced retreat into Austria during which troops massacred captured conscripts. Before arriving at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, troops marched his unit across a mountain top near Eisenerz. On the decline, German troops began to shoot randomly into the crowd of bodies. With over

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a hundred conscripts shot, many then fell and blocked the path. The remaining members of the group tripped while others attempted to walk over the wounded and dead. The ensuing panic caused some to stumble. With the remainder intimidated into fearing for their lives, people began to scramble through by climbing and trampling over those in front of them. Many of the wounded and others who had not been shot died by being crushed in the resulting stampede.62 These events began after Germany initiated the orders to carry out the Final Solution. From August 1942 onward, over a year and a half before the mass deportations that began in April 1944, Hungary conscripted and deployed unarmed Jewish men into the fray of combat against the Soviet Union to kill them off. The new labor battalions that the state established before and then deployed during World War II imprisoned tens of thousands of Jewish men who commanders later sent to their deaths.63 The Axis hoped to reorder central and eastern Europe in line with Hitler’s ethnonationalist vision. Mobilizing unarmed Jewish Hungarians removed and destroyed men who would otherwise have likely fought in defense of persecuted Jewish communities throughout Hungary. An example of this type of reaction that included men, women, and children took place in 1944 in the Warsaw uprising in Poland. Deployment, deportation, and forced marches followed the Axis plan to establish a Europe without Jews as the genocide continued after the Arrow Cross took over Hungary. In what can be surmised as the hurried attempts of completing the genocide, the Arrow Cross political regime rounded up any remaining Jewish Hungarians, captured them under the guise of enlistment into the labor service, forced them in marches to leave their homelands at gunpoint, and left imprisoned recruits who survived the journey to die in camps based within the few remaining strongholds of the Nazi Reich. Because many works explain the events of the mass deportations of civilians to death camps including Auschwitz, the focus here remains centered on detailing the experiences of conscripts. Survivor Eva Hoffman explained that she obeyed a proclamation of October 23, 1944, which ordered women of between sixteen and forty years of age to report to a sports field in Budapest to carry out labor duties. The instructions informed the women that they needed to pack three days’ worth of food, an amount that Hoffman considered as simply laughable given that no one had anywhere near that much in supply.64 After digging several shallow trenches in Kőszeg in Hungary in an ineffective attempt to slow the advance of Soviet tanks, the group’s commanders began to kill and kill off the conscripts.65 While resting in the rain with little to no sleep overnight, the laborers stayed outside a brick factory in November 1944. With no food provided, the guards moved them on in a forced march to the outskirts of Budapest.66 On their first night in charge, some new guards

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shot a man and a woman. Hoffman remembered that the woman died at the scene. The man received no medical care from those in uniform and died soon after due to an infection of his injuries.67 By the end of 1944 and into the first few months of 1945, targets included women killed and killed off in labor service battalions. Hungarian troops marched Hoffman and her fellow captive conscripts toward their deaths through a deportation process that at some point included the transfer of these victims into the custody of German guards such as those who ran the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. The account illustrates yet another change in the state’s use of conscription. Hoffman, having lived through the journey to Bergen-Belsen, only realized that major events had impacted the war in 1945 after she and her fellow captive camp laborers did not receive any food for several weeks. Scavenging for whatever sustenance they could find, Eva spent the mornings of the final three weeks of the ordeal carrying away the bodies of women who died overnight.68 In a notable description, she detailed how pervasive the deadly conditions became after guards abandoned the conscripts to die through starvation and disease. These labor conscripts had no food whatsoever. Without the energy to carry the weight of the dead, Eva lived among piles of nameless corpses. These people had been, in her words, thrown away.69 How does the triangulation of evidence document this case of genocidal conscription? Intentionally destructive acts of wastage meet clauses (b) and (c) of Article II of the UNCG. In the massacre at Cservenka, Hungarian military commanders collaborated with German and Bosnian-Croat military officers to kill members of the targeted population group in acts that meet clause (a).70 For collaborating with the events that directly killed victims, the actions of Axis-era Hungary meet conspiracy to commit genocide as documented by Article III clause (b) and complicity in genocide as detailed by clause (e) of the same article. The UNCG recognizes such acts as being punishable in international law.71 Perpetrators committed these killings as part of a broader genocidal plan ordered by state Magyar officials in Hungary, and carried out by Hungarian military commanders, officers, and guards. The deployment of unarmed conscripts to war zones caused serious bodily and mental harm to members of the targeted group and deliberately inflicted on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction. During Hungarian military campaigns in Ukraine and Russia, conscription provided commanders with the opportunity to commit genocide by intentionally destroying Jewish Hungarian conscripts. These victims died in the attritional destruction of war and through the deadly abuses imposed on them by their commanders. The evidence further notes that authorities of Axis-era Hungary also assigned conscripts to lethal worksites such as to the mines at

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Bor and participated as collaborators in massacres committed during death marches such as at Cservenka. By different means to those employed by Nazi occupiers of Hungary, perpetrators who deported the majority of Jewish Hungarians to the Reich’s concentration camp system including those whose deportations on foot began in late 1944, Axis-era Hungary used genocidal conscription to commit genocide by wastage from August 1942 until the state’s surrender to Soviet forces in February 1945. This testimony indicates that the state’s use of genocidal conscription carried into the administration of Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi’s puppet government and continued until Soviet troops overran Budapest. These crimes continued after Hofmann’s unit left the state for their arrival in Germany at which members of her unit worked and died during the last months of the war in 1945. The initiation of this genocidal agenda may have taken place simultaneously with the decision to deploy Jewish laborers with Magyar troops in June 1941, but such a conclusion would require additional evidence to effectively make that claim. To conclude, this part of the Holocaust that killed over 400,000 Hungarian civilians in 1944 also took the lives of as many as 76,000 Jewish Hungarian conscripts between August 1942 and February 1945 due to the state’s manipulation of the institution of conscription to carry out genocide by wastage under the guise of war. The state committed these acts while maintaining the pretense that such losses died as casualties in the wastage of war.72 NOTES 1. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Collaboration,” USHMM, 2020. 2. Paul R. Bartrop, Genocide: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 49. 3. Christopher R. Browning and Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of the Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), 14. 4. Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 26. 5. Penslar, Jews and the Military, 1–3. 6. István Deák, “Jewish Soldiers in Austro-Hungarian Society” (New York, 1975), 2–3, Center for Jewish History; Leo Baeck Institute. 7. Penslar, Jews and the Military, 4. 8. Penslar, 35–37. 9. Penslar, 64. 10. István Deák, “A Fatal Compromise? The Debate Over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 9, no. 2 (1995): 218.

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11. Tim Cole, “Hungary, the Holocaust, and Hungarians: Remembering Whose History?” (Hungary and the Holocaust Confrontation with the Past Symposium Proceedings, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, 2001), 3. 12. Cole, “Hungary, the Holocaust, and Hungarians,” 3. 13. Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (Wayne State University Press, 2000), 22. 14. Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 22. 15. László Csősz, “The Origins of the Military Labor Service in Hungary,” in The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later (New York: Central European University Press, 2016), 79. 16. Csősz, “The Origins of the Military Labor Service in Hungary,” 79–82. 17. Csősz, 82. 18. Csősz, 82–84. 19. Csősz, 84. 20. Csősz, 86. 21. Csősz, 79–82. 22. Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 24–25. 23. Hitler, “Defense Law 21 May 1935.” 24. Hitler. 25. Moshe Y. Herczl and Joel Lerner, Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 83–84. 26. Herczl and Lerner, Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, 85. 27. “Hungary to Rush Conscription Plan; Premier, After Visit to Hitler Says He Will Check Jews and Revolutionary Nazis Will Lead With Firm Hand,” New York Times, September 5, 1938. 28. “Hungary to Rush Conscription Plan.” 29. United Nations, “Arbitral Award Establishing the Czechoslovak-Hungarian Boundary, Decision of 2 November 1938,” in Reports of International Arbitral Awards, Vol. XXVIII, UN, 2007, 401–6. 30. Linda Margittai, Changing of the Guard within and beyond the Trianon Border: Two Case Studies: Hódmezövásárhely and Szabadka, 1938–1944 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, International Institute for Holocaust Research, 2014), 95. 31. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Axis Alliance in World War Two,” USHMM, 2019. 32. Randolph L. Braham, “The Hungarian Labor Service System (1939–1945): An Overview,” in Forced and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated Europe: Symposium Presentations (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 51; Zoltán Vági, László Csősz, and Gábor Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 46. 33. Vági, Csősz, and Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary, 47. 34. Vági, Csősz, and Kádár, 48, citing Elek Karsai, Fegyvertelen Álltak Az Aknamezőkön . . . Dokumentumok a Munkaszolgálat Történetéhez Magyarországon . . . Szerkeztette És a Bevezető Tanulmányt Írta [With Plates, Including Facsimiles] (Budapest: Magyar Izraeliták Országos Képviselete, 1962), 1:524–525. 35. Margittai, Changing of the Guard within and beyond the Trianon Border, 96.

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36. David Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 7. 37. Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East, 1. 38. Stahel, 10. 39. See Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets. 40. Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East, 2. 41. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Wannsee Conference and the ‘Final Solution,’” USHMM, 2020. 42. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts; Volume 2 (New York: Schocken, 1988), 1131. 43. Randolph L. Braham, “The Jewish Question in German-Hungarian Relations during the Kállay Era,” Jewish Social Studies 39, no. 3 (1977): 183–85. 44. Margittai, Changing of the Guard within and beyond the Trianon Border, 96. 45. Edmund Mandel, The Right Path: The Autobiography of a Survivor (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1994), 67–69. 46. Mandel, The Right Path, 63. 47. Mandel, 63. 48. Randolph L. Braham, “Interview 29402,” August 28, 1997, Segment 11, 03:10–03:25, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, University of Southern California. 49. Herczl and Lerner, Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, 141; Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1970), 182; Pór Dezső and Zsadányi Oszkár, Te Vagy a Tanú! [You Are the Witness]: Ukrajnától Auschwitzig (Budapest: Kossuth, 1947), 66. 50. Braham, “Interview 29402,” Segment 11, 28:06–28:29. 51. George Meles, “Interview 521,” January 9, 1995, Segment 37, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, University of Southern California. 52. Meles, “Interview 521,” Segment 38; Herczl and Lerner, Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, 141. 53. N. F. Dreisziger, “New Twist to an Old Riddle: The Bombing of Kassa (Kosice), June 26, 1941,” The Journal of Modern History 44, no. 2 (1972); Anthony Tihamer Komjathy, A Thousand Years of the Hungarian Art of War (Toronto: Rakoczi Foundation, 1982), 144–45. 54. Csősz, The Holocaust in Hungary, 99. 55. Vági, Csősz, and Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary, 47–48. 56. Raz Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 81. 57. Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians, 82. 58. Yehuda Deutsch, Bor: Slave Trade during Second World War (Natanyah, Israel: Y. Deutsch, 2003), 8, 16. 59. Deutsch, Bor, 131–37. 60. Deutsch, 135–36. 61. Deutsch, 135–36. 62. Meles, “Interview 521,” Segments 128–129, 01:12–02:03.

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63. Ilana Rosen, “Soldiers or Slaves? Narratives of Survivors of the Hungarian Army’s ‘Labor Service’ in World War Two and the Holocaust,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 26, no. 1 (2012): 95. 64. Eva Hoffman, “Interview 9777,” December 6, 1995, Segments 34–35, 05:26–06:13, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, University of Southern California. 65. Hoffman, “Interview 9777,” Segment 47. 66. Hoffman, Segment 43. 67. Hoffman, Segment 48, 20:20–20:27. 68. Hoffman, Segment 68, 10:00–10:22. 69. Hoffman, Segments 68–69, 10:39–11:01. 70. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 1. 71. United Nations, 1–2. 72. Peter Doyle, World War Two in Numbers (London: A & C Black, 2013), 64; Deutsch, Bor, 8, 16; Margittai, Changing of the Guard within and beyond the Trianon Border, 47.

PART III

Analysis, Contemporary Concerns, and Conclusions

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Comparative Findings

How did the Ottoman Empire and Axis-era Hungary requisition and deploy several different groups of conscripts during times of war? How did these states treat conscripts taken from multiple groups in different ways? By discussing similarities and differences in both cases, the line that delineates conscripted casualties who died in war and victims of genocidal conscription emerges. These factors indicate ways that could prevent a repeat of such devastating events in the future. Alongside the recruitment and deployment of regular armed forces sent to fight in both defensive and offensive operations, these states also utilized the institution of conscription to target, capture, and purge unwanted men, adolescent males, and in some cases also women taken from communities that suffered genocide. The transfer of civilian males into military roles has led some observers to dismiss or remain unaware of the reality that these men and teenaged boys also count as victims of genocide. These states used conscription to incrementally divide, isolate, subordinate, relocate, and destroy these conscripts and by ordering perpetrators, some of whom were also draftees, to carry out genocide by wastage and massacres. Given that Clausewitzian warfare between mass armies was so prevalent before and throughout the world wars, the number of states that accepted and expected the mass wastage of recruits includes all countries that engaged in total warfare throughout the modern era. The specific implementations of genocide by wastage can be summarized as including complicated and diverse events, policies, government actions, and military reactions. Ordinarily, the conclusion drawn from assessing the actions of these states would simply indicate the deaths of mass numbers of men and teenaged boys in an industrialized war. Mary Ann Warren’s term “gendercide,” meaning the deadly outcomes that impact males and females in different ways, goes some way to explain how the mass conscription of men can lead to their mass deaths, but this concept does not examine the intent of policy makers.1 In contrast to studies on gendercide, questions on intent are necessary when assessing a claim of 125

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genocide. Acknowledging that some conscripts taken from civilian populations belonged to groups that states subjected to genocidal actions separate from any wartime maneuvers leads any scholar of genocide to ask whether those conscripts could also be considered as victims of those broader genocidal campaigns. If the data supports such a view, then the next question to ask would consider aspects of how these states used conscription for war and as a tool of genocide. The only logical way to discern these differences and similarities is by assessing the roles of all groups of conscripts in both cases. ALL CONSCRIPTS OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE The Ottoman Empire used conscription to recruit soldiers and to create forced labor units composed of males taken from multiple different ethnic groups for several generations prior to and during World War I. The policy of askere alma—taking for military service—can be traced back at least as early as the 1830s and the reign of Sultan Mahmud II.2 Imprisoned and transferred to labor camps, askere alma impacted Muslim Ottoman conscripts throughout much of the 1800s. The normalized use of labor conscripts set a precedent that continued to divide population groups during World War I, by which time the policy specifically drafted Armenian men in the initial phase of the state’s genocidal campaign.3 Given that Ottoman conscription served different purposes and assigned various groups to such divergent roles, it is apt to compare the way the state treated wartime recruits, for instance Turkish troops, differently to many thousands of conscripted Armenian men and teenaged boys. Concerning the induction of soldiers conscripted for warfare, the process by which the Ottoman Empire constructed its modern army followed the advice of German allies. At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had in place a system of peacetime conscription in accordance with Germany’s modernizing designs that militarized its young male nationals. The empire, in following the trend of the time, insisted that all Muslim men aged twenty to forty-five years serve for three years in the infantry or as an alternative for four years in artillery and technical services.4 This prewar peacetime ordering barred non-Muslims from armed military service and instead derived a tax for exemption in place of conscripted service. These discriminatory segregation practices changed when the state issued its general mobilization orders at the outbreak of war.5 By the summer of 1914, Turkish conscripts soon found themselves commanding multiple Ottoman forces including labor battalions that consisted of members of multiple different population groups. The war brought about two distinct forms of service by Turkish conscripts in the Ottoman Empire. The first involved soldiering in battles whereas the second carried out acts

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of genocide against Armenian conscripts and civilians and likely also of Assyrian and Greek victims. Further evidence is needed to conclusively determine the fates of conscripts taken from the last two population groups. When considering the state’s treatment of Arab conscripts, the evidence suggests that the system identified such recruits for wartime soldiering in auxiliary capacities to supplement Turkish combatants. For instance, Ahmed Cemal Pasha led operations in the Sinai region of today’s Egypt in which Arab conscripts fought even though those troops could not speak Turkish.6 This regional aspect of military ordering mirrored the civil-military structuring of the empire that set Turkish leaders in command of provincial followers. Because Arab and Turkish conscripts fought in military campaigns and did not suffer genocidal impositions throughout their civilian communities across the empire, it is reasonable to conclude that the losses incurred by these ranks depended solely on military combat operations. In short, the deaths of conscripted Arab and Turkish forces took place under fundamentally different conditions than those of unarmed Armenians that the state enlisted into the military from December 1914 onward. This contrast demonstrates the different treatment that Turkish and Arab conscripts received from the state that sent them to fight in a war in which they could, as many did, die when compared to the way the Ottoman Empire took draftees who survivors and scholars recognize as dying at the hands of their own commanders and not because of an enemy’s attack. In short, the Ottoman state deployed armed Turkish and Arab Muslim conscripts into combat throughout World War I in which all resulting deaths can be viewed as casualties of the wastage of war and not in any form of genocidal destruction because this second conclusion would require the state’s intent to destroy members of those communities. Beyond the two larger Muslim population groups of Turks and Arabs, smaller Islamic communities of distinct ethnic population groups such as Kurds also provided conscripts to the state. Source materials often denote such conscripts in indefinite terms that infer their inclusion in larger bodies of Muslim forces. In multiple references, the accumulation of Muslim conscripts simply does not further designate identity into diverse ethnic categories. The consolidation of Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s pan-Islamic efforts in the decades preceding World War I may well explain why Ottoman sources compounded multiple Muslim groups into one integrated consortium.7 In the prewar years that witnessed the political violence of the Hamidian massacres in the 1890s, some references noted the presence of Kurds in groups identified as Çete bandits.8 While it is clear that Çete Muslim bandits carried out genocidal acts in coordination with Special Organization (SO) units composed of Turkish troops, the sources do not directly identify these militia forces as distinctly Kurdish participants of the Armenian genocide.9 Therefore, although

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potentially including drafted perpetrators, the evidence is inconclusive when considering the participation of Kurds in genocidal acts. A systematic use of Turkish and Çete conscripts conclusively details the genocidal role of perpetrator draftees.10 During World War I, ethnonationalist Turks who controlled the Ottoman Empire made use of conscription to carry out a part of the Armenian genocide. The ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP; Ittihad ve Terakki) rejected Armenian communities, sanctioned the military to selectively enforce the conscription of a variety of groups, and then destroyed Armenian conscripts sent to die under the attritional conditions of labor camps and at the hands of perpetrators who carried out massacres.11 Evidence includes several reports in which Çete units committed genocide against Armenians.12 These conscripted Çete perpetrators augmented Turkish Ottoman gendarmes in acts of torture and murder.13 To say that the reason why the state drafted any of these Turkish conscripts was to carry out genocide goes beyond the evidence. Even so, the findings clearly explain that Turkish and Çete conscripts did commit genocide. The evidence of this case documents the divergent ways that the state treated conscripts taken from various population groups during wartime. The groups that the state conscripted for wartime service included Arab, Armenian, Assyrian, Çete, Coptic Greek, Kurdish, and Turkish men and in some cases also teenaged boys. Of these, the civilians of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks suffered genocides across different regions of Anatolia. Armenian conscripts were also victims of genocide. From the remaining conscripted groups, the evidence suggests that drafted Arabs fought in the war and had little if anything to do with the CUP’s genocidal actions as a group, although local actions do not preclude the participation of individual or even regional Arab powers from collaborating with their Turkish leaders. Likewise to Arab enlistees, sources sparingly refer to Kurdish conscripts as a distinct identified population outside of the context of the state’s general grouping of Muslim forces. Given that some Kurdish Ottomans had contributed support to Turkish perpetrators during the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s, the issues of what Kurdish conscripts did during World War I and the extent to which Assyrian and Greek genocides included conscripts remain inconclusive. Having demonstrated some of the rudimentary differences that each conscripted group lived and died through, examining the complexities of sometimes conflictual government and military aspects of the CUP details some nuances present in this case. The events of the Armenian genocide developed haphazardly until April 1915.14 The bureaucratic inefficiencies that accompanied the initial implementation of the CUP’s genocidal campaign provide important insights into the disorganized and sporadic launch of genocidal actions against conscripts. Some commanders committed massacres in events that stand as clear examples of perpetrators who killed members of a targeted

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group in what were the early phases of the Armenian genocide. Even so, the dissemination of the state’s genocidal rather than wartime orders included interdepartmental disputes among certain civil-military institutions. Conflicts developed between commanders who required conscripted manpower to complete construction projects and those military officials who had, by early 1915, began to carry out order number eight of the “Ten Commandments.” Authorities from among this latter group attempted to follow instructions issued by the CUP to the army in December 1914 to kill Armenian men already inducted into the military.15 The conflicting demands led to a disagreement that lasted from September 1915 to July 1916. The administrative quarreling over whether to use laborers for their unpaid work or to kill and kill off these same conscripts eventually culminated in favor of the Ottoman Sixth Army. Commanders of the army performed something of a spectacle when massacring Armenian labor battalion conscripts who bureaucrats specifically had designated to fulfill construction duties. Records note why commanders went to such lengths to report the events of the massacre. They had hoped to demonstrate once and for all the ruling authority of the CUP’s orders to the military to kill Armenians under their command.16 Another example of massacres entered into the record of a postwar court case in 1918. The defendant, General Vehip Pasha, explained how Turkish military officials murdered almost two thousand Armenian conscripts.17 Alongside corroborating evidence, the findings clearly denote the state’s intent to destroy Armenian conscripts. Upon induction, Ottoman officials disarmed Armenian men, forced them to serve by way of completing arduous tasks until physically destitute, and then left conscripts to die from dehydration, disease, exposure, starvation, and untreated injuries. Perpetrators shot other victims as individuals and in groups. On attesting for service, commanders, gendarmes, and bandits killed many thousands of Armenian conscripts at and near the sites of their inductions.18 Given the ethnocentric political outlook of Ottoman rulers including the CUP, scholars of genocide may readily understand that conscription for World War I developed along two distinct ethnoreligious classifications. The first based recruitment by focusing on Islamic population groups and the second enlisted members of Christian communities. Following on from the massacres that had targeted Christians in prior generations, the CUP continued to treat communities that practiced Christianity with hostility and violence. By targeting Christian Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek fighting-aged conscripts to become victims of genocide from these multiple ethnoreligious communities, the state significantly reduced the capacity of such groups to resist the destructive plans of the Ittihadist regime.19 In contrast to the treatment suffered by Christians, Muslim recruits served in several military

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roles and served in higher ranks than those held by Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek men. In assessing the evidence provided here, it is reasonable to conclude that the Ottoman Empire recruited soldiers for war, laborers to materially support the conflict’s logistical requirements, to designate perpetrators to commit genocide, while also using conscription to target and destroy Armenians who died by wastage and in massacres. The state intentionally destroyed Armenian conscripts by way of a system of forced labor that induced wastage in events that meet clause (b) of Article II of the UN definition of genocide, processes that caused serious bodily and mental harm to members of the group, and by acts that meet clause (c) in which perpetrators deliberately inflicted on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Furthermore, evidence of massacres demonstrates that the state carried out acts that meet clause (a) of Article II by killing members of the group.20 A focus on the roles of conscripted perpetrators could identify a preventable aspect in the future. Comparing conscripts in the Ottoman military establishes the different ways that the state ordered and deployed various groups in pursuit of different outcomes. The evidence points out how several Christian groups included conscripted victims of genocide, whereas members conscripted from Muslim population groups either carried out the orders to commit genocide or died as casualties of war in combat operations. Beyond the recruitment practices that inducted and deployed hardened violent offenders, additional evidence corroborates in favor of the argument that the Ottoman Empire conscripted génocidaires. In one of the postwar trials held under British occupation, remarks made by a prosecutor of the Courts-Martial of January 13, 1920, identified the state as complicit in exterminating Armenians. The closing statement pointed out the intentional decisions made by the CUP and Dr. Behaeddin Șakir’s “battalions of butchers.”21 Whereas multiple ethnic groups became members of these units, only Muslims and no Christians served in these genocidal divisions. ALL CONSCRIPTS OF AXIS-ERA HUNGARY Among the groups from which the Hungarian state took conscripts, research on Jehovah’s Witnesses and socialists is inconclusive in comparison to the evidence available pertaining to the fates of other conscripts. The military inducted Christian Magyar troops for wartime soldiering in accordance with the prewar segregation policies that sought to isolate Jewish Hungarians within society. Jewish Hungarian and Roma men, women, and children served as groups of labor conscripts. Given that Axis-era Hungary maintained

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a strong bond with its ally Nazi Germany, it is not surprising that this case of genocide includes acts carried out by German Schutzstaffel (SS) forces. In what are a series of complex civil-military interactions, state leadership, martial commanders, unit officers, regular ranks, and auxiliary forces all participated in a range of acts that included those committed by Bosnian-Croat Handschar forces that supplemented German and Hungarian commanders. While this case involved several states, the analysis here examines the role of Axis-era Hungary, its conscription policies, and the delineations that separated the fates of conscripted groups. Testimonies provided by survivors who served as conscripted Jewish Labor Service battalion personnel described multiple aspects of the Hungarian state’s collaboration with Germany during the Holocaust. The evidence of this case includes orders issued by Hungary that demonstrate the implementation of genocidal conscription when Magyar commanders used the cover of war to kill off unarmed Jewish conscripts by deploying them into deadly environments.22 The role of Nazi Germany is an important secondary concern that contextualizes broader aspects of genocidal conscription in the Holocaust. In what may be an entirely coincidental if improbably disconnected series of events following the institutionalization of the Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference, Hungary changed its utilization of Jewish Hungarian conscripts in August 1942. The evidence conclusively demonstrates that the state killed off victims and reported their deaths as casualties of the wastage of war. These actions continued in multiple events during the middle years of the war. In addition to these acts of genocide by wastage, evidence also details the killing of conscripted Jewish victims in massacres. Survivors who lived through these events acknowledged that their fates depended upon the willful intentions of their commanders as they witnessed what was happening to so many thousands of their kin and community brethren. Those men who lived through both war and genocide survived at least in part due to the prudence of their unit leaders. Such officers pursued outcomes to protect, either actively or indifferently, the labor conscripts in their ranks. Their actions contrasted to the devastating ways of those officers who perpetrated this part of the genocidal campaign against Jewish Hungarians. The evidence also details the likely victimization of Roma conscripts in a similar system of genocidal conscription constructed by Axis-era Hungary in the last years of the war. Taking a broader view of the war, the state expected and instructed Christian Magyar Hungarian conscripts to both fight in combat zones and, for those officers in charge of Jewish Hungarian labor conscripts, also perpetrate genocide. The different experiences of these groups can be traced to the segregating policies implemented by the state before the war including those of Béla Imrédy and other leaders who allied closely with Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Shortly before World War II during the preparations of 1939,

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the state made attendance at Levente training camps mandatory for Magyar males aged twelve to twenty-one. These young men, teenagers, and preteen boys received training before becoming the reserves and recruits in what had rapidly become a largely ethnonationalist military structure.23 The different ways that the state treated conscripts mobilized from distinct population groups confirm the segregated structure of the Hungarian military as it existed from 1942 until the war’s end. Further demonstrating the segregated divide in the military ordering of Axis-era Hungary, Regent Miklós Horthy mobilized twenty-eight divisions to fight alongside Nazi forces by mobilizing 200,000 soldiers, 40,000 auxiliary troops, and 37,000 Labor Service personnel.24 Regular soldiers and auxiliary forces followed the antisemitic discrimination laws established prior to the war and consisted only of conscripts recruited from Christian Magyar Hungarian communities.25 The deployment of forced labor conscripts mostly consisted of Jewish Hungarian men and teenaged boys.26 A statistical estimate provides an approximate number of 300,000 casualties who died in combat while serving in the Hungarian Army, losses that have been viewed by some as only resulting from the wastage of war.27 Of significant importance to scholars of genocide, the figure does not account for losses incurred among the two main ethnoreligious categories present in Axis-era Hungary’s military. Therefore the reported total number of losses inadvertently repeats the falsehood that Jewish Hungarian conscripts died as casualties in the wastage of war and not as victims of genocide veiled under the guise of wartime operations. Because survivor testimonies and scholarly assessments provide an approximate number of between 50,000 and 76,000 Jewish Hungarian conscripts as having died during the war while serving under military command, it is reasonable to recognize that the figure of 300,000 total military casualties includes these victims of genocide. In acknowledging an estimate of the many Jewish Hungarian conscripts who the state sent to their deaths, the statistical calculation presented here also clarifies the number of Magyar soldiers who died as casualties due to the costs of the wastage of war. A range of perhaps as many as 224,000 to 250,000 Magyar conscripts died, whereas the remainder of between 50,000 and 76,000 Jewish Hungarian conscripts died as victims of genocide by wastage and massacres. Because the total of 300,000 only accounts for losses incurred in the operations launched against the Soviet Union, these figures do not account for the deaths of conscripted Jehovah’s Witnesses or Roma men, women, and children. While inconclusive, the evidence indicates that these groups also suffered losses in what are likely additional cases of genocide that took place simultaneously to others during World War II.

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On the topic of multiple cases of genocide carried out against several different groups of victims, the capacity of the state to conscript and deploy members of the Labor Service links directly to the events further afield throughout the Holocaust. As noted in Robert Rozett in his work Conscripted Slaves, this institution changed when Hungary sent Jews into war as part of the Hungarian Second Army’s advance into the Soviet Union.28 Due to Horthy’s order, the state captured men deemed as enemies of the state and deployed them to three special punitive units within the Labor Service. The state designated Jews, trade union leaders, social-democrat activists of different socialist and communist persuasions, and Jehovah’s Witnesses to these units while also rounding up other individuals whose deaths would contribute to what Horthy colloquially termed a blood-sacrifice made for the good of the country.29 Conscripts taken from targeted communities that the state intended to destroy who then died during the war lost their lives in acts that meet Article II clauses (b) and (c) of the UNCG, whereas conscripted victims who perpetrators killed in massacres meet clause (a).30 Commanders intentionally sent tens of thousands of men to die during the state’s advance against the Soviet Union. Although the military campaign began in 1941, policy documents and testimonial evidence explain how the state intentionally used the war as a way to destroy unarmed Jewish men beginning in August 1942 after the Wannsee Conference of January earlier that year began to institutionalize the genocidal Nazi plan known as the Final Solution throughout Axis-occupied Europe. Carried out simultaneously alongside the Final Solution, Axis-era Hungary subverted the institution of conscription to commit genocide. Because many of these events overlap with Nazi Germany’s continental campaign to exterminate Jewish and other targeted communities, it is necessary to clarify several significant details. Without doubt, the Holocaust includes multiple cases of genocide in which states prioritized the deportation of Jews to death camps ahead of military operations. Such events demonstrate the intention of perpetrators to destroy their targeted victims. Alternatively, the position of deniers and apologists posits that the prime motive of officials who transferred laborers into camps in which they died was so that those conscripts could maintain the necessary productive output required to continue the fight. Such views falsely assert that states only intended to exploit, instead of destroy, Jewish laborers. Such views have been roundly rejected since the first pioneers of Holocaust studies began to assess the genocidal events of World War II. A closer examination can point out that some governments had no role in the genocidal actions carried out by Nazis such as, for instance, in the case of Poland prior to Germany’s failed attempt to conquer the Soviet Union.31 Given the importance of such complex contextualization, it is reasonable to mention the

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contribution of genocidal conscription by Axis-era Hungary as being only one aspect within what are the many international relations that linked together states involved in the Holocaust. The context of this case sits within the broader genocidal plan carried out by multiple groups of perpetrators. As explained by Christopher Browning, World War II set off multiple opportunities for Nazi Germany and the Axis powers to initiate the mass destruction of their targets.32 Institutionalizing the Final Solution at Wannsee from January 1942 onward, perpetrators consolidated and internationalized the plans of the Holocaust’s architects who had already begun to blueprint their genocidal designs at the outbreak of war in 1939. Nazi forces experimented with several methods to carry out mass killing between 1939 and 1941 including by way of gas poisoning at Chelmno in December 1941.33 Weeks later at Wannsee, having already examined the practical methods by which Axis powers would then carry out mass killings through tried and tested genocidal acts, the Third Reich’s bureaucratic leadership received their orders to instigate the Final Solution in a change that altered pursuing victory in war to the new mission to commit genocide across Axis-occupied Europe. In what I consider as a highly significant finding of this book, the discussions held by officials present at Wannsee included the concept of killing conscripted targets by exposing them to the deadly environments that result in wastage during wartime operations. The following excerpt, relevant to the cases of genocide across Europe and Axis-era Hungary, are the words transcribed into the minutes of the meeting by Adolf Eichmann, one of the key planners of the Holocaust. Eichmann had recently received promotion in late 1941 to the rank of Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) of the SS.34 The minutes taken on January 20, 1942, at the meeting, and translated later into English, explained a proposal for how perpetrators would carry out a part of the Holocaust: In pursuance of the final solution, the Jews will be conscripted for labour in the east under appropriate supervision. Large labour gangs will be formed from those fit for work, with the sexes separated, which will be sent to these areas for road construction and undoubtedly a large number of them will drop out through natural wastage.35

The statement documents the centrality of conscription in the policy by which millions of civilians became victims of the Holocaust. These key architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust clearly stated that conscription for labor was to be utilized as one of the tactics by which government and military officials across Axis-occupied Europe would capture, deploy, and kill off their Jewish civilian targets. The last aspect of this

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genocidal policy explained how the Nazi regime accepted and expected many conscripts to “drop out through natural wastage.”36 The phrase explains how bureaucratic administrators at Wannsee realized Hitler’s plan to use the war to commit genocide by wearing down the civilian population that states conscripted and deployed to work as forced labor in arduous operations designed not to produce resources to fight the war but instead to incur the deaths of conscripts. The regime anticipated these losses to take place under the supervision of commanders, regular officers, auxiliary forces, and accompanying gendarmes. In what is a broader contribution in addition to the findings of the two cases, it is important to note that the anticipated results of the orders of the Final Solution issued to Nazi and Axis forces included orders and a method through conscription to commit genocide by wastage. The term “wastage” in the context of the translation of the Wannsee source requires some examination. The English translation presented at the Nuremberg Trials and later reproduced by John Mendelsohn and the University of Michigan provides an alternative translation of “eliminated by natural causes” in place of the phrase to “drop out through natural wastage” used by scholars Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance institute, cites this phrase as meaning to “drop out through natural reduction.”37 Because the precision of language is vital in translations, there emerges a need to reexamine the original German text.38 From the original minutes, the phrase used at the meeting in German was “durch natürliche Verminderung ausfallen wird,” which can be translated into English as meaning “will fail due to natural reduction.” The key word of Verminderung translates into English as meaning reduction or wastage and not causes. The original term confirms the Nazi state’s applications of wartime attrition in the orders of its strategy to wear down populations of captured civilians who became conscripts.39 Natural causes have no connection to the concept of reduction. Of significance to the argument of genocide by wastage, the word “reduce” is synonymous with Verbrauch and the many other references to depletion that Clausewitz made in his original German edition of On War several generations earlier when he referred to reduction, consumption, expenditure, and wastage.40 These instructions inducted millions of Jews throughout the Reich and exposed those conscripts to conditions designed to result in the natural reduction, the wastage, of these victims of genocide. When assessing the roles and identities of conscripted perpetrators, the overlapping stages of the Hungarian Holocaust require clarifying. Why did deportation take place so late on and after most other operations had ghettoized and destroyed so many other Jewish civilians throughout much of continental Europe? In considering the postponement of deportations in Hungary, the importance of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942

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cannot be underestimated. The meeting initiated many programs that sought to capture, relocate, and then kill and kill off millions of victims within the concentration camp system. Why did such actions not take place in Hungary until after Germany occupied the state from March 1944? The answer lies in the way that Magyar leaders and perpetrators attempted to conduct their own affairs independently from Nazi Germany. Antisemitic genocidal government and military leaders took it upon themselves to instigate a form of genocide from 1942 beyond the direct management of Hitler’s deputies. Population groups in Hungary other than Jewish civilians and conscripts faced different fates at this time. In somewhat exceptional circumstances, the state excused political elites and college-educated men from providing any form of military service.41 In what is an underexamined aspect of the Holocaust, genocides of other ethnonational and ethnoreligious minority communities include cases of Roma and Sinti Hungarians. A research agenda that only began in the 1990s noted the drafting of victims into “Gypsy work battalions” to comply with the Arrow Cross decree number 15.740/1944 of August 13, 1944.42 Note here that because the term “gypsy” is a derogatory term used as a slur against Roma and Sinti peoples, I only include the word for the purposes of accurately citing the text used in Hungary’s law. In no way should its use here be misrepresented as some form of slight or insult. The state forcibly enlisted approximately 50,000 Roma Hungarian men who served in near identical ways to those Jewish Hungarian forced laborers who the state drafted and deployed earlier in the war. There is one main difference in the way the state treated these two groups. Arrow Cross fascists captured Roma men after the retreat from advancing Soviet troops. Therefore, although the state was still at war, these conscripts served away from any foreign combat regions at agricultural, industrial, and construction sites in domestic locations within Hungary. There may have been sometime during the Soviet advance into Hungary in the last few months of 1944 and into the early part of 1945 that Nazi and Arrow Cross officials then wasted away or massacred Roma Hungarian conscripts on or near frontlines, but such research remains beyond the findings presented here. Current estimations conclude that Axis-era Hungary deported an estimated total of 28,000 Roma into the concentration camp system in what was a part of the porrajmos, a term used to describe the genocide of Roma, which translates from Romani into English as devouring.43 This word is also synonymous with consumption, which is yet another similar use of Clausewitz’s term “wastage.” Because no figure exists on the death toll or of those murdered while serving in Roma work battalions, the estimate I offer relies on an approximate equivalent to the ratio of losses incurred by Jewish Hungarian labor service conscripts. At least 50,000 Jewish Hungarians died out of an approximate total of 100,000 conscripts taken from this population group.

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Therefore, and with full disclosure of the speculative approximation of this evaluation, it is reasonable to conclude that perhaps as many as 25,000 labor service Roma may have died as victims of genocidal conscription carried out under the guise of war in addition to the 28,000 Roma sent to die at the Reich’s camps. The fact that the Arrow Cross deported thousands of other Roma victims, this position is merited but inconclusive due to the lack of available evidence pertaining to the state’s treatment of these draftees. While identifying the groups of wartime conscripts that sustained losses as victims of genocidal conscription are clear, detecting conscripted perpetrators is a more complicated task. In some histories, the contradictions of Regent Horthy’s leadership have muddled analyses of his actions and the role of the state. Having attempted to stay in the good graces of his Axis allies and having declared his reservations about the longevity and legitimacy of fascism, the jury is perhaps still considering the extent to which Horthy was culpable in the Holocaust. That he was involved is without doubt. Whether he issued genocidal orders is something that requires further discussion. According to Yad Vashem, Horthy’s antisemitism is clear, but his alliance with Hitler was more a relationship of necessary circumstance than as a deeply dedicated partner who jointly carried out genocide.44 The reason for the ambiguous verdict, or lack thereof, regarding Horthy as being a perpetrator is the issue of his intent. During his tenure, he issued various attempts that stalled, avoided, and partially placated Nazi interference in his running of Hungary. He gladly participated with Nazi Germany in claiming annexed lands taken from Hungary’s neighbors, and he provided resources in alliance with Hitler’s pursuit of victory against the Soviet Union. The results of winning against this enemy would have resulted in expanding the state’s boundaries eastward. As an ally in war, Horthy was complicit with the Nazis, but the case is inconclusive regarding his role as a perpetrator of genocide. The record shows that Horthy resisted the increasingly more depraved antisemitic regulations that accompanied Nazi rule across Europe during the war. From 1941 until 1944, Horthy shunned deportation orders until threatened by Hitler with the direct occupation of Hungary by what would become an embittered former ally. Because he then gave in to the Nazi demands to aid and abet in Germany’s plan to kill and kill off all Jews in Europe, he was complicit in the initial stages of the deportation process. Whether he knew the exact purpose that relocation would lead to is debatable. The fact that Horthy then changed his mind about Hungary’s complicity in the mass transportation project of hundreds of thousands of Jewish Hungarians speaks volumes. It cost him his leadership, a position that would have been untenable in the wake of Hungary’s entirely unavoidable defeat to the Soviet Army some few months after Horthy attempted to cease the deportation orders. At some point, Horthy realized that deportation would inevitably mean death. Even in

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the most generous of interpretations, an argument could suggest that he only knew this as late as 1944 and after Nazi forces began to occupy the offices of the Hungarian state.45 What is more likely, given his attempts to resist the discrimination practices of starring and ghettoization, is that Horthy knew what the war would mean for Jews much earlier in either 1941 or 1942.46 These alterations to policy decisions and contradictory actions also played out at different levels throughout Hungary’s military. Providing interviews decades after the war, survivors Randolph L. Braham and Dan Danieli reported interactions that include a range of different behaviors exhibited by various commanders. Braham, for instance, recalled two contrasting figures. One, his own commander, performed their role without malice and extended comparatively humane treatment toward conscripts. Among the more benign commanders was Imre Reviczky, a person who understood the reality of the war’s end and a return to civilian life one day in which he would need to be able to live with himself and alongside any survivors that made it to the postwar society. Reviczky’s attitude differed in degrees of likeness and type from a sergeant named Hollós, a commander who gained a reputation as being brutal toward Labor Service conscripts. Hollós not only participated in but also led many beatings of conscripts.47 Danieli’s recollections described how he and his family worked as members of a labor service unit during his childhood in World War II. He remembered how the work they provided preserved and ultimately saved their lives. The productive capacity that some conscripts could yield toward the end of the war enabled a few commanders to protect a small number of work battalions. Danieli explained how Hungarian officials tasked by Nazi occupiers with meeting industrial quotas put married Jewish Hungarian couples with children to work through what became an unlikely path to survival. By October 1944, mass deportations had emptied rural Hungary of Jewish communities. Danieli lived and worked at a guarded compound located on the outskirts of Budapest as part of a small enclave of men, women, and children of approximately 1,500 Jews. Intermittently, the German air force parachuted supplies to the Hungarian Army. The few remaining Jewish Hungarian Labor Service conscripts, who by this time in late 1944 included women and children in addition to older men and married fathers, recovered and unpacked the resources. Their relatively stable lifestyle held some semblance of semi-autonomous community, a rare political status that included their access to subsistence levels of food, shelter, and freshly tapped water that sprang from wells.48 One reason that explains the apparent contradictory behaviors of some military guards, officers, and commanders originates in World War I. The honorable prestige held by veterans of the Great War extended to Jewish Hungarian soldiers who lived on into World War II. In the order that subordinated many

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Jewish Hungarians from April 1941, Horthy included a special exception that allowed soldiers who served with distinction during World War I to keep their ranks and uniform insignia.49 This exemption, which lasted until August 1942, may go some way to clarify his later resistance to Nazi forces that hoped to enforce ghettoization and begin deportations. Although evidence illustrates how certain perpetrators carried out their crimes after states had conscripted them into military service, no evidence exists that the primary purpose of their recruitment was to carry out the extermination of Jewish Europeans. Instead, the evidence shows that commanders assigned such tasks in the allocation of instructions disseminated in the everyday course of the war. The intersectional aspects of these two forms of mass destruction intrinsically linked the motivations of the conflict to seek victory over foreign enemies and pursue the international destruction of groups that perpetrators deemed unwanted. In one significant initial episode of the genocidal violence that marked the summer of 1941, German Einsatzgruppen and local Ukrainian auxiliary troops followed along after the wave of violence that Axis forces unleashed in the initial advance into the Soviet Union. These forces killed approximately 18,000 Jews who had recently left Hungary. These civilians originated from a variety of different European heritages. Hungarian officials deported them across the state’s boundary from where they continued to the destination of Kamanets-Podolski in western Ukraine.50 German and Ukrainian perpetrators massacred these victims, none of whom were conscripts, who had been escorted by Hungarian troops during the deportation. Although the issue of detailing how these perpetrators, who by 1941 served under martial law in conscripted units, originally became recruited and deployed exists beyond the central focus here, further research conducted by historians of the Holocaust would likely be able to trace the impact of conscription policies on the recruitment and deployment of Christian Magyar, German SS, Bosnian-Croat, Ukrainian, other Axis, and auxiliary perpetrators. Such research could yield significant findings when contextualized in the wake of the notable contributions of Christopher Browning’s examination of conscripted German perpetrators who committed mass shootings as part of the Holocaust.51 While Hungary was complicit in the relocation of these victims, additional evidence is necessary to ascertain the extent to which the state intentionally conspired with the perpetrators of the genocidal massacre at Kamanets-Podolski. Killing people off by first capturing and then deploying them through the power made available to perpetrators by enacting conscription had, it would seem, become a norm in the latter years of World War II. Once Budapest fell to Soviet troops in February 1945, all of Hungary surrendered in April as German forces fled westward. These occupying forces then deported approximately 100,000 to 170,000 ethnic Germans during the final weeks of the war

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to camps within Soviet territories. These captives, some soldiers and others civilians, became forced laborers in the Soviet Union where an unknown number of thousands perished.52 Again, this case, while supplementing the view of the general strategy of the wastage of captives, because the Soviet Union was the perpetrator of this case that wasted away a captured group of enemies, the topic is one that requires further research. To conclude, Hungarian administrators, officers, chiefs, colonels, brigadiers, lieutenants, and captains managed each incremental aspect of the outcomes that each unit experienced.53 Records beyond the attaché case order are yet to be found, if indeed they still exist, or ever did in written form. The Axis government established one bureau and a subagency within the military to cover their tracks. Reporting on such events took on the guise of losses caused by the wastage of war. The misreporting of conscripted victims took place within another administrative wing of the Royal Hungarian Army known internally as Group X: Casualty Administration.54 Once officers posted near the frontlines reported the deaths of conscripts under their command, the government chalked up these losses as expected, accepted, and unavoidable while simultaneously carrying out genocide by wastage under the guise of war. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS In the effort to identify a similar aspect that could yield a form of indicating the need for intervention, or for constructing some form of preventative measure today and in the future, the findings provide several significant factors that existed across these distinct groups of conscripts. The data illustrates that other conscripts died as casualties of war. Some findings remain inconclusive discerning Assyrian, Greek, and Kurdish draftees in case one and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Roma conscripts in case two. The comparative findings of these cases illustrate several repeating patterns present across multiple conscripted groups. For instance, a relationship exists between all unarmed groups and their fates as victims in broader campaigns of genocide and, where evidence demonstrates so, also by genocidal conscription. Inconclusive aspects offer interesting possibilities for further research such as the many questions and answers that would clarify the roles played by Kurds in case one and the undocumented issue of Roma women and children in case two. Without doubt, gendered violence was a significant issue in both cases in terms of the experiences of victims, as has extensively been shown in other works. Within the context of conscription, it seems very likely that perpetrators also carried out acts of sexualized violence based

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on the propensity of such crimes in both cases. This topic requires additional research. Of those cases where research aspects are complete, the phases of division, isolation, subordination, relocation, and destruction indicate a commonality at the moment a targeted group became subordinate to the command of troops that represented and carried out the orders of a genocidal state. Tables 6.1 and 6.2 provide summaries of the different treatments that these conscripted groups encountered while under orders. From table 6.1, the estimated number of 240,000 to 300,000 deaths includes all Ottoman missing in action and combat losses of Arabs, Kurds, and Turks.55 Data in table 6.2 with an estimated total number of 300,000 deaths incorporates all members from every group that the state deployed to war zones under the command of the Hungarian army.56 These attempts to claim power and do away with certain minority communities indicate other relationships among the groups. Before both wars, empowered officials established integration policies to bring multiple groups together in nationalizing projects that the states manifested in their militaries. Later, the collapse of these missions and the resulting social divisions fed into the genocidal schemes of the most destructive of officials. The wars in both cases accelerated the genocidal implementation of preexisting ethnonationalist plans. In case one, the selective assimilation process of Turkish leaders sought to incorporate Arab, Çete, and Kurd conscripts in a broader ethnoreligious class of Muslim Ottomans. Perpetrators then utilized this group to distinguish the difference between themselves and the Christian communities that the state targeted including Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek conscripts. Such initiatives mirrored the widescale social engineering that worked toward a Muslim order and the extradition, ostracization, and destruction of Christians. In the second case, instead of forming through a shared religious perspective, the bonding ideology of antisemitic fascism brought perpetrators originating from separate regional and national territories together to carry out genocide against Jewish Hungarians. DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS As outlined in tables 6.1 and 6.2, these groups consisted of conscripts inducted from Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Çete, Greek, Kurdish, and Turkish communities in the first case and from Bosnian-Croat, German, Jehovah’s Witness, Jewish Hungarian, Magyar, and Roma populations in the second case. Both states intended to treat different conscripts in selective and various ways including their intentions to destroy some but not all members of selected groups. Of the conscripted population groups, unarmed Assyrian,

U, LV P U, LV U P

V

Y

Y N Y N N

U

N

Other Victims Genocidal Conscription from Same Status Group

U U Y U Y

Y

Y

1

U U Y U Y

Y

Y

2

U U Y U N

Y

N

3

Phase

U U Y U Y

Y

Y

4

U U Y U Y

Y

Y

5

N Y N Y Y

N

Y

Armed Part of 240,000 to 300,000 360,000 to 400,000 U U U U Part of 240,000 to 300,000

Approximate Number of Deaths

Wartime Status

U, LV Y, P U, LV U Y, P

Y, V

U

Evidence of Massacre

U U U U W

G

W

Type of Wastage

Destructive Outcome

Key: 1 = Division; 2 = Isolation; 3 = Subordination; 4 = Relocation; 5 = Destruction; G = Genocide by Wastage; LV = Likely Victim; N = No; P = Perpetrator; U = Unknown; V = Victim; W = Wastage of War; Y = Yes.

Assyrian Çete Greek Kurd Turk

Ottoman Arab Empire Armenian

Conscripted Wartime Group

Table 6.1: Conscripts Across Case One

V

U

Y

Y

U U

U

1

3

4

5

N

Y Y

Y Y

Y

U U U U

Y

Y

U U U U U U U U

U U U U

2

Phase

N

Y

N

Y U

Y

Armed

50,000 to 76,000 230,000 to 250,000 Likely 25,000

U U

U

Approximate Number of Deaths

Wartime Status

U, LV

Y, P

Y, V

Y, P U

Y, P

Evidence of Massacre

G

W

G

U U

U

Type of Wastage

Destructive Outcome

Key: 1 = Division; 2 = Isolation; 3 = Subordination; 4 = Relocation; 5 = Destruction; G = Genocide by Wastage; LV = Likely Victim; N = No; P = Perpetrator; U = Unknown; V = Victim; W = Wastage of War; Y = Yes.

Y

Roma

V

Y P

P U

N U

N

P

N

Magyar

Axis-Era Bosnian-Croat Hungary Handschar German SS Jehovah’s Witnesses Jewish Hungarian

Conscripted Wartime Group

Other Victims Genocidal Conscription from Same Status Group

Table 6.2: Conscripts Across Case Two

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Greek, and Roma men, faced similar treatment and outcomes when compared to Armenian and Jewish Hungarian conscripts. Across both cases, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, and Magyars all held arms and many fell in combat. Punitive measures imposed on soldiers from within these groups did not take place en masse in any equivalent terms to the ways that these states treated, killed, and killed off Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, Jewish Hungarian, and Roma victims. Evidence of orders to destroy these groups preceded deadly imprisonment and massacres in both cases. Orders from each state diverted Çete, German SS, and Bosnian-Croat conscripts from their wartime duties to carry out massacres that killed several thousands of drafted victims. The triangulation of the evidence defines and explains the ways in which the Ottoman Empire and Axis-era Hungary correspondingly took unarmed conscripted Armenian Ottomans and Jewish Hungarians and deployed them in wars in which both groups became victims of genocide by wastage and massacres. The emergence of ethnonational political forces that attempted to claim the leadership of these states, namely Turkish Ottomans and Magyar Hungarians, took advantage of social insecurities present throughout each state to respectively single out, scapegoat, capture, and then destroy Armenian Ottomans and Jewish Hungarians. In light of the evidence, the concept that these wars held within them an unavoidably destructive inevitability is one that should be consistently rejected. With the privilege of hindsight, apologist histories that continue to claim that the deaths of conscripts taken from targeted communities in these wars were inevitable is nothing more than the denial of genocide. Accepting these cases as including conscripted victims of genocide opens the potential for insightful debate into other genocides and other wars. Another comparable factor present concerns the practices of division that led to isolated political positions for both Armenian and Jewish populations. Armenian political leaders, having survived historical massacres and discrimination from oppressive regimes, received little to no support from Austro-Hungarian, French, German, and Russian delegates in the lead up to World War I.57 After the Ottoman Empire lost ground in the Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913 and then joined its ally Germany in fighting the Great War, the state isolated Armenians through a policy process that implemented discriminatory and unequal levies of selective conscription. In the second case, examples of the partial acceptance and inclusion of Jewish Hungarians within the broader social order punctuate the histories that document the many civil advancements achieved by Jewish communities in Hungary throughout the 1800s. These processes attempted to instill a shared vision of antidiscrimination and contributed to the development of nationalism that transcended ethnoreligious divides. This unity became a point of public pride through

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the state’s respectful honoring of Jewish Hungarian soldiers who had fought in World War I.58 After the state’s independence and subsequent territorial declines, reactionary parties initiated an ethnonationalist resurgence founded upon antisemitic rhetoric. Outlining the most significant comparative factors, I note preconditions, genocidal events, and general patterns that existed in both cases. Preconditions: 1.  Members of a majoritarian population group held political power. 2.  Previous wartime losses shrank the state’s territory. 3.  At least one minority community faced discrimination. 4.  Selective conscription historically applied different impositions upon groups. Genocidal Events: 1.  States utilized both combat and labor conscription. 2.  Laws ordered conscripted members of targeted groups to serve as subordinates. 3.  Orders prohibited targets from serving in regular combat units. 4.  Service options for targets became limited to forced labor units. 5.  Perpetrators served in higher ranks and in command of targeted conscripts. 6.  A military setback accelerated conscription of the targeted population. 7.  Laws prohibited targets from carrying weapons. 8.  Perpetrators subjected victims to waste away in environments designed to result in their deaths. 9.  Perpetrators committed massacres. Summary of Cases: 1.  Officials intended to destroy members of a targeted group. 2.  The state disarmed targeted conscripts prior to killing and killing them off by wastage and in massacres. 3.  The perpetrator’s intentions, the group targeted, and the deadly actions all meet distinctions listed in the UNCG. Further research will likely yield insights into the fates of other groups of men, women, and also the likely cases of genocidal conscription of child soldiers and laborers. Chapter 7 includes some discussion on the contemporary relevance of this latter concern pertaining to children that have been forcibly recruited into militias, militaries, and enslaved labor units in recent years.

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NOTES 1. Mary Anne Warren, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld), 1985, 5, 9. 2. Reid, “Total War,” 41. 3. Reid, 42. 4. Erickson, Ordered to Die, 8. 5. Erickson, 8. 6. Erickson, 153. 7. Çetinoğlu, “The Mechanisms for Terrorizing Minorities,” 278. 8. Astourian, “On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict,” 198–99, 204. 9. Graber, Caravans to Oblivion, 64; Derderian, “Common Fate, Different Experience,” 6. 10. Astourian, “On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict,” 198–99, 204. 11. Hovannisian, The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, 229, 242; Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 95–96, 116, 138. 12. James J. Reid, Crisis of the Ottoman Empire: Prelude to Collapse, 1839–1878 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2000), 108–9; Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Awakening to International Human Rights (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 178. 13. Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide,” 114. 14. Ernesto Verdeja, “The Political Science of Genocide: Outlines of an Emerging Research Agenda,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 2 (2012): 315–16. 15. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap, 159–60. 16. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 282–83, 282nn193–94. 17. Akçam, 398, 398n83. 18. Christopher Walker, “British Sources on the Armenian Massacres, 1915–1916,” in A Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide (London: Zed, 1985), 53–55. 19. Üngör, “When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder,” 146–47; Basso, “‘All Four Seasons and I Will Die,’” 281. 20. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 1. 21. Takvîm-i Vekâyn, no. 3771, Verdict of the Mamüretülaziz Trial, February 9, 1920, quoted by Basso, “‘All Four Seasons and I Will Die,’” 263. 22. Herczl and Lerner, Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, 141; Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others, 182; Pór Dezső and Zsadányi Oszkár, Te Vagy a Tanú! 66. 23. Csősz, “The Origins of the Military Labor Service in Hungary,” 86. 24. Cecil D. Eby, Hungary at War: Civilians and Soldiers in World War Two (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 18–19. 25. “Hungary to Rush Conscription Plan”; Herczl and Lerner, Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, 83–84; Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 24–25. 26. Eby, Hungary at War, 18–19. 27. Doyle, World War Two in Numbers, 65.

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28. Robert Rozett, Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, International Institute for Holocaust Research, 2013), 15–16. 29. Rozett, Conscripted Slaves, 48–49; Karsai, Fegyvertelen Álltak Az, 62–63. 30. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 1. 31. Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 130–31. 32. Browning and Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution, 11. 33. Browning and Matthäus, 415–19. 34. Moshe Pearlman, The Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 194; Public Broadcasting Service, “Adolf Eichmann (1906– 1962). American Experience,” PBS, 2020. 35. Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945, 1131. 36. Noakes and Pridham, 1131. 37. Yad Vashem, “Protocol of the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942.” 38. Adolf Eichmann, John Mendelsohn, and University of Michigan, “Wannsee Protocol January 20, 1942; Translation” (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan), 6; Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945, 1131. 39. Adolf Eichmann, “PROTOKOLL Der ‘Besprechung Über Die Endlösung Der Judenfrage’ Vom 20. Januar 1942” (Trägerverein des Hauses der Wannsee-Konferenz, January 20, 1942), 7. 40. The original in German reads, “Der Kraftaufwand des Gegners liegt in dem Verbrauch seiner Streitkräfte, also in der Zerstörung derselben von unserer Seite; in dem Verlust von Provinzen, also in der Eroberung derselben durch uns,” Clausewitz, “Vom Kriege. Book 1, Chapter Two (1832)”; Hemetsberger, “Verbrauch.” 41. Eby, Hungary at War, 45. 42. Gerhard Baumgartner, “Voices of the Victims: Hungary,” RomArchive, accessed June 17, 2022. 43. Ian Hancock, “A Glossary of Romani Terms,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 45, no. 2 (1997): 339; David M. Crowe, “The Roma Holocaust,” in The Holocaust’s Ghost: Writings on Art, Politics, Law and Education (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: University of Alberta Press, 2000), 178–210. 44. Yad Vashem Shoah Resource Center, “Horthy, Miklos” (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, no date). 45. Robert J. Hanyok, “Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939–1945,” Center for Cryptological History: National Security Agency 4, no. 9 (2005): 96–98. 46. Yad Vashem Shoah Resource Center, “Horthy, Miklos.” 47. Braham, “Interview 29402,” Segment 11, 03:07–03:30. 48. Dan Danieli, “Interview 3019,” June 6, 1995, Segments 71–73, 83, 87, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, University of Southern California. 49. Herczl and Lerner, Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, 141. 50. Marilyn J. Harran and John Roth, The Holocaust Chronicle (Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International, Ltd., 2000), 241, 256.

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51. Browning, Ordinary Men, 221. 52. C. Peter Chen, “Hungary in World War II,” World War Two Data Base, 2014. 53. Leo W. G. Niehorster, The Royal Hungarian Army 1920–1945: Organization and History, Vol. 1 (Bayside NY: Axis Europa Books, 1999), 193. 54. Niehorster, The Royal Hungarian Army 1920–1945, 191. 55. Erickson, Ordered to Die, 211. 56. Doyle, World War Two in Numbers, 65. 57. Roderie H. Davison, “The Armenian Crisis, 1912–1914,” The American Historical Review 53, no. 3 (1948): 481–82. 58. Israel Defense Forces & Defense Establishment Archives, “World War One— Jewish Soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian Army,” IDF, 2017.

Chapter 7

Potential Cases Today and Conclusions

Given that much of this work has focused on the historic development of the wastage of war and its outcome as a tool by which certain states have used conscription to commit genocide, this final chapter examines contemporary issues by applying the preconditions of the past to data on conscription policies employed by authoritarian regimes today. The information assists in identifying groups at risk today and provides avenues for reform to prevent any repeat of either the destruction of conscripts or the recruitment of perpetrators.

SURVEYING EXISTING PRECONDITIONS The topics of formal and informal discrimination in societies and the recursive consequences of military training, law, and labor are prevalent in multiple countries throughout the world. From among available data sources including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Freedom House Index (FHI), the following analysis identifies potential cases of genocidal conscription that may already be underway or could take place in the future.1 The source information from the CIA noted conscription policies in existence in 177 states and territories. From this large sample, the analysis discounts a few locations as holding only territorial semi-autonomous governmental authority at best such as in Western Sahara, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Additionally, some locations have no or very limited data, such as in Libya. Of those states that have the power to conscript, figures 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 illustrate the number of authorities that use or do not use any form of conscription as of December 2022. Along with these identified states, I include the many types of conscription policies noted by the CIA’s index, which include registration 149

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Figure 7.1 Conscription in Free Territories Source: Author’s credit. Central Intelligence Agency; Freedom House.

Figure 7.2 Conscription in Partly Free Territories Source: Author’s credit. Central Intelligence Agency; Freedom House.

drafts for alternative, combat, child recruitment, labor, men only, men and women, reserve, training, and unofficial service requirements with the latter form used by militias. Contemporary data on comparative political freedom and mandatory military service policies demonstrates a causal inference in the relationship between authoritarianism and conscription. Taking first the list of free countries, a designation made by the FHI based on civil liberties in societies and political rights that these governments protect, most free states do not require citizens to provide any form of conscripted service. Figure 7.1 lists thirty-seven free states as not using conscription while twenty-seven do either in active or latent forms such as is the case in the United States with its registration mandates for the Selective

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Service System. Because the FHI ranks each of these territories as free, the presence of conscription policies is not an indicator of risk due to the ability of civilians to request commutation, exemption, deferment, or alternative service roles for which they could choose to avoid combat zones. The share of those states that utilize some form of conscription is just over 42 percent in contrast to the remaining 57.8 percent that do not use or hold in reserve any process to exert any form of mandatory service from anyone in the general population of those nation-states. The FHI data also cites partly free places around the world that, when synchronized with policies on military recruitment systems available from the CIA, illustrate a similar pattern of distribution of conscription policies as compared to the first set of states. Figure 7.2 lists the number of partly free territories that either require or do not use any form of conscripted service. As with the first category of free states, the majority of partly free territories around the world does not utilize conscription at all. Of the total, thirty-one states have no such policies whereas twenty-four authorities do conscript draftees of some form. The status of partly free means that some of these twenty-four states have various alternative options of required service while others do not. Given that this indicator is beyond the core focus of the analysis that seeks to identify authoritarian states that employ types of conscription today, further categorizing these partly free states with conscription policies would require an additional study to address the extent of risk to civilians and of the presence of potential perpetrators in these territories. Instead, the focus here examines the most likely places and groups of people alive today that could potentially face the risk of either being the victim of or the enlisted perpetrator of genocidal conscription. As with free states, the proportion of governing regimes that use conscription in partly free political orders is significantly less than those that do not claim the power to implement a draft. The rate of those partly free states and territories that use or reserve the capacity to implement some form of conscription is slightly over 43.6 percent. The minor comparative increase from free to partly free holds little if any indicative insights. However, this increase between different categories representing greater and lesser degrees of political freedom and government coercion radically shifts when accounting for conscription in territories that the FHI considers as being not free. Figure 7.3 details the use and omission of conscription policies across not free states and territories of the world.

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Figure 7.3 Conscription in Not Free Coercive Territories Source: Author’s credit. Central Intelligence Agency; Freedom House.

Because Western Sahara is a province administered by the United Nations, it is not applicable, and with one state’s data not available, that of Libya, the results of not free states and territories that use some form of conscription is thirty-nine out of a total of fifty-six national governing authorities. This majority inverses the trend seen in both free and partly free categorizations of conscription policies across the world. Only seventeen not free states and territories make no claims to enact any form of conscripted service upon those citizenries. The significant increase in the use of drafts by regimes that oppress civil liberties and do not protect political rights throughout these thirty-nine societies illustrates a clear correlation between authoritarianism and conscription. The proportional rate of those territories the FHI considers to be not free that use some form of conscription is just over 69.6 percent of all such governing authorities. Given the positive correlation of this indicative relationship, that which connects increased authoritarian practices with an increase in a state’s use of conscription policies, what use in terms of prevention or intervention might this conclusion provide? Where throughout the world are these thirty-nine states? Are any of them currently at war or have unstable political borders with any neighboring state? How do they utilize conscription policies? Do any provide civilians with alternative options to mandatory military servitude or from enlistment in forced labor battalions? Which preconditions present in the cases documented in chapters 4 and 5 are currently applicable to those states that do not provide alternative options to draftees today?

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CONTEMPORARY GROUPS OF MOST CONCERN It is possible to generate a set of predictions and offer suggestions on how to prevent genocidal conscription today and in the future. I base these suggestions on the indicative preconditions that were present in the cases of the Ottoman Empire and Axis-era Hungary. I assess which of the thirty-nine places throughout the world that are both not free and use conscription have also experienced several of these preconditions. The findings of this analysis point to regional and territorial stability concerns that endanger identifiable groups in a certain set of these territories. Illustrating regional concerns can note which supranational intergovernmental agencies should begin to address the issue of genocidal conscription. The lack of political stability in a number of these territories pinpoints exactly which places are at a comparatively increased risk due to recent changes made to the borders of these states involved in recent warfare. Table 7.1 organizes the sample group of thirty-nine states and territories into the global regions of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Oceania has a zero count and so is not included in the table. The data shows that Asia has the highest number of places of concern with twenty-one authoritarian regimes that conscript recruits in some way.2 Second to this vast geographical collection of governments and peoples is Africa with fourteen.3 Given the extensive use of child soldiers during the genocide of 1994, it is important to acknowledge that the Rwandan government has ceased recruiting child soldiers and in 2019 joined a program to end the practice through international cooperation with the United Nations and the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative.4 Similarly, Burundi, Iraq, and Yemen, each of which have divergent informal recruitment systems at local and tribal levels but not through a nationalized institution, along with the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, have informal practices of conscription that include the compelled and forced enlistment of children, the last two of which consistently utilize mandatory recruitment practices for conflict against civilians and officials in the State of Israel. Of importance here, Europe includes both Russia and Belarus, two states that are currently embroiled in the conflict in Ukraine with the former actively engaged in war across its borders.5 To conclude this projection of current concerns, the analysis provides a summary of the most likely hotspots in which several preconditions, such as a history of interethnic violence and unstable state borders, are present. While this refinement notes the most likely current cases, any state with a history of selective conscription of different groups and mass destruction in the wastage of modern war may also have committed genocide by wastage by implementing genocidal conscription. A notable example of such history

Table 7.1: States and Territories of Concern by Region and Conscription Type Country

Type of Conscription

Africa

Algeria Angola Central African Republic Chad Democratic Republic of the Congo Egypt Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Ethiopia Guinea Mali South Sudan Sudan

M, T M, T C, CR, M A, MW, R, T C, R, T M, R, T M, T L, MW, R, T C, M, R, T R, T C, MW, R, T M, T MW, T

Americas

Cuba Venezuela

M, T MW, T

Asia

Afghanistan Azerbaijan Cambodia China Gaza Strip Iran Jordan Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Laos North Korea Qatar Syria Tajikistan Thailand Turkey Turkmenistan United Arab Emirates Uzbekistan Vietnam West Bank

C, M C, M M, T L, MW, R, T CR, U M, R, T A, M, T M, R, T M, R, T M, T L, MW, R, T M, T C, M, R, T A, M, T M, T A, M, T M, T A, M, T A, M, R, T M, R CR, U

Europe

Belarus Russia

A, T C, M, R, T

Key: A = Alternative; C = Combat; CR = Child Recruitment; L = Labor; M = Men only; MW = Men and Women; R = Reserve; T = Training; U = Unofficial in militias.

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is the likely case of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea, in the 1950s. Even though this state’s borders have become relatively stable over time, its former instability and the massive loss of life during combat and in labor camps indicates its potential as a case that requires further research. Table 7.2 lists eight states of most concern from among the total of thirty-nine authoritarian regimes that utilize some form of conscription.6 Significant preconditions derived from the two historical cases of genocidal conscription include national formal mandatory recruitment practices, the lack of any alternative service option for a citizen to choose, and the presence of some relevant form of territorial instability. Postgenocidal states including Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda, and Turkey are of significant interest, but each fall beyond the focus here due to either regional subnational informal recruitment practices, an availability of an alternative service option, or the government’s maintenance of relatively stable territorial borders. The table includes ethnoreligious categories of population demographics and a suggestion of a cause of any potential dispute. Figure 7.4 illustrates the locations of the eight states of most concern. As figure 7.4 illustrates, the borderlands that partition Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Sudan are highly significant and indicate ongoing regional crises today. Due to ongoing instability across the borders of each of several states, this prediction highlights Russia’s treatment of Ukrainian Russian recruits, China’s handling of Hui and Uyghur communities, Afghani Pushtun Table 7.2: Eight States of Most Concern Group Identity in Power Afghanistan China Eritrea Ethiopia Russia

South Sudan Sudan Syria

Sunni Pashtun Pluralist Han Christian Tigrinya Oromo, both Christian and Sunni Christian Russian

Traditional animist Dinka Sunni Sudanese Arab Shia Alawi

Disempowered Groups

Conflict Issue(s)

Shia Hazaras Sunni Hui and Uyghur Sunni Tigre and Saho Amhara mostly Christian, Somali mostly Sunni, Tigrayan mostly Christian Christian Chuvash, Christian Ukrainian, Sunni Bashkir, Sunni Tatar, Sunni and Sufi Chechen Traditional animist Nuer, Christian Shilluk Fur, Beja, Nuba, Nubian (all majority Sunni) Sunni Arab (majority), Sunni Kurd, Christian Greek, Christian Armenian

Religion Politics Religion Politics, religion, and tribal Politics

Religion Politics Politics

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Figure 7.4 Eight States of Most Concern Source: Map derived by author’s adaption of original Public Domain file: Tsui, “Asia Map Plain,” Wikimedia, 2007.

policies toward Hazara people, Sudan’s genocide against several ethnic groups in the eastern region of Darfur, and Ethiopia’s siege warfare strategy against Tigrayans. The remaining three states of Eritrea, South Sudan, and Syria have all also recently experienced instability and political violence and warrant the need for assessments of and likely reforms to their conscription policies. Russian and Chinese membership as permanent veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council make reform or intervention attempts there nearly impossible. Focusing on the remaining six states may yield more positive policy changes at national, supranational, and international levels. These ongoing conditions continue to raise multiple red flags that indicate political, ethnoreligious, and tribal conflicts that could result in any of those states implementing genocidal conscription in the near future if they have not already done so at the time of my writing this chapter in January 2023. Ethnoreligious tensions, political inequalities, and tribal disputes explain the range of potential rivalries that could instigate, and in some cases

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have already spiraled into, interstate conflicts that cross borders and intrastate civil warfare that devastates targeted domestic population groups. In my assessment, these states of concern have already reached a status of requiring intervention to provide refuge for individual members of targeted groups and pressure from the international community in the form of advancing a reform process of conscription within these authoritarian states, their militaries, and mandatory labor units. The most likely target groups that are at risk of such policies include the following: Shia Hazara in Afghanistan; Sunni Hui and Uyghur in China; Sunni Tigre and Saho in Eritrea; Christian Amhara and Tigrayan and Sunni Somali in Ethiopia; Sunni Bashkir, Chechen, and Tatar, Sufi Chechen, and Christian Chuvash, and Ukrainian in Russia; traditional Nuer and Christian Shilluk in South Sudan; Sunni Fur, Beja, Nuba, and Nubian in Sudan; and Sunni Arab and Kurd, and Christian Greek and Armenian in Syria. This last case is something of an exception due to leaders whose origins stem from a minority ethnicity that previously upheld French colonial rule. This difference point to the significance of colonial histories in politics today. The Alawite hold on Syria illustrates that belonging to an ethnic minority does not necessarily disbar its members from power but that a lack of sharing at least some commonalities with a country’s majority religious group may limit a group’s ability to rule an authoritarian regime. Of the groups that are empowered in these regimes and have control over the institution of conscription, Sunni Pashtun in Afghanistan, pluralist Tao and atheist Han in China, Christian Tigrinya in Eritrea, Christian and Sunni Oromo in Ethiopia, Christian Russians in Russia, traditional Dinka in South Sudan, Sunni Arab in Sudan, and Shia Alawi in Syria are of particular interest to reform their conscription policies to include alternative service options and integrate different ethnicities and religions into higher ranks of command. The list illustrates the potential number of minority ethnic and religious groups from which states draft men, women, and in some cases also children in developing countries who could be at risk of genocidal conscription and genocide by wastage. The findings point out the additionally significant role of civil wars as a factor in cases of genocide in which perpetrators seek to wear down nonconscripted civilian populations through a military’s strategy of attrition, as is the case in certain regions in Ethiopia. The findings suggest that several options exist for the intervention by free states to assist potentially vulnerable groups and pressure states of concern into considering how they might reform their mandatory recruitment practices. Such reforms would change conscription by these authoritarian regimes to include commutations, deferments, alternative duties, and exemptions. By doing so, the introduction of these reforms would promote political rights to civilians living under authoritarian rule and in theory increase the ability

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for these potential victims to avoid this type of genocide. International intergovernmental organizations would need to monitor these states and respond to any attempts they made to disarm, subordinate, or require the selective enlistment of members of communities listed in table 7.2. Because the United Nations is hampered in many of its attempts to enforce its own rules due to the sovereignty of individual states, I suggest that free states should establish a new policy regarding asylum from forced conscription. An assumption that exists within the concept of sovereignty, one that this work demonstrates as false, views civilians as little more than a resource under the mortal control of their states. It is important to ascertain the way that this notion lies at the foundation of many violations of human rights. If the regulating bodies of international politics condone the policies of oppressive and exploitative states, then what good are they when it comes to preventing violations of human rights or genocide? In light of the centuries of political debacles that have resulted in so many episodes of mass destruction by war, famine, and pestilence, the need for a new political paradigm is easily identified but far harder, if not impossible, to achieve. Instead of supporting such oppressive states, the caucus of free states can exercise their influence to bring attention to groups that potentially face the risk of becoming victims of such abusive conscription policies. Given that two of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council currently employ active conscription policies, Russia and China, this reform agenda would require a significant shift in foreign policy beginning with the United States, members of NATO, the European Union, and other members of the G7. Attempts for such reform should seek support from the African Union, the Arab League, and the United Nations. As explained by the cases of genocidal conscription, a contradiction exists when international organizations accept a state as holding legitimate sovereignty even though it abuses instead of protects individuals and groups living within its borders. In short, the persistent problem here is the acceptance that states have some form of right to force civilians into a veiled type of deadly servitude through policies that authorities present as being systems that only act in the best interests of the public. Instead of accepting this assumption, one that argues that civilians have a responsibility to die in defense of the state, this work supports the view of Francis Deng and the principle of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) that the United Nations accepted in 2005.7 Given that these realities are present in international politics today, the role of major powers that seek to uphold liberal democracy and cast off more oppressive forms of governance can play their part in establishing R2P in the context of reforming the selective conscription practices of authoritarian regimes. How could policy prevent or at least restrict genocide by wastage and genocidal conscription in the future?

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CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Given the continued impact of Clausewitzian civil-military ordering, and the waves of industrialization that ripple across the world, it is appropriate to review the wastage of war that took so many countless lives over the modern industrial era. Many states have sought out groups to expend in warfare by engaging in the mass carnage unleashed during World War I, throughout World War II, in the Cold War, and across the post-9/11 international system. A first step to resolving these most prominent problems of modern genocides, wars, and dysfunctional politics can begin with a reassessment of the way states have taken advantage of the norm of wartime wastage to dispose of unwanted populations. Education can provide the basis of knowledge for reform, reconciliation, and when necessary also reparations. As evidenced by the contemporary status of postgenocidal governments and societies, including Turkey and Hungary, many states from across the political spectrum have largely benefited from the wartime and genocidal losses imposed upon a multitude of civilian populations. By first seeing the guise by which such states have used populations as resources can the people begin to claim back their own power and insist that their governments exist to protect them. Because the planning of mass wastage opened up novel opportunities for some states to use war to commit genocide, the ramifications of this book indicate that such tactics may impact not only conscripts but could also target and destroy civilian populations through forms of devastating desolation including famine and pestilence. Imagine, for one moment, genocide by wastage during famine in the future. Such events have already taken place in histories such as during the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s. The ongoing crises that stem from the war Russia launched in February 2022 against Ukraine include the emerging global food shortages that will increasingly impact nation-states with lower incomes and those populations that are already dependent on resources provided by humanitarian aid agencies. Multiple groups have already begun to face financial ruin and famine in events that will in turn lead states to act in response to the instability and threat of losing their territorial holdings. Reversing this trend requires states that practice responsible and legitimate forms of sovereignty to wear down and then dismantle the coercive policies operated by authoritarian regimes. More insights can be examined from the complicated aspects of genocidal conscription. For instance, there remains several unanswered questions as to the Ottoman Empire’s treatment of Assyrian, Çete, Greek, and Kurdish recruits and Axis-era Hungary’s use of Bosnian-Croat, German, Jehovah’s Witness, Roma, and Sinti conscripts. Additional work could reveal significant insights into the processes coordinated at the Wannsee Conference that

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organized the wastage of conscripted civilian Jewish populations across Europe. One question that remains concerns whether any of the instructions disseminated by Hungary originated from officials who had direct ties to Nazi Germany. The same questions can also be asked about several other states that collaborated with the Third Reich during the Holocaust. Additionally, many unaccounted for conscripted victims and perpetrators may have existed across multiple other cases of genocide committed under the guise of war. Colonial and imperial wars fought after Clausewitz had described wastage may include instances of drafts that resulted in genocides by enlisting either victims, or perpetrators, or both. Further research into modern wars could yield subsequent contributions and insights on wastage as a form of genocide in the 1800s, during World War I, in World War II, throughout the Cold War, and during post–Cold War proxy conflicts and civil wars. For example, the Cambodian genocide is a case that indicates the existence of several preconditions such as selective conscription and unstable borders as well as the outcomes of mass death through attrition. Division, isolation, subordination, relocation, and destruction all took place through the Khmer Rouge’s practices of implementing forced labor conscription in what became a central factor in how these perpetrators carried out their destructively revolutionary vision.8 HISTORY LESSONS AND THE CHALLENGE OF POLICY REFORMS The domestic, international, and historical circumstances that this book traces seek to point out what Martin Shaw described as the need to explain theoretical concepts, assess conceptual soundness by analyzing cases, and then predict what could happen so that the field can generate preventative recommendations.9 In addition to Shaw’s point, the need to reexamine historical narratives is also crucial when forming theory, researching cases, and generating predictions for prevention. Some established historical narratives on war might well challenge and reject the premise of this book by arguing that conscripted mass death is only possible because of combat and not due to a state’s use of the institution as a tool of genocide. This claim is one that denialists make in suggesting that Hungary’s roles during the Holocaust extended only to that of bystander and then as an occupied state run by unrepresentative collaborators. The task of confronting denial highlights a concept of what may be called pastwashing by which I refer to the creation of false historical narratives that obfuscate a state’s crimes. The concept points to the documentation and retelling of events in less than accurate ways in postwar and postgenocidal eras. The need to cover up the extent to which many prominent

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figures carried out or conspired to commit crimes has become a necessary political process in Hungary’s recounting of its former government’s actions during the Holocaust. Researchers continue to clarify the ambiguities that accompany the histories of its Axis-era leaders more than seventy years after these events. Pastwashing is also significant when questioning the existence of potential cases of genocide and genocidal conscription from and after the colonial and imperial wars of the 1800s. This issue indicates a need to further research the histories of selective conscription policies implemented by discriminatory states that sent members of marginalized communities to die en masse in modern wars. INTERVENING TO RESCUE AND PREVENT In recognizing individuals who are known for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust, Yad Vashem has noted 876 Hungarian honorees who received the title of being “Righteous among the Nations.”10 Bringing attention to this rare shard of light points out how important rescuers were and are. Because the life or death of a conscript depended entirely on the attitude and decisions of the guard, officer, or commander in charge at each moment, the inclusion of survivor testimonies that witnessed more humane exchanges reveal exceptions to genocidal conscription and a way that such outcomes can be prevented. Instead of relying on an authority that works within a genocidal state, reform policies would seek to pressure changes in these states to abandon coercion in favor of liberty in civilian life and social pluralism. Greater acceptance and inclusion could begin if these eight most concerning states opened up their ranks of higher military and government authority to members of groups that have historically experienced discrimination. Beyond events in which states utilized conscription during war, the phases of division, isolation, subordination, relocation, and destruction took place in other more recent cases of genocide of the 1990s. For example, the genocide of Tutsi Rwandans included these phases in events that perpetrators repeated many thousands of times. While not all victims experienced these types of events, the systematic pattern of genocidal killings often matched each of these five phases. For instance, many thousands of armed Hutus stood at checkpoints at which they acquisitioned Tutsi civilians and those that authorities perceived as being Tutsi. Perpetrators and collaborators then insisted that a person suspected of being Tutsi show guards their identification card. Due to the government system of identifying civilians as belonging to a designated group, this form of social division repeated what were largely spurious tribal definitions invented by colonizers several generations previously. The formal institutionalized division of these groups had existed since Belgian administrators

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first introduced a nationwide carding system in 1932.11 Categorizing civilians into social divisions, isolating targets, and then subordinating them under the authority of armed guards at these checkpoints all took place before perpetrators proceeded to kill their targets either on site or at nearby locations.12 Prior to other massacres, isolation and subordination practices took place at the several hundred similar checkpoints scattered throughout the countryside, along main roadways, and outside of city boundaries. Once identified as members of the targeted group, individuals and groups of perpetrators attacked their isolated and subordinated victims as they stood moments away from their deaths at the hands of these state-authorized génocidaires. From one testimony provided by survivor Julienne Mukumana, the record shows how state officials implemented the first four phases in a different order from the cases documented in chapters 4 and 5 before perpetrators carried out killings that included the murder of her husband and five of her children.13 The incremental steps along which this genocidal state proceeded is clearly noted in the testimony provided by Mukumana. She recounted how at 3:00 a.m. on April 21, 1994, local state officials and armed Interahamwe militia men woke Rwandans up before ordering them to leave their homes and possessions to walk to a nearby city. On arrival, guards filtered the larger group taken from the village by way of their identification cards and divided the civilians into groups of Hutus and Tutsis. Once relocated and then divided, an official declared that all Hutu Rwandans could leave and return to their homes. It was at this point that Mukumana and many of her fellow Tutsi Rwandans realized that death would soon follow for many of those who remained gathered in the compound.14 In this instance, relocation took place first as the phase that initiated the genocidal action. Perpetrators then carried out the tasks of division, isolation, and subordination, before killing almost all of their captive victims. Because many aspects of the violence of Rwanda’s case of genocide took place in different circumstances, and in other types of organized actions, Mukumana’s testimony illustrates the generalizing and potentially preventative aspects of the five phases of genocide documented here. Identifying the first three phases of division, isolation, and subordination could open opportunities to intervene and prevent genocide in a range of potentially deadly circumstances. Of additional importance, the example discussed in Mukumana’s testimony illustrates the nonlinear and potentially simultaneous nature of these genocidal phases. In short, as the previous example validates, acknowledging the variables of these phases in multiple cases point to the moment when perpetrators begin to carry out genocide, whether they are conscripts or not, during acts of relocation and destruction. As this moment is the point at which no prevention can take place, any attempt to avoid these outcomes must emphasize reforms to prohibit division, isolation, and subordination of a group that has historically experienced discrimination.

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To realize a reversal of the normalized wastage of war requires a concerted effort to draw attention to the victims of genocidal conscription and the phases through which multiple different perpetrators in several cases carried out genocide by wastage. Reform efforts could pressure authoritarian states to alter their security structures in the following ways: 1.  reform toward an all-volunteer force by ending conscription of any form; 2.  introduce alternative options for civilians to remain away from the deadly environments of warfare while completing their terms of conscripted service; or 3.  instigate the integration of social plurality to increase diversity throughout the authority’s military ranks and government offices. While the first reform has taken other states many generations to complete, the ability to complete this transition is available through professional security and military structures. This agenda would likely require a significant effort to incorporate adequate replacements over a phased program that would seek to end conscription by authoritarian regimes. The incorporation of private military companies could potentially provide a different mode of security for these states. For-hire armies, some of which are notorious for operating beyond conventional security regulations, might only serve during transitionary periods to support a state’s shift toward a professionalized all-volunteer military. The second and third initiatives could take place through a policy announcement and the subsequent realignment of groups within militaries along with the candidacies of consociational representatives. This brand of politics upholds pluralism by way of reserving a seat in government for members of minority groups. Although an exceptional form of transitional governance, consociational politics has already served to end hostilities in cases of sectarian violence and ethnic conflict such as in Lebanon and Northern Ireland. Even with these examples, integration includes several difficulties. Enforcement and maintenance of new civil-military structures would likely face resistance from governments and societies that are so deeply institutionalized along discriminatory and unequal divides that discriminate against certain population groups. One model for the successful development of a military that consists of members from multiple ethnicities and religions while employing alternative forms of mandatory military service is that of the armed forces of the State of Israel. This successful application of universal conscription incorporates both military and vocational training options as alternatives to the authoritarian servitude present in other states. In stark contrast to this exceptional system of mandatory service, many conscripts serve other states today without any options for requesting alternative duties. They are currently deployed into

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deadly conditions both during peacetime, as is the case for labor conscripts in North Korea, and as wartime combatants that include Russians of Ukrainian and other minority heritages. Using the lessons learned while constructing Israel’s military could provide a way for not free and partly free nation-states to join the rest of the international community and abandon coercive sovereignty. What is needed is a comprehensive review of selective conscription policies by authoritarian states, which rule over multiethnic countries that have histories of interethnic conflict and discrimination. The effort to accomplish these reformative and preventative goals exists within the reach of the international community, a reality that is particularly clear now given the current restructuring that continues to emerge amid intergovernmental reactions to the COVID19 pandemic.15 So, exactly how could the international community and the United States, the leading liberal power in international politics, implement such reforms? A first stride of this initiative would acknowledge the need for rescuing those potential draftees that flee from oppressive regimes. An example from the case of Axis-era Hungary that indicates how to mitigate some aspects of genocidal conscription arises from the way that Randolph L. Braham ultimately survived the Hungarian Jewish Labor Service. The choices made by his unit commanders to not participate in the state’s ruse to use the war to commit genocide spared his life. Once the war was over, he served as a volunteer for the American Red Cross working as an interpreter in the Ainring bei Freilassing refugee and displaced person’s camp in Bavaria, Germany. He later immigrated to the United States where he became one of the most prominent and respected scholars of the Holocaust.16 In addition to assisting the survivors of punitive forms of conscription carried out by authoritarian regimes today, as the United States previously did after the end of the Third Reich, a second important reform could develop once Western powers take responsibility for the missteps they took in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The errors made in that era of change failed to protect individuals who became the victims of forced recruitment in several cases that include genocide and war. Without doubt, a difficult path lies ahead in changing the perception of the entrenched acceptance of conscription for warfare, a view that sees men as something of an expendable resource and women as productive supporters of a state at war. This norm of the expendability of males preceded the genocidal violence unleashed at Srebrenica in 1995 in which perpetrators killed over 7,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys in a type of mass killing unseen in Europe since the Holocaust.17 As Yugoslavia collapsed in 1992, the United States and the United Nations stood down from the responsibility to adequately manage political transitions at the end of the Cold War. Instead of establishing a concerted reform agenda that attempted to protect a wide array of vulnerable populations, these powerful political actors allowed

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ambitious and aggressive groups to persecute civilians by implementing punitive and abusive conscription policies. For example, civil-military leaders reordered the former Yugoslavia by implementing mandatory service policies in attempts to rapidly build state security institutions. However, this norm unfolded at the expense of civilians deemed expendable. Worsening the situation in the post–Cold War climate, liberal powers including the United States responded to applications for asylum from the forced conscription practices of the emerging authoritarian regimes in southeastern Europe with dismissal and degradation. Their claims received no support from either the United Nations or the American government. As explained by political scientist R. Charli Carpenter, in the years immediately prior to what was the largest massacre carried out in Europe since World War II at Srebrenica, the United States chose to reject calls to reform refugee asylum laws. Instead of protecting people at risk of being massacred, American diplomats cited the United Nations and condemned those fleeing from conscription under authoritarianism as deserters unworthy of sympathy.18 Emphasizing the prior knowledge of what conscription would entail for many recruits, Carpenter noted that an estimated number of 700,000 men and teenaged boys had fled the region at the outbreak of war to avoid becoming draftees and face the dilemma of either serving or refusing to serve an authoritarian regime.19 As Carpenter explained, such forms of gender-based violence require the attention of human rights advocates.20 In light of the challenges that reform policies face, what can be done rests on the treatment of potential victims by those who have the power to make a change. The negative reactions of the United States and the United Nations to asylum requests, and their support in favor of aggressive authoritarian sovereign powers, simply aggravated many of the conflicts that have raged throughout southeastern Europe, the Middle East, north and east Africa, and central Asia over the past three decades. These worrying episodes in recent history that unfolded a generation ago indicate the urgent need to challenge and reject the sovereign claims of authoritarian political entities that fail to uphold the principle of R2P today. Instead of owning their responsibility to protect civilians in territorial regions of the world absent of any functional protective state authority, as was the case in Rwanda and in the sectarian wars within the former Yugoslavian territories, the international community failed to act. The timid reactions of powerful democratic institutions maintained the problem of inactive enablement, a point that Leo Kuper and Herbert Hirsch explained as one reason why genocides happen again, and again, instead of never again.21 Avoiding the truth that men and boys have been, and continue to be, an identifiable group that faces a significant risk of suffering conscripted forms of political violence sustains a major barrier that hampers what are clearly necessary multiple domestic civil-military and foreign policy asylum reforms.

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The norms that have become established since Clausewitz’s tours of duty in the early 1800s assume that males should give their lives, that states can spend these lives, and that genocidal warfare that drafts victims and perpetrators is somehow an inevitable and acceptable state of politics. Instead of continuing to stand by while such crimes take place or buy into obfuscations that diminish the severity of genocides that take place under the guise of war, the international community, the United Nations, and the United States can heed the warning sign of subordination and take action to protect men and boys at the moment when they attempt to flee from the coercive impositions of authoritarian regimes. The following suggestions offer alternative political solutions that could prevent genocidal conscription from reoccurring in the future: 1.  redefine mandatory service to comply with safe working conditions for civilians; 2.  reform conscription for service in deadly environments as requiring the written informed consent of the recruit; 3.  decentralize the security norm that has traditionally led states to expend the lives of young adult males; 4.  promote interethnic cooperation across state institutions, including conscription, by constructing educational programs that seek to reduce the conflict among and between different ethnic groups; or 5.  open pathways of asylum for members of communities at risk of becoming targets of deadly subordinated forms of conscription. Implementing any of these domestic and foreign policy reforms would go some way to prevent a state from carrying out genocide by wastage. Deciding who serves in combat roles should rest upon the choices made by each recruit irrespective of whether they are a conscript or a volunteer. What of fighters who are unable to give legally recognized informed consent as is the case with child soldiers? A review of the 2013 guidelines of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) explains some recent efforts to diminish this practice. The five types of claims alleging persecution relating to military service are: 1.  objections to state military service for reasons of conscience; 2.  objections to a particular unlawful armed conflict or to the means and methods of warfare used (that is, war crimes); 3.  objections to the conditions of state military service; 4.  claims concerning forced recruitment and/or conditions of service in nonstate armed groups; and 5.  child recruitment.22

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Despite these concerns, as of 2019, the United Nations continued to recognize the sovereign right of states to expend civilian life unconstrained by international military law and with inconsistent responses to claims of conscientious objection to military service requirements. In the words of the United Nations, “States are entitled to require citizens to perform military service for military purposes; and this does not in itself violate an individual’s rights.”23 Even though ongoing attempts seek to challenge this deadly and abusive assumption, the power of life and death remains firmly in the grasp of sovereign entities rather than in the remit of individual civilians. Evoking the spirit of liberal politics that began to overturn epochs of another of humanity’s original sins, that of slavery, John Stuart Mill once wrote that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”24 I suggest that preventing harm to others and to the individual conscript while having the choice to not kill or risk being killed are the prerequisites for any legitimate form of conscripted service to exist in the political systems that have inherited the liberal sensibilities of the nineteenth-century abolition movement. With such preconditions in place, the free states of the world can promote antigenocidal conscription reforms across authoritarian regimes. In a world distraught by multiple crises, the time has arrived to modernize the fundamental political institution of mandatory military service to honor the choices of all individuals and groups. To do so may prevent a part of the harm caused by one of humanity’s oldest scourges.25 NOTES 1. Freedom House, “Freedom in the World Report: Countries and Territories,” Freedom House, 2022; Central Intelligence Agency, “Military Service Age and Obligation: The World Factbook,” CIA, 2021. All data collected from September 2021 to December 2022. 2. Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Fahim Abed, and Sharif Hassan, “Why the Afghan Military Collapsed So Quickly,” New York Times, August 13, 2021; Bureau of International Labor Affairs, “Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor—West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” U.S. Department of Labor, 2020; Middle East Monitor, “Yemen’s Houthis Order Compulsory Conscription of Civilians,” Middle East Monitor, May 6, 2020. 3. Global Security, “Central African Republic: Military Personnel,” Global Security, 2022; “Child Soldiers in Burundi Swap Conflict for Classroom,” The Guardian, September 5, 2016; Cara Anna, “People Fleeing Ethiopia Allege Attacks, Forced Conscription,” AP News, November 8, 2021. 4. James Tasamba, “Rwanda Joins Global Initiative to End Child Soldiers,” Anadolu Agency, November 15, 2019.

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5. Kimberley Bulkley, “Being of Service in Belarus,” OCSE, October 22, 2010; Global Security, “Venezuela Military Personnel,” Global Security, 2022. 6. Data on ethnic groups provided by World Atlas, “World Atlas,” World Atlas, 2022. 7. Mahfujur Rahman and Saifullah Akon, “The Responsibility to Protect Doctrine Expectations and Reality,” International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development 4, no. 3 (2020): 197; United Nations, “United Nations Office on Genocide: Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect,” UN, 2022. 8. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 187, 341, 454. 9. Martin Shaw, Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 29. 10. Yad Vashem, “Righteous Among the Nations Honored by Yad Vashem by 1 January 2020: Hungary” (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2020). 11. Caplan, “The 1994 Genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda,” 448–49. 12. Caplan, 470. 13. Caplan, 469–70. 14. Caplan, 470. 15. Phillip Inman, “Pandemic Is Chance to Reset Global Economy, Says Prince Charles,” The Guardian, June 3, 2020. 16. Stefan Fischer, “Retracing a Nightmare,” a Stefan Fischer production, 2004. 17. Jones, Gendercide and Genocide, 144. 18. R. Charli Carpenter, “Recognizing Gender-Based Violence Against Civilian Men and Boys in Conflict Situations,” Security Dialogue 37, no. 1 (2006): 92; Bill Frelick, Yugoslavia Torn Asunder: Lessons for Protecting Refugees from Civil War (Washington, DC: United States Committee for Refugees, 1992), 21–24. 19. Carpenter, “Recognizing Gender-Based Violence,” 92. 20. Carpenter, 93. 21. Kuper, Genocide, 9, 17–18; Herbert Hirsch, Genocide and the Politics of Memory: Studying Death to Preserve Life (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1995), 200–203. 22. European Council on Refugees and Exiles, “UNHCR Publishes Guidelines on Asylum Applications by Persons Avoiding Military Service,” ECRE, 2013. 23. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status under the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees” (Geneva, Switzerland: UNHCR, 2019), 187. 24. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 23. 25. Kuper, Genocide, 11; Jones, The Scourge of Genocide, 13.

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Index

Page numbers referencing figures are italicized. Alvarez, Alex, 3, 22, 63 antisemitism, 102–7, 136–37 Arrow Cross, 97–100, 116, 118, 136–37 authoritarian regimes, 13, 18, 150–58, 162–65 Axis-era Hungary, 97, 97–100 Axis Powers, 3, 15–16, 97–99, 106–7, 109–10, 133–55

anticonscription movements, 27, 39; and the Armenian genocide, 84–93; askere alma (Turkish, for military service), 84–86, 126; contemporary policies across the world, 150, 151, 154; concerning states and, 155, 156, 157; destructive and exploitative policies of, 59–62; during World War I, 42–48; during World War I by the Ottoman Empire, 126–30, 142; during World War II by Axisera Hungary, 130–33, 135–40, 143; French nationalism and, 28–32; and gendercide, 65, 125–26; genocidal, 67, 68, 68–71; and the Hungarian Holocaust, 104–18; informal recruitment policies, 153, 155; Jewish Europeans, Hungarians, and, 100–102;

Bartha, Károly, 108, 114 Bartrop, Paul R., 3, 99 Braham, Randolph L., 102, 112– 13, 138, 164 Çete (Turkish, bandits), 98, 127–28, 141, 142, 143 Charny, Israel W., 71–72 Clausewitz, Carl von, 1, 26, 32, 74n17; On War, 34, 135 Committee of Union and Progress, 79, 82–84, 128 conscription, 12–14; amele taburlari (Turkish, for labor units), 60, 84, 89, 93; ancient and premodern forms of, 26–28; 183

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Index

Lemkin’s acknowledgment of, 14–17; and Magyar ethnonationalism, 101, 104; modernization and, 38–41; Hungarian labor forms of (Munkaszolgálat, Honvedelmi Munkaszervezet), 107, 114; Ottoman history of, 78–80; penal battalions, 18–20; Russia and, 5, 18–20; selective forms of, 59, 61, 69–70, 78, 85–86, 105–6, 160; the Young Turks and, 82–83 French Revolution, 28–33 genocide, 1–5; Armenian case of, 73, 78, 81–83, 92, 127–29; attrition and, 58, 60–63; of the Hungarian Holocaust, 73, 98, 111–13; impositions as part of, 16–17, 59, 90, 127, 145, 166; intent and, 21–23, 49–50, 58–59, 62, 91, 112, 129–30, 139, 145; Lemkin, conscription, and, 14–17; mechanisms of, 17, 68–69, 90; militaries and, 11–14; perpetrators of, 2, 4, 16, 69, 71, 73, 90–92, 99, 109–10, 113– 15, 128, 134, 139–40, 146; porrajmos (Romani, devouring), 15, 136; postgenocide, 155, 159–60; case in Rwanda, 69, 153, 161–62; Seyfo Assyrian, 73; Srebrenica massacre, 164–65; victims of, 4–5, 11, 16, 21, 69, 71–73, 81, 93, 115, 129, 132, 134–37, 142, 143, 144; war and, 17–21. See also wastage Grande Armée, 41, 79

Hamidian massacres, 81, 127–28 Hitler, Adolf, 69, 105–6, 109–10 Holocaust, 7n13, 15–17; mass death events, 41, 51n32 Imrédy, Béla, 106–7, 131 International Military Tribunal, 3, 11 Lemkin, Raphael, 1, 14 levée en masse (French, mass levy), 29–30 Levente (Hungarian, knight), 104, 132 Nazi Germany, 15–16, 25, 38, 98–100, 103–5, 109–10, 131, 133–36 Ottoman Empire, 77, 77–84 Pasha, Ahmed Cemal, 127 Pasha, Ismail Enver, 87 Pasha, Mehmet Taalat, 93 Rubenstein, Richard L., 66–67, 88 Staub, Ervin, 12, 69 “Ten Commandments,” 91–93, 129 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 2–4, 22 Vendée, 30–31 Wannsee Conference, 99, 110, 131, 133–35, 159 war, 1–3; American Civil War, 38–39; attrition and, 26–27, 33, 36, 42–44, 58; Cold War, 39, 159–60; Crimean War, 79–80; crimes, 3, 5, 12, 21, 30, 166; Franco-Prussian War, 39; Russo-Japanese War, 40; Russo-Turkish War, 80;

Index

World War I, 14, 36, 39–49; World War II, 11, 15–16, 19, 49; modern colonial and imperial conquests, 159–60 wastage, 33; Clausewitzian, 5, 33–38, 40, 45; of war, 36, 40, 43–44, 49–50, 58, 63–65, 142, 143, 162;

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genocide by, 57–63, 65–69, 89–93, 98, 112, 115, 118, 125, 135–36, 142, 143, 166 Young Turks. See Committee of Union and Progress

About the Author

Christopher Harrison is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in political science at Northern Arizona University (NAU). He specializes in global politics, societies at war, and the histories of militaries involved in genocide. Harrison’s other published works focus on social changes shaped by international security systems, the impacts of researching trauma, sterilization during the Holocaust, and the establishment of civil liberties that can arise in response to refugee crises.

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