Human Rights Violations

Charles F. Bahmueller,
Editor

Salem Press
Human Rights Violations
This page intentionally left blank
 MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Human Rights
Violations

Volume 1

1903-1961

edited by

Charles F. Bahmueller
Center for Civic Education

Salem Press, Inc.

Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey
 Copyright © 2003, by Salem Press, Inc.
All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used
or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, re-
cording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without
written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For infor-
mation address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasa-
dena, California 91115.

∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American Na-

tional Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Mate-
rials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

Essays originally appeared in Great Events from History II: Human

Rights (1992). New material has been added.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Human rights violations / edited by Charles F. Bahmueller.
p. cm. — (Magill’s choice)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-58765-089-4 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-090-8 (vol. 1 :
alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-091-6 (vol. 2 : alk. paper)— ISBN
1-58765-092-4 (vol. 3 : alk. paper)
1. Human rights. 2. Civil rights. I. Bahmueller, Charles F. II. Series.
JC571 .H783 2003
323’.044’0904—dc21
2002015776

First Printing

printed in the united states of america

 Table of Contents — Volume 1

Complete List of Contents · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · vii

Publisher’s Note · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · xi
Contributors · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · xiii
Introduction · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · xvii

Atrocities Against Congolese Laborers Are Exposed· · · · · · · · · · 1

Iran Bars Non-Muslims from Cabinet Positions · · · · · · · · · · · · 8
Muslim League Protests Government Abuses of Minority
Rights in Colonial India · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 14
Hague Conference Formulates Legal Norms of Behavior
in War · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 20
Armenians Suffer Genocide During World War I· · · · · · · · · · · 27
Germany Uses Chemical Weapons in World War I · · · · · · · · · · 34
Bolsheviks Suppress the Russian Orthodox Church · · · · · · · · · 40
Russian Communists Inaugurate “Red Terror” · · · · · · · · · · · · 46
Palmer Raids Lead to Deportations of Immigrants · · · · · · · · · · 54
British Soldiers Massacre Indians at Amritsar· · · · · · · · · · · · · 60
Sweden Abolishes Capital Punishment · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 68
Mussolini Seizes Dictatorial Powers in Italy · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 73
League of Nations Adopts International Slavery Convention · · · · 80
El Salvador’s Military Massacres Civilians in La Matanza · · · · · · · 86
Hitler Uses Reichstag Fire to Suspend Civil and Political
Liberties · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 93
Nazi Concentration Camps Begin Operating · · · · · · · · · · · · 101
Stalin Begins Purging Political Opponents · · · · · · · · · · · · · 108
Japanese Troops Ravage Nanjing · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 114
HUAC Begins Investigating Suspected Communists · · · · · · · · 121
Stalin Nearly Destroys Russian Orthodox Church · · · · · · · · · · 127
Soviets Massacre Polish Prisoners of War · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 134
United States Interns Japanese Americans · · · · · · · · · · · · · 141
Legal Slavery Ends in Ethiopia · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 148
French Quell Algerian Nationalist Revolt · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 154
Japanese War Criminal Is Convicted· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 160
Nazi War Criminals Are Tried at Nuremberg · · · · · · · · · · · · 165
HUAC Investigates Hollywood· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 172
La Violencia Begins in Colombia · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 179
v
 Human Rights Violations

Palestinian Refugees Flee Israel · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 186

United Nations Adopts Convention on Genocide · · · · · · · · · · 193
East Germans Flee to West to Escape Communist Regime · · · · · 200
Geneva Convention Establishes Norms of Conduct in War · · · · · 208
China Occupies Tibet · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 214
South Africa Begins Separate Development System · · · · · · · · · 222
United Nations Sets Rules for Treatment of Prisoners · · · · · · · 229
Sudanese Civil War Erupts· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 235
Khrushchev Denounces Stalinist Regime · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 242
Soviets Crush Hungarian Uprising · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 249
United Nations Adopts Abolition of Forced Labor Convention · · · 256
Duvalier Takes Power in Haiti · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 263
Mao’s Great Leap Forward Brings Chaos to China · · · · · · · · · 270
Iraq Promotes Genocide of Kurds · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 276
Tamils Protest Discrimination in Sri Lanka · · · · · · · · · · · · · 283

vi
 Complete List of Contents

Volume 1
Atrocities Against Congolese Nazi Concentration Camps Begin
Laborers Are Exposed, 1 Operating, 101
Iran Bars Non-Muslims from Stalin Begins Purging Political
Cabinet Positions, 8 Opponents, 108
Muslim League Protests Japanese Troops Ravage Nanjing,
Government Abuses of 114
Minority Rights in Colonial HUAC Begins Investigating
India, 14 Suspected Communists, 121
Hague Conference Formulates Stalin Nearly Destroys Russian
Legal Norms of Behavior in Orthodox Church, 127
War, 20 Soviets Massacre Polish Prisoners
Armenians Suffer Genocide of War, 134
During World War I, 27 United States Interns Japanese
Germany Uses Chemical Weapons Americans, 141
in World War I, 34 Legal Slavery Ends in Ethiopia,
Bolsheviks Suppress the Russian 148
Orthodox Church, 40 French Quell Algerian Nationalist
Russian Communists Inaugurate Revolt, 154
“Red Terror,” 46 Japanese War Criminal Is
Palmer Raids Lead to Convicted, 160
Deportations of Immigrants, 54 Nazi War Criminals Are Tried at
British Soldiers Massacre Indians Nuremberg, 165
at Amritsar, 60 HUAC Investigates Hollywood,
Sweden Abolishes Capital 172
Punishment, 68 La Violencia Begins in Colombia,
Mussolini Seizes Dictatorial 179
Powers in Italy, 73 Palestinian Refugees Flee Israel,
League of Nations Adopts 186
International Slavery United Nations Adopts
Convention, 80 Convention on Genocide, 193
El Salvador’s Military Massacres East Germans Flee to West to
Civilians in La Matanza, 86 Escape Communist Regime,
Hitler Uses Reichstag Fire to 200
Suspend Civil and Political Geneva Convention Establishes
Liberties, 93 Norms of Conduct in War, 208
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 Human Rights Violations

China Occupies Tibet, 214 United Nations Adopts Abolition

South Africa Begins Separate of Forced Labor Convention,
Development System, 222 256
United Nations Sets Rules for Duvalier Takes Power in Haiti, 263
Treatment of Prisoners, 229 Mao’s Great Leap Forward Brings
Sudanese Civil War Erupts, 235 Chaos to China, 270
Khrushchev Denounces Stalinist Iraq Promotes Genocide of Kurds,
Regime, 242 276
Soviets Crush Hungarian Tamils Protest Discrimination in
Uprising, 249 Sri Lanka, 283

Volume 2
Eichmann Is Tried for War National Guardsmen Kill Four
Crimes, 289 Students at Kent State, 371
Amnesty International Is Canada Invokes War Measures Act
Founded, 294 Against Quebec Separatists, 377
Communists Raise the Berlin Calley Is Court-Martialed for My
Wall, 301 Lai Massacre, 384
Soviet Jews Resist Oppression, 308 FBI and CIA Interference in Civil
Civil War Ravages Chad, 314 Rights Movement Is Revealed,
China’s Cultural Revolution Starts 391
Wave of Repression, 321 Amin Regime Terrorizes Uganda,
Greek Coup Leads to Military 397
Dictatorship, 328 Prisoners Riot Against Conditions
Biafra’s Secession Triggers in Attica, 402
Nigerian Civil War, 335 Nations Agree to Rules on
Brezhnev Doctrine Bans Biological Weapons, 408
Independent Behavior by Burundi Commits Genocide of
Soviet Satellites, 341 Hutu Majority, 414
Proclamation of Teheran Sets United States Supreme Court
Human Rights Goals, 348 Abolishes Death Penalty, 420
Soviets Invade Czechoslovakia, Marcos Declares Martial Law in
354 the Philippines, 426
Statute of Limitations Is Ruled Arab Terrorists Murder Israelis at
Not Applicable to War Crimes, Munich Olympics, 432
359 Vietnam Releases U.S. Prisoners
Brazil Begins Era of Intense of War, 439
Repression, 365 Military Rule Comes to
Democratic Uruguay, 445
viii
 Complete List of Contents

Chilean Military Overthrows Soviet Citizen Group Investigates

Allende, 452 Political Abuses of Psychiatry,
United Nations Votes to Punish 528
South Africa for Apartheid, 459 Soviets Crack Down on Moscow’s
Medical Group Exposes Torture Helsinki Watch Group, 534
in Greece and Chile, 465 Dissident Writer Mihajlov Is
Soviet Union Expels Solzhenitsyn, Released from Prison, 541
471 Guatemalan Death Squads Target
Khmer Rouge Take Over Indigenous Indians, 548
Cambodia, 477 European Court of Human Rights
Tokyo Declaration Forbids Medical Rules on Mistreatment of
Abuses and Torture, 483 Prisoners, 554
United Nations Issues Declaration China Promises to Correct Abuses
Against Torture, 489 of Citizens’ Rights, 561
Argentina Conducts “Dirty War” Iran Uses Executions to Establish
Against Leftists, 495 New Order, 566
IRA Prisoner Dies After Hunger Pakistan Hangs Former Prime
Strike, 503 Minister Bhutto, 571
South African Government Iranian Revolutionaries Hold
Suppresses Soweto Student Americans Hostage, 578
Rebellion, 509 United Nations Convention
South African Government Kills Condemns Discrimination
Biko, 515 Against Women, 584
Zia Establishes Martial Law in
Pakistan, 522

Volume 3
Soviet Union Invades Afghanistan, Poland Outlaws Solidarity and
589 Imposes Martial Law, 614
Saudi Arabia Beheads Sixty-three Palestinians Are Massacred in
Persons for Attack on Mecca, West Beirut, 620
596 United Nations Principles of
Rioters Protest Miami Police Medical Ethics Include
Brutality, 602 Prevention of Torture, 626
Paraguayan Torturer Is Convicted Nigeria Expels West African
of Violating the Law of Nations, Migrant Workers, 632
607 Klaus Barbie Is Tried for Nazi War
Crimes, 639

ix
 Human Rights Violations

Philippine Opposition Leader Kenyan Government Cracks Down

Benigno Aquino Is on Dissent, 752
Assassinated, 645 Colombian Presidential
Amnesty International Starts Candidates Are Killed, 758
Program to Prevent Torture, Iran Calls for Murder of Writer
651 Salman Rushdie, 764
Indira Gandhi Is Assassinated, 657 China Crushes Prodemocracy
French Government Sinks Demonstration in Tiananmen
Greenpeace Ship, 664 Square, 770
Argentine Leaders Are Convicted Chile Voters End Pinochet’s
of Human Rights Violations, Military Rule, 777
671 Ceausescu Is Overthrown in
Marcos Flees the Philippines, 677 Romania, 783
Kazakhstan Muslims Riot Against Algeria and Egypt Crack Down on
Russians, 683 Islamic Militants, 790
Government-Supported Death Iraq Invades and Ravages Kuwait,
Squads Quash Sri Lanka 795
Insurrection, 690 Yugoslav Army Shells Dubrovnik,
Palestinian Intifada Begins, 696 803
Ethnic Riots Erupt in Armenia, Muslim Refugees Flee Persecution
702 in Myanmar, 809
Sudanese Civil War Uses Hunger Brazilian Police Massacre Slum
as a Weapon, 708 Dwellers, 814
New York Opens “Shock” Nigeria Hangs Saro-Wiwa and
Incarceration Camps for Other Rights Advocates, 820
Female Prisoners, 714 Taliban Begins Wholesale
United States Government Orders Suppression of Human Rights
Collection of Data on Crimes in Afghanistan, 826
Against Homosexuals, 719 United Nations Tribunal Convicts
Israel Convicts Demjanjuk of Nazi Rwandans of Genocide, 833
War Crimes, 725 China Suppresses Falun Gong
Ethnic Violence Erupts in Religious Group, 838
Yugoslavian Provinces, 732 Hague Court Convicts Bosnian
Iraq Uses Poison Gas Against Croats of 1993 Muslim
Kurds, 739 Massacre, 843
Amnesty International Exposes Terrorists Attack the Pentagon
Cruelty of Death Penalty, 745 and World Trade Center, 849

x
 Publisher’s Note

This three-volume contribution to the Magill’s Choice series of Salem ref-

erence works surveys major abuses of human rights over the past century
with articles on 134 individual events, ranging from “Atrocities Against
Congolese Laborers Are Exposed” in 1903 to “Terrorists Attack the World
Trade Center and Pentagon” in 2001. Most of the articles in Human Rights
Violations are taken from Great Events from History II: Human Rights (1992),
a publication with 462 articles covering a wide spectrum of issues that re-
late to both the advancement and denial of human rights throughout the
world. Ten additional, freshly commissioned articles carry the subject up
to 2001.
As Dr. Charles F. Bahmueller, shows in his Introduction to this set, the
concept of “human rights” is a broad one. For the purposes of this set, hu-
man rights may be understood as those rights inhering in individual per-
sons that should be recognized and protected by governments, through
domestic legislation and international agreements. Even more basic than
civil rights and liberties, human rights include the rights to life, liberty,
well-being, and property. Articles in this set provide close examinations of
extreme violations of those rights in countries throughout the world. Par-
ticular attention is paid to events involving government-perpetrated and
other large-scale abuses of rights. Topics include state violence and politi-
cal repression, genocide, terrorism, war crimes, suppression of national-
ist movements, and torture and cruel and unusual punishments. The
texts and bibliographies of the original articles have been updated as nec-
essary. Another ten articles, covering events since 1992, have been freshly
commissioned. These added articles cover such subjects as Myanmar’s
persecution of Muslims, anti-immigrant violence in Germany, Brazil’s no-
torious massacre of youthful slum dwellers in 1993, Algeria and Egypt’s
crackdowns on Islamic militants, Afghanistan’s repressive Taliban re-
gime, genocide in Rwanda, government massacres in Bosnia, and the ter-
rorist attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in September,
2001. All articles are arranged in chronological order of the events they
cover.
Although the subject matter of Human Rights Violations is of particu-
larly wide interest amidst the heated climate of antiterrorist concern that
has arisen in the new century, the articles themselves have been written
objectively, and the overall selection of articles presents a balanced view
xi
 Human Rights Violations

of worldwide rights abuses. The geographical distribution of topics is

broad, and some peoples—notably Muslims—are discussed both as per-
petrators and as victims of rights abuses in different articles. Moreover,
human rights abuses in the United States are not exempted from exami-
nation. Specifically American topics include the Palmer Raids of 1919-
1920, the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, the HUAC
investigations, and mistreatment of inmates at New York’s Attica State
Prison.
As in the original Great Events from History II sets, articles in Human
Rights Violations are of uniform length and format. Ready-reference top
matter includes dates, locales, and brief descriptions of the events; identi-
fication of the categories of rights violations that the events represent,
and brief identifications of the principal personages connected with the
events. The main text of each article is presented under two subject head-
ings: “Summary of Event,” which surveys details of the event, and “Impact
of Event,” which explores the event’s aftermath and broader ramifica-
tions. Articles conclude with annotated bibliographies, all of which have
been updated for this edition.
Six different indexes at the back of volume 3 will help readers find arti-
cles. These include lists of the articles arranged alphabetically, chrono-
logically, by country, and by category. Readers will also find an index of
names listed in the articles’ Principal Personages sections, as well a gen-
eral Subject Index.
As always, we are grateful to the many contributors whose work has
made these volumes possible. We are especially grateful to the project’s
Editor, Charles F. Bahmueller, of the Center for Civic Education in South-
ern California, who helped select the articles, wrote several of the new ar-
ticles himself, and contributed the thoughtful Introduction, which fol-
lows here.

xii
 Contributors

G. Anandalingam Alan Brown

Independent Scholar Livingston University

Tom L. Auffenberg Kendall W. Brown

Ouachita Baptist University Brigham Young University

Abdulla K. Badsha M. Leann Brown

University of Wisconsin at Madison University of Florida

Charles F. Bahmueller Dallas L. Browne

Center for Civic Education Southern Illinois University at
Edwardsville
Joann Balingit
Independent Scholar Anthony R. Brunello
Eckerd College
Carl L. Bankston III
Tulane University Maurice P. Brungardt
Loyola University
Geoffrey Bar-Lev
Independent Scholar David D. Buck
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
Iraj Bashiri
University of Minnesota William H. Burnside
John Brown University
Erving E. Beauregard
University of Dayton Sheila Carapico
University of Richmond
Robert E. Biles
Sam Houston State University Frederick B. Chary
Indiana University Northwest
Arthur Blaser
Chapman University Peng-Khuang Chong
Plymouth State College
Gordon L. Bowen
Mary Baldwin College Lawrence Clark III
Independent Scholar
John Braeman
University of Nebraska at Lincoln Robert O. Collins
University of California at Santa
John A. Britton Barbara
Francis Marion University
xiii
 Human Rights Violations

Bernard A. Cook Richard A. Fredland

Loyola University Indiana University at Indianapolis

David A. Crain Larry N. George

South Dakota State University California State University at Long
Beach
Nathaniel Davis
Harvey Mudd College Hashim Gibrill
Clark Atlanta University
Roger P. Davis
University of Nebraska at Kearney Robert F. Gorman
Southwest Texas State University
Bill Delaney
Independent Scholar Johnpeter Horst Grill
Mississippi State University
Mustafah Dhada
University of Northern Colorado Nancy N. Haanstad
Weber State University
Dixie Dean Dickinson
Tidewater Community College Frances Vryling Harbour
George Mason University
Thomas I. Dickson
Auburn University Claude Hargrove
Fayetteville State University
Jack Donnelly
University of North Carolina at Glenn Hastedt
Chapel Hill James Madison University

Jennifer Eastman Louis D. Hayes

Clark University University of Montana

David G. Egler Arthur W. Helweg

Western Illinois University Western Michigan University

Robert P. Ellis Michael F. Hembree

Independent Scholar Florida State University

Richard B. Finnegan Howard M. Hensel

Stonehill College USAF—Air War College

Nancy Elizabeth Fitch Ronald K. Huch

Temple University Eastern Kentucky University

xiv
 Contributors

Mahmood Ibrahim Lyndon C. Marshall

California State Polytechnic College of Great Falls
University at Pomona
Joan E. Meznar
Robert Jacobs University of South Carolina
Central Washington University
Alice Myers
Shakuntala Jayaswal Simon’s Rock College of Bard
Independent Scholar
Joseph L. Nogee
Phillip Dwight Jones University of Houston
Bradley University
Cathal J. Nolan
Richard C. Kagan Boston University
Hamline University
Norman C. Noonan
Edward Kannyo Augsburg College
Wells College
Robert C. Oberst
Paul W. Knoll Nebraska Wesleyan University
University of Southern California
Deepa Mary Ollapally
Gregory C. Kozlowski Swarthmore College
DePaul University
Kenneth O’Reilly
Jean-Robert Leguey-Feilleux University of Alaska
Saint Louis University
Jerry A. Pattengale
Thomas T. Lewis Azusa Pacific University
Mount Senario College
William A. Pelz
Earlean M. McCarrick Institute of Working Class History
University of Maryland
Dennis Rienhartz
Scott McElwain University of Texas at Arlington
University of San Francisco
John K. Roth
James Edward McGoldrick Claremont McKenna College
Greenville Presbyterian Theological
Joseph Rudolph
Seminary
Towson University
Barry Mann
Eve N. Sandberg
Independent Scholar
Oberlin College

xv
 Human Rights Violations

Asit Kumar Sen Howard Tolley, Jr.

Texas Southern University University of Cincinnati

L. B. Shriver Mfanya Donald Tryman

Independent Scholar Mississippi State University

R. Baird Shuman Laurie Voice

University of Illinois at Urbana- Sam Houston State University
Champaign
Thomas Jay Edward Walker
Darryl C. Thomas Pennsylvania College of Technology
State University of New York at
T. K. Welliver
Binghamton
Clarion University of Pennsylvania
Stephen C. Thomas
Allen Wells
University of Colorado at Denver
Bowdoin College
Randal J. Thompson
Thomas L. Whigham
Agency for International Development
University of Georgia
Larry Thornton
Kenneth L. Wise
Hanover College
Creighton University
H. Christian Thorup
Cuesta College

xvi
 Introduction

Human rights violations are at least as old as recorded history. Human

rights violations figure prominently in the most primordial accounts of
human crime, beginning in Western civilization with the biblical story of
Cain slaying his brother Abel. From all that is known about the history of
oppression, mass slaughter and torture, human beings have not become
morally worse in modern times than they were in ages past. The behavior
of various hideously cruel Roman emperors, leaders such as Attila the
Hun and Tamerlane, and dozens of others amply illustrate this point.
What has changed is the development of more powerful means to violate
what we know as human rights, especially the most fundamental right of
all, the right to life itself.

The Concept of Human Rights

The idea of “human rights” in the sense used today originated in the
political philosophy of seventeenth century England, especially in the
writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The human rights idea was
most explicitly stated by a number of writers in the years prior to the out-
break of the American Revolution. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson employed
language easily recognizable to his contemporaries when he wrote “that
all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness.”
Jefferson’s words rang down through the ages. When Ralph Waldo Em-
erson wrote in 1836 that the first burst from an American rifle in the
American Revolution was the “shot heard ’round the world,” he alluded
to far more than the gunshot that signaled the outbreak of war. It was the
justification of the revolution—the political philosophy of the Declara-
tion of Independence—that became broadcast to world. At the heart of
that political creed was the idea that every person on earth is born with
certain fundamental rights. Given a choice, people want these rights pro-
tected, and just governments are established to protect these rights.
In 1789, only thirteen years after the American Declaration of Inde-
pendence, the French Revolution broke out. That same year the French
National Assembly announced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
of the Citizen. Jefferson, who was then in Paris, was a principal adviser in
the document’s drafting. The French declaration expanded the central
xvii
 Human Rights Violations

idea of natural “rights of man” of the American declaration and helped

spread the “natural rights” doctrine throughout Europe and beyond.
By the twentieth century, the philosophy of the American Declaration
of Independence was known to both scholars and political leaders around
the world. Its democratic message had slowly been undermining the
foundations of empires and monarchies. The aftermath of World War I
saw the liberation of peoples ruled by empires against their will.
Meanwhile, human rights ideas were making steady inroads into rules
regarding the conduct of war. International military convention has long
prohibited attacks on civilians. Such formal international conventions at-
tempt to protect innocent human life, under the implicit or explicit
grounds that human life is valuable for its own sake. Such conventions as-
sume that human beings have a right to life and therefore ought not to be
deliberately attacked. Modern international conventions concerning the
conduct of war and the treatment of enemies began in the nineteenth cen-
tury. During the U.S. Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln appointed
German-born scholar Francis Lieber to develop rules for the conduct of
war. Afterward, these rules became influential in the development of limi-
tations on abusive wartime conduct by nations.
A further consequence of the twentieth century’s World War I was the
widespread view in Europe and America that war could no longer be tol-
erated among civilized peoples. The carnage of the war had been im-
mense; however, that “war to end all wars” sowed the seeds of a far more
destructive world war that erupted in 1939. World War II laid waste large
swathes of Europe and Asia, killing tens of millions. It also saw an almost
complete breakdown of distinctions between military personnel—long
considered legitimate targets during wars—and civilians—who were never
considered legitimate targets. The massive bombing of cities by all sides
during the war killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, often quite in-
tentionally. The Germans and Japanese were notorious for indiscrimi-
nately killing civilians and pillaging of their property. The Allies, however,
also specifically targeted civilians in such incidents as the firebombing of
Tokyo and the obliteration of German cities.
In a more heinous category, however, were crimes committed by
Germany and Japan that shocked the conscience of the world. In these
instances, although there were no specific international conventions out-
lawing them, the perpetrators were brought to trial after the war; many of
them were convicted, and some were executed. Japanese armies de-
stroyed large areas of China, bombing, invading, and marauding many of
xviii
 Introduction

its cities. The Rape of Nanking, in which perhaps 300,000 people were
killed, stands out for its barbarous cruelty. Japan also committed count-
less war crimes against captured Allied soldiers, including the infamous
Bataan Death March of American prisoners of war.
The most sensational and unthinkably evil of these crimes, however,
was the Holocaust of World War II, in which perhaps eight million people
were systematically rounded up throughout Nazi-occupied Europe and
murdered in specially constructed death camps. The special focus of the
Holocaust were Europe’s Jews, some six million of whom perished, mostly
in specially constructed death camps. Other Holocaust victims included
hundreds of thousands of homosexuals, Gypsies, and political opponents
of the Nazi regime. After World War II, revulsion at the spectacle of civil-
ian slaughter drove home the necessity to staunch the river of human
blood that so horrified humanity. At war crimes trials that began in
Nuremburg, Germany, in 1946, prosecutors coined new terms to deal
with the Holocaust, since no international law on the books had foreseen
murder of civilians on such a scale. The first of these terms was “crimes
against humanity.” To describe the attempt to kill an entire people a sec-
ond term entered the language—“genocide.”
The idea of a crime against humanity contained the idea that all hu-
man beings have a natural right to life, which was not a new idea. Soon the
idea of such rights was written into what was asserted as universally valid
international law when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
enacted by the United Nations in 1948. The declaration was drawn up
partly through the influence of Eleanor Roosevelt and incorporated cer-
tain doctrines that had been part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
New Deal thinking, especially the responsibility of governments to pro-
vide for the needs of all their citizens. This political program now rose to
the level of human rights. Passage of the Universal Declaration and a
large range of new human rights conventions recognized the menace of
humanity’s growing capacity for massive human annihilation.
The concept of crimes against humanity had as its premise the idea
made famous by the power of Jefferson’s prose, that certain rights come
not as enactments by governments, but by nature or birth—by nothing
more than the fact of the humanity of every man and woman. Thus the
idea of human rights is that each of us has rights independent of whatever
other rights we might have as citizens of this country or that; and that
those who have no country nevertheless have “certain unalienable rights.”

xix
 Human Rights Violations

Philosophical Considerations on Human Rights

Human rights encompass a variety of rights. Rights are claims made by
individuals on behalf of themselves as individuals or in association with
others. Collective entities such as states and fictitious entities such as cor-
porations also have rights under various bodies of law. We can understand
rights more clearly by contrasting them to opposition to duties or obliga-
tions. Some rights entail obligations on the part of others. If someone has
a legitimate right to the exclusive use of a piece of land, for example, oth-
ers necessarily have an obligation to respect that exclusivity. Thus rights
and obligations are usually two sides of the same coin.
Other rights do not involve complementary obligations on the part of
others. In all situations of legitimate competition, for instance, one party,
such as a sports team, claims the right to win a competition without also
claiming that the other team has an obligation to allow them to win. This
is the situation of a right versus a right. Claims of human rights, on the
other hand, state generally that other parties—usually nations but in
some instances individuals—have obligations to respect human rights.
There is an important distinction between positive and negative rights.
Negative rights are those that require governments or persons not to in-
terfere with such rights; while positive rights are those which require cer-
tain kinds of actions to fulfill them. The requirement that governments
not interfere with citizens’ freedoms of religion, speech, press, and as-
sembly, for example, is one that protects negative rights—rights of non-
interference. Positive rights, by contrast, demand active provision for
these rights by governments. The claim that there is a human right to an
adequate standard of living requires far more than not interfering with
individuals’ attempts to provide for themselves. As generally interpreted,
such rights require governments to establish programs through which re-
sources are transferred from the better-off to the less well-off. In this case,
the less well-off are said to have a positive right to resources.
Can such claims to universal human rights be sustained? The answer is
that there are grave difficulties with philosophical grounds to some
claims to human rights. To see why this is so, we might consider the stan-
dard case in which a nation becomes obligated in international law. The
standard case occurs when a nation signs and ratifies an international
treaty according to which it agrees to do, or to abstain from doing, one
thing or another. Here a nation consents to take up some set of obligations.
Thus persons or other states have valid rights—legitimate claims—against
ratifying states under the terms of treaties or conventions.
xx
 Introduction

However, the idea of human rights is that no such consent is necessary

for states to be obligated to uphold these rights. Human rights are funda-
mentally different from rights under a code of law. All that is required is
the status of human being for such rights to be considered valid. Are we to
believe, then, that each time an international organization, such as the
United Nations, issues a human rights declaration, all of the world’s gov-
ernments, regardless of their citizens’ will, acquire a new set moral obliga-
tions? Or, alternatively, that through such declarations the obligations
that have always been valid are now recognized as legitimate and binding?
One problem regarding either of these cases is the time-honored idea
that “ought” implies “can.” One cannot be obligated to do the impossible.
Since governments cannot possibly provide all of the benefits demanded
by certain statements of human rights, the claim that they “ought” to pro-
vide them fails. If promises are to be legitimate, they must arouse legiti-
mate expectations on the part of those promised. If the “pauper” is a poor
government, how can it be said to have a binding obligation to provide ex-
pensive resources to its citizens that it cannot possibly afford? Evidently it
has no such expensive human rights obligations. If this is so, are not many
claims of positive human rights simply empty charades?
The situation of rich countries, it might be argued, is different. They
have the resources to alleviate suffering. Since they can alleviate suffering
it is not senseless to argue that they ought to alleviate suffering. Such argu-
ments are frequently heard in international forums. Most wealthy coun-
tries do believe they should help poor countries in some circumstances.
However, most do not give aid because they believe others have a right to it
under human rights doctrine. They give humanitarian aid as a charitable
act—because they are concerned with human suffering.
Few governments believe such aid giving to be in the same category as,
for example, obligations under international conventions that they have
signed and ratified. Nor, in instances in which they have signed relevant
international covenants and agreements, do they believe it their duty to
impoverish themselves—to give until their citizens are no better off than
the impoverished of the world. Few, however, accept the idea that prop-
erty is illegitimate, that all things should be considered the common
property of humanity, and that no one has a moral right to be any richer
than anyone else. Indeed, from all we know of the nature of man, society,
and political power, such a doctrine would lead to chaos. Such claims on
behalf of the world’s poor nations to unlimited access to the wealth of the
rich nations seem farfetched. In any case, they are certain to be rejected
xxi
 Human Rights Violations

by large numbers of the citizens of wealthy and middling countries. Taken

seriously, such claims constitute a formula for the same perpetual armed
conflict that exists without settled means of securing property. The idea
that certain categories of positive human rights exist (such as rights to
medical care, food, housing, and living wages) that seek to impose obliga-
tions on all governments has grave difficulties.
Opinions differ on whether the idea of human rights is bogus. Those
who believe that such rights are—as the eighteenth century English phi-
losopher Jeremy Bentham put it—“nonsense upon stilts” are in the mi-
nority. However. the philosophical case for a maximal version of human
rights is hard to make. Nevertheless, at least two defenses of human rights
may be offered. First, the idea of negative human rights can be used to de-
fend basic liberal freedoms, such as those of religious beliefs, speech, and
press. Here the argument might be cast as found in the Declaration of In-
dependence, itself derived from principles established in seventeenth
century England. According to this argument, people are not born with
the duty to obey whatever government or set of laws happens to be in
place. If they are not born with obligations, it follows that they are born
with rights, as wherever individuals do not have obligations, they have
rights. For example, if people are not obligated to practice a certain reli-
gion, they do have a right to religious liberty.
To acquire political obligations, people must consent to them. A gov-
ernment’s “just powers,” the Declaration of Independence states, “are de-
rived from the consent of the governed.” Without consent, there are no
political obligations. In this conception it is part of the nature of things
that people acquire only those political obligations to which they consent,
and therefore they are born with certain rights as part of the human con-
dition. These rights are also known as human rights and may be expressed
in general terms, such as the right to liberty.
A second line of defense for the idea of human rights is to treat it as a
political movement with deep roots in the depths and horror of human
suffering, especially in the twentieth century and continuing into the
next century. In this view, declarations of human rights are, taken to-
gether, appeals to end the cruelties, slaughters, and oppression that have
afflicted humanity throughout history but which, during the past cen-
tury, became more heinous and more visible than ever before.
Common decency, it may be argued, demands a concept such as “hu-
man rights” as a moral cudgel to strike out at governments and others
who mock the value and sanctity of human life and try to prevent free and
xxii
 Introduction

law-governed societies from coming into being. The idea of human rights
argues, in effect, that a moral basis should be internationally established
to demand—systematically and in detail—that abuses of men, women,
and children cease. Thus courts have been established and trials held to
accuse, try, and punish those guilty of assault against human decency.
Such arguments alone, it may be said, justify a human rights move-
ment. In this view, while some human rights claims may be extreme, the
worldwide drive to rid the world of tyranny and substitute humane gov-
ernments in its place is another matter altogether. Articles within Human
Rights Violations present ample evidence of the moral rapacity of human
beings in every corner of the globe. In describing the doleful chronicles
of the viciousness of which humanity is capable, articles in these volumes
cover the violations of a comprehensive range of human rights.

War Crimes and Terrorism

Terrorist acts in the public sphere may be defined as illegal attempts to
kill, physically harm, or intimidate innocent civilians to further political
ends. No political end, however, justifies deliberate attacks on civilians.
The idea that “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter”
can have no legitimacy, since a single general standard lies at the heart of
all acceptable definitions of terrorism. In essence, the idea of “terrorism”
concerns the means used in attempts to attain political ends; it does not
concern judgment of the ends themselves. Such a judgment constitutes a
separate issue. “Just” wars may be fought with unjust means and among
unjust and morally untenable tactics is terrorism. To believe otherwise is
to believe that “the end justifies the means,” a doctrine that sets loose the
ill-winds of nihilism, since it destroys the legitimacy of all complaints
against the means used to fight wars. During the 1950’s, Algeria’s anti-
colonial National Liberation Party used terrorist tactics to gain its politi-
cal ends against the French colonizers in Algeria as well as in France itself.
The 1960’s and 1970’s, however, saw the rapid rise of a multitude of ter-
rorist organizations.
Terrorism grew apace during the 1980’s, when states such as Libya and
Iran began sponsoring terrorist activities. Outstanding among these acts
was the bombing of a Pan American jetliner that crashed near Lockerbie,
Scotland, killing 270 people in 1988. Two of the worst terrorist incidents
aimed at American targets outside the United States were committed on
August 7, 1998, when 224 civilians were killed by terrorist bombs explod-
ing at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
xxiii
 Human Rights Violations

In addition, some 5,000 civilians were also seriously wounded. Still, no in-
cident of such magnitude had ever occurred on American soil until Sep-
tember 11, 2001, when hijacked airliners were flown into the towers of
New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon Building outside
Washington, D.C. This increase in terrorism spelled out the weakening—
or outright dismissal—of international moral human rights norms among
those involved in a variety of political struggles.
A negative history of the twentieth century could be written by way of
an account of human rights violations respecting political freedom and
the committal of atrocities and war crimes. World War I, the brutal, de-
structive and needless conflict that, in effect opened the twentieth cen-
tury, quite apart from its senseless carnage that slaughtered a generation
of young European men, saw the world’s first wartime use of poison gas.
The same war allowed the Bolsheviks, Russia’s Communist party, to
stage a coup in 1917, inaugurating nearly three-quarters of a century of
oppression and agony in Russia, Ukraine, and other nations absorbed
into the new Soviet Union. The Red Terror of 1917 to 1924, which used
terror as a means of political control, killed many thousands of people.
After a brief respite, Joseph Stalin assumed power and murdered millions
through a deliberate terror famine in Ukraine and a series of purges of al-
leged Communist Party enemies during the 1930’s.

Soviet Communism and Post-World War II Europe

After World War II, Stalin added to his territorial and human booty by
annexing the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, incorpo-
rating them into the Soviet Union. At the same time, by the late 1940’s
Stalin’s communist lieutenants in Eastern Europe had taken over other
countries, making them political satellites of the Soviet Union, their gov-
ernments puppets of Stalin’s will.
Two other countries in the region, Yugoslavia and Albania, also suf-
fered communization, though independent of the Soviet Union. Yugo-
slavia’s version, under the anti-Nazi guerilla leader Marshall Tito, was
more benign than Stalin’s, though dissident writers still found themselves
arrested and imprisoned. Albania, turned into an impoverished, pre-
modern backwater by dictator Enver Hoxha, fared much worse.
Major episodes in the Soviet oppression of post war Eastern Europe in-
cluded the brutal put down of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, when
the Magyar nation attempted to throw off the Soviet yoke, but were no
match for the Red Army. A similar incident came in 1968, when Czecho-
xxiv
 Introduction

slovakia attempted to liberate itself from Soviet-style communism. Mean-

while, East Germany, under Soviet direction, erected a wall to separate its
part of Berlin from West Berlin, which was part of free West Germany, be-
cause many East Germans were rejecting communism by walking into
West Germany. Within the Soviet Union itself, change was fitful. Although
significant numbers of prisoners were released from prison camps after
Stalin’s death in 1953, significant numbers remained.
In 1956, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, revealed the worst hor-
rors of Stalin’s rule in a secret speech to the Communist Party’s central
committee. At that time there was a brief thaw in the icy grip of govern-
ment control of society; however, the oppressive regime soon returned
with full force. Among the most barbaric episodes in the later years of the
Soviet Union was its attack on Afghanistan in 1979. After years of fruitless
fighting, Soviet troops accomplished little, except for killing tens of thou-
sands of Afghans, while suffering heavy casualties themselves.

Chinese and Other Asian Communism

By the 1940’s communism had spread to Asia, where the Chinese com-
munists, under Mao Zedong, assumed power in 1949. Mao’s China soon
became a full-fledged totalitarian state, beginning with the conquest of
Tibet and suppression of its ancient religious culture, followed by forced
collectivization of agriculture and the slaughter of perhaps a million peas-
ants. Collectivization greatly aggravated the immiseration of the nation’s
vast rural population, which has remained deeply impoverished, with
onerous taxes extracted by corrupt rural bureaucrats.
Mao’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward of 1958-1960, intended to cat-
apult China into the ranks of industrial powers within an absurdly short
period, compelled peasants to neglect agriculture. Millions of people
starved to death, and many more suffered horribly. For a short time there-
after, when markets were allowed to function, bumper harvests in some
areas were so plentiful that some food was given away to avoid spoilage.
However, such prosperity did not last long. Within a few more years,
China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, led by violent student rad-
icals, produced a human rights calamity of vast proportions. The Cultural
Revolution bitterly attacked traditional Chinese culture, especially its
class structure and Confucian intellectual culture and social mores. Vi-
cious fighting erupted among contending political factions. More than a
million people may have died in the ensuing chaos.
Several years after Mao’s death in 1976, China adopted more rational
xxv
 Human Rights Violations

policies. Though the state still owned most productive capital, markets
began to function and a policy of opening China to the world, after de-
cades of suffocating self-enclosure, was gradually put into practice. By the
end of the 1980’s however, the forces of democratic reform had become a
powerful influence, especially among students. Matters came to a head in
June, 1989, when old, supposedly retired, top officials were called in to
deal with student demands for democratic change. Army troops poured
into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and an unknown number of students—
perhaps thousands—were slaughtered. Although the regime continued
economic reforms that allowed free markets an increasing portion of the
economy, China’s path to democracy became strewn with the detritus of
political oppression. Religious freedom continued to suffer, as the reli-
gious sect Falun Gong was persecuted because its independence threat-
ened the regime’s drive to retain total control of social life.
These were not the only sites of communist political oppression. To
China’s south, Vietnam became a communist state after the French were
driven out in 1954. Later, during the U.S. involvement in Vietnam during
the 1960’s and 1970’s, the bordering country of Cambodia was taken over
by the communist Khmer Rouge. Another human rights catastrophe
ensued, as the new regime, supposedly in the course of creating a new
society from its basic foundations, killed more than a million Cambo-
dians.

Fascism
Fascism, communism’s close political cousin, led to human rights vio-
lations that rivaled those of the communists. Benito Mussolini, who seized
control of Italy shortly after World War I, assumed dictatorial powers in
1925-1926 and held them until he was overthrown 1943. By then, he had
eliminated political liberty in Italy and, in the 1930’s, wantonly invaded
and occupied Ethiopia, and thrown in his lot with Nazi Germany.
Adolf Hitler helped found Germany’s Nazi Party in 1920 and in 1923
attempted the overthrow of the government of Bavaria in the famous
Beer Hall putsch. While imprisoned, he wrote Mein Kampf filled with poi-
sonous hatred of the Jews and plans for the conquest of Europe. In 1933,
after the Great Depression ominously descended, Hitler legally assumed
the office of chancellor and began Germany’s Nazification. Thereafter,
all semblance of a legal regime was rudely thrown aside. Within weeks of
taking power, Hitler set up the first concentration camp to house political
enemies, as political liberty was suppressed entirely. Germany’s Jews came
xxvi
 Introduction

under increasing pressure, as the Nazi regime falsely blamed them for all
Germany’s misfortunes. At a Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg in 1935,
Hitler passed the Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of civil rights,
forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and placed those of partial
Jewish heritage under various legal disabilities.
All of this, along with further outrages, was as nothing compared with
Hitler’s “final solution” to the “Jewish problem,” set in motion soon after
1940, when special death factories were constructed. After the war, the
infamy and unthinkable character of the Nazis’ crimes helped propel
widespread publicity of the vocabulary of human rights. Soon, the idea of
human rights assumed an unprecedented stature and currency in inter-
national public discourse.

Other Repressive Governments

Further examples of human rights violations stand out among an enor-
mous number that could be cited. One is the white-dominated Nationalist
regime of South Africa, which until its dismantling in the early 1990’s, en-
forced the system of apartheid of separate development. From the formal
inauguration of the policy in 1948 and its further implementation in
1951, apartheid was no more than a rationalization for racial oppression,
in which nonwhites, especially black Africans, were assigned a life of
drudgery to serve their white masters. This regime was enforced by a po-
lice state and savage methods, including terrorist acts and murder.
Articles in these volumes on other human rights violations in Africa
extend throughout the whole continent, above and below the Sahara
Desert. Events discussed include the bloody Nigerian civil war over the
breakaway state of Biafra, the terrorist regime of Uganda’s Idi Amin,
genocides in Burundi and Rwanda, and the use of hunger as a weapon by
the Sudanese government.
Other of the world’s twentieth century population of murderous dicta-
tors included Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, who held power from
1965 until he fled the country in 1986. During that time, Marcos sup-
pressed democracy, declaring martial law in 1972, looted the country of
more than $2 billion, and had opponents killed, including opposition
leader Benigno Aquino.
In Latin America, Argentina fell under the rule of a military junta that
conducted a “dirty war” in which thousands of political opponents disap-
peared and were never seen again. In Chile, General Augusto Pinochet
took over the government in 1973 and ruled with an iron fist, threw hu-
xxvii
 Human Rights Violations

man rights standards aside, until he yielded to popular will in 1990 and
stepped aside. Uruguay and Brazil likewise felt the alien presence in pub-
lic life of military rule, until each managed to restore democracy. Brazil’s
period of intense political repression began in 1968. Even after the resto-
ration of civilian rule in 1985, the fragility of human rights was illustrated
by the police massacre of Rio de Janeiro slum dwellers in 1993.
In Central America, human rights were likewise fragile throughout the
twentieth century. The mass killing of civilians by El Salvador’s military in
1932 was indicative of the behavior of military governments in the region.
Several other governments in the area, notably Guatemala, behaved little
better. With the active assistance of Soviet Russia, the Cuban regime of Fi-
del Castro maintained a totalitarian regime from the late 1950’s onward,
while partisan elements in many parts of the world cheered him on, as if
human rights meant nothing.
In the Middle East, the barest catalogue of human rights violations
would require volumes. Here, the regimes of Iraq under Saddam Hussein
and Iran under the shah of Iran, followed by Islamic fundamentalists led
by radical cleric Ayatollah Rouhallah Khomeini, were among the most re-
pressive and murderous in the region. Both Iraq and, especially, Iran
aided terrorists. After Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, the resulting war lasted
until 1988, resulting in up to 1.5 million dead. Then, in 1991, Iraq in-
vaded neighboring Kuwait, whose oil it coveted. During the Iraqi occupa-
tion, hundreds were murdered or mutilated.
In Southwest Asia in 1996, a religious movement in Afghanistan called
the Taliban began its takeover of the war-ravaged country. During the en-
suing five years, until driven from power by the United States in late 2001,
the Taliban regime enforced its version of fundamentalist Islam with the
systematic suppression of human rights, especially those of women. Abuses
inflicted upon women under the Taliban regime represent just one in-
stance among many others of the ill-treatment of women by Islamic fun-
damentalists in a number of nations.

Creation of International Norms

The existence of the term “human rights” alone tells us that humanity
has not simply stood idly by as murder, torture, and other forms of abuse
have become ever more widely publicized. As early as the eighteenth cen-
tury a determined cry went up among European intellectuals decrying
practices such as torture, which was widely used. Condemned by the En-
lightenment, torture became steadily outlawed in Western Europe. The
xxviii
 Introduction

U.S. Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791, followed this trend by outlawing

cruel and unusual punishments.
America’s bloody Civil War was among the catalysts that led European
nations to adopt a series of conventions regarding the conduct of war, be-
ginning in the late nineteenth century. The mass slaughter of World War I
led the brightest political minds to conceive the idea of collective security
through international cooperation to outlaw and punish the worst abuses
of power in the international sphere. Out of the Versailles Treaty of 1919
that formally ended World War I was born the League of Nations. How-
ever, the league was doomed to failure when the United States Senate
failed to ratify the treaty. In 1935, when fascist Italy’s flagrant aggression
against Ethiopia occurred and Emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the
league for assistance, the league was entirely ineffectual. Similarly, when
in the same decade a resurgent Germany failed to abide by the Versailles
Treaty’s terms by rearming and occupying Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland,
a weak and vacillating League of Nations proved powerless.
However, after the uniquely horrific war crimes of World War II, the
Western powers, together with the Soviet Union and a war-wracked Chi-
nese state, came together in San Francisco and founded a collective secu-
rity organization, the United Nations. This was the beginning of a series
of treaties that set international norms for their signatories.
In 1947 the United Nations Universal Declaration of Rights was pro-
mulgated. Afterwards, a host of new international treaties and covenants
concerning protection of human rights, including conventions against
genocide, torture, slavery, racial discrimination, abuse of women, abuse
of children, and other such victims. Separate international covenants
were issued on economic, social, and cultural rights and on civil and polit-
ical rights that are formally binding only on signatories. In addition, an
International Court of Justice was established in The Hague, Nether-
lands; a law of the sea, requiring many years to negotiate among numer-
ous nations, was finally established in 1982.
In general, life among nations after World War II took on a host of
international laws and regimes that helped to chart a surer course for na-
tions in their everyday relations with each other. The General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade, later renamed the World Trade Organization, be-
gan successive rounds of negotiations to lower tariffs, increasing interna-
tional trade and prosperity. International regimes regulating air traffic
among nations and other subjects were agreed to.
These are but a few of the most recent important developments in cre-
xxix
 Human Rights Violations

ating order, stability, and predictability in international life. They may

serve not only to introduce the articles of these volumes but also to en-
gage the reader in further researches to gain a more complete view of the
complex web of international rules, organizations, and regimes and the
roles they play in stabilizing and regulating international life.

Making Sense of Suffering and Evil

At one level most of the events discussed in Human Rights Violations
constitute a depressing catalogue of the ill nature and malevolent possi-
bilities of the human estate. The ground covered can quite properly be
considered as definitive confirmation of biblical judgment that speaks of
“the crooked timber of humanity” from which “morally straight” action
can be expected. These volumes may also serve to rebuke utopians who
claim that the Good Society can be achieved if only organized power can
control, oppress, or otherwise maraud upon the power of free choice and
the moral sensibilities of humanity.
The same material can be looked at from another perspective, how-
ever. It is not one that looks forward to a new age of perpetual peace; but
it is a perspective that sees progress in a long, slow process of crafting inter-
national and intranational norms and spreading consciousness every-
where of norms that may one day largely be realized. The addition of
intranational norms means that in at least some instances the interna-
tional community will not tolerate the worst forms of human rights abuses
by governments against their own peoples.
By the opening of the twenty-first century, the world was drawing ever
closer together on account of advances in transportation and communi-
cation affecting international life. Although global terrorist actions and
local wars proceeded unabated with uncharted dangers lying ahead, nev-
ertheless, there was an important degree of international solidarity among
the nations that fought back. Violent assaults against humane values and
the principles of civilized life continued within and among nations and
peoples; but an enlarged and energetic counter-effort just as surely
opposed them. Humankind was perilously endangered. However, con-
certed, continuing, collective efforts to save humanity from the death and
destruction of modern weapons offered renewed hope that although the
“crooked timber of humanity” can never be made entirely straight, ratio-
nal enlightenment might yet triumph over the forces that threaten civili-
zation.
Charles F. Bahmueller
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Human Rights Violations
This page intentionally left blank
Atrocities Against Congolese Laborers
Are Exposed
Category of event: Indigenous peoples’ rights; workers’ rights
Time: 1903
Locale: Congo Free State (later Belgian Congo; Democratic Republic of the
Congo; Zaire)

King Leopold II of Belgium colonized the Congo Basin as his personal domain,
maximizing his personal profits by having his agents commit unspeakable atroci-
ties against the people of the Congo

Principal personages:
Leopold II (1835-1909), king of Belgium, whose reign over the Congo Free
State created one of the worst labor scandals in colonial history
Sir Charles Dilke (1843-1911), an author and radical member of the British
parliament committed to the welfare of Africans, who exposed Leopold’s
atrocities to the British Parliament
Edmond D. Morel (1873-1924), the chairman of the Congo Reform Associa-
tion, which fought to end King Leopold’s rule of the Congo
Tippu Tib (1837-1905), an Arab-Swahili trader, merchant, and administrator
in Central Africa whose empire in the Eastern Congo was absorbed by
Leopold II
Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), a journalist, soldier, explorer, and pio-
neer explorer in Africa

Summary of Event
As Europe emerged from its Dark Ages, it struggled to break the Arab stran-
glehold on trade by developing sea routes to other continents. By the late
1400’s, Portugal had pioneered sea routes along Africa’s west and southern
coasts. During explorations of Africa’s coast, Europeans made contact with
many African states that had achieved roughly equal levels of political devel-
opment. Among these was the Congo kingdom.
Europe became wealthy as a result of a bloody and violent trade that devel-
oped in African slaves. Moral outrage and declining profits, however, curtailed
the slave trade in the New World by the late 1800’s. Europeans sought a new
1
2 Human Rights Violations

basis for their relationship with Africa and tried free trade. Africans proved so
adept at pitting European rivals against each other that they nearly caused
wars in Europe between rival commercial partners. To prevent competition
from escalating out of control, fourteen world powers convened a conference
in Berlin in 1884-1885. In essence, they carved up Africa among themselves.
Belgium received the Congo and the right to monopolize internal and exter-
nal trade and government.
King Leopold II of Belgium convinced the Berlin conference to grant him
exclusive control over the Congo by declaring that the state he would establish
in the Congo would be a neutral field for all commercial activity and that the
natives would benefit from the blessings of justice and good government. He
denounced material motives for acquiring the Congo. Great Britain, fearing
French and Portuguese rivalry, preferred to support Leopold, who appeared
to them as weak and no real threat. Germany also supported Leopold’s claim
as one means of taking the French government’s mind off Rhine territory lost
to Germany.
Immediately after his claims on the Congo were given international recog-
nition, Leopold II began assembling a vast African army commanded by Bel-
gian officers. Many “recruits” were forced into service against their will. Boys as
young as eleven years of age were conscripted, trained, and used as porters and
as the core of future regiments. Officers were paid bonuses for every conscript
recruited, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. Ruthless force was applied to
those who refused to go voluntarily.
Arab slave traders were initially used by Leopold II as high and mid-level ad-
ministrators. The most famous of these Swahili-Arabs was Tippu Tib, who had
helped Henry Morton Stanley pacify the Congo Basin Africans and had be-
come the chief administrator of the Eastern provinces. Tib demanded a share
of the ivory profits earned in his districts. This annoyed the ambitious and
greedy Leopold II. He declared to Berlin conference members his abhor-
rence of slavery and opposition to Arab slave traders. Leopold ordered his ar-
mies to annihilate all Arabs operating in the Congo. This earned for him the
praise of Europe and left him as the undisputed ruler of the Congo. Tippu Tib
and other Swahili-Arabs who survived this war lived out the balance of their
lives in exile on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania.
Leopold II then issued clandestine orders to remove all non-Belgian Euro-
pean merchants from his territory. This was accomplished in part through
heavy taxation, which ruined many merchants and forced others to relocate. It
became apparent that Leopold II had never intended to honor his promise of
making the Congo a neutral commercial zone.
Atrocities Against Congolese Laborers Are Exposed 3

Leopold’s next move was to pay big personal bonuses to all officers secur-
ing very low prices for ivory; officers buying ivory from natives at high prices
were given either small bonuses or no bonus at all. This guaranteed that
Leopold would acquire large quantities of cheap ivory. His officers imposed
ivory quotas upon villages. If a village’s quota was not met, the village chief,
along with village women and children, was kidnapped and held until the
ivory quota was met. Selected victims were killed to force compliance when
kidnapping proved to be insufficient motivation.
The pneumatic rubber tire was growing in popularity, and there was a grow-
ing demand for rubber on world markets. Rubber vines and trees grew in
abundance in the Congo. Seeing this opportunity, Leopold established rub-
ber quotas for villages in addition to ivory quotas. Chiefs were told to force vil-
lagers to supply the quota demanded or suffer punishment. Noncompliance
was considered an act of rebellion,
and Leopold’s soldiers declared war
on rebellious villages. Armed with ri-
fles, his soldiers easily overwhelmed
villagers armed with spears, bows and
arrows, swords, and clubs. For every
bullet fired in a village raid, Belgian
officers demanded that their African
soldiers present them with one left
hand as proof that a rebel had been
eliminated. In the 1890’s, white of-
ficers became suspicious of their Af-
rican troops’ loyalty. Subsequently,
whites demanded that their African
soldiers bring them both the right
hand and genitals of males killed. This
was deemed necessary to prevent sol-
diers from killing women and chil-
dren and presenting their hands as
evidence that they had crushed a re-
bellion. Women and children from
rebellious villages, if captured, were
enslaved and forced into both prosti-
tution and involuntary collection of
rubber. King Leopold II of Belgium. (Library
Soldiers also forced villagers to sup- of Congress)
4 Human Rights Violations

ply all the fish, meat, vegetables, and fruit that they ate, regardless of season.
Fish are abundant, for example, only during certain seasons of the year. A vil-
lager who could not catch the quota often had to travel far downriver and buy
the balance at exorbitant prices. In extreme cases, to make such payments a
son or daughter was sold into slavery.
Leopold II claimed that he eliminated slavery in the Congo when, in fact,
he had merely introduced it in a new form and driven out potential Arab com-
petitors. Africans were forced to go deeper and deeper into forests occupied
by leopards, venomous snakes, and other threats. They often neglected to
grow food for themselves to ensure that they met their excessive rubber quo-
tas. The only escape from Leopold’s tyrannical reign of terror was death or es-
cape to another colonial territory.
On top of other demands, Leopold forced each village to repair specified
sections of roads, railway tracks, and harbors. Most of his African subjects suf-
fered from a chronic lack of sleep and poor nutrition. Sleeping sickness and
malaria killed many in areas where these diseases had been rare before Bel-
gian rule. Populations declined by more than 60 percent between 1890 and
1990. In many cases, whole villages migrated to neighboring colonies to es-
cape Leopold’s cruelties.
Missionaries reported these atrocities as early as 1892. Their reports were
ignored until Leopold’s soldiers began raiding villages in British colonies and
capturing Africans. Those who survived often returned home missing their
left ears, left hands, or left feet. British officials were outraged that such
atrocities were committed against British subjects for Leopold II’s personal
gain. Sir Charles Dilke, a radical member of the British parliament, intro-
duced evidence of these atrocities into parliamentary debates in 1897, 1903,
1904, 1905, and 1906. This created public awareness of these atrocities in Eu-
rope. Leopold consistently denied that he ordered, condoned, or had knowl-
edge of these horrors. He gagged the Roman Catholic Church by assassinating
irritating missionaries and declared that rival rubber merchants, jealous of his
success, were using agitation against him to mask their own personal ambi-
tions.
The fact remained that the Congo’s forests and natural resources were be-
ing used not to benefit the Congo’s inhabitants but to profit King Leopold II
and his associates. Henry Richard Fox Bourne of the Aborigines Protection
Society began writing extensively about the atrocities in the Congo. Edmond
Morel, another reformer and convincing writer, also began publishing ac-
counts of these atrocities as well as accusing Leopold of knowingly recruiting
members of allegedly cannibalistic tribes from the Sudan into his army. Morel
Atrocities Against Congolese Laborers Are Exposed 5

shocked Europe by reporting cases of reluctant rubber-workers being muti-

lated and eaten by Leopold’s men. He claimed that white officers knew of
these crimes and ignored them as long as ivory, rubber, and food quotas were
met. He further claimed that Leopold invited European officials who were dis-
enchanted with his policies to dine with him in Brussels, at his expense. They
were offered a percentage of profits from their areas in return for covering up
atrocities used to gain compliance with his labor demands. Many accepted his
bribes and kept quiet, fearing that assassination was the alternative. Some who
refused to cooperate later disappeared. Wild animals were alleged to be the
cause of death.
In 1903, an outraged European public organized the Congo Reform Asso-
ciation in an effort to end Leopold’s wanton abuse of power and public trust.
European opinion noted that people should have the right to trade freely in
the produce of their soil and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Trade, free labor,
and the right to possess private property were believed to be basic human
rights and the essential basis of economics. Denial to the Congolese of their
right to trade goods and labor was thought to strangle their development and
reduce them to permanent slavery.
Leopold had thus violated Congolese rights by declaring that the state
could appropriate all salable products of the land on which his citizens dwelt.
In practice, he also appropriated their labor and gave them no judicial means
to challenge these acts. Leopold thus destroyed a potentially mutually profit-
able relationship between whites and Africans throughout the Congo. Afri-
cans were reduced to tenants on Leopold’s property rather than proud land-
owners.
Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Harry Johnston, Sir Edward Grey, Henry Fox Bourne,
Edmond Morel, and the Congo Reform Association decided that Leopold’s
crimes against humanity were so heinous that his rule must be ended. From
1903 to 1908, they campaigned vigorously against Leopold. Public opinion in
Belgium forced Leopold to resign, despite the fact that he surrendered the
Congo to the Belgian public in a final failed ploy to maintain monopolistic
control over commerce in the Congo. Defeated, humiliated, and broken,
Leopold died in 1909, soon after handing over control of the Congo to a
reform-minded Belgian government.

Impact of Event
An Italian official in Leopold’s Congo government once noted that the
black slave trade should have been labeled the white slave trade. Officials with
a sense of decency came to the Congo filled with Belgian patriotism and hu-
6 Human Rights Violations

man compassion, thinking that their mission was to uplift the natives. Such
men were told, after reaching the Congo, to get rubber using the most bar-
baric and inhumane means conceivable. In this living hell, many perished
from self-inflicted gunshots. Like the Africans, they too were victims of
Leopold’s system with its heartless, cruel policies. That system turned decent
men into pitiful brutes, while Leopold and his associates in Belgium quietly
pocketed the profits produced. Ultimately, Leopold was responsible for the
anguish, suffering, and denial of rights of millions of Africans whom he had re-
duced to misery, poverty, and slavery. Leopold preferred to call this his “taxa-
tion scheme.” No public accounts were produced to account for these taxes,
and in fact, Leopold was their principal beneficiary.
Duplicity and deceit could not disguise Leopold’s atrocities forever. Clean,
healthy, prosperous, densely populated villages were reduced to ghost towns
under his rule. The few malnourished, dirty, impoverished inhabitants who re-
mained were those too sick, weak, or frightened to flee.
Denied their rights, whole regions fought back by rebelling. The wars of re-
bellion that occurred bear testimony to the resilience of the human spirit,
even under appalling inhuman conditions. The rebellions also show that war
and widespread bloodshed should be expected responses to attempts to deny
people their fundamental human rights. The courage of the decent Africans
and Europeans who stood up to and fought against Leopold’s tyranny helped
safeguard human rights for millions of people.
Acts establishing a new colonial charter for the Congo and transferring it to
Belgian control, rather than Leopold’s personal control, were passed in 1908.
Forced labor was not outlawed under the new charter, and many of Leopold’s
administrators kept their positions. The efforts of Morel and other reformers,
however, gradually dismantled Leopold’s system. In June, 1913, the Congo Re-
form Association dissolved itself, having determined that the process of re-
form had gone far enough.

Bibliography
Anstey, Roger. Britain and the Congo in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford, England:
Clarendon Press, 1962. Recounts Britain’s rivalry for control of the Lower
Congo and coast, followed by a period of collaboration with Leopold and
consequent evolution of a policy to reform his government. Anstey ex-
plains why British plans to use Leopold as an instrument for their own ex-
ploitation of the Congo failed.
__________. King Leopold’s Legacy: The Congo Under Belgian Rule 1908-1960.
London: Oxford University Press, 1966. The Belgian government, Anstey
Atrocities Against Congolese Laborers Are Exposed 7

argues, inherited a country whose tribal traditions and customary institu-

tions had been badly damaged by King Leopold. It also inherited his forced
labor system, with all of its abuses and atrocities. Anstey blames Leopold for
the inadequate preparation of Africans to accept independence in 1960.
Ewans, Martin. European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free
State and Its Aftermath. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2002. Examines
the formation of Leopold’s Congo Free State and explores the overall con-
sequences of European colonization on the African continent.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism
in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Historian Adam
Hochschild’s award-winning book provides a well-researched, retelling of
Leopold’s brutal colonization of the Congo.
Morel, Edmond D. Edmond D. Morel’s History of the Congo Reform Movement.
Edited by William Roger Louis and Jean Stengers. Oxford, England: Clar-
endon Press, 1968. A fascinating autobiographical account of Edmond Mo-
rel’s life and his successful crusade against labor abuse and atrocities in
Leopold’s Congo Free State. Provides the best contemporary record avail-
able of the Congo Reform Association and extensive supplementary mate-
rial.
__________. Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishing on the
Congo in the Year of France 1906. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1906. A
vivid record of Leopold’s atrocities and a passionate plea to free humanity
from them.
Slade, Ruth. King Leopold’s Congo: Aspects of the Development of Race Relations in the
Congo Independent State. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Recounts
the history of racial contact and the evolution of race relations in the
Congo. Captures the debate in Belgium concerning whether Africans were
capable of improvement and high culture.
Starr, Frederick. The Truth About the Congo. Chicago: Forbes, 1907. A collection
of a series of Chicago Tribune newspaper articles written between January
20 and February 3, 1907, which exposed the American public to atrocities
in the Congo.
Dallas L. Browne
Iran Bars Non-Muslims from Cabinet
Positions
Category of event: Political freedom; racial and ethnic rights; religious
freedom
Time: 1906-1907
Locale: Iran

The constitution of Iran guaranteed individual religious freedom but denied non-
Muslims access to high government office

Principal personages:
Mozaffar od-Din Shah (1853-1907), the Iranian ruler who signed the first
portion of the constitution when near death
Mohammad Ali Shah (1872-1925), Mozaffar’s successor, who was bitterly op-
posed to the constitutional movement
Mirza Malkam Khan (1833-1908), a onetime Iranian royal minister who was
typical of the liberal constitutionalists
Sheikh Fazlullah Nuri (1841-1910), a staunch advocate of establishing a
government on Islamic principles who was typical of the religious scholars
(ulama) who joined the constitutional movement
Sayyid Jamal od-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897), a leading Pan-Islamicist who
pioneered the alliance between the liberals and the ulama that made the
Iranian revolution of 1905-1907 possible

Summary of Event
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Iran became increasingly en-
meshed in international politics. The Russian empire was expanding to the
southeast, while that of the British in India was moving toward the northwest.
Iran was the unwilling buffer between those two imperial giants.
Iran’s population at that period was approaching ten million people. More
than a third of that number, however, were nomadic or seminomadic tribes-
men. The rest of the country’s inhabitants were scattered over the countryside
in villages and hamlets. Under the Safavid dynasty (ca. 1500-1727), Iran had
been a major force in the Middle East, but the fall of the Safavid empire was fol-
lowed by seventy years of civil war and political chaos. The Qajar dynasty, which
8
Iran Bars Non-Muslims from Cabinet 9

claimed the throne in 1796, never enjoyed the prestige of the Safavids. The
Qajars exerted real authority only in their capital, Teheran, and in a few other
cities. To govern the rest of the country, the Qajars depended on an intricate
series of alliances with tribal chiefs and local landlords.
The weakness of the Qajar government meant that the dynasty was compar-
atively poor. Their extortionate policies were much resented, but the Qajars
were never able to gain sufficient wealth to sustain their imperial pretensions.
This made them an easy mark for European entrepreneurs eager to gain a
commercial advantage in exchange for a comparatively small contribution to
the royal purse. In this way, Europeans began to exert more control over Iran’s
economy. Iran’s merchant class (the bazaaris) was especially hurt by the influx
of relatively cheap European goods. Old patterns of production and distribu-
tion were disrupted.
Europe’s influence was further emphasized in March, 1890, when the
Qajar king granted the British a monopoly over the production, processing,
and sale of tobacco in Iran. Iranians were avid smokers and the crop was widely
grown. Farmers, petty manufacturers, and shopkeepers all faced the prospect
of losing control over this valuable cash crop.
All classes of Iranian society began to protest the granting of the tobacco
concession. A few individuals who had been educated in Europe or in Iran’s
few European-style schools led the way by complaining that the Qajars were
selling out to British imperialists. They carried on their protest through pam-
phlets and newspapers printed in England or Russia and smuggled into Iran.
At the same time, the religious scholars (ulama) also began to involve them-
selves in the controversy. The ulama, educated in the Islamic religious sciences,
far outnumbered those trained in modern schools. Also, the ulama of the
Imami branch of Shiism, which the Safavid emperors made the majority sect in
Iran, enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the masses, especially the
merchants. Many scholars came from mercantile families and found their
most devoted followers in that group. Although they were contemptuous of
the Qajars, they did not trust those educated in European schools. To the
ulama, the liberals seemed to be as bad as the imperialists.
As the tobacco controversy heated up, some of the liberals approached
Sayyid Jamal od-Din al-Afghani, who was on an extended visit to Iran. Al-
Afghani convinced the liberals that they had to express their opposition to the
Qajars in Islamic terms. Only then would the ulama and the bazaaris join them.
The liberals followed his advice, and al-Afghani began writing to the scholars
arguing that they and the liberals both wanted the same Islamic reforms. Reli-
gious scholars had greater access to the masses than did the liberals. Many of
10 Human Rights Violations

them were preachers in mosques, and soon their sermons were filled with
attacks on the Qajars. The protest grew so strong that the king was forced to
withdraw the tobacco concession. He expelled al-Afghani for his participation
in the controversy. Al-Afghani’s work in bringing the liberals and religious
scholars together, however, set the stage for more serious political change.
Throughout his reign, Mozaffar od-Din Shah dragged Iran further into
foreign debt. Mozaffar was a sickly man, and he made several trips to famous
European spas. In order to finance those expeditions, Mozaffar floated a
number of large loans from the Russians. Scattered protests continued.
The Iranian revolution began in December of 1905. The governor of Tehe-
ran had several prominent merchants publicly beaten for refusing to cooper-
ate with his economic policies. In protest, a crowd of bazaaris and ulama went to
the Royal Mosque. In turn, a government minister hired a mob to drive them
out. Several merchants and scholars were roughed up. The throng then
proceeded to a shrine outside the city, where they claimed religious sanctu-
ary. They issued a number of demands to the king, but these were not spe-
cifically formulated. Mozaffar fired the governor of Teheran, and revolu-
tionary fervor abated temporarily.
By the end of the summer of 1906, protests had reached dramatic propor-
tions. Several thousand prominent citizens left Teheran for the city of Qom, a
famous religious center. Another fourteen or fifteen thousand people took
refuge on the grounds of the British embassy. Life in Teheran came to a stand-
still. This time the protesters demanded an elected parliament (majlis). The
king was forced to concede. The first majlis met in October of 1906, and one of
its committees set about drafting a constitution, known as the Fundamental
Law. In the throes of his final illness, Mozaffar signed the document in Decem-
ber of 1906. The Fundamental Law was a fairly brief document, much of it pat-
terned on the constitution of Belgium. Unlike Great Britain, Belgium was not
a threat to Iran, so the framers of the law thought it would not inspire much op-
position.
In October, 1907, a much larger document, “The Supplementary Funda-
mental Law,” was reluctantly approved by the new king, Mohammad Ali Shah.
This second portion of the constitution reflected some of the tensions that
had emerged between the liberals and the religious scholars. After the initial
success of the constitutional revolution, some of the ulama began to suspect
that they and the modernizers did not mean quite the same thing when speak-
ing of Islam. One of the prominent scholars, Sheikh Fazlullah Nuri, said,
“What is the use of a constitution cooked in a British stew pot?” The question of
the rights of religious minorities was a case in point.
Iran Bars Non-Muslims from Cabinet 11

Although the Safavids had made Imami Shiism the dominant sect in Iran,
large numbers of the Sunni sect (the majority in the Muslim world outside
Iran) remained. Sunnism was particularly strong among the tribal groups. No
one considered banning Sunni participation in government, because their
minority status made it unlikely that any Sunnis would find their way to high of-
fice. Christians of several sects, Jews, and Zoroastrians also lived in Iran, mostly
in the cities. During the nineteenth century, European missionary and benev-
olent organizations began working with the Jewish and Christian groups. They
built schools and hospitals that generally improved the social and economic
position of the minorities. That development, however, raised the suspicion
that Jews and Christians were agents of European imperialists.
In the majlis, religious minorities had reserved seats. Their representatives
were supposed to take care of the needs of their communities. The liberal con-
stitutionalists wanted to ensure absolute equality among all Iranians, but the
ulama opposed that measure on several grounds. Having non-Muslims ruling
over Muslims was to them a doctrinal and practical impossibility; moreover, they
suspected Jews and Christians of having imperialist sympathies. As a compro-
mise, the liberals conceded the principle that only Muslims could hold high
government office and agreed to ban any missionary attempts to convert Mus-
lims. Since the missionaries had never been successful in attracting converts
from Islam, this did not amount to a serious denial of rights. The constitution
did, however, guarantee personal religious freedom. Jews and Christians contin-
ued to practice their faiths without government interference. The constitution’s
ban on non-Muslims in the cabinet did not rouse any significant opposition
among the religious minorities, perhaps because these groups had never had
much influence in any of Iran’s previous governments. Indeed, the prevalence
of monarchy meant that even Muslim Iranians had not had much say in the way
they were governed. The revolution of 1905 and the constitution were attempts
to give ordinary Iranians some influence on the policies of the state.

Impact of Event
Iran’s constitutional experiment ultimately failed. Mohammad Ali Shah
was driven into exile in 1909. He had tried twice to overthrow the parliament
and on the second attempt succeeded, but after his ouster a coalition of land-
lords even more reactionary than the king took control in Teheran. A few con-
stitutionalists, including the prominent religious scholar Sheikh Fazlullah
Nuri, held out in Tabriz, but eventually the Russians took the city and turned
them over to the government. Many, like Nuri, were given the briefest of trials
and hanged.
12 Human Rights Violations

During World War I, Iran was occupied by British and Russian troops. Al-
though the latter withdrew following the 1917 Russian Revolution, Great Brit-
ain retained a considerable amount of influence after the war. The British
were not interested in reinstating the constitution. Their policy focused on
keeping Iran stable so that the British could control Iran’s expanding oil in-
dustry.
Iran never had a strong military tradition. Before the late nineteenth cen-
tury, kings had relied on tribal levies when they needed an armed force. In
1879, a Cossack Brigade was established. The troopers were Iranians and the
officers were Russians. Their primary duty was to protect the king. In 1917, the
Russian officers withdrew, and their Iranian subordinates succeeded them as
the unit’s commanders. One of these, Reza Khan, staged a military coup in
1921. Although Reza was anti-British, he accepted British help in taking over
the government. In 1928, Reza declared himself Shahan Shah (king of kings)
and founded the Pahlavi dynasty. He and his son, Mohammad Reza, were to be
its only monarchs. Throughout the rule of the Pahlavis, the constitution of
1906-1907 was, in theory, the law of the land, but the Pahlavis observed it only
when it served their political purposes.
When the revolution of 1978-1979 began, an alliance of Western-educated
liberals and religious scholars emerged, similar to that formed in 1890. Both
sides looked back to the tobacco protest and the constitutional movement for
heroic models. The names of Sayyid Jamal od-Din al-Afghani and Fazlullah
Nuri were invoked constantly. Although the new constitution of the Islamic
Republic of Iran was built more thoroughly on Islamic principles than that of
1906-1907, it still guaranteed religious toleration for Jews, Christians, and Zo-
roastrians. Like the earlier document, the new constitution did not allow reli-
gious minorities to hold high government office.
The revolutionaries of 1978-1979 were also fearful of foreign interference.
They looked upon the Shah Mohammad Reza as a puppet of the British and
Americans. They believed that both Great Britain and the United States would
attempt to crush them. Once again, Jews and Christians in Iran were suspected
of harboring antirevolutionary sentiments. In the years after 1980, however,
that suspicion diminished. Many Jews and Christians fought in the war with
Iraq. Those who died were given “martyr” status alongside that accorded Ira-
nian Muslims killed in the war.
In many ways, the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 was a continuation of the
one that began in 1905. It resolved some of the tensions between liberals and
ulama in favor of the latter. The ulama still appeared to command the loyalty of
the Iranian masses as well as that of the bazaaris.
Iran Bars Non-Muslims from Cabinet 13

Bibliography
Afary, Janet. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1996. A detailed, scholarly account of the formation of the first
Iranian constitution and of the Iranian constitutional revolution. Includes
a chronology, glossary, and bibliography.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir, ed. Authority and Political Culture in Shi‘ism. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1988. A collection of articles covering every
aspect of Shiism’s relationship to politics. Some concern the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, which were crucial in the formation of Iranian
Shiism. Also contains translations of texts, including two tracts on the 1906-
1907 constitution.
Keddie, Nikki. Iran: Religion, Politics, and Society. Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1980.
Keddie is one of the most prominent among a comparatively small number
of Euro-American scholars who really seem to understand Iranian history.
In part, this is a result of Keddie’s extensive use of Persian sources. This col-
lection of some of her shorter articles covers a number of aspects of the
1905 revolution and its aftermath.
__________. Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran. New Ha-
ven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981. This work is a genuine tour de
force. Keddie manages to make sense of Iran’s history from the nineteenth
century through the revolution of 1978-1979. She covers the period be-
tween the tobacco protest and the revolution very well.
Nashat, Guity. The Origins of Modern Reform in Iran, 1870-1880. Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1982. Although the works of Keddie and Arjomand
cited in this bibliography cover the backgrounds of the ulama, Nashat’s
book pays attention to the liberal constitutionalists, giving them due credit
for their contribution to modern Iran.
Schirazi, Asghar. The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Repub-
lic. Translated by John O’Kane. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1997. Detailed exam-
ination of the formation and evolution of the Iranian constitution. In-
cludes useful bibliography.
Wilber, Donald N. Iran Past and Present. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1981. Although some of Wilber’s views now appear dated, this book
remains a handy single-volume introduction to the long and complex his-
tory of Iran. Places the first constitution of Iran in the context of the many
events that led to it and that have flowed from it.
Gregory C. Kozlowski
Muslim League Protests Government
Abuses of Minority Rights in Colonial
India
Category of event: Indigenous peoples’ rights; racial and ethnic rights
Time: December 30, 1906
Locale: Dacca, India

The All-India Muslim League was established in 1906 to promote the political, ed-
ucational, social, and economic interests of India’s minority Muslim community

Principal personages:
Aga Khan III, Sir Mohammad Shah (1877-1957), the leader of the 1906
Simla delegation and a founder and first president of the All-India Muslim
League
Lord Gilbert John Minto (1845-1914), the viceroy of India who received
the Muslim delegation at Simla
Nawab Mohsin Ul-Mulk, Sayyid Mahdi Ali (1837-1907), a founding mem-
ber of the Muslim League
Khwaja Salim Ullah, a Muslim who called the organizational meeting of the
All-India Muslim League
Maulana Muhammad Ali (1878-1931), the principal architect of the Muslim
League’s constitution

Summary of Event
On December 30, 1906, a meeting of delegates to the Muhammadan Edu-
cational Conference (MEC) gathered to establish the Muslim All-India Con-
federacy. The site of the formation of what would be known thereafter as the
All-India Muslim League was Dacca, the capital of the newly formed, predomi-
nantly Muslim province established by the 1905 partition of Bengal. Delegates
to the MEC, more than three thousand from all of India, answered a call by
Khwaja Salim Ullah to discuss establishing a political organization that would
safeguard Muslim social, economic, and political interests from unfair com-
petition and influence by majority Hindus in British India. Muslim leaders
perceived encroaching disenfranchisement from European-ruled India.
14
Muslim League Protests Government Rights Abuses 15

Thus was born an association conceived because of the perception of a

duality of interests and goals between British India’s two main communities,
Hindus and Muslims. The league would later facilitate not only Indian inde-
pendence but also the partition of the subcontinent into two sovereign
countries, India and Pakistan. That partition would have its origins in the
communal and political diversity of Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims
during the period from 1857 to 1947, a period known as the nationalist era.
Muslim separatism and the “two-nations” principle derived from the idea
that Indian Muslims were culturally and politically distinct from India’s Hin-
dus. Indian Muslims, however, comprised many ethnic groups, reflecting the
nations of the subcontinent’s invaders. They were Arabs, Turks, Afghans, and
Persians as well as indigenous South Asians who were converts from Hindu-
ism. These ethnic groups constituted a syncretic Indian Islam influenced by
varying cultural traditions; India’s Muslims did not, therefore, constitute a
monolithic group except in terms of their communal differences with the
Hindu majority.
After 1857, cultural and religious nationalism became especially important
to Indians, especially Muslims. Hindus had tended to adapt better to their in-
vaders, stressing their distinctiveness as a community less than Muslims did
and assimilating more easily. With the political advent of the East India Com-
pany, Muslims and several martial ethnic groups such as the Rajputs, Sikhs,
and Marathas found themselves jockeying for position to fill the political void
left by faltering Moghul imperial rule. Several of these groups vied with one
another and with the British and the French in an attempt to fill that void. Af-
ter the Indian mutiny of 1857, the British made tangible what had been true
since the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and formally established the British Raj. The
events of 1857 reflected badly, justifiably or not, on the Muslims, since they
were perceived as having the most to gain by disrupting British rule in north-
ern India. For a brief time after the conflict, however, since both Hindus and
Muslims had been involved, there was a sense of Indian nationalism; for some
it meant simply “anti-British.” Indian nationalism was cemented when Queen
Victoria of England became Empress of India and India was proclaimed the
“jewel” in the British crown.
When the British officially announced their political hegemony, Indian
nationalism became interlocked with culture, religion, and politics, most
noticeably between Hindus and Muslims. With the government in the hands
of foreigners who needed indigenous bureaucrats and administrators to oper-
ate it, there was keen competition for economic and political representation
and influence. Muslims, shouldering a greater part of the burden in 1857 and
16 Human Rights Violations

having been defeated by the British in governance of India, fell behind more
progressive Hindus who eagerly sought positions within the British Raj. Hin-
dus also adapted more readily to the British educational system, and educated
Hindus were the first chosen when opportunities for Western education and
government and military employment were opened to Indians. If this were
not enough, the influence of the British extended even to social matters, af-
fecting the lives of the indigenous governed in terms of religious and cultural
practices and even language usage. This trampling on social traditions had led
directly to the conflict of 1857.
Accompanying Hindu participation in the British Raj was a Hindu renais-
sance reviving the symbols, myths, heroes, and history of ancient Hindu rule
in India. Such organizations as the Brahma Sam3j and the #ry3 Sam3j sug-
gested to non-Hindus that Indian nationalism reflected only the interests of
the majority. Muslim revival and reassessment was one response to this.
The nineteenth century Muslim community was reflected by two main
schools of thought, the Aligarh and Deoband movements. Both looked toward
Islamic revitalization, but the Aligarh movement, founded by Sir Sayeed
Ahmad Khan, was progressive, looking toward Western traditions and science
to uplift the Muslim community rather than the orthodox revival desired by
the Deoband movement. In 1875, Sayeed Khan founded the Muhammadan
Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh. Unlike some other Muslims, he saw British
India not as a Dar al-harb, a country of the enemy, but as Dar al-Islam, a country
of peace. Within the latter, Khan believed Muslims and Islam could flourish
and prove loyal to the government. In 1867, Maulana Muhammad Qasim
Nanawtawi founded the Deoband movement. Members of this group had
been very active during 1857. Education was seen by both Sayeed Khan and
Maulana Nanawtawi as paramount to cultural revival and survival under
British rule. Whereas Khan more than accommodated Western learning,
Maulana Nanawtawi did not. His curricula reflected more orthodox Muslim
learning and focused on Islamic distinctiveness. It did not reflect an interest in
equipping its students for participation in a government believed to be hostile
to Muslims. Further straining communal harmony was the birth in 1885 of an
institution instrumental in bringing about Indian independence from British
rule in 1947—the Indian National Congress. With it came the beginnings of a
political separation that would evolve into partition of the subcontinent. Al-
though Muslims were members and officials of the Congress, many were con-
cerned that it did not adequately reflect their interests and would work only to
the advantage of its predominantly Hindu membership. Sayeed Khan was very
much against the Congress, in part because he wanted to foster better rela-
Muslim League Protests Government Rights Abuses 17

tions between Muslim subjects and British officialdom. He saw the Congress as
antigovernment and as a vehicle only for protest and “agitational” politics. To
this end, he established the Joint Committee of The Friends of India, oppos-
ing the Congress’s goals and objectives. All these political machinations, as
well as the 1905 partition of Bengal, which created a new province in which
Muslims increased their representations on legislative bodies, led to the depu-
tation to Simla of thirty-six influential Muslims to see Lord Gilbert John Minto,
the viceroy of India, on October 1, 1906. The delegation, led by Aga Khan III,
included Muslim landowners, lawyers, nobles, and merchants addressing the
viceroy on “communal interests of diverse Indian communities.” The delega-
tion advised the government that the relative numerical strength of a commu-
nity should not be an issue for the government but instead the “political im-
portance and value” of each community should be considered. In detailing
the distinctiveness of Indian Islam, the delegation built upon the recent parti-
tion of Bengal, which would have worked in Muslims’ political favor had
Hindu protests not nullified it in 1911. Two months after the delegation, Na-
wab Waqar-ul-Mulk explained the difference between the newly formed
Muslim League and the Congress. The league did not seek to emulate the
agitational politics of the Congress but to submit any demands to the govern-
ment with due respect. The league stressed a (Muslim) national duty to be
loyal to the British rule, to defend the British Empire, and to give the enemy
(Hindus) a fight in doing so.

Impact of Event
The establishment of the All-India Muslim League provided Indian Mus-
lims with a national political and communal voice different from the usual
regional cultural and educational organizations, which were not as effective in
political lobbying. The league, however, largely represented the interests of
prosperous and influential Muslims wanting equal input into the governance
of India along with influential Indian Hindus. With the Indian National Con-
gress, it was a major negotiating factor in the bid for svaraj (self-government),
a Congress goal announced in 1906, and later in the bid for independence
and, finally, in the establishment of Pakistan.
The league was in place to protest the nullification of the partition of
Bengal in 1911, which depleted Bengali Muslim representation on legislative
and advisory boards and councils. The league’s purpose was also to harness
and focus the political and economic interests of subcontinent Muslims. It was
not, however, a grassroots movement, as the Congress became under the guid-
ance of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Its impact on the lives of
18 Human Rights Violations

average Muslims was thus negligible until 1947, when the partition of India led
to mass migrations of Hindus and Muslims and to a painful and often deadly
refugee problem. The league, however, provided a regional voice on world
problems affecting the status of Muslims, particularly the fall of the Ottoman
Empire and the resultant Indian Khilafat movement. The league and its lead-
ers became symbols of Pan-Islamism.
As a political voice of Muslim leadership, the Muslim League was necessary
to the passage of the Minto-Morley Reforms under the Indian Councils Acts
of 1909, which provided the foundation for a set of constitutional safeguards
for Muslims and other groups. These safeguards included separate electorates
and proportional representation, instruments to strengthen the political in-
fluence of Muslims on government. The league also addressed nationalist
inclinations, especially as it became clear that gradual self-government would
eventually lead to political independence from Great Britain. It would be the
Muslim League and its leader, former congress member Mohammed Ali
Jinnah, that would usher in the Islamic state of Pakistan with Jinnah as Qaid-i-
Azam (supreme leader) of the new country. It is safe to say that without the
political machinations of both, there would be no Pakistan. It was Jinnah, as
president of the league, who articulated most effectively the two-nation policy
that finally convinced the British that there would have to be a division of the
subcontinent upon their leave-taking. In August, 1947, Pakistan became a
reality—the embodiment of minority rights politics in India.

Bibliography
Aga Khan III. Aga Khan III: Selected Speeches and Writings of Sir Sultan Muhammad
Shah. Edited by K. K. Aziz. New York: Kegan Paul International, 1998. Col-
lection of the speeches and writings of Aga Khan from 1902-1955. Provides
comprehensive exposure to the ideas of this first president of the All-India
Muslim League.
Ahmad, Aziz. Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment. Oxford, En-
gland: Clarendon Press, 1964. This excellent study looks at Indian Islam
in a regional way, highlighting its evolution and development in a non-
Muslim environment. Aziz sees this as the “long story of divided coexis-
tence of Hindus and Muslims in India, leading to divided existence as India
and Pakistan in the twentieth century.”
Faruqi, Ziya-ul-Hasan. The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan. New
York: Asia Publishing, 1963. Rare monograph on the Deoband school,
which like the better-known Aligarh movement contributed to the sense of
separatism among prosperous Muslims during the Indian nationalist era
Muslim League Protests Government Rights Abuses 19

(1857-1947). Includes a helpful glossary of terms and religious and politi-

cal movements.
Gopal, Ram. Indian Muslims: A Political History, 1858-1947. New York: Asia Pub-
lishing, 1959. Starts with the military conflict of 1857 at Meerut and the
events that transpired as a result of it. Gopal concludes that the separatism
between Hindus and Muslims was not communally based but the result of
divide-and-conquer strategies by the British Raj.
Metcalf, Barbara, and Thomas Metcalf. Concise History of India. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001. This volume provides a brief, comprehensive
overview of the people and events that shaped India’s history. Includes a
chapter on colonial India, a glossary, and a bibliographical essay.
Mujeeb, M. The Indian Muslims. London: Allen & Unwin, 1967. Cultural, social,
and religious encyclopedic study of Indian Muslims that gives a compre-
hensive look at this community up to 1960. A nice review for the specialist.
Rajput, A. B. Muslim League: Yesterday and Today. Lahore, Pakistan: Muhammad
Ashraf, 1948. Important and rare monograph on the history of the All-
India Muslim League. Very light on the history of its inception but strong
on personalities and the last twenty years of British India. A definite po-
lemic but very useful.
Nancy Elizabeth Fitch
Hague Conference Formulates Legal
Norms of Behavior in War
Category of event: Atrocities and war crimes; international norms
Time: October 18, 1907
Locale: The Hague, the Netherlands

The Second Hague Peace Conference of 1907 revised and expanded the rules de-
veloped during the 1899 conference to mitigate suffering and protect the rights of
persons in international war

Principal personages:
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), the president of the United States (1901-
1909) who took the initiative to reconvene the Hague Conference
Nicholas II (1868-1918), the sovereign of Russia who convened the First
Hague Peace Conference
Wilhelmina (1880-1962), the sovereign of the Netherlands who sent the invi-
tations to attend the Second Conference at The Hague

Summary of Event
In the second half of the nineteenth century, advances in technology were
rapidly making the use of force more destructive. There was a growing need to
limit what states were allowed to do in the course of armed conflict; the laws
and customs of war had to be revised and expanded. A number of interna-
tional agreements began to do that. For example, the 1864 Geneva Conven-
tion sought to improve the condition of wounded soldiers in the field, and the
1874 Brussels Declaration attempted to codify the norms of land warfare.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the expansionist drive of the
great powers made the outbreak of war more likely. It became more urgent to
codify the standards of civilized warfare. The initiative came from Czar Nicho-
las II, who invited all nations maintaining diplomatic relations with the Rus-
sian government to meet for the purpose of seeking the most effective means
of preserving peace, limiting armaments, and regulating the conduct of war.
The Hague was selected as the site for this conference. At the request of Russia,
the Dutch monarch issued the invitations. Twenty-six governments partici-
pated in the First Hague Peace Conference from May 18 to July 29, 1899.
20
Hague Conference Formulates Norms of Behavior in War 21

That first conference failed to provide new approaches to peace or to limit

armaments. It did produce, among other things, new rules of international
law to protect both combatants and noncombatants from the effects of war
and provided the foundation for the 1907 Hague Conference. This second
conference, in fact, had been expected to meet sooner. The 1899 negotiations
were seen as useful, and an early reconvening was supported by the diplomats
involved. More urgent problems intervened, however, as Russia found itself
at war with Japan, and plans for the next conference were set aside. The
Interparliamentary Union (an organization of representatives of parliaments
of sovereign states working for international cooperation) decided in 1904 to
urge U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt to convene the Second Hague Con-
ference. He accepted and immediately sounded out the governments repre-
sented at the first conference. All responded positively. The termination of the
Russo-Japanese War, however, led the czar to resume the initiative. It was on his
invitation that the queen of the Netherlands convoked the Second Hague
Peace Conference.
This time, forty-four nations participated in the proceedings, from June 15
to October 18, 1907. Once again, the participants failed to devise effective ways
of preserving peace or controlling armaments. They did, however, draft an un-
precedented number of agreements setting limits to the conduct of hostilities,
safeguarding human rights, and reducing the brutality and destructiveness of
war. The most important of these was Convention IV, a revision and expansion
of one of the conventions written in 1899. It provided the most comprehensive
set of rules to that date for military operations on land. The regulations, as
they were called in the convention, were of considerable significance for the
protection of human rights. On a personal level, many of the rules promised
to protect individuals in a variety of ways. The regulations stated that prisoners
of war must be humanely treated. Specific rules established, often in very de-
tailed manner, the extent of their protection, for example, the kind of work
they could be ordered to do and their compensation for it. The sick and
wounded must be treated according to the Geneva Convention, revised in
1906. Some of the means and methods of combat were also regulated. For
example, it was forbidden to use poisoned weapons or to kill soldiers who had
laid down their weapons. A belligerent occupying enemy territory was allowed
to exercise its authority but with a number of restrictions. For example, the
occupant must respect the rights of the people living there, their private prop-
erty, and their religious practices. Pillage was forbidden. The states that were
party to this convention agreed that they would issue instructions to their
armed forces ensuring compliance with these regulations.
22 Human Rights Violations

Other conventions specified that hostilities between states must not begin
without prior and explicit warning. They prohibited the use of armed force for
the purpose of recovering contract debts owed by a government unless the
debtor state refused or failed to reply to an offer of arbitration, or failed to
comply with the result of the arbitral proceedings. This was a small step in the
attempt to restrict the sovereign right of states to use armed force, a goal that
eventually was achieved on a much larger scale by the League of Nations, the
1928 Pact of Paris (the Kellogg-Briand Pact), and the United Nations.
Another 1907 Hague Convention specified the rights and duties of neutral
states, essentially protecting them from the destruction of war in return for
their concerted efforts not to be of assistance to any of the belligerents. Some
of the rules protected specific human rights. If, for example, some of the
armed forces of a belligerent entered the territory of a neutral power, the
latter was obligated to intern them for the duration of the war and provide the
food, clothing, and relief required by humanity. After the war, the neutral
power would be entitled to compensation for the internment expenses
incurred.
The last eight conventions written at The Hague regulated naval warfare.
They included provisions ensuring the security of maritime trade against the
sudden outbreak of war and, to this end, protected against seizure of mer-
chant vessels belonging to one of the belligerents found in an enemy port at
the beginning of a war. Other provisions distinguished merchant ships con-
verted into warships, protected the freedom of sea lanes in times of war, and
ensured the safety of vessels not involved in the conflict by forbidding the lay-
ing of unanchored contact mines, which are indiscriminate.
The Hague regulations developed for land warfare were made applicable
to naval bombardment. This was meant to protect the population of unde-
fended ports, towns, or villages and to preserve buildings used for artistic, sci-
entific, or charitable purposes and otherwise reduce the destructiveness
and harshness of war.
Some provisions developed in 1899 were meant to adapt to maritime war-
fare the principles of the Geneva Convention for the protection of sick and
wounded personnel. These were revised and expanded in 1907, specifying the
conditions under which hospital ships and medical personnel could carry out
their humanitarian mission.
The conventions further elaborated the rules of capture in naval warfare,
exempting from capture postal cargoes and vessels used exclusively for fishing
along the coast, or those employed in local trade or engaged in religious,
scientific, or philanthropic activities. The conventions set up an Interna-
Hague Conference Formulates Norms of Behavior in War 23

Czar Nicholas II (left), the initiator of the Hague Conference, in a formal pose with
Great Britain’s King George V. (Library of Congress)

tional Prize Court to ensure greater justice in the capture of merchant ships or
their cargo.
Finally, rules were made to protect the rights of neutral powers in naval war.
The kinds of activities belligerent ships could engage in while in neutral ports
were specified, for example, as was the length of time belligerent ships could
stay in neutral ports.
24 Human Rights Violations

The rules and regulations written in 1907 were significant, but the nations
represented at The Hague were aware that further development was needed.
The Second Hague Peace Conference had failed to create institutions to pre-
serve international peace and reduce armaments. The delegates were con-
vinced, however, that their efforts had been useful and that this work should
continue. They agreed, therefore, that a third peace conference should be
held in about eight years. This lack of urgency was astounding in the light of
growing international tensions and an increasing risk of war. By 1915, the
scheduled date of the third conference, World War I was under way. The third
conference never met.

Impact of Event
The 1907 conference substantially clarified and expanded the laws and cus-
toms of war. It showed a concern for curbing the brutality of armed conflict
and reducing the suffering of both combatants and noncombatants. It is true
that rapid technological developments would soon make war infinitely more
devastating and that human suffering would reach unprecedented heights.
The humanitarian rules of behavior would nevertheless save millions of hu-
man beings from inhumane treatment.
The legal norms of behavior, although far from evenly or generally applied,
were sufficiently respected that large numbers of prisoners were taken and
cared for. Wounded were attended to, medical facilities were, more often than
not, given some protection, and some restraint was shown in the conduct of
military operations. Undeniably, what was needed was a better way of preserv-
ing international peace, but human rights would have been infinitely more
imperiled without the rules developed at The Hague. It must be remembered
that a small step was taken to limit the sovereign right of states to go to war, in
this case a prohibition to do so for the collection of international debts under
some conditions. The League of Nations, the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, and
the United Nations would go much further than that. A new philosophy on the
lawful use of force was emerging.
Humanitarian agencies, particularly the International Red Cross, have
played an important role in the application of legal norms of behavior in war.
Relentless visits or inspections (in the battlefield, in military hospitals, and in
prisoner-of-war camps) by their representatives enabled them to document vi-
olations and to apply pressure for better observance of the law. Exposure occa-
sionally led to public outcries and sanctions (for example, the war crimes trials
following World War II). It would be an error to believe that most armies or
most governments are anxious to violate the law. Every war finds leaders, com-
Hague Conference Formulates Norms of Behavior in War 25

manders in the field, and lesser combatants who refuse to surrender to inhu-
manity. The norms of behavior found in the law of war, such as the Hague
rules, give them an instrument to justify their restraint.
The Hague rules were tied to a particular period of history and its values
and priorities. War rapidly changed and technology created drastically new
problems in the conduct of warfare. International society changed just as
much, requiring the law to be revised periodically, particularly under the spon-
sorship of the International Red Cross and the United Nations. A number of
the rules written in 1907, however, remain a part of today’s law of war.
The 1907 conference showed that large-scale codification was feasible. It
demonstrated a widely shared conviction that, difficult as the task may be, na-
tions could develop legal restraints. It was important to affirm or reaffirm stan-
dards of humane conduct. This did not solve the problem of war, but as efforts
are made to find alternatives to armed violence, it remains important to at-
tempt to protect basic human rights, even (or perhaps especially) in wartime.

Bibliography
Best, Geoffrey. Humanity in Warfare. New York: Columbia University Press,
1980. Reviews the history of the principles and rules of war and the influ-
ence of specific periods on their evolution. A serious, thoughtful book try-
ing to approach this difficult subject with objectivity. Very helpful in under-
standing the role of restraints in war. Provides a useful chronological guide
to the formulation of the law of war and a substantial bibliography.
Detter Delupis, Ingrid. The Law of War. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1987. Provides a succinct presentation of the law of war includ-
ing its special characteristics and the place of the Hague rules in the mod-
ern system. Provides a clear overview of the present norms of this body of
law and explains their evolution and application. Includes an extensive bib-
liography.
McKercher, B. J. C., ed. Arms Limitation and Disarmament: Restraints on War,
1899-1939. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992. Examines the history of efforts
to limit warfare. Includes a chapter on the Hague Peace Conference of
1907.
Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. New York: Random House, 2001. This second
volume of Morris’s critically acclaimed biography focuses on Roosevelt’s
presidential years from 1901 through 1909.
Oppenheim, L. International Law. 7th ed. Vol 2 in Disputes, War, and Neutrality,
edited by H. Lauterpacht. London: Longmans, Green, 1948-1952. Presents
the Hague law in the context of the evolution of the law of war. Discusses
26 Human Rights Violations

the application of specific rules developed at The Hague and their subse-
quent revision and expansion. Provides a useful and sufficiently compact
review of the war crimes trials. A record of the ratifications of the Hague
conventions is found in the appendix.
Rosenblad, Esbjörn. International Humanitarian Law of Armed Conflict. Geneva:
Henry Dunant Institute, 1979. An excellent statement of the practical need
for a continuing development of humanitarian law applicable in wartime.
Reviews the contemporary problems involved and the various efforts to
overcome them. Provides a useful context for the study of the Hague rules.
Includes an extensive bibliography.
Scott, James Brown. The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1909. This is the most basic work on
the Hague conferences. Volume 1 gives an excellent account of the two
conferences and an extensive discussion of the conventions negotiated
there. Volume 2 provides the full text of all documents as well as diplomatic
materials concerning the two conferences. Extremely useful.
Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars. New York: Basic Books, 1977. A remark-
ably interesting and insightful study of restraints in war, both moral and le-
gal, demonstrating their relevance and applications even in the bitter
armed conflicts of recent history. The author also discusses the limitations
of restraints. Provides many historical examples and case studies.
Jean-Robert Leguey-Feilleux
Armenians Suffer Genocide During
World War I
Category of event: Atrocities and war crimes; racial and ethnic rights
Time: 1915 to early 1920’s
Locale: Armenia and Turkey

The genocide of nearly one million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire was a care-
fully orchestrated plan by that government and its officials to provide a final solu-
tion to the Armenian question

Principal personages:
Mehmet Talaat Pasha (1872-1921), a member of the Young Turk triumvi-
rate that ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1918
Enver Pasha (1881?-1922), another Young Turk triumvir
Ahmed Djemal Pasha (1872-1922), the third triumvir
Abdul-Hamid II (1842-1918), one of the last sultans of the decaying Ottoman
Empire; the Young Turks staged a revolution that pared him of all real
power
Henry Morgenthau (1856-1946), the United States ambassador to Turkey
during the Armenian genocide

Summary of Event
Several factors contributed to the massacre of close to one million Armeni-
ans in Turkey during World War I. The Ottoman Empire was in rapid decline
in the latter half of the nineteenth century. European powers, notably the
United Kingdom, France, Russia, and (after 1871) Germany gradually severed
various parts of the once-great empire. The Treaty of San Stefano ended the
Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 at Turkey’s expense. The genesis of the war
was the massacres carried out by Turkish troops in Bulgaria in 1876. As a result
of the Treaty of San Stefano, the Ottomans lost territory to Russia. The impe-
rial Russian government acted as the protector of Christians within the Mus-
lim Ottoman Empire, and Russia pressured the Ottoman government to allow
Christian Armenians to have administrative autonomy in eastern Turkey. A
second treaty, the Treaty of Berlin (1878), signed by the Ottoman Empire and
Russia, essentially modified the San Stefano stipulations by allowing the Otto-
27
28 Human Rights Violations

man government to agree only to treat the Armenians fairly. The modification
eliminated the earlier treaty’s insistence on better treatment of the Armenians
as a condition for the withdrawal of Russian troops from eastern Turkey. Nev-
ertheless, the Armenians were confident that Russian policy and national in-
terest would effectively guarantee their safety from any attempts by the Turks
to massacre their people.
Sultan Abdul-Hamid II carried out a large-scale massacre of Turkish Arme-
nians between 1894 and 1896. The sultan justified his actions by accusing the
Armenian mountaineers of the Sassoun district with rebelling against govern-
ment authority. He claimed that the Armenians’ refusal to pay customary pro-
tection tribute to Kurdish chieftains was sufficient grounds for military action.
In the end, although the totals are estimates, between 200,000 and 250,000 Ar-
menians were killed by Turks and Kurds (the latter are also an ethnic minority,
but are Muslims). International protests and Russian threats averted a greater
loss of Armenian lives. This event, together with the discontent of national mi-
norities within the Ottoman Empire, especially in the Black Sea area, eroded
the power of the sultanate. Turkey was perceived by the great powers as the
“sick man” of Europe.
In Salonika, Turkish army officers loyal to the Committee of Union and
Progress (the “Young Turks”) were embracing a new revolutionary ideology
and a program of action that would capsize Abdul-Hamid II’s regime and, they
hoped, restore the empire to its former grandeur. On July 23, 1908, Abdul-
Hamid II was overthrown. The Young Turks, however, were not able to consoli-
date power until January 26, 1913, when Enver Pasha and Mehmet Talaat Pa-
sha took control of the Ottoman Empire. They were joined later by Ahmed
Djemal Pasha. These three constituted the dictatorial triumvirate that was re-
sponsible both for Turkey’s entry into World War I on the side of the Central
Powers and for the genocide of nearly one million Armenians.
These men espoused a new ideology known as “Pan-Turkism.” This ideol-
ogy was shaped by the intellectual Ziya Gökalp, who was a close friend of
Mehmet Talaat Pasha and a member of the Central Council of the Committee
of Union and Progress. Mehmet Talaat Pasha was a forceful advocate for exter-
mination of the Armenian people as part of an effort to “Turkify” Turkey.
The triumvirate planned the extermination of the Armenians before the
outbreak of World War I. The genocide was discussed by members of the Cen-
tral Council in 1913 at a series of secret meetings. A chief aim of the Young
Turks was the reunification of Ottoman Turkey with Turkish Caucasia (which
was part of Russia) and Central Asia, but the Armenians were an obstacle to
their Pan-Turkish empire. The Armenians were accordingly scheduled for
Armenians Suffer Genocide 29

elimination. It is unclear if the triumvirs really believed that the Armenians

might pose a threat to Turkey by fighting on the side of Russia in the event of
war. From 1913 onward, the officials of the junta at Constantinople informed
governors and police chiefs of their planned genocide of the Armenians. The
exact time would be determined by events.
After Germany invaded France on August 2, 1914, the Turkish government
moved swiftly to join the war on the side of Germany. Ottoman troops crossed
the Egyptian border and had a minor clash with British forces, and the United
Kingdom declared war in response. The war served as a pretext for the
planned genocide, and the triumvirs were poised to strike at the Armenians.
The Dashnak Party, an Armenian political party, called on its members and all
Turkish Armenians to be loyal to Turkey in the event that war broke out be-
tween Russia and Turkey. Nearly one-quarter million Armenians were in-
ducted into the Ottoman armed forces. During January, 1915, Turkish forces
led by Enver Pasha suffered a major defeat by Russia at Sarikamish, on the Rus-
sian border. The junta was convinced that military defeat by the Russians was
imminent and feared that revolution might break out among their subjugated
nationalities. The Turkish triumvirate made the crucial decision to extermi-
nate the Armenians in order to deflect attention from their failure on the
battlefield and to implement their ideology of “Turkey for the Turks.”
Melvanzrade Rifat, a member of the Central Council, recorded a telling dis-
cussion at a council meeting to the effect that, since Turkey was at war, the time
was opportune to exterminate the Armenians while the European powers
were preoccupied with their own struggles. Rifat noted the council’s decision
that even though the projected massacre might create some difficulty and
public objections, it would be an accomplished fact and thus closed forever be-
fore the Europeans could react. Another member of the Central Council did
not mince words, stating that an easy technique to exterminate the Armenians
would be to send Armenian troops to the front to fight the Russians. The Ar-
menians who were engaged with the Russians would then face fire from special
forces in their rear sent there by the government for that purpose; they would
be trapped and annihilated.
The massacres began on April 24, 1915, when the leaders of the Armenian
community in Constantinople were seized by the authorities and executed.
This date is still commemorated as the beginning of the Armenian genocide,
which would continue in spurts, after 1915, until the early 1920’s. Armenian
military units were disarmed by the Ottoman government. They were system-
atically starved, beaten, and finally shot. Squads of fifty or one hundred Arme-
nian troops were sent into the countryside, allegedly to work on roads and
30 Human Rights Violations

other projects, and were shot by Turkish troops. Two thousand Armenian sol-
diers were sent out from Kharput in July, 1915, and murdered in the country-
side; their bodies were piled in caves. Many thousands of Armenians were
murdered in this fashion.
The Ottoman government, to save ammunition, decided to carry out mass
deportation of Armenians, claiming that they posed a national security threat
near the Russian border, where Russian forces were penetrating eastern Tur-
key. Many of the deportations, however, occurred far from the front. The de-
portation of many thousands was done during the summer months of 1915.
Few of the deportees reached their destination in the Syrian wilderness. In An-
gora (modern Ankara), the vali (governor) refused to deport Armenians. The
Young Turks replaced him with a governor more eager to do the bidding of
the Central Council. This reliable party man carried out the wishes of the
junta. Most of the Armenian inhabitants of Angora were moved at night to an
area called Asi Yozgad, where Turkish tanners and butchers murdered the de-
fenseless Armenians and threw their bodies into a river from a bridge. The
sight and stench of the many bodies in the river compelled the authorities to
close the bridge during the hours of daylight. The triumvirs did not keep
count of the dead. According to an American relief worker, Stanley Kerr, of
eighty-six thousand Armenians once living in the city of Sivas, only fifteen
hundred remained in 1918. Fifteen thousand Armenians were killed in Bitlis,
in the adjacent district, in a single day in 1915.
Kurds were used by Turkish officials to murder Armenians. The Ottoman
government recruited Kurds and ordered them to kill Armenians, especially
the males, children, and old women; young women were often spared. Kurds
tossed bodies of Armenians into ravines, cisterns, and caves. Mehmet Talaat
Pasha, after making himself grand vizier, boasted to the American ambassador,
Henry Morgenthau, that he had done in three months what Abdul-Hamid II
had failed to do in thirty years. Morgenthau protested the massacres. Talaat
replied, “The massacres! What of them? They merely amused me.”
The massacres were repeatedly denied by Turkish and German officials as
inventions of the newspapers. When the fact of the massacres was established,
both the junta and its German allies dismissed them as a national security
necessity. The United States protested and, along with the United Kingdom,
made it clear that Turkish officials would be held personally responsible for
the atrocities in the Armenian provinces of Turkey. Otherwise, nothing fur-
ther could be done until the end of the war.
A Turkish military tribunal tried the triumvirs in absentia for complicity in
mass murder of the Armenians. Their sentences were carried out in various
Armenians Suffer Genocide 31

Threats to Armenian survival in Turkey continued after 1918, and residents of the
neighboring Armenian homeland faced new challenges when the Soviet Union was
formed in the early 1920’s, as this appeal for American aid shows. (Library of Con-
gress)

ways: Mehmet Talaat Pasha was killed by Armenian exiles in 1921; Ahmed
Djemal Pasha was assassinated on July 21, 1922, in Soviet Georgia, also by Ar-
menian exiles; and Enver Pasha was killed in action in the Bukhara region on
August 4, 1922, leading an attack against Soviet troops.

Impact of Event
The calculated murder of the Armenians generated world outrage. Unfor-
tunately, that outrage took the form of parades, speeches, fund-raising for the
hapless survivors, and protests from several foreign offices in a futile attempt
to stop the genocide. These efforts provided no meaningful punitive or
ameliorative effects.
What effect did the Armenian genocide have on the survivors? Did it teach
the world, especially the great powers, to take extra care to prevent such atroci-
ties in the future? The answers are easy enough, at least at first glance. The
governments of the United States, England, and France reacted incredulously
32 Human Rights Violations

to the mounting evidence of the mass extermination of a people. Gargantuan

evil seems beyond imagining, although history is replete with pogroms and
genocide. In August, 1939, Adolf Hitler, in discussing his planned murder of
the Polish people, asked his advisers, “Who still talks nowadays of the extermi-
nation of the Armenians?” Hitler understood how quickly that slaughter was
forgotten by the world. Who would be concerned about the Poles or the Jews
in the midst of a world war?
The establishment of the League of Nations after World War I was an im-
portant development and perhaps did prevent many atrocities. The League of
Nations was clearly concerned about human rights and had some limited suc-
cess against the slave trade. Its several conventions on the rights of people to be
free from compulsory labor and state torture were giant steps that laid at least
a foundation for respect of human rights. The Armenian genocide did not in-
spire all these efforts, but it did galvanize much contemporary interest in mass
atrocities.
The world forgot the Armenian genocide too quickly. In part, such forget-
fulness was connected with the enormous slaughter on the battlefields of
Europe and Africa; another several hundred thousand deaths did not seem to
matter. They did matter. Killing armed soldiers was not the same thing as
murdering defenseless civilians. Humanity surely learned something from the
Armenian genocide. It was not, however, a sufficiently learned lesson.

Bibliography
Dadrian, Vahakn N. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the
Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1995.
Scholarly account of the history of and factors leading to the Armenian
genocide. Annotated bibliography.
Hartunian, Abraham. Neither to Laugh Nor to Weep: A Memoir of the Armenian
Genocide. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Detailed and sympathetic treat-
ment of how a people were murdered. Contains graphic descriptions of
torture, drowning, and other nightmarish ways people were extermi-
nated.
Kloian, Richard. The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from the American Press,
1915-1922. Richmond, Calif.: ACC Books, 1985. Voluminous collection of
contemporary news accounts of the genocide tells a poignant but credible
story of the first holocaust of the twentieth century. The author comments
on numerous specific atrocities that prove that there was a holocaust. Turk-
ish revisionism is forever debunked by this interestingly designed and exe-
cuted account of the Armenian genocide.
Armenians Suffer Genocide 33

Lang, David M. The Armenians: A People in Exile. Winchester, Mass.: Allen &
Unwin, 1981. Describes successive genocides against the Armenians by
Ottoman rulers. The focus is on the years from 1894 to 1918. A balanced ac-
count by any criterion.
Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide
and the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Examines the
roots of both the Armenian genocide and the Jewish Holocaust. Seeks to
analyze the forces that led to genocide and to revolution. Bibliography and
index.
Miller, Lorna Touryan, and Donald Eugene Miller. Survivors: An Oral History of
the Armenian Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. This
collection of interviews from more than one hundred survivors of the Ar-
menian genocide provides highly personal historical insights. Includes a
bibliography and an index.
Claude Hargrove
Germany Uses Chemical Weapons in
World War I
Category of event: Atrocities and war crimes
Time: April 22, 1915
Locale: Ypres, Belgium

By initiating lethal chemical warfare in World War I Germany broke an important

legal, moral, and psychological barrier protecting soldiers and civilians

Principal personages:
Erich von Falkenhayn (1861-1922), the commander in chief of the German
forces (1914-1916)
Fritz Haber (1868-1934), the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry; supervised the German chemi-
cal weapons effort
Duke Albrecht von Württemberg (1865-1935), commander of the Ger-
man Fourth Army (1914-1917)

Summary of Event
The initial decision to use lethal chemical weapons at Ypres in April, 1915,
was the product of disappointed expectations, frustration, and blood. At the
start of World War I in August, 1914, each side expected a relatively easy vic-
tory by Christmas. Instead, the war escalated to a scale never before seen.
More than 800,000 men were killed, wounded, or captured in the early bat-
tles of First Marne, First Ypres, Masurian Lakes, and Tannenberg. This figure
does not include casualties from smaller skirmishes and naval encounters or
those who simply fell ill in the unhealthy conditions of trench warfare. Nor
were most of these casualties the expected lot of hardened professionals:
Most soldiers had been civilians or, at most, in national part-time militias only
a few months before. Far from being over by Christmas, in early 1915 the war
had no end in sight. The war was to drag on for almost four more years and
would be fought by nearly a whole generation of young men of draft age.
For their part, the Germans had expected to sweep through Belgium and
then to encircle and overwhelm the French army. This so-called Schlieffen
Plan, however, failed to work as expected. The French, Belgian, and British
34
Germany Uses Chemical Weapons 35

forces were able to halt and even push back the invaders. By mid-October,
1914, the Western Front had crystallized into an essentially static line extend-
ing some four hundred miles, from the North Sea to Switzerland. The main
tactics applied by both sides consisted of attrition and siege, punctuated by
deadly but more or less futile attempts to push through the opposing forces.
Both sides sought ways to break out of the stalemate. Chemical warfare, poi-
son gas in particular, seemed to some a possible solution to the impasse. This
was not a decision to be made lightly, however. Although there are accounts of
limited uses of poisonous gases in the Middle Ages and even in the wars be-
tween Athens and Sparta (431-403 b.c.e.), no modern army had ever used
them. Indeed, when British government officials considered the possibility
during the Crimean War (1854-1856), they rejected the idea out of hand on
the grounds that the effects were so terrible that “no honorable combatant”
could take advantage of them. This sense was behind the international Hague
Declaration of 1899 which explicitly prohibited “the use of projectiles the ob-
ject of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” In the same
vein, the 1874 Brussels Declaration Concerning the Laws and Customs of War,
as well as regulations annexed to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907,
recognized a principle dating back at least to Roman times forbidding the use
of “poison or poisoned weapons.”
The decision to use lethal chemical weapons was highly controversial in
military circles. Nevertheless, General Erich von Falkenhayn, commander in
chief of the German forces after the initial German failures, asked for volun-
teers among the commanders of his armies to try out the technology devel-
oped and overseen by Dr. Fritz Haber. With the exception of Duke Albrecht
von Württemberg, commander of the Fourth Army, no one was willing to use
this untested and distasteful new technology.
April 22, 1915, was a beautiful spring day near the Belgian town of Ypres.
The afternoon, a Thursday, was dry and sunny with a pleasant breeze blowing
off the German trenches. Even the war seemed relatively quiet. Not long after
the heavy shelling began again at 5:00 p.m., two almost invisible greenish yel-
low clouds rose into the air near the outlying village of Langemark. The clouds
merged and crept in the direction of the Forty-Fifth Algerian Division and the
French Eighty-Seventh Division, by a twist of wind only skirting the Canadian
First Division to the east. At first, no one among the Allies understood what was
happening.
As the chlorine gas filled the trenches, it became clear that something le-
thal was in the air. Men and animals started gasping, choking, and crying out
in pain. Within a few minutes, hundreds fell to the ground, dying. Most of
36 Human Rights Violations

those who could do so fled in blind panic, thus forcing even more of the poi-
sonous gas into their lungs. A few had the presence of mind to wet handker-
chiefs and hold them to their faces to provide some protection as they ran.
Chaos reigned all the way back to Ypres along a four-mile gap, where only a
few minutes before there had been a seemingly immovable front. Men totally
divorced from military discipline choked the roads. Frightened horses with-
out drivers dragged heavy guns. Coughing, choking, purple-faced soldiers
told wild tales to anyone they met.
The Germans were not able to exploit the hole they had just put in the
Allied line, nor could they profit from subsequent uses of chemical weapons
in the battle. By the end of the Second Battle of Ypres on May 27, all they had
accomplished was a flattening of the Allied line.
The Germans later claimed that only two hundred of their casualties at the
five-week Second Battle of Ypres came from chemical weapons. The Allies said
that fifteen thousand of the fifty-nine thousand casualties they suffered were a
result of chemical weapons, including five thousand deaths. Although histori-
ans doubt the figures on both sides, the results of the first use of modern, lethal
chemical weapons at Ypres make it clear that chemical warfare, even against
untrained and unprotected opponents, is both terrifying and deadly but is no
guarantee of military victory. This is significant in light of later claims that mili-
tary necessity morally justifies the use of chemical warfare.
The Germans argued that their initial use of chlorine was not a violation of
the regulations annexed to the 1899 Hague Declaration, since the gas escaped
from canisters and was not part of a projectile. The French, who may have used
tear gas in hand grenades beginning in the winter of 1915, responded to the
chlorine clouds by putting tear gas in artillery shells during the fall of 1915.
They claimed that their actions were not improper because the chemicals in-
volved were not lethal. By the time the two technologies were combined, it was
possible for a cynic to say that each side was merely retaliating against the viola-
tion of the other. No one mentioned Article 23(a) of the regulations annexed
to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 prohibiting the use of “poison or
poisoned weapons.”

Impact of Event
Chemical weapons took a terrible human toll over the next three and one-
half years. Of the approximately fifteen million casualties suffered in World
War I, more than one million soldiers were hospitalized or killed because of
exposure to chlorine, phosgene and its relatives, or mustard gas. Moreover,
the airborne nature of chemical weapons allows them to spread beyond the
Germany Uses Chemical Weapons 37

immediate battlefield. This makes them relatively uncontrollable area weap-

ons, prone to harming civilians who happen to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time. More than two thousand total civilian casualties can be docu-
mented from industrial accidents and attacks by the Germans that individually
led to twenty or more French or Belgian casualties. Use of chemical weapons
also contributed to the erosion taking place in the concept of insulating civil-
ians from military activities. As General Peyton March, chief of staff for the
United States Army, wrote later, “War is cruel at best, but the use of an instru-
ment of death, which, once launched, cannot be controlled, and which may
decimate noncombatants—women and children—reduces civilization to sav-
agery.”
After the war, proponents argued that chemical weapons were actually
more humane than conventional high explosives. They based their claim on
the assertion that the weapons are highly effective militarily, yet kill a smaller
proportion of those who are disabled by them than do more conventional
weapons. Both sides in World War I had some tactical successes using chemical
weapons, but, for the war as a whole, as at Ypres, the weapons did not produce
overall victory. As to their humanity, all three of the main lethal chemicals used
in World War I involve very significant suffering, both physical and psychologi-
cal. Victims of phosgene or chlorine end up black in the face, spitting blood,
and drowning in their own bodily fluids. An unprotected victim of mustard gas
will suffer blisters on every inch of the body the aerosol droplets touch, inter-
nal or external. Long-term respiratory damage for survivors was common.
Conventional weapons may or may not be physically less unpleasant as sources
of wounds and death, but they are often perceived as producing less horrifying
kinds of injury.
The fact that chemical weapons have not been militarily decisive, while they
have inflicted considerable physical and emotional pain, suggests that they
may cause unnecessary suffering. This is one of the criteria recognized in in-
ternational law, including the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, for pro-
tecting soldiers’ human rights. Chemical weapons substantially increased the
suffering of a generation of young men without being crucial to the final re-
sult. They certainly killed substantial numbers of civilians needlessly.
The experience with chemical weapons from 1915 to 1918 strengthened
the international conviction that chemical warfare ought to be forbidden ex-
plicitly under international law. That conviction took the form of a prohibi-
tion on the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases, and of bacte-
rial methods of warfare, written into the Geneva Protocol of 1925. As of 1991,
there were 129 parties to this treaty. Formal reservations of the right to retali-
38 Human Rights Violations

ate convert the protocol into a no-first-use pact, but, as such, the moral and le-
gal tradition against first use in war has proven remarkably sturdy. The only un-
ambiguous first users of chemical weapons since World War I are Italy in
Ethiopia in 1935-1936, Japan against China from 1937 to 1945, Egypt against
Yemen in 1963-1967, and Iraq against Iran from 1984 to 1988 and against its
own Kurdish citizens in 1988. Evidence in all but a handful of other cases is
highly questionable.
Chemical weapons continue to be a concern in international politics.
Their utilization in the Iran-Iraq War, and especially against Kurdish civilians,
has heightened fears that a legal ban on first use is not sufficient to stop a
power with a chemical arsenal. Use against the Kurds also emphasizes the par-
ticular suitability of chemical weapons for use against unprotected civilians.
Thus, negotiations under the auspices of the Conference on Disarmament at-
tempted to ban development, production, possession, and transfer of chemi-
cal weapons. Important strides have been made toward a new chemical weap-
ons convention. Although success may still prove elusive, a worldwide distaste
for chemical arsenals and the desire to limit proliferation may lead to an even
wider prohibition against the use of chemical weapons.

Bibliography
Brown, Frederick J. Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1968. Account of the history of the use of chem-
ical weapons and attempts (mainly failed in Brown’s view) to restrain use by
legal measures. Also discusses the “humanity” of chemical warfare. Al-
though one may well disagree with Brown’s conclusions, the book contains
important material about chemical warfare and chemical arms control that
is difficult to find elsewhere.
Fotion, Nicholas G., and Gerard Elfstrom. “Weapons of War.” In Military Ethics:
Guidelines for Peace and War. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. Inter-
esting and persuasive utilitarian argument for why use of some kinds of
weapons, including chemical and biological weapons, ought to be morally
condemned, while use of others is permissible. Distinguishes between first
use and retaliation. Conclusions are very different from those of Richard
Krikus, cited below.
Haber, L. F. The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986. A painstaking and thorough account
of the origins, development, organization, use, and effects of chemical
weapons in World War I. Written by the son of chemist Fritz Haber, who
presided over the German chemical weapons program. One especially
Germany Uses Chemical Weapons 39

thoughtful chapter deals with the psychological effects of chemical weap-

ons. Some of the conclusions are controversial, but this book should not be
missed by anyone interested in the history of chemical warfare.
Hart, Liddell. History of the First World War. London: Cassell, 1970. Originally
published in 1930 under the title The Real War, 1914-1918, this book pro-
vides a readable and detailed account of World War I that manages to cap-
ture not only successes and failures of strategy on the grand level but a good
deal of the flavor of what it was like to live through the events chronicled.
Provides a good background for understanding chemical warfare in the
context of World War I.
Richter, Donald C. Chemical Soldiers: British Gas Warfare in World War I. Law-
rence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Presents a detailed, scholarly look
at the use of chemical weapons during World War I from the perspective of
the British military brigade instituted to combat the German’s use of chem-
icals. Includes several helpful research tools, such as maps, appendices and
bibliography.
Spiers, Edward M. Chemical Warfare. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
A useful account of the modern history of chemical warfare and chemical
arms control, now somewhat dated by the fact that it was written before the
1988 chemical weapons offensives by Iraq.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The Rise of CB Weapons.
Vol. 1 in The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare. New York: Humanities
Press, 1971-1975. Part of a series which constitutes the definitive account of
chemical and biological weapons before the 1970’s. This volume provides
an overview and covers the history of chemical weapons and warfare from
1914 to 1970. It also evaluates more than two hundred alleged uses. Other
volumes deal with technology, international law, and arms control negotia-
tions. Unsympathetic to use or possession of chemical weapons, SIPRI still
manages to be both comprehensive and carefully objective in its approach.
Frances Vryling Harbour
Bolsheviks Suppress the Russian
Orthodox Church
Category of event: Religious freedom
Time: 1917-1918
Locale: Russia

In 1918, the new Bolshevik government began confiscating church property, for-
bidding religious instruction in schools, and taking civil rights away from priests

Principal personages:
Vasily Belavin Tikhon (1865-1925), the first Russian patriarch of the Ortho-
dox Church since the time of Peter the Great; led the church against the
Bolsheviks from 1918 to 1923
Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924), the architect of the October, 1917,
Bolshevik Revolution
Georgy Y. Lvov (1861-1925), the titular head of the provisional government
from March until July, 1917

Summary of Event
The Bolshevik Revolution of October, 1917, meant serious trouble for the
Russian Orthodox Church. Church authorities for centuries had closely as-
sociated themselves with the Russian monarchy. The Russian church had
evolved from the Greek Orthodox Church, which followed the doctrine of
caesaropapism; that is, the head of the state was also the head of the church. In
the tenth century, Kievan Grand Prince Vladimir made Orthodox Christianity
the official religion of Russia.
For a period in the seventeenth century, during the “Time of Troubles,” the
head of the church (the patriarch) emerged as a more important political
leader than the Russian emperor, but Peter the Great reestablished the power
of the emperor over the church in the eighteenth century. Peter created the
Holy Synod to replace the patriarch as head of the church. Synod members
were selected by the emperor. Despite the protests of many radical priests in
the nineteenth century, state control of the church remained intact into the
twentieth century.
At the time of the 1917 revolutions, the Russian Orthodox Church was still
40
Bolsheviks Suppress the Russian Orthodox Church 41

a powerful institution. It continued to receive political and financial benefits

from the government of Czar Nicholas II through 1916. Nevertheless, when
the February revolution of 1917 overthrew the czar, the Holy Synod offered
Nicholas II only perfunctory support. Although some Orthodox priests, par-
ticularly in the rural areas, remained loyal and even refused to admit that the
czar had abdicated, there were many in the clergy who not only backed the
February revolutionaries but also wished to see the order of Russian society
completely overturned. The lower clergy in the church long had been associ-
ated with radical reform activity. It was not unusual for radical priests to take
the lead in anticzarist organizations.
The Holy Synod attempted to work positively with the provisional govern-
ment established after Nicholas II’s abdication, but it was not long before con-
servative members of the synod began to resent the government’s attempt to
advance the cause of church reform. Georgy Lvov, titular head of the provi-
sional government in March, 1917, on several occasions tried to circumvent
the Holy Synod to achieve reforms he believed to be necessary. Lvov had
hoped that an all-Russian church council (sobor) that he had helped to plan for
the autumn of 1917 would adopt reform measures, but he soon realized that
the sobor would be restrained by the ultraconservative synod. Lvov’s intended
reforms were far from sweeping, but clergy at all levels were alarmed that he
wanted to reduce the role of the church in education.
Throughout the summer and early autumn of 1917, the church and the
provisional government experienced numerous changes in leadership. In
these circumstances, it was very difficult to reach an understanding as to what
position and role the church would have in the new regime. By the end of July,
1917, uncertainty about the future drew liberal and conservative clergy to-
gether in defense of the church. There was grave concern that the church was
on the verge of losing its privileged place in Russian society. This reality led the
church’s hierarchy to ally itself more firmly with conservative political inter-
ests. The church, therefore, continued to support Russia’s participation in
World War I at a time when the army was in shambles, large numbers of people
were without food, and industry was at a standstill. Those who argued for dra-
matic social reform (especially the Bolshevik Party) were accused by the
church of disloyalty to the country. Even reform-minded priests tended to sup-
port the war effort.
The provisional government, shaky and under attack from the left and the
right since May, collapsed in September, 1917, and the Bolshevik Party seized
control of the government in mid-October. Before the October Revolution,
Orthodox Church officials had condemned the Bolsheviks as traitors and hat-
42 Human Rights Violations

ers of Christ. The organizers of the

Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Ilich
Lenin and Leon Trotsky, accepted
the view of Karl Marx that religious
belief made people fatalistic about
their circumstances and sapped their
will to accomplish needed change.
While the Bolsheviks were attempt-
ing to consolidate their authority in
the days just after the revolution, the
church sobor was in session. The sobor,
a gathering of representatives from
all ranks of the clergy, was swift in its
condemnation of the Bolshevik take-
over. Conservative leaders in the sobor
believed that the time had come for
the church, in a twentieth century
When V. I. Lenin ordered the nation- “Time of Troubles,” to choose one
alization of all the land in Russia, it person to guide the future of the in-
was a heavy blow against the church, stitution. They prepared to reestab-
which was the country’s biggest land- lish the office of the patriarch, a posi-
owner. (Library of Congress) tion abolished by Peter the Great in
the eighteenth century. Traditionally,
the patriarch was not only the highest
church official but also a national leader with great influence in government.
This is what conservatives in the sobor desperately wanted in 1917. Although
some clergy objected to the plan, the sobor selected Tikhon (Vasily Belavin),
formerly archbishop of Vilna. His name was drawn from an urn that con-
tained the names of three nominees who had received sufficient votes from
the sobor. Tikhon lacked outstanding characteristics of leadership, but, with
the Bolsheviks in power, it really mattered very little. Church officials clearly
deceived themselves if they thought any person holding the title of patriarch
could have any impact on the Bolsheviks.
Lenin’s first act against the church came on December 4, 1917, when he or-
dered the nationalization of all land in Russia. As the church was the single big-
gest landowner in Russia, this was a serious blow to its finances. In succeeding
weeks, the Bolshevik government closed church schools and seminaries, made
marriage a civil ceremony, and placed records of births, marriages, and deaths
in government hands. On January 23, 1918, Russia was made a secular state by
Bolsheviks Suppress the Russian Orthodox Church 43

government decree. This meant that all religious observances would disap-
pear from state functions and that the government would make no further
payments to the church. During the course of 1918 and beyond, recalcitrant
priests and monks were arrested and imprisoned or killed.
When the great civil war began in March, 1918, the assault on the church,
which sided with the opponents of the Bolsheviks, intensified. It is important
to point out, however, that Lenin recognized the significant place that religion
held in the lives of many Russian citizens. He did not try to prevent private reli-
gious worship, nor did he arrest Patriarch Tikhon or disband the sobor.
Throughout 1918 and into the early 1920’s, the patriarch and the sobor contin-
ued to berate the Bolshevik Party. (The Bolsheviks officially changed the name
of their party to “Communist” in February, 1918.) The patriarch, for example,
contended that the revolution was part of an international Jewish-Masonic
conspiracy. The czar had been cast out so that Russian Christians could be
made slaves of the Jews. The sobor, meanwhile, encouraged Russian believers to
resist the separation of the church from the state.
It was not until 1922 that Lenin brought charges against Patriarch Tikhon
and had him arrested. Tikhon was later released when he agreed to end his
protests against the communist government. By that time, it was clear that all
hope of displacing the communist regime was gone.

Impact of Event
The denial of church rights by the Bolsheviks put an end to the privileged
relationship the Orthodox Church long had held with the government of Rus-
sia. For centuries, the church and the emperors had reinforced and protected
each other psychologically and financially. Suddenly, the church and its fol-
lowers needed to fight for survival. Orthodox followers benefited from the
New Economic Policy (NEP) imposed by Lenin in 1921. The NEP provided
for slowing down the march toward a fully communist state. The government
backed away from an aggressive assault on religious belief. It was not until Jo-
seph Stalin came to power, after a brief power struggle following Lenin’s death
in 1924, that a major effort was made to eradicate all religious worship in the
Soviet Union (which was officially formed in 1922). Even Stalin, however, was
forced to relax his efforts in the burst of patriotism that accompanied the So-
viet Union’s participation in World War II.
During the 1920’s and 1930’s, many church officials and priests left Russia
to pursue their faith in other European locales. Wherever they migrated, they
found other Russians who had fled from the country before the Bolsheviks
could secure the borders. Large numbers of émigrés, including many from
44 Human Rights Violations

the Russian intelligentsia, found their way to France, Belgium, Czechoslova-

kia, Germany, and Bulgaria. Even among those who had become disillusioned
with the practices of the Orthodox Church, there was never doubt that the
church still existed in exile. For those who were not fortunate enough to es-
cape, it would be necessary to carry out religious observances in secrecy dur-
ing the times of the most severe repression. There was no way that Christian
followers who remained in Russia could match the government’s massive
funding of atheist organizations and publications that were intended to deni-
grate religious belief, yet scholars are unanimous in suggesting that there was
never much chance that the communist government would succeed in elimi-
nating religious belief or the longing of Russian believers for the return of
their church.
The greatest impacts of the early Bolshevik attack on the Orthodox Church
were to reduce its political significance, to deplete its financial resources, to
create an aging and vastly diminished clergy, and to discourage young people
from following the religion of their parents. It was not until the emergence of
Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet leader in 1985 that circumstances improved
for the church as an institution. Gorbachev, although an atheist, showed little
opposition to religious ceremonies. In the spirit of glasnost (openness) and
perestroika (restructuring), he joined in the celebration of one thousand years
of Russian Orthodox Christianity in 1989. Subsequent events in 1990-1991,
principally the crumbling of the central power of the Soviet state, brought
about a major revival of church activities. In some of the Soviet republics, it
seemed likely that the Orthodox Church again would have a major political, as
well as spiritual, role.

Bibliography
Brovkin, Vladimir, ed. The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the
Civil Wars. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. This book col-
lects the work of various scholars to explore the Bolshevik government. Par-
ticular attention is paid to Russian resistance to the Bolsheviks and policies
governing religion are addressed. Well organized and indexed.
Curtiss, John Shelton. The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950. Bos-
ton: Little, Brown, 1953. This is the best work on the Orthodox Church and
the Bolsheviks from 1917 to 1928. Curtiss writes well, and his study is nota-
bly unbiased. The book is suitable for the general reader as well as the seri-
ous scholar. Highly recommended. Index, notes, and bibliography.
Freeze, Gregory L. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth Century Russia: Crisis, Reform,
Counter-Reform. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Although
Bolsheviks Suppress the Russian Orthodox Church 45

not an easy book to digest, the reader who perseveres will be richly re-
warded. The author delves into the serious problems that burdened the
church in the nineteenth century, problems that had not disappeared at
the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. Superb notes, glossary, bibliography,
and index.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. 2d ed. New York: Penguin,
1995. Written by a widely respected scholar of Russian history, this book
covers the years of the Bolshevik regime.
Ulam, Adam B. The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph
of Communism in Russia. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1997. This classic work is reprinted with a new preface placing Lenin
and the Bolsheviks in current perspective. A comprehensive study of the
history of the Bolsheviks in Russia.
Young, Glennys. Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in
the Village. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Young
recounts the religious persecution during the Bolshevik regime from the
perspective of those who resisted. Illustrated, with a glossary and bibliog-
raphy.
Ronald K. Huch
Russian Communists Inaugurate
“Red Terror”
Category of event: Atrocities and war crimes; political freedom
Time: 1917-1924
Locale: Russia

The Bolsheviks under Vladimir Ilich Lenin seized power in Russia and proceeded
to eliminate opposition by ruthless repression and violation of fundamental hu-
man rights

Principal personages:
Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924), the leader of the communists who seized
ruling authority
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), the Marxist whom Stalin defeated in the struggle
to succeed Lenin
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), the ruthless dictator who made the Soviet Union
a world power

Summary of Event
Russia entered World War I allied with Britain and France against the Cen-
tral Powers, of which Germany and Austria were the chief members. Although
Russians fought bravely, the country’s poorly developed industries could not
meet the needs of the armed forces or the civilians. Decades of protest against
autocratic rule had divided Russia at a time when conduct of the war de-
manded national unity. The war brought defeat and the end of czarist rule.
Nicholas II abdicated in March, 1917, amid revolution.
The abdication left Russia without a legal government. Nicholas named
Prince Georgy Lvov as prime minister. Lvov became leader of a committee
from the Duma, Russia’s ineffectual parliament. That committee formed a
provisional government that was largely under the influence of liberals who
wanted a constitutional republic. More radical factions desired sweeping so-
cial and economic, as well as political, changes and therefore viewed the provi-
sional government with malice.
Among the dissidents, two Marxist movements, the Mensheviks and the
Bolsheviks (communists), competed for power with other factions. The gov-
46
Russian Communists Inaugurate “Red Terror” 47

ernment’s decision to continue the war gave the Bolsheviks a major propa-
ganda advantage. They demanded immediate peace. Lvov and Aleksandr
Kerensky, the minister of war, tried to revitalize military efforts, but discipline
in the army was extremely poor, and mass desertions occurred. Lvov resigned
in July, 1917, and Kerensky became prime minister while German armies ad-
vanced and the provisional government languished in confusion.
In the midst of this disarray, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks,
returned to Russia after three years spent in exile for revolutionary activities.
He called for the overthrow of the government as a prelude to peace and a rad-
ical restructuring of society. Soon the populace of Petrograd became an
uncontrollable mob demanding peace, and the Bolsheviks grew rapidly.
Kerensky’s frantic effort to find support failed as military units defied his or-
ders. On November 6, 1917, communists seized control of the capital and ar-
rested ministers of the provisional government. A Military Revolutionary
Committee, under Leon Trotsky, had gained support of the garrison in
Petrograd. Armed force brought the communists to power.
At the time of their victory, the communists were still only one of several
revolutionary groups in the capital. Ever since the unsuccessful uprising of
1905, soviets (revolutionary councils) had provided leadership for various so-
cialist factions in the country. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’
Deputies was the most important such body in 1917. Socialist Revolutionaries,
Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks all had blocs of support within it, as they did
within soviets elsewhere. A Congress of Soviets convened as the communists
seized power in Petrograd. Most Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries de-
nounced the Bolsheviks’ action and left the congress to protest it. This lack of
action left Lenin’s party in control.
Lenin demanded “all power to the soviets” and total authority for the Com-
munist Party. The congress declared the immediate creation of a socialist soci-
ety and instituted a Council of Peoples’ Commissars to lead the new regime.
Lenin was chairman, Trotsky foreign commissar, and Joseph Stalin commissar
of nationalities.
The transition to dictatorship did not proceed smoothly. Most government
officials were hostile and went on strike as soon as commissars appeared to
take charge. The state bank refused to give money to the new rulers. The com-
munists responded with brutal coercion.
Once the Congress of Soviets had disbanded, the Communist Party ce-
mented its control over a one-party state. Against some opposition within his
own Central Committee, Lenin made peace with the Germans on terms hu-
miliating and costly to Russia, but the imminence of a German conquest had
48 Human Rights Violations

left no alternative. When Socialist Revolutionary protests became violent and

a dissident wounded Lenin, his regime imposed a reign of terror executed by
the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabo-
tage (Cheka), the communist secret police.
Among the victims of the terror were former officials of the provisional gov-
ernment who, upon release from jail, denounced Bolshevik tyranny and de-
manded free elections to choose a constituent assembly. The Cheka incarcer-
ated them at Kronstadt Naval Base. Lenin ordered the abolition of hostile local
councils and city governments.
Immediately after the communist coup, Lenin had promised parliamentary
elections, but he feared that the outcome might be detrimental to his party.
Trotsky persuaded him to hold the elections rather than risk a severe reaction
for reneging on the promise. The results confirmed Lenin’s fears. Of the 703
deputies chosen, only 168 were communists. The Socialist Revolutionaries had
a clear majority. The people had spoken; Lenin decided to silence them.
The communists arrested more opposition leaders to intimidate the assem-
bly into declaring a vote of confidence in Lenin’s government. When that
body met, it nevertheless elected Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov
its president rather than accept dictation from the communists. When the
deputies recessed, the communists would not allow them to reconvene. They
shot those who protested. The duly elected assembly was no more, and the
communists had full control of the government.
By this time the plight of the imperial family was precarious. Nicholas,
Czarina Aleksandra, and their five children were under house arrest at
Ekaterinburg, Siberia. In July, 1918, local Soviet leaders executed all of them.
Even the family dog died in a volley of gunfire.
Despite its control of the central government, the position of the Commu-
nist Party was not secure across Russia. It needed a large, disciplined military
force to impose its directives and to fight opposition groups in various parts of
the country. Trotsky proceeded to construct the Red Army. Military training
became compulsory for urban workers and peasants. People deemed in-
curably anticommunist became conscripted laborers. Capital punishment
awaited deserters. Trotsky coerced former officers of the czar’s army to serve
his regime; reprisals awaited their families if they refused. Political commissars
watched such officers and indoctrinated the troops.
To feed the Red Army, the government forced peasants to deliver to the
state all but the minimum needed for their own subsistence. Peasants often
resisted and suffered execution for doing so. In factories, managers worked
under the supervision of Communist Party agents.
Russian Communists Inaugurate “Red Terror” 49

Sporadic uprisings against the regime were unsuccessful. Organized mili-

tary forces gathered around commanders of the old imperial army and navy,
and civil war raged until 1921. Despite Western and Japanese interventions,
the communists won. Foreign assistance to the anticommunists was insuffi-
cient but just enough to allow the Bolsheviks to claim they were defending Rus-
sia against outside aggressors.
The empire of the czars had been a multiethnic state in which Russians
dominated other peoples. Resentment led to secessions, beginning in 1917, as
the war effort disintegrated. Finland, the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Esto-
nia declared independence. The communists lacked the means to prevent the
loss of the Baltic states, but they did reclaim a large sector of the Ukraine,
which they made a Soviet republic despite Lenin’s avowed subscription to the
principle of self-determination of peoples. In Central Asia, the Red Army,
aided by communist subversives, imposed its rule without regard to the wishes
of the peoples involved. When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics came
into being in 1922, its constitution affirmed the right of constituent republics
to secede, but rulers in the Kremlin had no intention of allowing secession.
Despite losses of territory, the Russian empire remained intact, with Lenin in
control.

Bolsheviks forming a barricade in the streets of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1917.

(Library of Congress)
50 Human Rights Violations

Not only did the communists impose their rule upon the non-Russians of
their country, but they also dealt severely with all dissidents within Russia itself.
In March, 1921, sailors at Kronstadt supported striking workers in Petrograd.
Trotsky led the Red Army in conquering the naval base. Many of the sailors
who surrendered were shot, and many more went to prison camps.
The strength of the Kronstadt rebellion, in addition to continuing unrest
in general, convinced Lenin to compromise communist ideology in order to
save his regime. From 1921 until his death in 1924, he followed a New Eco-
nomic Policy (NEP), a temporary retreat from state socialism. The govern-
ment allowed small businesses and factories to operate in private hands, and it
obtained foreign investments to aid the economy. Although many problems
remained, the NEP did bring stability that aided Lenin’s government.
The achievement of relative stability gave Lenin an opportunity to elimi-
nate his opponents in a systematic way. Frightened Socialist Revolutionaries,
Mensheviks, and others fled into exile. Many who remained spent years in
prison and went into exile afterward. By the end of 1922, organized opposi-
tion no longer existed within the country.
In addition to dealing with opposition parties, Lenin had to face conten-
tion within the Communist Party, where abject surrender to the Germans and
the NEP contradictions of Marxism had aroused criticism. Some Bolsheviks,
including Trotsky, became alarmed at the growth of bureaucracy as a power
base for dictatorship. A workers’ opposition protested the trend toward despo-
tism and joined Trotskyites in complaining about the NEP. At the same Party
Congress that adopted the NEP, Lenin denounced deviations from this pro-
gram and vowed to stop them. He purged Party membership from 730,000 to
530,000. The secret police arrested troublesome Party members.
Although Lenin was dictator, he claimed that the Soviet government oper-
ated on the principle of democratic centralism, which allowed free discussion
at all levels until a Party Congress established policy. This freedom was, how-
ever, entirely theoretical. The Political Bureau of the Central Committee (Po-
litburo) ran the party, and its members sat on the Council of Peoples’ Commis-
sars and controlled the state.
In July, 1918, a Congress of Soviets adopted a constitution with a Declara-
tion of Rights of Toiling and Exploited People. It soon became clear, however,
that this was not a guarantee of rights but an expression of aspirations for the
future. This remained the case in the constitution of 1923, of which Joseph Sta-
lin was the chief author. Despite proclamations about human rights in official
documents, the peoples of the Soviet Union were subjects more than citizens,
as policies toward education, religion, and the Jews indicated.
Russian Communists Inaugurate “Red Terror” 51

Impact of Event
In the early days of Bolshevik rule, schools became chaotic, as revolution-
ary fanatics introduced an anarchic concept of freedom. The state eventually
imposed discipline and made schools instruments of propaganda. Atten-
dance was compulsory, and teaching had to conform to communist ideology.
Children learned to spy on their parents, and the Young Communist League
(Komsomol) became a training ground for future Party members.
Since communism was militantly atheistic, Lenin’s regime attacked Rus-
sia’s churches. The Orthodox Church ceased to be the state religion, and the
government seized its properties, including schools. A decree in 1921 forbade
teaching religion to young people. When church leaders demanded freedom
of religion under the constitution, the communists responded with terror.
They murdered the metropolitan of Kiev and executed 28 bishops and 6,775
priests. Despite mass demonstrations in support of the church, repression
cowed most ecclesiastical leaders into submission. Bishops asked their people
to accept the authority of the government and promised to refrain from politi-
cal pronouncements and activities. In return, the regime allowed the church
to continue its strictly ceremonial and sacramental ministries.
Lenin believed public interest in religion would disappear as Marxist ideol-
ogy prevailed through state-controlled education. Although individual clergy
members and members of various sects continued to defy the government and
paid a high price for their disobedience, the Orthodox hierarchy remained
subservient. Some bishops became tools of propaganda by telling the world
that the Soviets respected freedom of religion.
In contrast with its animosity toward Christians, the regime appeared
at first favorably disposed toward Jews. Among thirty-one members of the
first Communist Party Central Committee, five were Jews. War Commissar
Trotsky was a Jew, as was Grigory Zinoviev, director of the Comintern, the
agency to promote revolutions worldwide. Jews obtained positions even in
the Cheka.
Since Jews were welcome in the Communist Party, many believed that a new
day of freedom and opportunity had dawned for Soviet Semites. Others re-
garded the disproportionate number of Jews in the Red leadership as evi-
dence that communism was an international Jewish conspiracy, and some
Gentiles distrusted Jews because of their prominence in the Cheka.
When Lenin came to power, he recognized the Jews as a minority entitled
to self-determination, but since the Jews were dispersed across the country,
that recognition was meaningless. Stalin said that all minorities would eventu-
ally be submerged into a single socialist culture, a prospect acceptable to Jews
52 Human Rights Violations

who had become communists. Jews who remained religious, however, were of-
ten victims of persecution.
Communist leaders showed special hatred of Zionism, the belief that world
Jewry should repossess Palestine, its historic homeland. Jewish communists in-
duced their government to outlaw Zionist organizations as counterrevolution-
ary. Soon the state ordered all Jewish social bodies to disband, and confisca-
tion of Jewish schools and synagogues followed. Jews in so-called bourgeois
occupations—clergymen, landlords, businesspeople, and moneylenders—
suffered the same discriminations imposed upon their gentile counterparts.
Writing prophetically in the nineteenth century, novelist Fyodor Dostoevski
had predicted that, when it came, the Russian revolution would begin with the
promise of great freedom but lead to a cruel despotism. The rule of authoritar-
ian czars gave way to that of totalitarian Soviets. A revolution many expected to
produce a free and just society led to perhaps the most rigorous police state in
history. Atrocities that began under Lenin reached huge proportions under
Stalin, whose purges of the Communist Party and imposition of collective
farming brought death to at least ten million people.

Bibliography
Courtois, Stephane, ed. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repres-
sion. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. This controversial book written by
a collection of scholars and historians examines the brutal history of
Communism.
Mailloux, Kenneth F., and Heloise P. Mailloux. Lenin: The Exile Returns. Prince-
ton, N.J.: Auerbach Publications, 1971. Vivid account of how Lenin and his
Bolshevik supporters seized power from the confused provisional govern-
ment and then rendered other revolutionary factions impotent by the tac-
tic of dividing and conquering. It shows that Lenin never maintained a sin-
cere commitment to democracy either within the Communist Party or for
the Soviet Union.
Pipes, Richard. Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism,
1917-1923. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.
This comprehensive history is the work of one of the leading authorities
on the Soviet Union. It is especially valuable for coverage of the Bolshevik
policy toward non-Russian nationalities. It shows how the communists de-
rived great advantages from the civil war.
Service, Robert. Lenin: Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2000. Hailed as an authoritative and well-rounded biography, Service’s
Russian Communists Inaugurate “Red Terror” 53

book uses information recently available from Soviet archives to shed new
light on Lenin.
Wolfe, Bertram. Three Who Made a Revolution. New York: Dell Books, 1964. Per-
haps the best history of the Bolshevik Revolution, this penetrating bio-
graphical study of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin is a masterpiece of research
and writing. The author was acquainted with several original Bolsheviks
and lived for a time in Moscow. No student of the Russian Revolution can
afford to ignore this work.
James Edward McGoldrick
Palmer Raids Lead to Deportations of
Immigrants
Category of event: Civil rights; immigrants’ rights; political freedom
Time: 1919-1920
Locale: United States

The Palmer raids, fueled by antiradical and anti-immigrant sentiments, were the
most spectacular anti-civil rights excesses of the Red Scare of 1919-1920

Principal personages:
A. Mitchell Palmer (1872-1936), the attorney general who created a new di-
vision of the Bureau of Investigation for the war against radicalism
J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), the head of the Justice Department through-
out 1919
Edward Y. Clarke, a member of the Southern Publicity Association who, in
1920, was given the task of organizing, managing, and increasing the mem-
bership of the Ku Klux Klan
William D. Haywood (1869-1928), the dynamic leader of the class-conscious,
revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World
Emma Goldman (1869-1940), a Russian-American anarchist who was de-
ported from the United States to Russia at the height of the Red Scare
Alexander Berkman (1870-1936), a Russian-American anarchist and editor
of the Blast, deported to Russia with Emma Goldman

Summary of Event
In an attempt to rid the nation of radicalism, in 1919 United States Attor-
ney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered various police units of the govern-
ment to raid the homes and headquarters of suspected radicals and aliens.
The raids and the arrests that followed were directed against those, usually
foreign-born, who were accused of radicalism. This offense covered every-
thing from parliamentary socialism to Bolshevism, encompassing “radical
feminism,” anarchism, and labor militancy as well. In the immediate postwar
period, American resistance to anything foreign stemmed from rumors and
formal pronouncements of a great radical foreign conspiracy aimed at over-
throwing the American way of life. Many Americans, encouraged by political
54
Palmer Raids Lead to Deportations 55

rhetoric and official pronouncements, were convinced that a communist revo-

lution was imminent and that a reaffirmation of traditional American values,
coupled with a good dose of law and order, was the only thing that would make
America safe for Americans.
In several respects, Palmer’s antiradical crusade continued the espionage
and sedition prosecutions of the war years. The Overman Committee investi-
gating German espionage during World War I, for example, simply switched
to hunting communists and socialists after the war. The most spectacular ex-
cesses of the “Red Scare” ended by 1921, but the scare remained part of the
political climate in the United States for many years to come. Antiradicalism,
for example, played a significant role in the political agitation for immigrant
restriction and antiforeign sentiments that followed the raids.
In 1919, the U.S. government and organizations purporting to defend
“Americanism” responded to any activity that was perceived to be radical:
strikes were busted (1919 steel and coal strikes, for example); newspapers
called for government action against all radicalism, perceived or real; duly
elected legislators were denied their seats in the New York State Assembly; and
the National Security League, whose main weapon was “organized patrio-
tism,” successfully lobbied Congress to pass laws authorizing the deportation
of aliens and other “irreconcilable radicals.” The American Legion, advocat-
ing the Americanization of United States society, declared that radicals were
mostly from non-English-speaking groups. Individual state legislatures, among
them those of Idaho and Oregon, came close to passing laws forbidding any
publication not written in English. In short, “It was an era of lawless and disor-
derly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitu-
tion, of suspicion and civil conflict—in a very literal sense, a reign of terror,”
according to historian Frederick Allen.
Public reaction to radicalism so affected Palmer that he ordered the Justice
Department’s Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation) to infiltrate and investigate all radical groups. Following the
implementation of this program, the bureau’s head, J. Edgar Hoover, re-
ported back to Palmer that revolution was imminent. Palmer then organized a
federal dragnet aimed at stepping up the raids and arrests. On January 2,
1920, federal agents arrested more than six thousand people, most without
proper warrant, incarcerating them in jails and detention centers for weeks
and even months without granting rights to legal counsel or bail. Of those
arrested, 516 were eventually deported, including the feminist, anarchist, and
militant labor organizer Emma Goldman and fellow anarchist and labor or-
ganizer Alexander Berkman.
56 Human Rights Violations

The intolerance expressed in the Palmer raids took many forms. Some ad-
vocated book censorship and others inflicted agony on “hyphenated Ameri-
cans,” including African Americans, who were arguably the chief victims of the
Palmer raids and their aftermath. As African Americans moved to the North,
northern whites reacted in fear. Many of them perceived the influx of these
visibly distinct Americans to be a threat to their social status. The employment
of blacks threatened white workers with a status deprivation. In response,
many whites struck out at the newcomers, rekindling racist fears of the past.
For the emigrating blacks, the move north signaled a refusal to accept a caste
system in the South which had excluded so many of them from the general
prosperity of the nation. Tension mounted as black aspirations clashed with ra-
cial norms. The racial conflict which followed immediately became linked to
the antiradical mood of the time. White mainstream America feared social up-
set from any source, whether it was black Americans or radical immigrants.
The mood of society in 1919 was as conducive to racial tension as it was to
the Red Scare. Fueled by a witch hunt to weed out Bolsheviks and other radi-
cals from America’s inner fabric, racial prejudice became a natural extension
of a patriotic call for complete Americanism. From Chicago to Tulsa, racial
relations often became racial violence. It was in just such an atmosphere that
the Ku Klux Klan experienced a rebirth.
Fighting for its own version of “one hundred percent Americanism,” the
Klan played upon the fears and hostility that existed between urban and rural
America. Klan propaganda, advocating a concern that public morals were
being weakened by the mixing of the races and by “Red-inspired” trade union-
ism, sought to rally traditional Americans to its banner. The Klan’s chief orga-
nizer, Edward Y. Clarke, roused his constituents against a “Jewish-Banker-
Bolshevik conspiracy” that the Klan saw leading an international movement to
take control of America. This fit right in with Palmer’s warning that a
Bolshevik uprising would occur on May Day, 1920. Racism was fused to anti-
Bolshevism and all that it implied. Because Jews were perceived by many in
rural Protestant America to be of foreign birth, the Klan’s propaganda was
received with patriotic fervor. Most rural Americans identified radicalism with
foreigners. Jews, Roman Catholics, and immigrants fit into this xenophobic
milieu. By 1921, Klan membership reached the one million mark.
The Americanism crusade fit in nicely with concerns of American business
over the growth of trade unionism. Strikes, after all, were a threat to profits,
and American businesspeople were in no mood to have profits reduced. Labor
organizers, in turn, called for a reorganization of the industrial system to pro-
mote workers to a position on par with the power and prestige of industrial
Palmer Raids Lead to Deportations 57

capitalists. In a countervailing move against trade unionism, the business com-

munity called upon patriotism to defeat any “Bolshevik-inspired” labor orga-
nizing activity. Trade unionism was labeled as anti-American, radical, and for-
eign by design. American business viewed the struggle of the worker for better
wages as the beginning of armed revolution in America. Anything or anyone
associated with workers’ rights was therefore anti-American and should be
treated as such. If this meant intolerance of Constitutional guarantees, so be it.

Impact of Event
A search for a human rights perspective on the Palmer Raids revolves
around three interrelated questions. First, what gave rise to the Red Scare
which precipitated the raids? Second, why were the raids aimed for the most
part at an alien component of the labor movement? Third, was the entire phe-
nomenon an aberrant episode or an action which set the tone for the rest of
the decade?
The Palmer raids became part of the “normalcy” of the Harding admin-
istration. Antiradicalism continued to play a role throughout the decade in
the agitation for immigrant restriction and as a catalyst for the business
community’s countervailing response of trade unionism. Significant anti-
immigration activity resulted in the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration
Act of 1924, which ended three centuries of free European immigration. This
law laid the groundwork for continued anti-alien activity as some native-born
Americans lashed out against those who, by their mere presence, challenged
traditional norms.
Union activity was confronted by the emergence of the antiunion “Ameri-
can Plan,” pursued by business throughout the decade. This effort, launched
by employers to resist labor unionization on every front, included the use of
labor spies to infiltrate the labor movement, the manipulation of public opin-
ion through antiradical and anti-alien propaganda, and the hiring of strike-
breakers to counter organized labor’s ultimate weapon. A major force behind
the plan was the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Throughout
the decade, NAM expended a very large amount of money and political
influence to lobby against trade unionism. Palmer’s replacement, James
Daugherty, complemented this activity in the courts. During his tenure in of-
fice, he was influential in obtaining many federal injunctions against work
stoppages, forcing striking workers back to work. The courts also made it possi-
ble for trade union activities to be classified as a restraint of trade and there-
fore to be made illegal. The prevailing mood of the nation greeted such deter-
minations with enthusiasm. At the beginning of the decade, 20 percent of all
58 Human Rights Violations

nonagricultural workers belonged to labor unions. By the end of the 1920’s,

because of a combination of antiradicalism, employer pressure, and unfriendly
government activity, this percentage was cut in half.
Support for official antiradical activity also fanned the fires of nativism. The
Palmer raids continued a wartime obsession for internal security. A postwar re-
cession, high unemployment, and failures of international cooperation led to
an overall atmosphere of an inability to confront emerging social pathologies.
Antiradical and deportation remedies of the Departments of Justice and Im-
migration were part of the nativistic renewal of the period.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) played a key part
in the postwar antiradical renewal. Communist influence within the group en-
couraged anti-Bolshevist passions to surface against it. Pursuit of the Wobblies
had been going on since their organization in 1905. Their attempt to unite all
workers into one big union, and their objection to and rejection of revered
American values such as free enterprise and upward social mobility, painted
an anti-American and therefore foreign picture of the organization. America
saw the Wobblies as a threat to the internal security of the nation and as a con-
duit of alien ideas, and the IWW became a feared organization. Whether it de-
served this reputation was not the point. Federal policies toward the group
took on an antiradical and antialien tone. By the time of America’s entry into
World War I, the immigration, espionage, and sedition laws had been broad-
ened to allow arrest and deportation of IWW officials. Many were jailed for
conspiracy because of their opposition to the war. The organization’s leader,
William Dudley (Big Bill) Haywood, fled from the United States to the Soviet
Union, where he died and was buried in the Kremlin wall.
IWW paranoia, and the fervent nativism which it helped to spawn, was reaf-
firmed after the war. Wobblies, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, were
rounded up in antiradical and antialien crusades. The use of troops in the
raids and the denial of legal rights to those arrested and held became at once
an official answer to a nation’s security problem and an appeasement to an in-
secure public’s extreme xenophobia. This “normalcy” continued throughout
the decade.

Bibliography
Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York: Norton, 1991.
Includes a chapter on the Palmer raids. Bibliography and index.
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1988. An “intellectual history” that encompasses and synthesizes po-
litical, economic, and social change by providing a summary of agitation
Palmer Raids Lead to Deportations 59

for immigrant restriction and against immigration in the early twentieth

century. Includes index and bibliographical notes.
Kiel, R. Andrew. J. Edgar Hoover: The Father of the Cold War. Lanham, Md.: Univer-
sity Press of America, 2000. An extensive review of Hoover’s career.
Preston, William, Jr. Aliens and Dissenters. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1963. The significance of this study lies in its examination of the
problems of aliens and dissenters. Deals with the period from 1890 to 1920,
when the fear of foreigners and radicals increased in intensity. Concludes
that such fears ultimately made aliens and radicals scapegoats for the coun-
try’s ills. Includes index and bibliographical notes.
Tuttle, William M., Jr. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York:
Atheneum, 1982. A history which attempts to explain the race riot and its
causes in terms of individuals and groups. The analysis gets its foundation
from a revealing overview of 1919’s Red Summer and the Red Scare, detail-
ing the racism and antiradicalism of that period. Includes index and biblio-
graphical essay.
Wexler, Alice. Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish
Civil War. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Details the last twenty years of the life
of American anarchist Emma Goldman, who was deported from the
United States to Russia in 1919, at the height of the anticommunist move-
ment. Presents the image of this radical feminist as “the most dangerous
woman in America.”
Thomas Jay Edward Walker
British Soldiers Massacre Indians at
Amritsar
Category of event: Atrocities and war crimes; indigenous peoples’ rights;
political freedom
Time: April 13, 1919
Locale: Amritsar, Punjab, India

The Amritsar Massacre, or Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, was such an atro-

cious action that it can be singled out as spurring the Indian indepen-
dence movement

Principal personages:
R. E. H. Dyer (1864-1927), the officer who ordered a small force of Indian sol-
diers to open fire on a crowd of twenty thousand people
Sir Michael O’Dwyer (1864-1940), the lieutenant governor of Punjab who
approved of General Dyer’s actions
Saif-Ud-Din Kitchlew (1883-1963), a Kashmiri Muslim who was a coleader
of agitation against the Rowlatt Acts in Amritsar
Doctor Satyapal, a middle-class medical doctor who was a coleader for agita-
tion against the Rowlatt Acts in Amritsar
Udham Singh (1899-1940), an Indian revolutionary who assassinated Sir Mi-
chael O’Dwyer

Summary of Event
Historian Alfred Draper titled one of his books Amritsar: The Massacre That
Ended the Raj. The book’s subtitle is correct, for it was that incident that galva-
nized sentiment to terminate British rule (the Raj) in India. Britain had ruled
India for two hundred years, and India was considered the “jewel in the crown”
of the British Empire. Under British rule, Indians had viewed the world
through British spectacles. For the average Indian, there were two major pow-
ers in the world, Great Britain and Russia. Other European powers, except for
Germany, a trading partner, were not considered relevant, nor was the United
States.
In spite of this worldview, disenchantment had developed by the middle of
the nineteenth century. The Mutiny of 1857 had exposed the exploitation of
60
British Soldiers Massacre Indians at Amritsar 61

British rule, and although Queen Victoria had “added the Jewel to her
Crown,” Indian society was also combating philosophical and religious en-
croachment from the West. Revitalization movements developed to counter
Christian and Western ideas. One reaction was the elimination of the Brahmo
Samaj movement that had combined Christian doctrine and practices with
Hindu philosophy. This was replaced by the Arya Samaj, or “Society of the
Aryan People,” which not only emphasized a return to Aryan foundations but
also included personal relationships that were merged with Hindu traditions
to develop a sense of superiority.
Events after World War I, however, altered the British-centric view held by
Indians. The change was so rapid that within three months after the war, Brit-
ish prime minister Herbert Asquith stated that Indian questions would have to
be approached from a new angle. Events in the world contributed to the loss of
awe for British power. Stirrings of nationalism in Asia and the defeat of Russia
by the Japanese showed that Europeans were not invincible. The Russian Rev-
olution resulted in the collapse of a great reactionary power and of prewar
ideas of world political relations. Also, the emergence of the United States and
President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points emphasized rights rather than
the British ideas of concessions.
The change was not merely in attitudes or worldview. An educated leader-
ship had emerged in India, many of whose members were educated in Lon-
don and influenced by the political philosophies of John Locke and Karl
Marx. It was these men, including Jawaharlal Nehru, who would later provide
political leadership to the country. More immediate, however, was the treat-
ment of and attitude toward the British after the war. At the outset of World
War I, there was an outburst of loyalty to the British by the Indian people, but it
diminished after the Allied victory.
A social gap had always existed between the British and the Indians; how-
ever, the gap increased with a change in the type of people in the Indian Civil
Service (ICS). The old component had stayed on during the war, while youn-
ger people had served in the military, with the result that India, by the end of
the war, was ruled by an old and tired bureaucracy. Furthermore, the Indian
Civil Service lacked the ability it had had in early years; it lost its prestige, and
the quality of its recruits decreased. Those in the ICS saw themselves as rulers
of an inferior people and perceived themselves as fulfilling the “white man’s
burden” by administering to incompetent heathens.
The Indian contribution to World War I, especially from the Sikhs of
Punjab, had been enormous. Sixty thousand men had been recruited from
Patiala, and Sikh soldiers had fought on all fronts. Fourteen of the twenty-two
62 Human Rights Violations

military crosses awarded for gallantry went to Sikhs, whom police and local
officials treated like rustics. When Sikhs faced discrimination in Canada and
the United States, the British government did not come to their aid. Tales
of discrimination and humiliation meted out to Sikh soldiers in Canada and
California filtered back to villages in Punjab, and the Indians believed they
had been betrayed by their British rulers. In spite of the sacrifices and support
they had given to the Allied cause in the war, they did not receive promised
reforms.
Dissatisfaction became rampant among the Indian overseas community in
Canada and the United States. As a result, the Ghadr Party was formed in
North America. The party sent money and fighters to spark an uprising, which
did not materialize but was worrisome for the British administrators. In 1919,
the harvest in Punjab was poor, land prices were high, productivity in the canal
colonies decreased, and the cost of living rose. Not only were general eco-
nomic conditions worse, but the oppressive Rowlatt Act was introduced in Feb-
ruary of 1919 and passed in March. Actually, the Rowlatt Act comprised two
acts that empowered police to arrest and search people without a warrant, de-
tain suspects without a trial, and try people before special courts with neither
juries nor rights of appeal. Interestingly, wild and fabricated stories spread
about how a policeman who coveted a man’s wife could get the husband out of
the way because of the acts; a bride and bridegroom allegedly had to be in-
spected by a British doctor before a marriage could take place; and, it was ru-
mored, a family would have to pay the government a sum of money equal to
that spent on a wedding. The uneducated masses believed these rumors. Mo-
hammed Ali Jinnah, an Indian politician who resigned from his post in pro-
test, stated in his letter of resignation, “In my opinion a government that passes
such a bill in times of peace forfeits the claim to be called a civilized govern-
ment.” This act energized the independence movement.
At that time, Sir Michael O’Dwyer was lieutenant governor of Punjab.
O’Dwyer was a brilliant academic and a good sportsman who had entered the
ICS full of confidence and imbued with the conviction that the British had the
divine right to rule India. O’Dwyer was pugnacious and outspoken and had a
disdain for the educated Indians. He detested and distrusted them and openly
expressed his views. Thus, an equal disdain developed between him and the
educated Indian class. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer came from a family
with a long line of associations with India. His family had lived through the Mu-
tiny of 1857, and the events were still in their memory, as was the fear of a fresh
uprising. After graduating from Sandhurst, Dyer saw several campaigns; he
was a swashbuckling character who had done well in fights and brawls.
British Soldiers Massacre Indians at Amritsar 63

Mohandas K. Gandhi (seated, left), the driving moral force in the Indian nationalist
movement, was lifted to national prominence by the Amritsar Massacre. (Library of
Congress)

In April of 1919, these two men were the principal British players in Punjab,
as Mohandas K. Gandhi led the agitation against the Rowlatt bills in India. In
fact, it was the oppressiveness of the Rowlatt Act and Gandhi’s agitation against
it that propelled Gandhi from his role as an obscure politician into national
prominence. In the Punjab, protests were conducted in an orderly and peace-
ful manner until the police caused escalation in Amritsar. Peaceful demonstra-
tions had been led by a Hindu and a Muslim, a fact that surprised the British
but resulted in Hindu-Muslim unity. One leader was Saif-Ud-Din Kitchlew,
a Kashmiri Muslim who had been at the University of Cambridge with
Jawaharlal Nehru. Kitchlew had a Ph.D. from Munster University and was
considered pro-German. He was an eloquent speaker and supported home
rule. The Hindu leader, Dr. Satyapal, was a medical doctor from a middle-
class family. He was reserved, but he was a good orator and a progressive
nationalist who believed in peaceful and constitutional means to gain political
freedom.
64 Human Rights Violations

When the police arrested Kitchlew and Satyapal and whisked them away to
Dharamsala, the news of their capture spread throughout the city, and crowds
protested the action. The mob got out of hand, and in trying to disperse the
crowd, the police killed six people and wounded more than thirty. As a result,
the mob assaulted white people and set fire to English-owned banks, a church,
and other establishments. Marcia Sherwood, a white Englishwoman, was
caught in the mob and beaten. Sherwood was a well-liked doctor who had
spent fifteen years helping the people of Amritsar. This event resulted later in
the famous “crawl order” given by General Dyer. The order required every In-
dian passing the spot where Sherwood was assaulted to crawl along the street.
Three British soldiers were stationed on the spot to enforce the order.
On April 12, 1919, when Brigadier General Dyer arrived from Jullundur
with troops and armored cars, he was greeted in the bazaar by crowds shouting
anti-British slogans. When he received information that telegraph cables had
been cut and railroad tracks had been tampered with, he declared a state of
emergency, which made all meetings illegal.
The local Congress Party had already called a meeting at Jallianwalla Bagh
for the Baisakhi fair, and Sikhs were there to celebrate the birth anniversary of
their Khalsa, the Sikh soldier-saint brotherhood. Many were unsuspecting vil-
lagers who came from outlying villages and were not aware of the events that
had preceded their arrival at Amritsar. General Dyer took the attitude that it
was best to use quick and strong force on such occasions, so when he heard of
the April 13 meeting at the Jallianwalla Bagh, he marched troops over to the
scene.
Jallianwalla Bagh was a seven-hundred-by-four-hundred-foot walled-in area
with only one entrance, a seven-and-a-half-foot-wide passage. There was a large
crowd of people in the courtyard; estimates of its size range from fifteen thou-
sand to fifty thousand. A meeting was going on with pictures of Kitchlew prom-
inently displayed. Speeches and poetry were read and a resolution passed call-
ing for Kitchlew’s release. At around 5:15 p.m., Dyer’s troops surrounded the
area. Seeing the soldiers, people rose to leave, but Hans Raj, a revolutionary
leader, urged people to remain, arguing that the government would never fire
on them.
Hans Raj was wrong. Dyer ordered his soldiers to fire. Fifty soldiers fired a
volley of shots into the crowd, but Hans Raj continued to shout “they are only
blanks” when he fell. As people fell dead and wounded, others made desperate
attempts to escape, but they were trapped by the high wall surrounding the
area. The only exit was blocked by soldiers firing at the crowd. Some climbed
into a well but later drowned. Dyer ordered the soldiers to continue firing and
British Soldiers Massacre Indians at Amritsar 65

to aim where the crowd was the most dense. There was no escape. Many inno-
cent people, ignorant of the no-meeting order, were killed or wounded. The
soldiers fired 1,650 rounds into the crowd, killing 379 and wounding more
than 2,000. The cries of agony and thirst sounded long into the night as
wounded lay dying among the corpses.

Impact of Event
It was not until the next day that people were allowed to pick up corpses and
help the wounded. Repressive measures known as “Dyerarchy” were intro-
duced. The term was coined in reference to the lawlessness of the British ad-
ministrators. These measures were not excessive in physical pain or loss of
money but in wounded pride. Indians meeting a white person were required
to bow. Electricity was cut off in the Indian quarters, and a rigid curfew and
other restrictive measures made normal existence impossible for the Indians.
In the meantime, police had carte blanche powers to round up suspects and
seemed motivated to obtain convictions at any cost. Indians were flogged with-
out trial, and bicycles, carts, and vehicles not owned by Europeans were confis-
cated. Lawyers were commandeered as special constables and made to patrol
the streets. Courts tried three hundred men and summarily sentenced fifty-
one to death and others to imprisonment. Lahore, Kasur, Gujranwala, and
most of Punjab suffered under martial law. In seven weeks, twelve hundred
people were killed and thirty-six hundred wounded.
Public opinion was divided: The British community stood behind Dyer, and
Indians were confused over what they saw as a change in British justice and ad-
ministration. On April 19, when Dyer saw Sherwood in the hospital, in pain
and her life in the balance, he was outraged and issued the famous crawl order.
The summary courts that followed destroyed what faith the Indians had in
British fairness. Punjabis were confused, for they had believed that, in spite of
their faults, the British ruled with a semblance of fairness. They witnessed the
opposite. The punishments were not countered by higher British officials,
which surprised and bothered many Indians, especially the middle and upper
classes who had grown up with a respect for English justice and fair dealings.
Publicity followed in the “Amritsar Leader Case,” in which Satyapal and
Kitchlew were tried for revolutionary plotting against the British. The trial did
much to destroy British credibility and helped galvanize public opinion
against Dyer’s and O’Dwyer’s actions. Nobel Prize winner Sir Rabindranath
Tagore wrote to the viceroy and relinquished his knighthood, and Mohandas
Gandhi returned medals he had received in honor of service to the British.
The events aroused little interest in Britain, but in India they exposed to the In-
66 Human Rights Violations

dian people a racist attitude. The Hunter Committee, composed of English

and Indians, was formed to investigate the actions. During the testimony, Dyer
displayed a callous attitude. After the hearings, on a train journey to Jullundur,
Dyer talked freely about teaching the “bloody browns a lesson.” He did not
know that the man on the bunk above his was Jawaharlal Nehru, who was edu-
cated at Harrow and Cambridge and was the future prime minister of India.
Nehru was appalled by Dyer’s callousness, and his admiration for the British
changed to animosity. Dyer was censured by the committee and subsequently
relieved of his command.
The matter was debated in the British House of Lords and House of Com-
mons. Dyer was vindicated by the House of Lords but censured by the House of
Commons. Dyer’s vindication had an adverse effect on British-Indian rela-
tions. In the meantime, O’Dwyer continued to proclaim his and Dyer’s inno-
cence. Eventually the matter went to court, and O’Dwyer came out victorious.
Dyer had been in poor health during much of his time in India, and he died on
July 23, 1927. A Sikh by the name of Udham Singh assassinated O’Dwyer on
March 13, 1940. For this action Udham Singh became a hero among the Sikhs.
The results of the Amritsar Massacre were many. Gandhi, for example, was
rocketed to national prominence. He inspired many to fight the British when
he visited Punjab and encouraged patriots to be nirbhai (fearless). Gandhi was
instrumental in the decline of the Chief Khalsa Diwan, a group that espoused
Western ways, and in the creation of the Central Sikh League, a group more
aligned with revolutionary ideology.
Racial tensions increased. The British feared the Indians and looked on
their actions with suspicion, as they had after the Mutiny of 1857, when the
British almost lost India in an uprising of Indian soldiers. On the other hand,
the myth of British fairness and honor was destroyed. Even Indians who had
been loyal to the Empire suffered and were victimized by O’Dwyer, who
claimed that he had saved the Empire. In fact, he had alienated some of its
most loyal supporters, especially the Sikhs, who had been crucial in maintain-
ing British rule in India.

Bibliography
Colvin, Ian. The Life of General Dyer. Edinburg: William Blackwood & Sons,
1931. A biography of General Dyer. It provides good insight into his life.
Draper, Alfred. Amritsar: The Massacre That Ended the Raj. London: Cassell,
1981. This is a well-researched and detailed account of the massacre.
Furneaux, Rupert. Massacre at Amritsar. London: Allen & Unwin, 1963. A well-
researched and detailed account.
British Soldiers Massacre Indians at Amritsar 67

Singh, Khushwant. A History of the Sikhs 1839-1964. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 1966. The most authoritative account of Sikh history. The
best summary source of the Amritsar Massacre and subsequent events.
Spear, Percival. “The First World War and the Great Leap Forward.” In A His-
tory of India. Vol 2. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965. An excellent history of
India during the modern period, this chapter provides a good context for
understanding the massacre.
Tinker, Hugh. “The Rise of Modern Social, Religious, and Political Move-
ments.” In South Asia: A Short History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1990. This work is recognized as the most authoritative account of South
Asian history. Tinker’s chapter is the best explanation of the cultural con-
flict faced by Indians as they dealt with Western dominance.
Arthur W. Helweg
Sweden Abolishes Capital Punishment
Category of event: International norms; prisoners’ rights
Time: 1921
Locale: Stockholm, Sweden

During a period of democratic reform and minority governments, Sweden’s parlia-

ment enacted several human rights reforms including abolition of the death pen-
alty for peacetime offenses

Principal personages:
Oscar von Sydow (1873-1936), a member of parliament chosen by King
Gustav V in 1921 to replace De Geer as prime minister
J. A. Bouvin, introduced the abolition of the death penalty for peace time of-
fenses in Sweden’s parliament in 1867
Carl Albert Lindhagen (1860-1946), a member of the Second Chamber of
Parliament from 1897 to 1917 and of the First Chamber from 1919 to 1940
Gerard Louis De Geer (1854-1935), a Liberal who headed a “caretaker” gov-
ernment in 1920 and 1921
Karl Hjalmar Branting (1860-1925), the prime minister of the first Social
Democratic government in Sweden

Summary of Event
As early as 1855, Sweden had begun to adopt more humane treatment of its
citizens. Punishments such as caning, whipping, and “church duty” (sitting in
special pews at church, to be publicly ridiculed) were abolished. Limited reli-
gious freedom was granted in 1860. It was within this context of reform that
the first attempt was made, in 1867, to abolish the death penalty for peacetime
civil offenses and wartime offenses under the military penal code. J. A. Bouvin
introduced a motion to abolish the death penalty into parliament in that year,
but it was defeated.
A restructuring of Sweden’s political system was also under way. In 1866,
parliament began to revise its own structure and processes. The earlier four es-
tates (nobles, the clergy, burghers, and landowners and the rural middle class)
were replaced by the popularly elected Second Chamber (lower house) and a
senatorial upper house. In 1907, manhood suffrage was broadened, and prop-
erty qualifications generally were abolished.
68
Sweden Abolishes Capital Punishment 69

During World War I, the Young Socialists, also known as Left-Socialists, con-
tinued to demand liberalization of the government and espoused Marxism.
The Young Socialists were able to strengthen their political organization
throughout the duration of World War I. When a potato famine in 1917 left
Swedish farmers destitute, considerable public unrest threatened the govern-
ment. Many nonsocialist party leaders, both Conservatives and Liberals, be-
came concerned that the Socialists might lead the nation in a revolution simi-
lar to the Russian Revolution. Even if the Young Socialists had developed a
stronger leadership, however, their power base was too small to cause major
disruption.
The end of World War I caught the Conservatives unprepared. The Liberal
and Socialist parties, which had both gained strength in parliament, took ad-
vantage of the moment to join forces. The two parties cooperated in order to
continue their political reforms. This collaboration helped bring both politi-
cal and social emancipation of women. When the 1921 Electorate Law went
into effect, the number of eligible voters more than doubled, with women the
clear majority. Numerous other political and humanitarian reforms were en-
acted, in part because they were a natural evolution of the great period of re-
form and in part as a means of undermining the growing strength of the
Young Socialists by adopting some of their programs.
In 1920, Karl Hjalmar Branting became prime minister of Sweden’s first
Social Democratic government. As a single-party, minority government, it had
little chance for a long tenure. When the election for the Second Chamber
took place, six months after Branting’s election, the Conservatives made a rel-
atively strong recovery. Branting was forced to resign. The result of the shift in
power, however, was that no party had a clear majority in the chambers, and
none of the parties would form a government on a minority basis. The Lib-
erals, the “middle” party, would cooperate with neither the right nor the left.
King Gustav V therefore proposed a bureaucratic “caretaker” ministry under
Gerhard Louis De Geer that would not be aligned with any of the parties. Only
one member of parliament served in De Geer’s “professional” ministry.
Many reforms were introduced in parliament during this critical period.
Included in those reform measures was Proposition No. 144, which provided
for the abolition of the death penalty for peacetime offenses. The measure was
introduced in the First Chamber in 1921. De Geer, with the support of the
Conservatives, attempted to block passage of the proposition. At the same
time, parliamentary member Carl Albert Lindhagen put forth a motion to
amend Proposition No. 144 to include the abolition of wartime offenses
as well. Lindhagen’s motion for amendment was defeated by a 46 to 32 vote.
70 Human Rights Violations

The unamended Proposition No. 144,

which exempted peacetime offenses,
passed through the First Chamber by
a vote of 62 to 23.
When First Chamber elections
were held in 1921, the Social Demo-
crats gained more seats, although no
political party had a clear majority.
Once again, the king suggested a co-
alition government, but the parties
would not comply. Largely because of
his failure to show strong leadership,
De Geer was replaced by Oscar von
Sydow, another nonparty legislator. It
was during the tenure of Prime Minis-
ter von Sydow that both the original
Karl Hjalmar Branting served as Proposition No. 144 and Lindhagen’s
prime minister of Sweden three times amendment were considered and
and was awarded the Nobel Peace acted upon in the lower house, or Sec-
Prize in 1921. (© The Nobel Founda- ond Chamber. The motion for com-
tion) plete abolition was defeated, but the
original peacetime-only abolition was
passed by a 116 to 48 vote. The failure of parliament to approve Lindhagen’s
amendment can be attributed to the lack of a strong majority party and the
concerns of the Swedish people about wartime offenses in the aftermath of a
world war and a revolution in Russia.
The abolition of the death penalty for wartime offenses as well as for peace-
time offenses was finally enacted in 1972 by a 266 to 37 vote. Sweden com-
pleted abolition of the death penalty for all offenses with the 1972 legislation.

Impact of Event
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, most governments accepted
the death penalty as an effective and appropriate way to prevent and to punish
crime. Executions were made to appear lawful and were justified by arguing
that the supreme penalty was necessary, especially for the more serious of-
fenses, for the good of society. Since 1867, when Bouvin introduced abolition
legislation, there have been intermittent movements throughout Scandinavia
and the Western world to abolish the death penalty, even as punishment for
murder.
Sweden Abolishes Capital Punishment 71

Sweden’s 1921 Proposition No. 144 affirmed the value of human life and
established a limit on what the state might do to its citizens. Some members of
parliament based their votes on the measure on political exigencies, attempt-
ing to avert further political crises. Many, however, cast their votes in a princi-
pled stand for human rights.
As one of the first nations to abolish the death penalty, Sweden exerted
pressure on other Scandinavian and Western nations to reevaluate their own
statutory punishments. The result has been the limiting of the numbers of of-
fenses for which the death penalty may be demanded or the removal of that
penalty entirely. Great Britain used Sweden’s abolition of the death penalty
and later reforms of alternative punishments as a yardstick to evaluate its own
position on incarceration and executions. Great Britain’s 1949-1953 Report of
the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment examined the alternative pun-
ishments imposed by Sweden and expressed interest in the efficiency and hu-
manity of Stockholm’s Utrecht and Langholmen prisons, where psychiatric
clinics worked with both convicted prisoners and suspects awaiting trial. The
report concluded that available evidence showed that few released murderers
committed further crimes of violence.
The prohibition of the death penalty became an integral part of the Instru-
ment of Government of the Swedish Constitution. Chapter 8 states in Article 1
that no law or regulation may imply that a sentence for capital punishment can
be pronounced. In 1976, this statement was moved to Chapter 2, which con-
cerns fundamental liberties and rights. Its Article 4 states, “Capital punish-
ment may not occur.” Inclusion of the statement in Chapter 2 means that the
abolition of the death penalty applies not only to Swedish citizens but also to
alien residents, who are thus protected against extradition to nations where
the death penalty is still practiced.
Although Norway preceded Sweden by removing the death penalty for
peacetime offenses in 1905, that nation did not abolish all death penalties un-
til after Sweden had done so. Denmark, in 1933, and Finland, in 1949, also
abolished the execution of convicted offenders. By the end of the 1970’s,
many countries had abolished the death penalty as international public opin-
ion generated pressure to stop executions. International human rights trea-
ties have established restrictions and safeguards on the use of the death pen-
alty in countries which have not yet abolished it.

Bibliography
Amnesty International. When the State Kills . . . The Death Penalty: A Human Rights
Issue. New York: Author, 1989. A concise source for the status of capital pun-
72 Human Rights Violations

ishment worldwide. Each nation is listed separately. The work presents a

bias toward abolitionism but discusses arguments for and against capital
punishment. The appendix includes extracts from various human rights
conventions. No bibliography.
Aspelin, Erland, and Sten Hecksher, rapporteurs. A New Penal System: Ideas and
Proposals. Report No. 5. Stockholm: Kristianstads Boktryckeri, 1978. This re-
port for the National Council for Crime Prevention addresses the underly-
ing principle that treatment should replace punishment. It is an excellent
source for details on imprisonment, conditional sentences, probation,
“open prisons,” and other aspects of Sweden’s penal system. No bibliogra-
phy. Indexed.
Great Britain. Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949-1953). Report.
London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1953. This report is a detailed ex-
amination of the effectiveness of Sweden’s penal system. It provides the
most thorough analysis of the techniques employed. Extensive graphs and
charts are useful in making comparisons with other nations’ systems.
Indexing is based on paragraphs, not page numbers.
Hadenius, Stig. Swedish Politics During the Twentieth Century. Translated by Vic-
tor Kayfetz. 3d rev. ed. Stockholm: Swedish Institute, 1990. A brief but
scholarly analysis of the “Swedish model” of parliamentary government. It
is especially useful because it includes a bibliography of recent English-
language publications. No index.
Metcalf, Michael F., ed. The Riksdag: A History of the Swedish Parliament. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1987. This work presents an unbiased look at the evolu-
tion of Sweden’s parliament, beginning in the thirteenth century. Includes
maps, charts, and tables. The extensive topical bibliography is annotated,
but many sources will be found only in the Swedish language. Indexed.
Scott, Franklin D. Sweden: The Nation’s History. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1977. Scott’s work is probably the most comprehensive of the
sources listed here. The evolution of Sweden’s political parties is discussed
in depth, with an extensive listing of references included. Although the
death penalty is not specifically addressed, the work outlines the political
setting for its abolition. The extensive bibliography contains many sources
in the original Swedish. Indexed.
Verney, Douglas V. Parliamentary Reform in Sweden, 1866-1921. Oxford, En-
gland: Clarendon Press, 1957. Useful primarily for passages on the parlia-
mentary reforms. This volume includes excellent biographical notes on
many of the chief participants. Extensive bibliography.
H. Christian Thorup
Mussolini Seizes Dictatorial Powers
in Italy
Category of event: Political freedom
Time: 1925-1926
Locale: Italy

Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power in the 1920’s led to a dictatorship that de-
stroyed political freedom in Italy and threatened international peace and stability
during the 1930’s

Principal personages:
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), the founder and leader of the National Fas-
cist Party; called on by King Victor Emmanuel III in October, 1922, to be-
come prime minister of Italy
Victor Emmanuel III (1869-1947), the king of Italy from 1900 to 1946
Giacomo Matteotti (1885-1924), an attorney and socialist representative in
the Italian parliament

Summary of Event
Italy made slow but notable progress in human rights during the first de-
cades of the twentieth century. Under a constitutional monarchy, Italians
shaped a limited parliamentary democracy similar to those of other Western
European nations. By the early 1900’s, the working class had won the right to
organize and strike. Socialist labor unions vigorously advanced both economic
and political goals. A lively, diverse press gave voice to a wide range of political
opinion, although the more radical publications were often restrained by
government censorship and the moral condemnation of the Roman Catholic
Church. Universal male suffrage, enacted in 1913, underscored the nation’s
political progress. Women, although denied the vote, acquired important
legal and property rights in 1919. The emergence of mass political parties after
World War I heralded the prospects for democratic reform.
The post-World War I years offered new opportunities to create a more
equitable, democratic society. The war also jeopardized Italy’s progress by
creating grave economic and political instability. Conservative government
leaders, business people, and landowners feared a communist revolution simi-
73
74 Human Rights Violations

lar to that of Russia in 1917. Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party com-
pounded the political crisis with its revolutionary program and its violence
against political opponents. Mussolini, a former socialist party leader and
newspaper editor, had founded the Fascist movement immediately after the
war. His virulent nationalism, anticommunism, antidemocratic politics, and
appeal to violence attracted a large following of war veterans and political mal-
contents. Fascist paramilitary units, known as squadristi, carried out “punitive
expeditions” against their rivals, primarily the socialist party and labor unions.
Their brutal assaults and destruction of property, often unopposed by local
government authorities, brought the country to the brink of civil war in the
early 1920’s.
The political crisis in Italy culminated in October, 1922, with the “March on
Rome.” Benito Mussolini orchestrated this threat to occupy the nation’s capi-
tal with his party’s paramilitary forces. While threatening armed conflict, he
negotiated with influential business and political leaders and pressured King
Victor Emmanuel III to invite him to form a new government. Mussolini as-
sumed the position of prime minister and organized a coalition cabinet, filling
the ministerial posts with members of his own and other conservative parties.
Although the Fascists were a minority party, they achieved political dominance
in the parliament following the elections of April, 1924. Under a new election
law, the party receiving the most votes was given two-thirds of the seats in the
Chamber of Deputies.
Mussolini’s new government contended with a large, but divided, parlia-
mentary opposition on the political left—democrats, socialists, and commu-
nists. One of his most persistent and outspoken adversaries was Giacomo
Matteotti, leader of the reformist socialist party and a member of parliament.
Matteotti gained a reputation as Mussolini’s most dangerous critic by carefully
documenting specific cases of abuse and corruption in the government. His
report on the 1924 elections revealed widespread election fraud and violence
by the Fascist Party. Despite personal threats from Fascist leaders, including
Mussolini, Matteotti continued to denounce the government from his seat
in parliament and to collect information about financial improprieties of gov-
ernment officials.
Matteotti’s disappearance on June 10 immediately raised allegations of
government involvement, and several witnesses later verified his kidnapping
by Fascist squadristi. Although Matteotti’s body was not discovered until mid-
August, most of the public assumed that his abduction and murder had been
sanctioned at the highest level of Fascist Party leadership, perhaps by Musso-
lini himself. The Matteotti affair provoked a spontaneous outpouring of popu-
Mussolini Seizes Dictatorial Powers 75

Benito Mussolini addressing the people of Cardonia in 1938. (New York Times)

lar protest against the government. Labor unions organized political strikes
and public demonstrations. More than one hundred deputies from op-
position parties refused to participate in parliamentary proceedings, declar-
ing that Mussolini had lost all moral and political right to govern. The
“Aventine Secession”—alluding to similar protests during the ancient Roman
Republic—gave the outward appearance of solidarity on the political left.
Even leading conservatives, who had previously supported Mussolini’s govern-
ment, now called for his resignation.
The overwhelming protest initially paralyzed Mussolini, belying his reputa-
tion as a man of action. He attempted to mollify the political right—the king,
influential businesspeople, and senators—by reshuffling his cabinet and
replacing Fascist ministers with well-respected conservatives. This compro-
mising outraged Fascist militants, especially the local party leaders who
demanded a “second wave” of violence to destroy the remnants of political
opposition and the pretense of parliamentary government. They confronted
76 Human Rights Violations

Musolini and threatened him personally in several heated party meetings. De-
fiance to his authority within the Fascist Party as well as in the government
compelled him to take action.
On January 3, 1925, Mussolini made a dramatic speech in the Chamber
of Deputies in which he assumed complete responsibility for the violence
committed by the Fascists, including the murder of Matteotti. He challenged
the members of the parliament to impeach him, and with a threatening over-
tone announced that the situation would be “cleared up all along the line” in
the following forty-eight hours. This speech marked the beginning of Musso-
lini’s dictatorship. Within hours, local authorities began closing down the
meeting halls of opposition groups and suppressing antigovernment publica-
tions. More than one hundred political dissidents were arrested. The squadristi
unleashed a “second wave” of violence, destroying opposition presses and us-
ing intimidation and physical assaults to silence protest. The anti-Fascist oppo-
sition, contentious, divided, and unable to agree on a course of action, offered
little effective resistance to Mussolini’s seizure of power.
Mussolini’s personal dictatorship gradually took shape over the next two
years. He established his authoritarian rule through rigorous enforcement of
existing laws, new restrictive legislation, and special executive decrees. After
several unsuccessful assassination attempts against Mussolini in 1925 and
1926, the government passed a series of “exceptional decrees” that formally
outlawed all political parties, banned anti-Fascist organizations and publica-
tions, and cancelled all passports. The participants in the Aventine Secession
were stripped of their parliamentary immunity and barred from taking their
seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Local elected governments were eliminated
and replaced by state-appointed administrators.
The exceptional decrees created the Special Tribunal for the Defense of
the State, a military court that functioned outside the normal judicial process
and allowed the arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of more than five thou-
sand government opponents. The death penalty, which had been abolished
in 1890, was reintroduced. Giovanni Amendola, Piero Gobetti, Antonio
Gramsci, and several other prominent anti-Fascists died as a result of street
beatings or lengthy prison terms. Hundreds of others fled the country in
order to escape the squadristi violence or imprisonment.
The government decrees sanctioned the operations of a secret state police,
identified by the sinister, but apparently meaningless, acronym OVRA. Under
the efficient direction of Arturo Bocchini, the police monitored antigovern-
ment activity and used their authority to place individuals under house arrest
or send them into “internal exile” in remote villages or on coastal islands. Man-
Mussolini Seizes Dictatorial Powers 77

datory identity cards allowed the police to control personal movement, em-
ployment, and access to public services. By 1927, Mussolini’s regime had elimi-
nated most vestiges of political freedom in Italy. Discarding the parliamentary
designation of prime minister, he referred to his position as “head of state”
and adopted the title Il Duce —the Leader. Through his dictatorship, he
sought to fulfill his own maxim: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the
State, nothing against the State.”

Impact of Event
Mussolini’s seizure of power marked a disturbing political development in
the modern world. It repudiated more than a century of European progress
toward greater political democracy and individual liberty and introduced the
term “totalitarian” into modern political vocabulary. Although Mussolini’s re-
gime never achieved the totalitarianism of Adolf Hitler’s Germany or Joseph
Stalin’s Soviet Union, the results of his dictatorial rule proved devastating to a
free society. The ban on political parties and elections destroyed democratic
politics; the abolition of labor organizations stripped workers of their right to
seek economic redress; and the purging of the state bureaucracy and the
courts ensured total government acquiescence to Mussolini’s authority.
The establishment of the Special Tribunal allowed the regime to bypass
regular judicial procedures and arrest, imprison, or exile thousands. Many
Italians defied the government by leaving the country on their own accord.
During the 1920’s and 1930’s, Italy lost some of its most talented citizens to em-
igration, including the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi and the renowned or-
chestral conductor Arturo Toscanini. The elimination of a free press, strict
control of the media and education, and the use of secret police to stifle politi-
cal dissent further eroded individual freedoms.
The goal of creating a totalitarian state represented an unprecedented de-
gree of government intrusion into the daily lives of citizens. Even organized
sports, recreational programs, youth groups, artistic activities, and profes-
sional associations fell under government supervision. Only the conservative
institutions that lent timely support to Mussolini in his first years—the military,
the monarchy, and the Roman Catholic Church—retained a large degree of
autonomy under the Fascist regime.
Mussolini’s success in Italy inspired similar “fascist” movements in several
European countries. Each had its own identity, but they all shared an affinity
for political violence and an abiding contempt for democracy and individual
civil rights. In Germany, the Nazis imitated and refined the methods of the Ital-
ian Fascists. Their success brought Adolf Hitler to power in 1933 and marked
78 Human Rights Violations

the beginning of an unparalleled disaster for human rights and international

peace.
Mussolini’s belligerent foreign policy effectively destabilized international
relations at a time when most nations were seeking ways to ensure peace. In the
years following World War I, European diplomats had worked diligently to
limit armed conflict through the newly founded League of Nations, naval dis-
armament treaties, and collective security agreements. With his invasion of
Ethiopia in 1935, Mussolini challenged the League of Nations and revealed its
impotence against military aggression. He defied the Geneva Convention’s
ban on poison gas and used it with devastating results against Ethiopian
troops. His military assistance to Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War
helped destroy democratic government in Spain and install a dictatorial
regime that remained in power for more than thirty-five years. Mussolini’s
military success in Africa encouraged Hitler’s ambitious plans for German
territorial expansion. With the Pact of Steel in 1939, the two men cemented
a military alliance that brought on the greatest human catastrophe in mod-
ern history, World War II.

Bibliography
Bosworth, R. J. B. The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpre-
tation of Mussolini and Fascism. New York: Arnold, 1998. Written by an au-
thority on Italy’s history, this book places fascism within a broader social
context.
__________. Mussolini. New York: Arnold, 2002. Lauded as a definitive new
biography of the life of the infamous Fascist leader. A detailed, exhaustive
study with footnotes and bibliography.
Cannistraro, Philip V., ed. Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1982. The standard reference for individuals, institu-
tions, and events in Italy under Fascist rule. Includes informative entries on
the anti-Fascist movement. The appendix contains a complete listing of
government ministers who served in the Fascist government.
Lyttelton, Adrian. The Seizure of Power in Italy, 1919-1929. 2d ed. London: Wei-
denfeld & Nicolson, 1987. A brilliant study, the best work available in any
language on Mussolini’s “seizure of power.” Lyttelton focuses on the intri-
cate personal and institutional relationships that brought Mussolini to
power and maintained his dictatorship for almost twenty years.
Mack Smith, Denis. Mussolini. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. The best of
several modern biographies available in English. Thoroughly researched
from a wide range of archival and secondary sources. The author’s highly
Mussolini Seizes Dictatorial Powers 79

critical, even derisive, assessment of Mussolini strips away the mythology of

Il Duce and Fascist revolution to reveal a corrupt, unscrupulous, and often
inept political leader.
Matteotti, Giacomo. The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination. New York:
Howard Fertig, 1969. First published clandestinely in 1923, Matteotti’s re-
port documents in detail the terrorism of the squadristi, the complicity of
government authorities in the Fascist violence, and the political corruption
during Mussolini’s first year in power. This impressive exposé established
Matteotti’s reputation as Mussolini’s most dangerous critic and eventually
led to his murder by Fascist agents.
Salvemini, Gaetano. The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy. New York: Howard Fertig,
1967. First published in 1927 by one of the most important anti-Fascist his-
torians, Salvemini’s work weaves pointed commentary with extracts from
contemporary documents (some taken from Matteotti’s exposé) to under-
score the criminality of the Fascist movement and its leadership.
__________. The Origins of Fascism in Italy. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
Written in 1942 and based on Salvemini’s lectures at Harvard University,
this book remained unpublished until after the author’s death. Salvemini
goes beyond his earlier polemic against the Fascist regime and explores the
conditions in Italy that made Fascism possible. Chapter 26 provides a good
summary of the political infringements resulting from the creation of
Mussolini’s totalitarian state.
Seton-Watson, Christopher. Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 1870-1925. London:
Methuen, 1967. Although somewhat dated, this remains the best survey of
modern Italy up to the Fascist period. Seton-Watson traces the triumph of
Fascism to the failure of liberalism during the post-World War I political
crisis. Includes an annotated bibliography and a helpful listing of the
many Italian governments and their cabinet ministers during the years
1871-1925.
Michael F. Hembree
League of Nations Adopts International
Slavery Convention
Category of event: Civil rights; international norms; workers’ rights
Time: September 25, 1926
Locale: Geneva, Switzerland

The 1926 International Slavery Convention was part of an effort begun by colo-
nial nations a century earlier to suppress slavery in all of its forms

Principal personages:
Paul Hymans (1865-1941), a delegate to the League of Nations from Belgium
Frederick J. Lugard (1858-1945), the United Kingdom’s delegate on the
Temporary Slavery Commission
Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), a British subject, writer, and explorer:
his expeditions helped reveal the extent of slavery in Africa

Summary of Event
The ancient Greeks believed in natural slavery, especially for people who
did not speak Greek, who were referred to as “barbarians.” With the advent of
Christianity and the nation-state, a variety of justifications were used to harmo-
nize slavery with the teachings of the Bible. Christians, for example, justified
enslaving people who practiced cannibalism and human sacrifice.
The philosophers of the American and French revolutions did much to
discredit slavery by condemning it for destroying the natural liberty of human
beings. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, at the Congress of Vienna on
February 8, 1815, the victorious nations declared their intention to suppress
the slave trade. The powers with colonial possessions were advised of their ob-
ligation and duty to abolish the slave trade. However, the institution of slavery
itself, in the form of plantation slavery in the British possessions and in the
United States, was virtually untouched.
None of the nations at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was willing to tres-
pass on the sovereignty of other states to end any form of domestic slavery.
Nevertheless, the Congress of Vienna was a major step toward engendering an
agreement among European nations to work to abolish the international traf-
fic in slaves, especially the trans-Atlantic trade.
80
League of Nations Adopts Slavery Convention 81

Colonialism could be justified, according to Sir Frederick Lugard, who had

served for many years in Africa as a colonial administrator, only if it provided
mutual advantages for the colonized “natives” and for the world. Colonialism
was a “school” to Christianize and civilize “savage” peoples. In return, the col-
ony would provide European capitalists with raw materials for their industries
and markets for their manufacturers.
In 1885, European nations held the African Conference at Berlin. That
conference called for the suppression of slavery and specifically of “the Negro
slave trade,” but the act passed by the conference applied only to the Congo
Basin. It was, however, an important development in creating a body of inter-
national law which was militantly opposed to slavery.
Explorers, such as Henry Morton Stanley, had discovered and publicized
the existence of a vast area in Africa that was controlled by Arab slave raiders.
Arab traders, such as Tippu Tib, actually posed a military threat to the tribes of
the region and even to the Belgian military. Strong military operations were
necessary in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa to defeat combative slave trad-
ers. The parties to the African Conference, in an 1886 decree, provided for
penal servitude for slave traders.
Slave caravans penetrated the interior of Africa from the shores of the Med-
iterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. The traffic
in slaves encompassed the modern countries of Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia,
Ghana, Burundi, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, among others.
Slaves brought to trading centers in northern and eastern Africa were sold
for local use or, as was more often the case, were sent to Turkey, Saudi Arabia,
Iran, and other eastern countries. Another decree in 1888 regarding labor
contracts prohibited the enslavement of natives by nonnatives. The colonial
powers were trying to abolish slavery indirectly by abolishing the slave trade.
There were difficulties connected with the outright abolition of domestic
slavery (that is, slavery within a colony) and forced labor, and an international
consensus did not yet exist for a frontal attack on slavery and its analogous
forms. An impressive step was taken to suppress slavery at the Second Brussels
Conference of 1890. The General Act of Brussels, signed on July 2, 1890, as a
result of that conference, had more signatories than earlier international con-
ventions on the suppression of slavery; it also had more enforcement require-
ments in its articles than did preceding conventions. The nations meeting at
Brussels included all of the major European nations, as well as the United
States, Turkey, Iran, and Zanzibar. The General Act of Brussels prescribed spe-
cific measures for the acceding nations to take against slave raiding and trad-
ing in the territory under European control.
82 Human Rights Violations

The measures enacted by the antislavery alliance were designed to spur the
parties to organize the administrative, judicial, and military services of govern-
ment in their territories of Africa so that they could more effectively regulate
the slave traffic. The General Act of Brussels required the establishment of mil-
itary posts in the interior, where slave raiders collected slaves for overland tran-
sit to the coasts for shipment to eastern countries; an increase in the use of
steamships manned by soldiers on navigable waterways and lakes, thus ex-
panding the presence of the central government throughout the region;
more operations by “flying columns” of soldiers to maintain contact between
various military posts; and the installation of telegraphs as a means of linking
isolated areas to the provincial capital to monitor movements of slave traders
and to allow for a more rapid deployment of military forces.
The articles of the General Act of Brussels were meaningful in setting the
foundation for more expansive efforts toward suppressing the slave trade, do-
mestic slavery, and many of the forms of forced labor. Belgium employed mili-
tary force against slave raiders to gain control of the interior and to suppress
slavery. In time, with the use of native troops and modern weapons, the Bel-
gians secured the interior from large-scale raids from outside the Congo Ba-
sin, at a cost of considerable losses of Belgian soldiers. The problem of domes-
tic slavery was left to languish. It was difficult to differentiate between slavery,
according to many European apologists, as an acceptable social institution
and slavery as a barbaric and cruel method of employment of individuals
against their will. Domestic slavery was seen as inevitable but susceptible to
gradual elimination through “civilizing” of native people by European colo-
nizers. Enslavement of natives by natives was considered by Europeans to be
beyond the realm of their control, while slavery imposed by nonnatives on na-
tives was strictly prohibited as odious to all civilized people and was punishable
by law.
World War I interrupted the international efforts to stop slavery and the
continuing endeavor at enforcement of the precepts of the General Act of
Brussels. The victorious allies—Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, Italy,
Japan, Portugal, and the United States—signed a new compact at Saint-
Germain-en-Laye on September 10, 1919. The new convention was formu-
lated to complete the work started by the General Act of Brussels.
The Saint-Germain-en-Laye Convention was short-lived. It was superseded
by antislavery activities of the newly founded League of Nations. The League
of Nations confirmed the previous antislavery declarations and proclaimed its
own intent to achieve the complete suppression of slavery “in all of its forms
and of the slave trade by land and sea.”
League of Nations Adopts Slavery Convention 83

In 1924, the League of Nations appointed a Temporary Slavery Commis-

sion of eight experts to compile information on slavery, so-called domestic
slavery, slave raiding, serfdom, purchase of girls as brides, simulated adoption
of children for purposes of sexual exploitation, varied forms of indenture, and
compulsory labor by state and private employers. Sir Frederick Lugard, per-
haps the most influential and respected member of the Temporary Slavery
Commission, helped to craft the commission’s report to the Council of the
League of Nations. Sir Frederick’s broad experience and practical approach
to the suppression of slavery assured the report’s adoption by most of the
member states of the League of Nations. His suggestions moved the members
to moderate positions while retaining the goal of the eventual end of de facto
slavery through a process of transition and the development of new modes of
employment.
Paul Hymans, the Belgian delegate to the League of Nations in 1926, per-
sonified the efforts by Belgium to establish an unambiguous posture toward
the suppression of the slave trade and nonnative enslavement of natives. He
was reluctant, as were most members, to grapple with the question of forced
labor and domestic slavery. The Belgians were, to a good extent, successful in
suppressing the slave trade in the Congo Basin.
The report of the Temporary Slavery Commission stated the objectives of
the commission. It defined “enslavement,” made proposals for regulating and
punishing persons engaged in slave-raiding and the slave trade, and addressed
“slave dealing” and the more controversial domestic slavery issue. In an auxil-
iary category, the report discussed the acquisition of girls by purchase, dis-
guised as payment of dowry, and adoption of children “with a view to their
virtual enslavement or the ultimate disposal of their persons.”
The Temporary Slavery Commission was shrewdly cautious on the ques-
tion of forced labor: Its abolition was desirable but not achievable given the
provisions of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which prohibited
intervention by member states into the domestic affairs of any state. In addi-
tion, the commission recognized a need for compulsory native labor in an en-
vironment that was inhospitable to white workers. According to the adopted
Convention on Slavery, signatories recognized the need for governments to
use compulsory or forced labor for public projects but urged that such use
should be transitional and should end as soon as possible. Signatories were
allowed to accept all or only some of the provisions of the convention, sig-
nificantly weakening its impact. It was more moral suasion than enforceable
law, but it represented a goal to be striven for by many members of the League
of Nations.
84 Human Rights Violations

Impact of Event
The 1926 Slavery Convention defined slavery as “the status or condition of
a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of owner-
ship are exercised.” The convention required the former colonies of Germany
and the Ottoman Empire, now mandates of the League of Nations, to suppress
slavery and to prepare the people of the mandates for active participation in
their own political affairs.
Ethiopia was denied entry into the League of Nations until it formulated a
definite plan to eliminate all forms of slavery, which it finally accomplished to a
limited extent in the official abolition of slavery in 1942. Liberia, the other
recalcitrant slave state, was pressured by the League of Nations to outlaw inter-
tribal slavery and to abolish some other forms of servitude.
The most significant impacts of the 1926 Slavery Convention were on slave
raiding and the de jure abolition of slavery in Ethiopia and Liberia. The man-
date system also gave the League of Nations moral clout and some circum-
scribed political leverage in suppressing domestic slavery and specific forms
of forced labor.
It was the transition from slavery to certain forms of servile labor, including
debt bondage and contract labor, that undermined the effects of emancipa-
tion of slaves around the world. Two strategies emerged to replace de facto
slavery. One was to entice new labor from other areas by means of indentures,
or contracts to work for specific periods of time. This system often involved the
accumulation of debts by the laborer. The other form, emerging in the after-
math of emancipation, was peasant bondage, which used former slaves on
small land holds and on large projects, such as road building and railroad con-
struction. Peasant bondage was a form of virtual slavery in which workers were
“paid” in the form of training or provisions. Both systems, in many variations,
are indirect forms of slavery, or servitude. In the United States, servile labor
took the form of sharecropping and share tenancy, in which workers paid part
of their harvest as rent. In the Caribbean, it was in the form of contracted labor
from India and the Middle East.
The 1926 International Slavery Convention had an important impact, in
laying the foundation for continuing struggle against de jure slavery and in es-
tablishing continual international opposition to all forms of slavery. It did not,
however, immediately end all forms of exploitive labor arrangements.

Bibliography
Barnes, Anthony J. Captain Charles Stuart: Anglo-American Abolitionist. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. A solid biography of a rela-
League of Nations Adopts Slavery Convention 85

tively obscure militant abolitionist. His attack on gradualists in the move-

ment convinced people like William Lloyd Garrison to take a more militant
stance.
Drescher, Seymour. Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Compara-
tive Perspective. London: Macmillan, 1986. This revisionary account of black
slavery in the Americas and in Africa is convincing. Drescher’s assessment
of the historiography on slavery is broad and powerfully written. Drescher
explains English law and slavery.
Ennew, Judith. Debt Bondage. London: Anti-Slavery Society, 1981. A survey of
contemporary debt bondage throughout the world. This report shows
graphically the persistence of contract labor and the little progress being
made to end it.
Koger, Larry. Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-
1860. London: McFarland, 1985. There have been several works on free
blacks owning slaves in the antebellum South. This is the first study to show
that free black masters behaved similarly to white slave owners. Both ex-
ploited slaves for profit.
Ostrower, Gary B. The League of Nations, from 1919-1929. Edited by George J.
Lankevick. Garden City Park, N.Y.: Avery Publishing Group, 1996. This in-
teresting and readable volume covers the first ten years of the League of Na-
tions. Illustrated, with a comprehensive chronology and a bibliography.
Watson, Alan. Roman Slave Law. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987. The author maintains that in a strict sense there was scarcely
any such thing as “Roman slave law”; rather, every category of the law was
affected by the fact of being a slave.
Claude Hargrove
El Salvador’s Military Massacres Civilians
in La Matanza
Category of event: Atrocities and war crimes; revolutions and rebellions
Time: January-February, 1932
Locale: El Salvador

The massacre of up to thirty thousand peasants by the army ended a radical reform
movement in the Salvadoran countryside and ushered in fifty years of repression
and military rule

Principal personages:
Agustín Farabundo Martí (1893-1932), a principal leader of the Salva-
doran Communist Party
Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (1883-1966), the military dictator of El
Salvador who ordered the 1932 bloodbath
Arturo Araújo (1877-1967), the reform-minded civilian president of El Sal-
vador, unseated by a right-wing coup that transferred power to General
Martínez

Summary of Event
Social relations in El Salvador in the first decades of the twentieth century
were characterized by a wide division in power. The peasant masses, who had
once enjoyed communal property rights as part of an ancient landholding sys-
tem, had seen these rights taken away in the late 1800’s by a powerful clique of
coffee planters. Behind a shield of “liberal” legislation, these growers had suc-
ceeded in expanding their holdings to encompass nearly all of the country’s
arable land. They modernized the economy by tying their fortunes to the ex-
clusive cultivation of coffee, for which a large international market existed.
The peasants, most of whom were Pipil Indians, had an almost mystical rev-
erence for their cornfields. The disestablishment of their communal system
had a psychological, as well as a material, effect on their lives. Without access to
land, they had no options other than to work on the coffee plantations as colon-
os, receiving in exchange tiny plots for their own subsistence along with a mis-
erable wage, often issued in kind. Once-independent peasants were thus re-
duced to debt peons.
86
El Salvador’s Military Massacres Civilians 87

For their part, the coffee growers, or oligarchs, took advantage of a seem-
ingly limitless world demand for their product. The coffee boom, which lasted
throughout the 1920’s, stimulated urbanization, brought railways and tele-
graph lines to the interior, and widened the economic gap between the coffee
growers and the peasantry. The wealthy lived in regal splendor while the poor
seethed in their poverty.
The rural environment of El Salvador had little in it of philanthropy. The
planters kept wages low and they paid almost no taxes that might support
social services. Discontent among the poor was widespread in consequence,
and isolated uprisings occurred frequently. The rural constabulary and the
national guard smashed all of these movements. As time went by, the oligarchs
came to rely more and more on coercion to maintain the status quo in the
countryside.
The Great Depression of 1929 provided the catalyst for a social explosion.
The demand for coffee on the world markets collapsed. With prices falling,
the colonos lost the opportunity to find work. Wages fell 60 percent. In the cit-
ies, the Depression gave rise to a period of intense political discussion, with
younger members of the oligarchy expressing some doubts as to whether the
traditional order could contain the social crisis. A few individuals looked to re-
formist solutions.
Among their number was Arturo Araújo, an admirer of Britain’s Fabian So-
cialists. Araújo was something of a wild card in Salvadoran politics, and the
Partido Laborista he founded reflected an eclectic blend of mysticism, anti-
imperialism, and what was termed vitalismo mínimo—the idea that every citizen
deserved a “vital minimum” of goods and services necessary to a happy life.
Such sentiments appealed to many, especially in the cities, where trade union-
ists and middle-class professionals lent avid support to Araújo.
The Communist Party of El Salvador also favored this wayward son of the
oligarchy. In this instance, however, their support was conditional, since the
communists, led by veteran activist Agustín Farabundo Martí, feared that
Araújo’s popularity might overshadow their own plans to carve a measure of
power from the country’s difficulties. As it turned out, they needed to fear
something far more sinister.
Despite the misgivings of most oligarchs, the government held free elec-
tions in January, 1931. Five presidential candidates, most of whom repre-
sented conservative coffee interests, entered the field against Araújo. The lat-
ter went on to win anyway and took office at the beginning of March. Problems
plagued Araújo from the beginning. The Depression hit the country people
very hard. Although he had made vague promises as to land reform, the new
88 Human Rights Violations

San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, shortly before the revolution. (National
Archives)

president simply could not deliver on these while simultaneously safeguarding

the privileges of the elite.
The lack of direction displayed by Araújo was evident from the beginning.
The oligarchs, who had previously thought Araújo merely risky, now saw him
as positively dangerous and looked to anyone who might deliver them from his
influences. The peasants and the trade unionists also became disillusioned.
Seeing that their support had brought them repression and not reform, they
began to consider more radical solutions, particularly those espoused by
Farabundo Martí and the communists. Several strikes by colonos in April and
May were brutally crushed by forces under War Minister (and Vice President)
Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. Widespread rebellion now seemed likely.
Of all the groups opposed to Araújo, clearly the most willing to act upon its
grievances was the military. The president had tried to reduce the army’s bud-
get by 25 percent and tried to retire a number of senior officers. Most crucial,
however, was his inability to pay his soldiers. In normal times, export duties
paid the greater part of government expenses, but with coffee exports at rock
bottom, Araújo’s administration was delinquent in its payments to all officials.
The end came swiftly. On December 2, 1931, army units loyal to General
Martínez seized control of San Salvador and other major cities. Only Araújo
loyalists initially condemned the attack. Most political parties, including the
El Salvador’s Military Massacres Civilians 89

communists, gave their tacit approval. They felt reassured when Martínez
announced that municipal elections scheduled for January, 1932, would go
forward. The Left then organized meetings and street demonstrations, distrib-
uted leaflets, and prepared for the elections. Few doubted that Martínez
would keep his word.
The general, however, had his own ambitions. A man of a mystical frame of
mind who would later conduct seances in the presidential palace, Martínez
felt certain that he acted with divine aid. Having identified all opposition orga-
nizers, he cancelled the elections and began a massive repression. Realizing
that they were moving in the eleventh hour, the communists launched an ur-
ban revolt on January 22, supposedly set to coincide with a rural insurrection
in the western departments of Santa Ana, Ahuachapán, and Sonsonate. The
Indian leaders of those areas had tenuous ties to Farabundo Martí, even
though they had no use for communists generally. They nevertheless decided
that a revolt offered them their last chance of deliverance.
They were wrong, tragically so. The army quelled the urban uprising in a
matter of hours, police agents having already penetrated the revolutionary
cells. They had previously detained Farabundo Martí. A policy of summary ex-
ecution began that included even suspected members of opposition groups.
Martí received unusual treatment: He was given a brief trial before he faced
the firing squad.
The rural districts experienced the full fury of the repression. The peasant
rebels, armed with machetes, managed to hold out for forty-eight hours. They
killed some fifty policemen. The army and the irregular forces set up by the
landowners exacted an awesome revenge in what Salvadorans still refer to sim-
ply as la matanza, the massacre. The army regarded anyone with Indian fea-
tures as being automatically guilty and liable for the ultimate penalty. Whole
villages were razed. Hospitals were checked and the wounded dragged out and
killed. Women, children, and dogs were shot along with men. The corpses
soon became so numerous that they could not be buried and were simply left
in ditches along the roads. As one witness later observed, only the vultures ate
well that year. Before the violence had run its course in February, as many as
thirty thousand people had died. The massacre left a legacy of violence in
Salvadoran politics that decades later had yet to be overcome.

Impact of Event
La matanza left a deep scar in Salvadoran society. Virtually every family in
the western part of the country lost someone to the army terror. The effects
of the repression went even further, however, than the loss of life.
90 Human Rights Violations

There were cultural losses. Because Martínez and the army chose to iden-
tify the Pipil Indians as part of a wide communist conspiracy, most Indian survi-
vors rushed to deny their Indian identity. They abandoned the use of native
garb, which they saw as a provocative symbol of resistance likely to bring down
the wrath of the police. Indians encouraged their children to avoid speaking
Pipil except at home, and then only in hushed tones.
There were social losses. With the members of many families serving in the
army or among the rebels, the repression could not help but have a divisive im-
pact. It became impossible to trust anyone. All of the traditional foci of rural
authority and trust—the church, and more important, the socioreligious
brotherhoods (cofradías)—lost the popular support they once had enjoyed.
Fear dominated the peasant landscape. Only the oligarchs could claim that la
matanza had increased the level of solidarity in their ranks. It also taught them
the false lesson that class solidarity outweighed national reconciliation and
that their survival depended on the subordination of the peasants.
Finally, the repression brought political losses. General Martínez followed
la matanza with a twelve-year dictatorship that brooked little opposition, even
from the oligarchs. Although civilian vigilantes conducted much of the
1932 slaughter, its political outcome confirmed the army’s claim on power.
Martínez was only one of many military presidents who were to rule El Salva-
dor during the twentieth century. As an institution, the Salvadoran armed
forces consistently resisted pressures to make room for civilian participation in
politics. When open application of force was inadvisable, the military acted in
collusion with the oligarchs to create death squads.
For their part, the peasant masses in the El Salvador of the late twentieth
century became caught between two polar extremes. They could either join
the ranks of the army and the elites, who perceived the struggle as an anticom-
munist crusade, or they could join with the Farabundo Martí National Libera-
tion guerrillas, the ideological descendants of Martí, and fight to establish the
kind of Leninist regime that had been repudiated throughout the Eastern
Bloc. In either direction, death threatened the average citizen. The greatest
and most frightening legacies of la matanza are the effects that it left in the
popular mind and the knowledge that it can happen again.

Bibliography
Anderson, Thomas P. Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1971. Despite its inaccurate title, this work is
still rightly considered the classic English-language account of the repres-
El Salvador’s Military Massacres Civilians 91

sion. It is also the most thoughtful and the least pedantic. Anderson con-
ducted extensive interviews with participants and made use of little-known
manuscript materials. Includes map, footnotes, extensive bibliography,
and index.
Dalton, Roque. Miguel Marmol. Willimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1987.
This is a unique and fascinating account of la matanza, based on extensive
interviews with an active organizer of the Salvadoran Communist Party who
was himself shot and left for dead in 1932 and who later spent many years in
exile in the Soviet Union. Marmol’s Stalinist attitude dates him, but his
comments about sacrifice and struggle still ring true. Dalton, an important
poet and member of the revolutionary underground, was murdered in
1975 by a rival leftist faction. Includes three letters from Marmol as well as
an October, 1986, interview.
McClintock, Michael. State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador. Vol. 1 in
The American Connection. London: Zed Books, 1985. This thorough exami-
nation of U.S. military and economic aid to El Salvador contains some use-
ful references to the 1932 massacre, including some of the comments of the
American military attaché in San Salvador at the time. Includes endnotes,
bibliography, and index.
Montgomery, Tommie Sue. Revolution in El Salvador: Origins and Evolution.
Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982. This insightful history of the Sal-
vadoran struggle for justice focuses more on the 1970’s and 1980’s than on
la matanza. Nevertheless, its detailed account of the antecedents of the
quagmire of the 1990’s marks it as a key source of information for under-
standing modern El Salvador. Includes photos, maps, tables, index, and
bibliography.
North, Liisa. Bitter Grounds: Roots of Revolt in El Salvador. 2d ed. Westport, Conn.:
Lawrence Hill, 1985. Chapter 3 covers the 1932 peasant revolt and its
bloody aftermath. The study as a whole is a brief but concise treatment of
Salvadoran politics in the twentieth century. It is especially strong on eco-
nomic questions. Includes maps, tables, notes, index, bibliography, and
appendices.
Parkman, Patricia. Nonviolent Insurrection in El Salvador: The Fall of Maximiliano
Hernández Martínez. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988. This is a
valuable and well-researched account of the Martínez regime, concentrat-
ing more on his ouster in the mid-1940’s than on la matanza. It is based
largely on materials drawn from the archives of the Department of State
and on interviews. Includes maps, illustrations, endnotes, and bibliog-
raphy.
92 Human Rights Violations

Russell, Philip L. El Salvador in Crisis. Austin, Tex.: Colorado River Press, 1984.
Like most “committed” historical works, this study favors a leftist solution
for the Salvadoran problem. It is quite thorough and well-researched in its
treatment of the 1932 bloodbath, although it cannot boast the depth of An-
derson’s account. Includes maps, tables, illustrations, graphs, endnotes,
bibliography, and index.
Thomas L. Whigham
Hitler Uses Reichstag Fire to Suspend
Civil and Political Liberties
Category of event: Civil rights; political freedom
Time: February 27, 1933
Locale: Berlin, Germany

Adolf Hitler used the burning of the German parliament (Reichstag) building
as an excuse to limit civil and political liberties granted under the Weimar Consti-
tution

Principal personages:
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the chancellor of Germany and leader (Führer)
of the Nazi Party
Hermann Göring (1893-1946), the Prussian minister of the interior, presi-
dent of the Reichstag, and prosecutor at the Reichstag fire trial
Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), the Nazi propaganda leader and, after March
13, 1933, the German minister of propaganda
Marinus van der Lubbe (1909-1934), the Dutch arsonist who burned the
Reichstag building
Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1949), a Bulgarian defendant at the Reichstag fire
trial, later secretary-general of the Communist International
Ernst Torgler (1893-1963), a German communist representative to the
Reichstag and defendant at the trial

Summary of Event
The years following World War I were a period of chaos in Germany. Defeat
in war and the humiliation of the peace at Versailles made the populace bitter,
frustrated, and angry. They vented their frustration on the Allies, on Jews and
other non-German peoples, and above all on the Weimar Republic created to
replace the monarchy. The first wave of turmoil arose from 1918 to 1923, but it
subsided as economic conditions improved in the second half of the 1920’s.
The Weimar Constitution appeared to be working very well. With the out-
break of the depression in 1929, however, a new swell of political agitation
based on race and class hatred gained momentum.
93
94 Human Rights Violations

The turbulent years immediately after the war saw the rise of extremist par-
ties on the left and right. From 1919 to 1923, the German Communist party
initiated three uprisings. Nationalist, anticommunist, and anti-Semitic groups
also on several occasions attempted to overthrow the republic and committed
acts of terror against its officials. The most infamous uprising of the political
right in those years occurred in Munich in October, 1923—the unsuccessful
“Beer Hall Putsch” of Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German
Workers’ Party, the Nazis. In the lull of 1925-1929, the party did not fare well,
but with the depression, all extremist parties and organizations gained sup-
port. Hitler found his star on the ascendant.
As conditions in Germany worsened and political haggling in the parlia-
ment (Reichstag) accomplished little, the aged and reactionary president of
the republic, former Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, disregarded the
principles of democratic government. He relied solely on his aristocratic cro-
nies to rule, principally Baron Franz von Papen, who assumed the chancellor-
ship in 1932. The latter, however, found himself stymied by the communists
and the Nazis, whose strength in the parliament had increased with the de-
pression. Preferring the right, von Papen came to an agreement with Hitler,
whom he hoped to control. Thus, after a number of back-room deals, on Janu-
ary 30, 1933, von Papen convinced von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as the
new chancellor of Germany.
Hitler’s chancellorship came through neither a mass revolution nor the
ballot box. Although the Nazi Party had grown rapidly in strength since 1929,
Hitler had lost the presidential election to von Hindenburg in 1932. Likewise,
his Nazis, although gaining a plurality, were able to win only thirty-seven per-
cent of the vote in the parliamentary elections of July, 1932. Without sufficient
popular support, Hitler needed a different way to break out of the restrictions
which von Papen had imposed on him.
In one of his first acts as chancellor, Hitler used emergency decrees pro-
vided by the constitution to replace the democratically elected Socialist gov-
ernment of the Prussian state with one led by Hermann Göring, a Nazi minis-
ter without portfolio in the national cabinet. Hitler also took measures against
the communists, who were calling for resistance although not actually carry-
ing out any overt acts. Göring raided communist headquarters in Berlin and
closed their printing presses. Many did not see Hitler’s chancellery as a threat
until then because the Nazis remained a minority in the government. The left
now became alarmed, and apprehension concerning the Nazis spread.
On February 25, the day after Göring’s raid, three attempts to start fires in
government buildings were aborted. The next day, Hitler’s astrologer, Erik
Hitler Uses Reichstag Fire to Suspend Liberties 95

Hanussen, predicted a building would soon go up in flames. On Monday, Feb-

ruary 27, a Dutch arsonist, Marinus van der Lubbe, perpetrator of the Febru-
ary 25 attempts, purchased some incendiary materials and went to the Reichs-
tag. After surveying the building from several directions, he entered a nearby
building to wait for dark. At 9:00 p.m. he scaled the wall to the balcony near a
little-used entrance. Shortly afterward, a passerby, hearing breaking glass and
seeing a person (presumably van der Lubbe) fleeing with a flame in his hands,
notified the police. An officer went to the scene but watched transfixed while
flames began to engulf the internal rooms.
By the time the firemen arrived, the building was already burning down.
Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, an associate of Hitler, saw the fire from his apart-
ment and notified Goebbels, at whose house Hitler was attending a party. Nei-
ther Hitler nor Goebbels at first believed Hanfstaengl, who was known for his
practical jokes, but as the fire progressed further, even the revelers could see
the red sky. One report states that Hitler yelled, “It’s the communists!” Hitler
and Goebbels went to the scene. They found Göring, who was distraught over
the possible loss of the building’s precious Gobelin tapestries. Göring also
blamed the communists. He told Hitler that a number of communist deputies
had been in the building shortly before the fire broke out and that one arrest
had already been made. Hitler asked about other buildings, and Göring as-
sured him that he had taken precautions to preserve them.
Hitler, Göring, and von Papen then conferred on what action to take. Von
Papen went to inform von Hindenburg, and Hitler convoked a meeting of
his cabinet and civic and police officials. The police inspector assigned to the
case reported that the police had found van der Lubbe, who admitted that he
committed the arson as a protest. Göring shouted, “This is the beginning of a
communist uprising,” and Hitler added, “Now we’ll show them! Anyone who
stands in our way will be mown down!” He threatened to hang or shoot com-
munists, socialists, and even conservative opponents. When the police inspec-
tor revealed that van der Lubbe was not a communist and had carried out the
deed alone, Hitler refused to believe it. “This is a cunning and well-prepared
plot,” he said. The chancellor then went to the offices of the Nazi Party news-
paper, Voelkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer), and immediately helped
compose a version of the story that blamed the communists for the fire.
Göring likewise assisted in changing the report of the official Prussian press
service to exaggerate the facts and imply that a conspiracy was involved.
The fire was just the excuse Hitler needed to begin his drive for totalitarian
power, to change the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. Hitler argued
that a single individual could not have perpetrated the arson. Van der Lubbe,
96 Human Rights Violations

furthermore, had been a member of the International Communist Party and

also had been arrested twice in Leiden for setting fires to public buildings. In
fact, however, historical research has demonstrated that van der Lubbe did set
the fire alone. The International Communist Party to which he belonged was a
small splinter group, more anarchist than Marxist in ideology and not part of
the Communist International directed by Moscow. Indeed, van der Lubbe and
the communists loyal to Joseph Stalin had little use for each other.
Göring found four communists to indict in addition to van der Lubbe—
Ernst Torgler, a leader of the German Communist Party and a member of the
Reichstag, and three Bulgarian agents of the Communist International:
Georgi Dimitrov, Vasili Tanev, and Blagoi Popov. In a spectacular trial in which
Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring (one of the prosecutors) hoped to prove to
the world that a communist conspiracy actually did exist, the communist
defendants, particularly Georgi Dimitrov, proved their innocence. In fact,
Dimitrov went as far as accusing the Nazis of deliberately setting the fire them-
selves. He humiliated Göring in an unexpected courtroom confrontation
which was broadcast and reported around the world. In other countries, com-
munists and other antifascists organized protests. Nazi opponents convened
a countertrial in London with a court of respected international jurists to
show that the Nazis did indeed start the fire. Goebbels’s propaganda ploy
had backfired, causing the government to move the trial from Berlin to Leip-
zig, where they concluded it with little publicity.
The court acquitted the communists but found van der Lubbe guilty. The
Dutchman was executed shortly thereafter. Dimitrov, Tanev, and Popov were
released and were welcomed to the Soviet Union. Some say their acquittal and
release came about through pressure from Moscow, which threatened retalia-
tion against German citizens living in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the
court ruled that although the accused communists were innocent, the fire was
part of a communist conspiracy. The authorities released Torgler several
months after the Bulgarians.
Dimitrov in 1935 became the secretary-general of the Communist Interna-
tional and the spokesperson for Moscow’s new foreign policy, which was to be
implemented by world communist parties promoting antifascist coalitions
even at the expense of delaying the world socialist revolution. In 1948,
Dimitrov became prime minister of communist Bulgaria. Popov also returned
to Bulgaria after the war and served in a number of government posts. Tanev
was killed in guerrilla warfare during World War II. Torgler, falsely accused of
being a Nazi agent, was expelled by the German Communist Party. He settled
in Hanover, where he retired from political life.
Hitler Uses Reichstag Fire to Suspend Liberties 97

Ernst Torgler, the German communist who was falsely accused of starting the Reichs-
tag fire. (New York Times Berlin)

Impact of Event
Even before Hitler became chancellor, economic crises and flaws in the
Weimar Republic’s constitutional government subjected Germany to stress
and social disorientation. The constitution’s provisions allowed President von
98 Human Rights Violations

Hindenburg and Chancellor von Papen legally to act in a high-handed man-

ner. They had no compunctions about doing so, as they had little regard for
parliamentary or democratic government in general and the Weimar Consti-
tution in particular. The spirit of the law fell victim to this era. The conservative
government’s favoritism toward right-wing nationalists allowed Nazi storm
troopers to wreak havoc in the German cities and placed Jews, trade unionists,
political moderates, and the political left in a state of jeopardy and fear. These
events did not bode well for the promise of civil and political freedom which
the drafters of Weimar had hoped to bring to a recovering Germany.
Von Papen and von Hindenburg’s political manipulations, in fact, brought
Hitler to power. He, too, needed little excuse to begin antidemocratic and
anticonstitutional actions, such as the dismissal of state governments and raids
on opponents. Nevertheless, the high-handed manner in which the Nazis
acted as soon as they gained power could have caused them difficulty in retain-
ing it. After all, they still depended on the barons (von Hindenburg, von
Papen, and their associates) for their real authority. These aristocrats disliked
the Nazis not so much because of their nationalist and anticommunist ideol-
ogy but because of their lower-class origins and “crudeness.” Hitler’s party may
have had the plurality in Parliament, but it did not have the majority and as yet
had not demonstrated its ability to win a clear victory at the polls.
Thus, Hitler needed to have extraordinary powers. The Reichstag fire gave
him the opportunity to demand the enabling legislation which virtually cre-
ated a dictatorship for him. Whether he believed that the communists were
conspiring to seize power is immaterial, just as it is immaterial whether, as the
communists then charged, the Nazis deliberately started the fire to get this
legislation. Historical opinion considered the latter allegation true until the
1960’s, when it was disproved. The fire was an opportune event for Hitler, but
if it had not happened, he undoubtedly would have found another route to
totalitarian power.
President von Hindenburg enacted the enabling legislation on February
28, 1933, the day after the fire. He cited a constitutional provision permitting
the government to rule by decree in times of emergency. The justification was
the need for “a defensive measure against communist acts of violence endan-
gering the state.” The decree, in part, read: “Restrictions on personal liberty,
on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on
the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal,
telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house search-
ers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permis-
sible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”
Hitler Uses Reichstag Fire to Suspend Liberties 99

With the enabling legislation, Hitler outlawed the Communist Party and ar-
rested its leadership. He harassed other opposition parties as well, closing
their papers and outlawing their meetings. New elections were scheduled for
March 5. The government’s own actions hindered the opposition campaigns.
Despite their efforts, the Nazis could do no better than forty-four percent of
the vote. Nevertheless, Hitler held full power. He used the legislation to break
down the federal structure of the republic and take over all the state govern-
ments. Although originally perceived to be temporary, the decrees enacted
under the enabling legislation were permanently applied to the Third Reich.
Over the ensuing months, the government banned all political parties except
the Nazis. Civil and political guarantees were effectively ended. Discrimina-
tory legislation directed against the Jews was put into effect. Political oppo-
nents, some even within the Nazi Party, were arrested without cause, forced to
emigrate, or even murdered extralegally. The Weimar Republic was dead and
the Führer was the dictator of his Third Empire.

Bibliography
Broszat, Martin, and Volker R. Berghahn. Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar
Germany. Translated by Volker R. Berghahn. New York: Berg, 1987. A survey
of the descent of the Weimar government through the period before Hitler
was appointed chancellor. Bibliography and index.
Delmer, Sefton. Trail Sinister: An Autobiography. Vol 1. London: Secker & War-
burg, 1961. The autobiography of an Australian journalist born in Ger-
many. It contains a very good eyewitness account of the Reichstag fire, the
trial, and its consequences. Index.
Fest, Joachim C. Hitler. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. The best
scholarly biography of Hitler, placing him in the context of German history
and politics of the twentieth century. Fest tends to follow Tobias (below) on
the issue of the Reichstag fire but does not absolutely reject the possibility
of a Nazi plot. He believes the actual culprits are irrelevant and argues that
the fire provided a convenient excuse to institute totalitarianism. Docu-
mented; bibliography, indexed.
Lee, Stephen J. The Weimar Republic. New York: Routledge, 1998. Overview of
the Weimar Republic with a chapter on its collapse. Bibliography.
Mommsen, Hans. The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy. Translated by Larry E.
Jones and Elborg Forster. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996. Examines the political, social, and economic developments of Ger-
many between 1919-1933.
Tobias, Fritz. The Reichstag Fire. Introduction by A. J. P. Taylor. New York: G. P.
100 Human Rights Violations

Putnam’s Sons, 1964. This controversial book first revealed the fact that the
Nazis did not burn down the Reichstag, but that van der Lubbe did it alone.
It is a well-researched refutation of the Brown Book’s thesis (see next en-
try), although at times it sinks to an anticommunist polemic. Illustrations,
bibliography, index.
World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism. The Reichstag Fire Trial:
The Second Brown Book of the Hitler Terror. 1934. Reprint. New York: Howard
Fertig, 1969. A reprint of the 1934 edition published to demonstrate that
the Nazis themselves actually burned down the Reichstag. Critics claim that
it is communist propaganda, exaggerating and manufacturing facts and ev-
idence. Presents the case against the Nazis which was believed universally
until Fritz Tobias’s research. Contains a list of about 750 victims of Nazi
atrocities before March, 1934. Illustrations, not indexed.
Frederick B. Chary
Nazi Concentration Camps Begin
Operating
Category of event: Atrocities and war crimes; prisoners’ rights
Time: March, 1933
Locale: Germany

The opening of Nazi Germany’s first concentration camps was an early step in a
destruction process that culminated in the Holocaust

Principal personages:
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the Nazi Party leader named German chancellor
on January 30, 1933
Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), the head of the SS and second in power in
Nazi Germany; presided over the “final solution”
Theodor Eicke (1892-1943), the commandant of Dachau beginning in June,
1933; became chief of Nazi concentration camps in July, 1934
Hermann Göring (1893-1946), the Prussian minister of the interior who
played a leading role in organizing the Gestapo
Rudolf Höss (1900-1947), an SS officer who became commandant of the
death camp at Auschwitz
Ernst Röhm (1887-1934), the leader of the SA (Sturmabteilung), the Nazi
storm troopers
Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934), Germany’s president from 1925 to 1934

Summary of Event
Although the Nazis never gained a majority in any freely contested elec-
tion, their control of Germany began on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler
was named chancellor by Paul von Hindenburg, president of the Weimar
Republic. Six months later, the Nazis stood as the only legal political party in
Germany, Hitler’s decrees were as good as law, basic civil rights had been
suspended, and thousands of the regime’s suspected political opponents
had been interned in a growing number of concentration camps. Before the
Third Reich fell twelve years later, millions of people—including two-thirds
of the European Jews—would perish in the brutal world of concentration
camps.
101
102 Human Rights Violations

Disregarding the principle that one should not be punished unless found
guilty in a fair trial, concentration camps remove from society people who can-
not be confined through the normal workings of a state’s criminal code. The
Nazis did not invent them, nor did they have a systematic design for develop-
ing such places as soon as they came to power in Germany. Gradually, however,
a deadly camp system did evolve. An early step in that process occurred at
Dachau, a town about ten miles northwest of Munich, where one of the first
concentration camps was established. The site of a vacated World War I muni-
tions factory provided the needed space for Dachau’s first prisoners, who en-
tered the camp in late March, 1933. Those early inmates were political oppo-
nents of the Nazis, mainly communists and social democrats, who were kept
under so-called “protective custody.”
Heinrich Himmler was the Nazi leader who established Dachau. In 1925,
he had joined the SS (Schutzstaffel), a small group of dedicated Nazis who
served as Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguards. Hitler appointed Himmler head
of the SS in 1929. Only about two hundred strong at the time, the SS, under
Himmler’s direction, eventually numbered in the hundreds of thousands and
formed an awesome empire within the Nazi state. Meanwhile, shortly after
Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Himmler gained important police powers
in Munich and in the entire province of Bavaria. He used his authority to
create the Dachau camp.
Bavarian state police guarded the camp at first, but in April, 1933, SS per-
sonnel took over. Theodor Eicke became Dachau’s commandant in June. As
he regulated camp life, including stating rules about work and punishment,
Eicke ensured that Dachau’s procedures would be systematic and replicable as
well as harsh. After Eicke was appointed head of the Nazi network of concen-
tration camps in July, 1934, the system he had developed at Dachau became
standard. The SS personnel who trained under him saw to it that his policies
were established at other camps as they rose to new positions of leadership in
the system. One who did so, for example, was Rudolf Höss, whose Dachau
training prepared him to become the commandant of Auschwitz in German-
occupied Poland in 1940.
Although the Dachau model fostered by Himmler’s SS leadership eventu-
ally dominated the Nazi camp system, that outcome was not a foregone con-
clusion in the early months of the Third Reich. By the end of July, 1933, Nazi
Germany held nearly twenty-seven thousand political prisoners in “protective
custody.” Dachau contained its share, but thousands more prisoners could be
found in a variety of other detention centers. These centers lacked overall
coordination. They shared only the fact of incarcerating people who predomi-
Nazi Concentration Camps Begin Operating 103

nantly were “guilty” only in the sense that they were judged politically suspect
by the Nazis.
An early pretext for arrests of the “politically suspect” was the fire that rav-
aged the German parliament building on February 27, 1933. Although Nazis
have been suspected of setting the blaze to serve their own purposes, Hitler
blamed the Reichstag’s destruction on communist arson. The next day, Presi-
dent von Hindenburg signed the emergency decree that the Nazis wanted: By
suspending basic rights guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution, and thereby
allowing detention for persons suspected of hostility to the state, it opened the
door for a policy of Schutzhaft, or “protective custody,” that would guard the
Reich’s security by imprisoning those who were suspected of threatening it.
Taking advantage of this sweeping decree, the Nazis launched a wave of arrests
throughout the country.
Many victims of this campaign were interned in camps quickly set up by the
SA (Sturmabteilung), the brown-shirted Nazi storm troopers led by Ernst
Röhm. Others, especially in Prussia, were imprisoned in detention centers cre-
ated by Hermann Göring, the chief of the Prussian police, who was also orga-
nizing the Gestapo, a secret police force dedicated to maintaining the security
of the Nazi state. Precisely how many of these camps existed in 1933 remains
unclear, although informed estimates indicate that Prussia alone had twenty
of them.
In a regime where terror loomed so large, anyone who could gain control
of the Nazi concentration camps would wield immense power; thus, Göring at-
tempted to outdo his rivals, only to be outdone by Himmler. By early July, 1934,
Himmler not only had established the SS camp at Dachau but also had gained
control of the political police in the Reich’s various states—including Göring’s
Gestapo in Prussia. In addition, he had masterminded a purge of the SA, and
appointed Eicke, his SS subordinate, to supervise the concentration camps
throughout Germany.
This consolidation of power eliminated most of the small camps that had
sprung up wildly in 1933. By September, 1935, the six official concentra-
tion camps in the Third Reich were at Dachau, Lichtenburg, Sachsenburg,
Esterwegen, Oranienburg, and Columbia Haus (near Berlin). On the eve of
World War II, in the late summer of 1939, even those camps—except for
Dachau, which was reconstructed in 1937 and 1938—had been eclipsed by
newer and larger installations at Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937),
Flossenbürg (1938), Mauthausen (in Austria, 1938), and Ravensbruck (a con-
centration camp for women, 1939).
In the period from 1933 until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, there
104 Human Rights Violations

were changes in the concentration camp population. The number of prison-

ers fluctuated. Although mostly political prisoners were incarcerated at first,
the concentration camps gradually engulfed many other types of people in ad-
dition to the communists, social democrats, and trade unionists who had been
targeted initially. By 1938, Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of the clergy, “asocial
elements”—such as homosexuals and those called “habitual criminals”—
as well as Gypsies and Jews were among those in the camps. From person to
person and place to place, treatment varied to some degree, but exhausting
labor, severe punishment, poor food, filth, disease, and execution were all
among the possible and persistent threats. Release from a concentration camp
was possible, but death while in a camp was likely.

Slave laborers in Buchenwald concentration camp. Conditions in individual con-

centration camps varied, but prisoners faced exhausting labor, severe punishment,
poor food, crowding, filth, disease, and possible execution in virtually all the camps.
(Digital Stock)
Nazi Concentration Camps Begin Operating 105

Impact of Event
Nazi concentration camps of the kind that began at Dachau in March,
1933, were only the beginning of an unprecedented twelve-year assault against
human rights. What followed from that beginning may be glimpsed by consid-
ering further what the term “concentration camp” can mean. Sometimes that
category is used to refer collectively to all the camps of detention and death
that the Nazis established. The evolution of Nazi policy, however, requires
some further distinctions.
Although all the Nazi camps derived partly from impulses and intentions
that brought Dachau into existence, not every camp in the Nazi system was
simply a holding pen for political detainees. After World War II began with the
German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, different but related insti-
tutions started to appear. There were, for example, labor camps, transit camps,
prisoner-of-war camps, and, most destructive of all, extermination or death
camps.
The Nazis violated human rights in virtually every possible way, but no
group received more inhumane treatment from them than the Jews. In the
early years, however, relatively small numbers of Jews were interned in concen-
tration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald. Not until the summer of 1938,
and especially after the Kristallnacht pogrom in November, 1938, were large
numbers of them imprisoned solely because they were Jews. Even then, most
of these Jewish prisoners were eventually released after paying a ransom or
proving that they were about to emigrate from Germany. Jewish fate, however,
would change catastrophically with the outbreak of World War II.
Nazi ideology held that Jews were the chief obstacle to the racial and cul-
tural purity that Hitler craved for the Third Reich. Political opponents were
dealt with ruthlessly to ensure Nazi domination of Germany. Nazi aims soon
identified the Jews as an even more virulent threat. Their polluting presence,
Hitler believed, would have to be eliminated. For a time, the Nazis relied
largely on punitive laws to segregate Jews, expropriate their property, and de-
prive them of their professions and other rights. The Nazi strategy was to make
life so difficult that the German Jews would be forced to leave. This plan did
not achieve its goals; thus, Nazi policies aimed at specific population reduction
had to change when Hitler went to war to expand geographically the German
nation.
Hitler’s conquests, especially in Eastern Europe, brought millions of Jews
under German domination. What gradually evolved was a policy of mass
murder—the “final solution” to the Jewish question. From late 1941 until late
1944, the policy was implemented most systematically by the gas chambers that
106 Human Rights Violations

operated at six death camps in occupied Poland: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor,

Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Dachau and the other early concentration camps on German soil were
never death factories like Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The violations of
human rights initiated at the first camps, however, were part of wide-ranging
aims to stamp out every element of dissent and diversity that stood in the way
of Nazi domination. Concentration camps such as Dachau helped to pave the
way for other camps. These other camps were even worse because they were
specifically designed to remove unwanted lives, especially Jewish ones, by un-
relenting mass murder.

Bibliography
Feig, Konnilyn G. Hitler’s Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness. New York: Holmes
& Meier, 1979. This detailed study gives an overview of the Nazi concen-
tration and death camps and, focusing on their structure and function, a
camp-by-camp analysis of many of them, including Dachau. Contains help-
ful maps and photographs.
Gutman, Israel, ed. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. 4 vols. New York: Macmillan,
1990. Contains articles on many concentration camps as well as on the
camp system as a whole. Provides surveys of the SS, SA, and Gestapo, as well
as essays about individual SS leaders in the camp system. All of the essays in
this extensive work have been carefully prepared by highly qualified schol-
ars. Useful maps and illustrations included.
Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Rev. ed. 3 vols. New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1985. An unrivaled study of the bureaucratic process of
destruction that the Nazis directed toward the Jews of Europe. Analysis situ-
ates the concentration and death camps within that systematic process. Fo-
cuses especially on developments that transformed the conventional con-
centration camps into centers of mass murder such as those at Treblinka
and Auschwitz-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland.
Höhne, Heinz. The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS. Translated by
Richard Barry. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979. Offers a detailed study of
the rise of the SS, its immense power in Nazi Germany, and its central role
in administration of the concentration and death camps. Focuses on indi-
vidual figures as well as on the overall organization of the SS.
Krausnick, Helmut, Hans Buchheim, Martin Brozat, and Hans-Adolf
Jacobsen. Anatomy of the SS State. Translated by Richard Barry, Marian Jack-
son, and Dorothy Long. New York: Walker and Company, 1968. Supports a
theory of concentration camp crimes and genocidal treatment of Jews as
Nazi Concentration Camps Begin Operating 107

essential features of Nazism. In particular, Martin Brozat’s “The Concentra-

tion Camps 1933-45” provides effective documentation.
Laqueur, Walter, and Judith Tydor Baumel, eds. The Holocaust Encyclopedia.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Detailed, comprehensive
survey of all aspects of the Holocaust. Includes over 200 photos and many
helpful research tools.
Rubenstein, Richard L., and John K. Roth. Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holo-
caust and Its Legacy. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987. An overview of the Ho-
locaust. Discusses the emergence and development of the concentration
and death camps that played a central role in the mass death unleashed by
Nazi Germany. Focuses on the victims as well as on the perpetrators.
Wistrich, Robert S. Hitler and the Holocaust. New York: Random House, 2001.
An authoritative work recounting the major issues of the Holocaust.
John K. Roth
Stalin Begins Purging Political
Opponents
Category of event: Atrocities and war crimes; political freedom
Time: December, 1934
Locale: Soviet Union

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin undertook a brutal four-year campaign of terror

against those he believed to be his political enemies in the Communist Party

Principal personages:
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), general secretary of the Communist Party begin-
ning in 1922
Sergei Kirov (1886-1934), the closest aide to Stalin during the late 1920’s; led
the Party organization in Leningrad
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), a Marxist theorist who played a principal role in
orchestrating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
Nikolai Yezhov (1895-1938), the head of the NKVD (secret police) during
the most intense period of the purge
Lev Kamenev (1883-1936), a close associate of Vladimir Ilich Lenin; became
chair of the Moscow Soviet in 1918 and a member of the Politburo in 1919
Grigori Zinoviev (1883-1936), the head of the Comintern (Communist
International) in 1919 and a collaborator with Lenin

Summary of Event
The murder of Sergei Kirov, the Communist Party leader in Leningrad
and a member of the Soviet Politburo (policy-making committee), gave Joseph
Stalin an excuse to begin a reign of terror similar to those carried out by earlier
Russian leaders Ivan IV and Peter the Great. Scholars have debated for some
time over what motivated Stalin to embark on such a destructive course. There
are some who have argued that he was disappointed by the failure of his first
Five-Year Plan (1928) to achieve all the goals he had set, while others have sug-
gested that his intent was to centralize power in his own hands at the expense
of the Communist Party. More than a few have contended that the purging
stands as proof of Stalin’s unstable and unbalanced state of mind.
Although the “Great Purge” began in December, 1934, there were harbin-
108
In 1937 Leon Trotsky fled the Soviet Union for Mexico, where he was assassinated in
1940. Here he is pictured sitting in the company of artists Frida Kahlo (in white
dress) and Diego Rivera (left rear) and others. (Archivo Cenidap)
110 Human Rights Violations

gers of what was to come during the period from 1927 (when Stalin assumed
power) to 1934. On several occasions, the Party, at Stalin’s urging, had re-
moved hundreds of local communist leaders from their posts. They were
charged with falling under capitalist influence or not pushing hard enough to
fulfill Stalin’s drive to collectivize the countryside. The areas most affected
were Odessa, Kiev, and the Urals. These “preliminary purges,” widespread as
they were, paled by comparison to what occurred after the murder of Kirov in
December, 1934.
Kirov was shot by Leonid Nikolayev, a Communist Party member described
by some at the time as disgruntled. Stalin immediately blamed the assassina-
tion on his principal political enemies, Leon Trotsky (in exile at the time), Lev
Kamenev, and Grigori Zinoviev. It is now generally agreed by scholars that Sta-
lin arranged the murder of Kirov, his friend and ally.
On the day of Kirov’s murder, Stalin asked the Party to issue a decree elimi-
nating civil and legal rights for all persons accused of “terroristic acts.” This
made it possible for the government to arrest, detain (for the purpose of gain-
ing forced confessions), or execute anyone it wished. In January, 1935,
Kamenev, Zinoviev, and two others were tried, convicted, and sentenced to
prison for their alleged roles in the Kirov murder. The length of the sentences
was irrelevant, as none of those arrested was ever released. This was the begin-
ning of what became known as the “purification” of the Communist Party. Sta-
lin began with Kamenev and Zinoviev because he perceived them as especially
treacherous. They had once worked closely with him in the 1920’s but then
had turned against him and given their loyalty to Trotsky. After the January
convictions, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Party members came under sus-
picion. Many were shot, detained, or sent to distant regions of the Soviet
Union. Although some in the Politburo were uneasy with this development,
Stalin insisted that it was necessary to protect the country from those who
wished to “wreck” his great drive for full communization.
The first victims when Stalin began purging the Party were those consid-
ered to be “Old Bolsheviks,” Party members who had been associated with Le-
nin and Trotsky during the 1917 Revolution and in the formative days of the
Soviet state. Many had been supporters of Lenin’s moderate New Economic
Policy begun in 1921. The greatest number of those purged in 1935 were indi-
viduals who, after Lenin’s death in 1924, had supported Trotsky’s claim to suc-
ceed Lenin as head of the Party and the state. Between 1924 and 1927, Trotsky
and Stalin competed for control. Stalin was ultimately successful, and Trotsky
went into exile for the remainder of his life. Stalin continued to insist, however,
that Trotsky’s followers (“Trotskyites”), guided by their leader from abroad,
Stalin Begins Purging Political Opponents 111

were working to remove him from power. Having been established as his ene-
mies, they became convenient scapegoats to explain every failure that Stalin
experienced. He could simply say that the Trotskyites had wrecked his plans.
In 1936, Stalin intensified the purging. Public trials (“show trials”) were
held in which those accused were expected to confess their misdeeds and to
implicate others involved in plots against Stalin. Kamenev and Zinoviev,
already in prison, were among sixteen Old Bolsheviks put on public trial in Au-
gust, 1936. All were charged with conducting a terrorist campaign at Trotsky’s
bidding, and all were sentenced to death. From that point, the purging began
to mushroom. After a second round of show trials in January, 1937, there was
no way to brake the terror that Stalin had instigated in 1935. No one except
Stalin was insulated from the possibility of being charged as a Trotskyite.
For the first eighteen months after Stalin started the purge, the country at
large remained relatively unaffected. That changed in 1937. Nikolai Yezhov,
the new chief of the NKVD (secret police), understood that Stalin expected
him to dispatch all the Soviet leader’s political opponents as quickly as possi-
ble. With Yezhov in charge, the purging became much better organized. The
NKVD began to arrest thousands of people, usually in the predawn hours. Any-
one accused of disloyalty to Stalin was presumed to be guilty of “wrecking.”
Desperate to prove their loyalty to the regime, officials and ordinary citizens
began to accuse others of treason. Neighbors denounced neighbors, fellow
workers denounced each other, subordinates denounced their superiors, and
relatives denounced relatives. In each instance, the person denounced to a
local official was arrested and charged as an “enemy of the people.” Falling
victim to the purge was largely chance for those outside the Party, but those
most frequently denounced were persons of foreign birth or members of
minority groups, especially Ukrainians, Jews, and Armenians. All who were
accused were expected to confess (the NKVD used torture when persuasion
failed) and to implicate others.
There is evidence that Stalin was aware of the effect on the country of the
expanded purge, but by the middle of 1937 even he was powerless to slow it
down. The general hysteria in the country made the terror an unstoppable
force. Citizens throughout the Soviet Union lived in fear of a late-night or
early-morning knock on the door. The terror reached its peak in 1937 and
early 1938; thereafter, the NKVD was no longer able to respond to the huge
number of accusations. Yezhov, architect of this worst phase of the purging,
was himself charged with “Trotskyite” leanings in 1938 and purged. The com-
ing of World War II in the late summer of 1939 finally brought the purging to
an end.
112 Human Rights Violations

Impact of Event
Stalin’s purging of political opponents created great problems for the
Communist Party and, ultimately, for the country at large. Those officials and
Party leaders who were purged had to be replaced, and the replacements were
frequently ill-equipped to handle their new responsibilities. The dimensions
of the purging serve to illustrate this point. More than one-half of the Commu-
nist Party’s Central Committee (78 of 139 members) were purged, and more
than one-third of those who sat in the Politburo between 1927 and 1938 were
expelled. The army and the government suffered staggering losses: Thirteen
of the fifteen commanders of the Soviet Army were purged between 1935 and
1938, as were fourteen of the eighteen ministers of state. Thus, throughout the
ordeal the purgers were themselves always subject to being purged.
As the purging expanded beyond the confines of the Party, the effect on
the country was devastating. Business and industry came virtually to a stand-
still, as workers and supervisors were afraid to make an error lest they be
charged with “wrecking.” In the major cities—Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev—
there was little activity, as residents tried to limit their associations. The Mos-
cow telephone directory was not published in 1938, because most people
wanted to keep their telephone numbers and street addresses a secret. Artists,
writers, and intellectuals dared not express themselves freely. All were ex-
pected to produce works that somehow glorified the Stalinist state and re-
flected negatively on what had existed before Stalin. Stalin wanted paintings of
tanks and factories, not romantic sunsets or anything that might be considered
bourgeois. Writers of history were to make it clear that Stalin’s regime repre-
sented the culmination of all that had gone before in Russia’s past.
The most important political consequence of the Great Purge was that Sta-
lin obliterated all political debate and discussion. Members of the Politburo
no longer raised questions during their meetings with Stalin. He had suc-
ceeded in creating one-person rule, or, as Nikita Khrushchev called it, “the
cult of the personality.” Although World War II made Stalin a hero in the So-
viet Union, the legacy of fear that he instigated was not seriously challenged
until three years after his death, when Khrushchev addressed the Communist
Party Congress. In that February, 1956, speech, Khrushchev, who had risen to
prominence as Stalin’s ally during the purge, condemned Stalin as a murderer
and Stalinism as a misguided formula for a successful communist state.

Bibliography
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. Rev. ed. New
York: Macmillan, 1973. This is the most popular, most readable, and per-
Stalin Begins Purging Political Opponents 113

haps most thoroughly documented account of the Great Purge. Conquest,

an English political writer, provides a comprehensive discussion of all as-
pects of the purge. His epilogue on the “Heritage of the Terror” is espe-
cially valuable. Scholars have questioned some of Conquest’s conclusions.
Appendices, bibliographical note, select bibliography, and index.
Crowley, Joan Frances, and Dan Vaillancourt. Lenin to Gorbachev: Three Genera-
tions of Communists. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1989. A very
useful introduction to communist leaders from Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels to Gorbachev. Crowley and Vaillancourt write in a style that is clear
and without jargon. The section on Stalin is excellent. Suggestions for fur-
ther reading and index.
Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-destruc-
tion of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1999. This detailed account of Stalin’s campaign is the first to utilize for-
merly secret Soviet documents. Includes appendices.
Potok, Chaim. The Gates of November: Chronicles of the Slepak Family. New York:
Knopf, 1996. Biography of a family who survived Stalin’s purge.
Thurston, Robert W. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia: 1934-1941. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. A controversial account of Stalin’s
purges, proposing an alternative interpretation of the terror campaign. Il-
lustrated, includes maps.
Von Laue, Theodore. Why Lenin? Why Stalin? 2d ed. Philadelphia, Pa.: J. B.
Lippincott, 1971. This may be the single best essay written about the forma-
tive years of the Communist Revolution. Von Laue’s grasp of Russian his-
tory and its application to early twentieth century events is impressive.
Highly recommended for all readers. Suggestions for further reading and
index.
Ronald K. Huch
Japanese Troops Ravage Nanjing
Category of event: Atrocities and war crimes
Time: December, 1937, to February, 1938
Locale: Nanjing, People’s Republic of China

After having captured the Nationalist Chinese capital city of Nanjing, three divi-
sions of Japanese troops were allowed to kill, rape, loot, and burn

Principal personages:
Iwane Matsui (1878-1948), the overall commander of the expeditionary
force that captured Nanjing, later executed for war crimes
Prince Yasuhiko Asaka (1887-1964), the commander succeeding Matsui at
Nanjing; presided over the atrocities but was not prosecuted
Akira Muto (1892-1948), the officer who ordered troops into Nanjing and
was in closest contact with the atrocities; later executed for war crimes com-
mitted elsewhere
Kingoro Hashimoto (1890-1957), the officer who ordered the sinking of the
USS Panay and other vessels; later sentenced to life imprisonment
Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), the president of China and military com-
mander in chief who rejected negotiations

Summary of Event
Japan had begun absorbing parts of China in 1895 with the annexation of
Taiwan, followed by Manchuria in 1932, Jehol Province in 1933, and Inner
Mongolia in 1935. In the latter three, a pattern was established of local Japa-
nese field commanders initiating military action, whereupon the Tokyo
higher command would debate but finally back up their actions, and then the
Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek would submit to a lo-
cal settlement to avoid major confrontation. The Japanese attitude toward the
Nationalist government and the Chinese people came to be contemptuous. In
July, 1937, an accidental clash occurred outside Beijing and, when the Chinese
did not back down, the Japanese army was forced to choose between with-
drawal and full military assault. Dismissive of Chinese military capability, they
chose the latter course, hoping that a quick defeat would topple Chiang, neu-
tralize China, and free Japanese troops for expected confrontations with the
Soviet Union.
114
Japanese Troops Ravage Nanjing 115

The key to rapid conquest was Shanghai, the gateway to the Yangtze valley
and central China. Once taken, the passage to Nanjing, the Nationalist capital
170 miles inland, would be easy. Chiang committed the cream of his officer
corps and best-trained troops to the battle for Shanghai, losing the majority
of them in a suicidal stand against naval and air bombardment that began in
August and lasted into November.
With the Japanese forces bogged down in street fighting, the higher com-
mand formulated a strategy that would outflank the Shanghai fortifications
and expedite the drive on Nanjing, which many in the Japanese army and gov-
ernment expected to be the final campaign. The overall commander of the ex-
peditionary force was General Iwane Matsui, a slight, tubercular man pulled
out of retirement by the emperor himself. He had been a pan-Asian idealist
earlier and, although he advocated the drive on Nanjing, there is nothing to
indicate that he held any enmity toward the Chinese, whose language he
spoke fluently. The flanking forces he drove toward Nanjing, however, were
hard to control. Indications of their mood were shown in the bombing, straf-
ing, and looting of cities and villages along the way.
Many in the Japanese high command, including Matsui, believed that ne-
gotiations for a cease-fire should have been initiated before attacking Nanjing.
Chiang had indicated willingness to negotiate, although at the same time he
issued orders that Nanjing was to be defended to the last, despite its inde-
fensible position and its lack of military value. In any case, Japanese moderates
were overridden and no terms were offered. The assault began on Decem-
ber 9, with a creeping artillery and air barrage that shattered all resistance by
December 13. On December 17, with the Nanjing atrocities already begin-
ning, Chiang, who had moved his government inland, issued his historic
address rejecting all negotiations and calling for a people’s war to the bitter
end.
As the attack on Nanjing began, General Matsui was removed from per-
sonal supervision of field operations and confined to theater command. Em-
peror Hirohito’s uncle, General Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, was appointed to the
Nanjing operation. His headquarters issued secret orders to kill all captives, re-
ferring presumably to the Chinese troops trapped in the besieged city. Under
him were the field commanders whose troops perpetrated the Nanjing out-
rages: Lieutenant General Kesago Nakajima of the Sixteenth Division, Gen-
eral Heisuke Yanagawa of the Nineteenth Corps, Lieutenant General Hisao
Tani of the Sixth Division, and Colonel Akira Muto, in charge of billeting
troops, who moved troops from encampments safely outside Nanjing into the
city, where the holocaust took place.
116 Human Rights Violations

The remains of South Station in Shanghai, which the Japanese ravaged before attack-
ing Nanking. (National Archives)

The Chinese never formally surrendered the city. Their retreat was un-
planned and disjointed, leaving about seventy thousand troops trapped in-
side. About three-fourths of the city’s population of one million fled, with Japa-
nese firing on boats in the Yangtze, killing thousands as overloaded junks
capsized. Many people were trampled in the confusion. As the Chinese au-
thorities departed, they turned over supplies and effective authority to a self-
appointed committee of twenty-seven foreign residents—American, British,
German, and Danish missionaries, academics, and businesspeople—who es-
tablished a safety zone of about two square miles in the northwest part of the
city. Working tirelessly to protect a refugee population that reached a total of
one-quarter million, they protested to Japanese authorities without result and
restrained countless acts of individual brutality by their sheer presence, al-
Japanese Troops Ravage Nanjing 117

though they were never formally recognized by the Japanese. It was their dia-
ries, letters, reports, film, and reminiscences that provided the four-thousand-
page record of the atrocities in Nanjing for history and for the Allied war
crimes trials.
Systematic looting began as soon as Japanese troops reached the city. Evi-
dence of command complicity lay in the organized nature of the looting and
the fact that army trucks were used. Later, even refugees were stripped of their
pitiful possessions. Arson was likewise systematic, with thermite strips effi-
ciently used to burn whole sections of what had been one of the loveliest cities
in China. Tricked by notices promising good treatment, disarmed Chinese sol-
diers, and later virtually all males of military age, were bound and murdered by
machine gun or bayonet. Many were staked and used for bayonet or sword
practice. Prisoners were roasted over fires, doused with kerosene and set on
fire, burned with chemicals, disemboweled, or buried up to the neck before
torture.
Rapes occurred more and more frequently and increasingly flagrantly, of-
ten on the street in broad daylight. Pregnant women, girls as young as nine,
and women as old as seventy-six fell victim. Women were gang-raped, were
raped and then murdered, or saw their children murdered. Women were
rounded up and kept for months in sexual bondage at camps.
The grisly statistical totals for the seven weeks between December, 1937,
and February, 1938, when the carnage finally subsided, are difficult to deter-
mine since official sources are often biased and the eyewitnesses were unaware
of the bigger picture. Many died unrecorded, given the difficulties of wartime
records in China. A high estimate of the death toll is 300,000; the true number
is almost certainly more than 150,000. There were more than twenty thousand
rapes. The overall economic loss is impossible to fix. Japanese army ware-
houses were filled with looted valuables. Some officers, including Nakajima,
retained small fortunes in plunder, but most was sold to defray army expenses.
A study on a limited sample of individuals estimated that the average farmer
lost the equivalent of 278 days of labor and the average city dweller lost 681
days. Nanjing would take more than a year to begin economic revival.
On December 12, as Nanjing was falling, Japanese forces under Colonel
Kingoro Hashimoto bombed and sank an American gunboat, the USS Panay,
twenty-five miles upriver from Nanjing. Lifeboats were strafed and the craft
was machine gunned from a nearby Japanese gunboat. Two American tankers,
two British gunboats, and two British-flag steamers were also bombed. Four
American crew members were killed, and sixty were wounded; two British
crew members and countless refugees were also killed. Hashimoto, an ultra-
118 Human Rights Violations

nationalist zealot, had done this on his own initiative in defiance of standing pol-
icy to avoid provoking the West. In contrast to the Nanjing outrages, the Japa-
nese government apologized officially and privately and offered indemnities,
which were accepted by the United States and Great Britain with little protest.

Impact of Event
The attitude of the Japanese army and government at first was to ignore the
events at Nanjing, treating them as a matter for the army and accepting the
army’s bland fictions minimizing the horror. Later, however, Nanjing veterans
on leave boasted openly of their depredations. In December, newspapers had
even reported a grotesque sort of contest between two lieutenants racing to
see who could cut down the most Chinese with their swords, referring to the
race as “fun.” The authorities were forced to suppress virtually all mention of
atrocities. Japanese school texts, even decades later, avoided the subject, and
prominent officials have asserted that it never happened.
The Imperial Japanese Army almost never punished a soldier for excesses
(punishment was reserved for lack of aggressiveness), so punishment had to
wait for the war’s end. Matsui, who had scolded his subordinates for their com-
plicity (they laughed at him), retired after Nanjing, built a temple, and held
services for the dead of Nanjing. Even though he was less guilty than most, he
offered no defense and so was the only prominent officer executed specifically
for the Nanjing atrocities at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal. Muto was executed
for war crimes in the Philippines, Hashimoto was given a life sentence, and
Prince Asaka, protected by his royal connections, escaped prosecution.
Nanjing had a crucial effect on the course of the war. Japan might have won
the war either with an acceptable offer of terms or with an immediate drive
past Nanjing into the interior. Instead, the brutal tactics at Nanjing clearly
failed to shock the Nationalists into negotiating and allowed them time to re-
organize to carry on the war. This left the Japanese with the sole alternative of
creating collaborationist governments, which were divided and subject to the
same independent field commands that had produced the Nanjing incident.
Japan’s actions in China cost it any credibility in negotiations with the United
States. The breakdown of these negotiations produced the impasse that made
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor possible.
The atrocities in Nanjing had a consciousness raising effect on world, and
particularly on American, public opinion. Newspapers in the United States be-
gan reporting on the sinking of the USS Panay almost immediately. Reports on
the larger disaster at Nanjing came more gradually, but were regular after De-
cember 30. Photographs were taken by foreigners, and even by the ingenuous
Japanese Troops Ravage Nanjing 119

Japanese, of horrible scenes. Chinese shops that processed the film smuggled
out duplicate prints. There was even motion picture footage taken by the Rev-
erend John Magee of the carnage, footage that was later used by the isolation-
ist America First organization to frighten Americans into staying out of war. So
many, however, were moved to anger and sympathy that the film was with-
drawn.
Nanjing was one of the great atrocities of World War II. Never quite over-
shadowed by the more massive but impersonal Holocaust, it remained the
benchmark for personal savagery and exemplified the dilemma posed by the
rights of noncombatants in any profound nationalistic or ideological conflict.

Bibliography
Brook, Timothy, ed. Documents on the Rape of Nanking. Ann Arbor: Michigan
University Press, 1999. Collection of primary sources that document the
rape of Nanjing. Divided into two parts addressing both letters and docu-
ments during the time of the invasion and records of the judicial proceed-
ings which followed.
Butow, Robert J. C. Tojo and the Coming of the War. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1961. More than a biography of Tojo Hideki, this book de-
lineates the military-bureaucratic environment that produced the decision
to go to war with the United States. A classic, and a foundation for sub-
sequent scholarly works on the political history of Japan’s part in World
War II. Excellent bibliography and index.
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New
York: Basic Books, 1997. Vivid, horrifying account of the Nanjing attack
from viewpoints of Japanese soldiers, Chinese civilians, and Westerners.
Coox, Alvin D., and Hilary Conroy, eds. China and Japan: A Search for Balance
Since World War I. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1978. Predominantly ana-
lytical. Discusses the emperor’s role in the war. The Nanjing atrocities are
seen as a watershed in the “pure military” line toward China. Some of the
articles later became major works.
Crowley, James B. Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy,
1930-1938. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966. The major
monograph on diplomacy, bureaucracy, and military decision making. Par-
ticularly good for Sino-Japanese relations behind the scenes, in which
Nanjing becomes only a part of a larger picture composed of hard deci-
sions, misperceptions, lost opportunities, and situational imperatives. A
thorough and scholarly work covering territory not dealt with elsewhere at
the time.
120 Human Rights Violations

Eastman, Lloyd. “Facets of an Ambivalent Relationship: Smuggling, Puppets,

and Atrocities During the War, 1937-1945.” In The Chinese and the Japanese:
Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions, edited by Akira Iriye. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980. A thoughtful and intriguing glimpse
behind the obvious national hatreds at the fraternization, trade, and other
cooperative ventures between the two sides. Offsets the brutality of Nanjing
with instances of mutual accommodation. Eastman makes no apology for
the widely observed Japanese arrogance.
Fogel, Joshua A., ed. The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2000. This collection of essays analyzes
the Nanjing massacre and how the issue has become a political controversy.
Hsue, Shu-hsi. The War Conduct of the Japanese. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1938.
This includes hastily compiled essays on Japanese atrocities in China. Ex-
ceedingly detailed, it is designed as an archive for war crimes charges and to
inform public opinion. Based on International Safety Zone Committee
sources and international publications.
Morley, James W., ed. The China Quagmire: Japan’s Expansion on the Asian Conti-
nent, 1933-1941. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Part of the
seven-volume Japanese Taiheiyo senso-e no michi, translated with additional
chapters and commentary. Reflecting a Japanese academic (liberal) view, it
accepts all of the occurrences at Nanjing but tends to dwell on the decision-
making context of the war as a whole.
Wilson, Dick. When Tigers Fight: The Story of the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945.
New York: Viking Press, 1982. Probably the best-balanced condensed mili-
tary history of the war, it contains astute judgments of all the major military
leaders of both sides. It is heavily anecdotal, with a preference for extensive
quotes, but is written in an accessible style. This is the best work to start with
on this subject.
David G. Egler
HUAC Begins Investigating Suspected
Communists
Category of event: Accused persons’ rights; political freedom; workers’ rights
Time: 1938
Locale: Washington, D.C.

HUAC searched for communists and fascists within the government and elsewhere
for thirty-seven years before quietly expiring in the wake of the Watergate scandal

Principal personages:
Martin Dies (1901-1972), the first chair of the Un-American Activities Com-
mittee
Samuel Dickstein (1885-1954), a New York congressman and tireless foe of
anti-Semitism
J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI)
J. Parnell Thomas (1895-1970), a HUAC member, later chair of HUAC

Summary of Event
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigated
Communist Party members, native fascists, and other proponents of so-called
foreign “isms” in five different decades. For the first seven years of its life (1938-
1945), HUAC served as a special committee chaired by Martin Dies. Estab-
lished as a regular, standing committee of the House of Representatives in
1945, HUAC reorganized in 1969 and served the last six years of its life as the
House Committee on Internal Security (HCIS). For the entire thirty-seven
year period, the committee remained committed to what its members and
staff called a politics of exposure.
The two congresspeople who led the fight to establish HUAC, Martin Dies
and Samuel Dickstein, could scarcely have had more different priorities.
Dickstein was predominantly troubled by native Nazi and other far-right move-
ments, notably Fritz Kuhn’s German-American Bund and William Dudley
Pelley’s Silver Shirts. Explicitly anti-Semitic, such groups looked to Adolf
Hitler’s Germany for inspiration. They goose-stepped, rallied, flew swastikas,
and advocated violence against Jews and other so-called lesser races. To root
121
122 Human Rights Violations

out native fascism, Dickstein proposed an investigation of all organizations

found operating in the United States for the purpose of diffusing within the
United States slanderous or libelous un-American propaganda of religious, ra-
cial, or subversive political prejudices, especially that which would incite the
use of force or violence. From 1933 to 1938, the House rebuffed Dickstein’s
repeated calls for such an investigation.
With little interest in anti-Semitism but with a great interest in subversion by
communists and other leftists, Martin Dies saw the possibilities in the sort of
investigation that Dickstein advocated. Backed by conservative leadership in
the House and assured of the support of the southern bloc, Dies proposed a
similar investigation of the extent, character, and objects of un-American pro-
paganda activities in the United States; the diffusion within the United States
of subversive and un-American propaganda that attacked the form of govern-
ment guaranteed by the Constitution; and all other questions that would aid
Congress in any necessary remedial legislation. Dickstein himself became the
most fervent advocate of Dies’s resolution, and in May, 1938, with the support
of both conservatives and those who wanted to attack anti-Semitism, the
House overwhelmingly approved Dies’s resolution. HUAC was born.
Martin Dies conceded that it would be difficult to legislate effectively in this
matter but promised nevertheless to bring “the light of day . . . to bear upon”
un-American activities and to allow public sentiment to do the rest. Under his
leadership, the committee membership—Arthur D. Healy, John J. Dempsey,
Joe Starnes, Harold G. Mosier, Noah M. Mason, and J. Parnell Thomas—acted
on this directive. Samuel Dickstein had only a Pyrrhic victory. He was not ap-
pointed to the committee and soon became a critic of Dies’s nearly exclusive
focus on the left.
Where Dickstein stood against Hitler and anti-Semitism, Dies stood against
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. During Roosevelt’s first term, a clear
majority of the House and Senate were willing to accept the administration’s
innovative social and economic program to combat the Great Depression. In
the second term, a congressional rebellion began, with New Deal Democrats
facing increased opposition from a coalition of Republicans and conservative
southern Democrats. HUAC’s birth represented one of a handful of victories
for this anti-New Deal coalition.
Dies and his conservative supporters were critical of the New Deal’s limited
accomplishments. The Depression was simply not going away. Unemployment
remained high, production continued to lag, and in 1937 the economy tum-
bled downward once again—a recession, in other words, in the midst of
depression. Roosevelt’s second-term emphasis on urban-based issues, the so-
HUAC Investigates Suspected Communists 123

called Second New Deal, also alienated congressional conservatives, many

of whom, because of the seniority system, chaired powerful committees in the
House and Senate. Dies’s own benefactors included the ultra-conservative vice
president, John Nance Garner of Texas, and Speaker of the House William
Bankhead of Alabama. Dies, Garner, and Bankhead were further alarmed
by the sit-down strikes of 1935-1936; the efforts of Senator Robert Wagner
and others to obtain antilynching legislation in 1936-1937; Roosevelt’s court-
packing scheme of 1937 and attempt to purge the Democratic party of
obstructionists by calling for the defeat of anti-New Deal Democrats in the
1938 primaries; and what was generally perceived to be a marked ideological
shift by the White House to the left.
President Roosevelt faced not only an informal yet quite formidable con-
servative coalition but also nearly unanimous congressional antipathy toward
further meddling with the separation of powers doctrine or the fundamental
institutions of Congress, the courts, and the states. Congressional conserva-
tives were determined to halt the expansion of the New Deal and to reverse
what HUAC would later describe, in 1942, as the “creeping totalitarianism” of
the executive’s “effort to obliterate the Congress of the United States as a co-
equal and independent branch of government.”
When HUAC began functioning in August, 1938, the conservative bloc
in Congress was already strong enough to grind the New Deal to a halt. Dies
used the new committee to go on the offensive. His strategy was direct. Tar-
geting the New Deal’s programs, personnel, and constituency in a series
of well-publicized hearings, Dies intended to expose and neutralize what
J. Parnell Thomas, the senior Republican member of the committee, called
“the four horsemen of autocracy”—fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, and New
Dealism. Equating the modest social and economic reforms of the Roosevelt
years with un-Americanism, Dies and Thomas recognized no distinction be-
tween the New Dealers’ efforts to tinker with the system and the more radical
plans of communist revolutionaries to overthrow the government and abolish
capitalism.
HUAC launched well-publicized hearings on the National Labor Relations
Board, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Federal Theater Project, among
other New Deal agencies; compiled dossiers on people from lowly civil ser-
vants all the way up to Eleanor Roosevelt; and spread allegations about com-
munist infiltration of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and other
groups that supported the Roosevelt administration. In August, 1938, alone,
The New York Times devoted more than two hundred column inches of space to
the Dies Committee’s spectacular charges.
124 Human Rights Violations

During the World War II years, Dies and Thomas pushed for a stringent fed-
eral employee loyalty program. Although HUAC never ignored native fascist
groups, the focus on communism and the New Deal remained intact. In 1942,
Dies sent a list of 1,124 allegedly subversive federal employees to Attorney Gen-
eral Francis Biddle and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Ed-
gar Hoover. Nearly every one of them was accused of communist associations.
When subsequent investigations led to the firing of only four employees, Dies
charged a cover-up. The Roosevelt administration’s incompetence and negli-
gence in confronting the domestic communist threat, he argued, raised the
specter of the administration’s complicity, unwitting or otherwise, in an inter-
national communist conspiracy. “The New Deal,” Thomas said, carrying the
assault one step further, “is either for the Communist Party, or is playing into
the hands of the Communist Party.”
Such charges did not stick, and HUAC labored in relative obscurity during
the last of the war years. Dies himself gave up the fight. Citing poor health and
a desire to return to private business, he chose not to stand for reelection in
1944, and his committee expired at the end of the Seventy-eighth Congress,
only to be recreated in January, 1945, as a regular, standing committee of the
House—the result, ironically, of a parliamentary maneuver by John E. Rankin,
one of the most outspoken anti-Semites ever to serve in the House.

Impact of Event
Martin Dies and his committee refined many of the methods and tech-
niques later identified with McCarthyism. HUAC, in its early days, mined the
communists-in-government issue, worked to legitimize the idea of guilt by as-
sociation, championed the veracity of excommunist witnesses, and worked dil-
igently to open a direct pipeline to the FBI and other executive agencies con-
cerned with internal security. Dies himself, as one historian observed, named
“more names in a single year than Joe McCarthy did in a lifetime.”
Ultimately, HUAC derived its power from its incredibly voluminous files,
consisting of derogatory information on the political associations of at least
several hundred thousand American citizens; its access to FBI informants and
symbiotic relationship with FBI officials; and its ability to compel testimony un-
der threat of imprisonment. During the Cold War era, assumptions about the
seriousness of the threat posed by communists on the home front put the law
on HUAC’s side, enabling the establishment and maintenance of pervasive
blacklists of the sort that Dies could only dream about. These blacklists were
first institutionalized in the entertainment industry. HUAC’s interest in Holly-
wood had in fact dated from 1938, when its chief investigator advised the press
HUAC Investigates Suspected Communists 125

that even child actor Shirley Temple had once inadvertently served the inter-
est of the Communist Party. In 1947, J. Parnell Thomas, then HUAC chair,
formed a secret alliance with the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover. By 1950,
the blacklists were spreading with startling speed to the nation’s teachers, law-
yers, doctors, newspaper reporters, carpenters, and plumbers.
It was also during Thomas’s tenure as chair that HUAC broke its most spec-
tacular case, against former State Department official Alger Hiss. Against the
backdrop of the Cold War, the Hiss case provided HUAC with the ammunition
needed to make a credible attack on the integrity of New Deal programs and
personnel. It also gave HUAC and its imitators, notably Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, enough power to
plunge the nation into a protracted four-year search for communists in gov-
ernment.

Bibliography
Bentley, Eric, ed. Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings Before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968. New York: Viking, 1971. At
times hilarious and at other times sobering, this volume remains the best in-
troduction to the things said and done in HUAC’s name.
Carr, Robert K. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1945-1950.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1952. This is the first scholarly study
of the committee. It remains valuable for its systematic and remarkably ob-
jective coverage of HUAC’s activities during the early Cold War years.
Dies, Martin. Martin Dies’ Story. New York: Bookmailer, 1963. The memoir of
the man who set the committee’s tone and tact.
__________. The Trojan Horse in America. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940. Dies’s
summary of the subversive threat posed by communists and native fascists.
Gellermann, William. Martin Dies. New York: John Day, 1944. The only biogra-
phy to date of the committee’s first chair.
Goodman, Walter. The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee
on Un-American Activities. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968. Written
in a lively, journalistic style, this is the standard history of HUAC’s first thirty
years. Goodman criticizes both the committee, for its inquisitorial and sen-
sationalist style, and the investigated, for their dissident politics and con-
frontational posturing.
Navasky, Victor. Naming Names. New York: Viking, 1980. This self-described
moral detective story investigates HUAC in Hollywood and the difficult
choices faced by those who received committee subpoenas.
O’Reilly, Kenneth. Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red
126 Human Rights Violations

Menace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. Based on thousands

of FBI and other government agency files obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act, this book explores the on-again/off-again relationship
between the FBI and HUAC. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways in
which HUAC publicized information from FBI files on dissident individu-
als and groups.
Weinstein, Allen. Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1978. The author was the first to gain access to the voluminous FBI files on
this famous case. He concluded that the new evidence proved that Alger
Hiss was indeed guilty as charged. Some commentators have argued that
this book finally closed HUAC’s biggest case. Others have argued that the
author of Perjury ignored the new evidence from government files and in-
stead relied almost exclusively on Whittaker Chambers’s memoir, Witness
(1952).
Kenneth O’Reilly
Stalin Nearly Destroys Russian Orthodox
Church
Category of event: Religious freedom
Time: Summer of 1939
Locale: Soviet Union

The long Bolshevik campaign against religious practice and belief in the Soviet
Union reduced the Russian Orthodox Church to institutional near-extinction by
the late summer of 1939

Principal personages:
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), the general secretary of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the dictator of Germany who made the Soviet-
German pact of August 23, 1939
Sergius (1867-1944), the senior prelate of the Russian Orthodox Church be-
tween 1927 and 1944
Aleksi (1877-1970), the metropolitan of Leningrad from 1933 through the
siege of Leningrad in World War II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church
from 1945 to 1970

Summary of Event
When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in 1917, they began to act on
their atheist convictions, which held that all religion was opium, a spiritual gin
which capitalist exploiters used to drug the workers into submission. They de-
creed the separation of church and state, nationalized church lands and assets,
cancelled the status of the Russian Orthodox Church as a legal entity, discon-
tinued state subsidies to religious bodies, deprived church marriages and bap-
tisms of official standing, and banned organized religious education of the
young. In 1922, in the midst of famine, the Bolshevik regime ordered the
church treasures confiscated, ostensibly to finance relief for the starving. Be-
lievers and international religious bodies, among them the Holy See, offered
to ransom the Russian Orthodox Church’s sacramental objects, but the
Bolshevik regime pressed ahead. Soviet press accounts reported some four-
teen thousand bloody fights as priests and parishioners tried to guard their
127
128 Human Rights Violations

churches. Many churches were closed and priests and hierarchs arrested.
Tikhon, the patriarch (religious leader) of Moscow, was placed under house
arrest. With government support, a Renovationist, or Living Church, move-
ment was organized and split the church for a time.
On April 7, 1925, Patriarch Tikhon died. His death plunged the Russian
Orthodox Church into a rolling crisis of leadership. By 1927, ten out of eleven
prelates successively named to act as head of the church were in prison or in
exile, and most of the bishops were in similar straits.
The man who emerged as acting head of the church was Metropolitan
Sergius. Arrested more than once, Sergius was released from prison in March
of 1927 and issued a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet Union on July 24 of that
year. Sergius’s action in support of a godless and hostile state outraged many
believing Orthodox people in the Soviet Union as well as many Soviet exiles
abroad. Sergius justified his declaration as necessary to preserve the church.
The forced industrialization and collectivization drives that were launched
in 1928 led to another crisis for the church. Troops and Communist Party
workers fanned out into the countryside. Peasant resistance to them produced
violence, the slaughtering of livestock, and the destruction of food stores.
More than five million people were said to have died in this man-made famine.
Peasants defended their churches and priests with scythes and pitchforks
against soldiers and communist militants determined to deal harshly with the
vestiges of Orthodox reaction. The campaign changed the face of the Russian
countryside, which later became dotted with the shells of churches serving as
granaries, overcrowded dwellings, storehouses, and workshops, their rusting
and disintegrating cupolas standing hollow against the sky.
A third great wave of church closings began in 1936 and gathered momen-
tum over the next three years. This was the period of the great purges. The ter-
ror of the prison camp complex of the Gulag Archipelago in Siberia was felt in
every corner of the land. An estimated nineteen million Soviet citizens died in
the purges, and the police (NKVD) became the largest employer in the Soviet
Union, responsible for one-sixth of all new construction. With restraint and
normal living swept away, church closings on a large scale resumed, and the
arrest of priests and the incarceration of bishops accelerated.
By mid-1939, Metropolitan Sergius lived in Moscow virtually alone, cut off
from any regular contact with the churches still functioning in the country.
There were only four active bishops in all of Russia. Metropolitan Aleksi of Le-
ningrad was the second, Aleksi’s suffragan, Nikolai of Peterhof was the third,
and Metropolitan Sergi, who later defected to the Germans, was the fourth. All
four prelates lived from day to day in the expectation of arrest.
Stalin Nearly Destroys Russian Orthodox Church 129

The numbers of open churches and functioning priests were very small. So-
viet official sources and foreign scholars confirm that there were no open
churches at all in more than one-third of the provinces of the Russian feder-
ated republic. One-third of the provinces of the Ukraine had no functioning
churches, and an additional three Ukrainian provinces had only one open
church each. According to Friedrich Heyer, the German troops that occupied
Kiev in 1941 found only two churches in that diocese; sixteen hundred
churches had been functioning before the 1917 Revolution. Three priests
were serving in those two churches, one at the edge of the city of Kiev and one
in the countryside. In the Ukrainian province of Kamenets-Podolski, the Ger-
mans found one aged priest holding services. A mission team which followed
German troops into the area south of Leningrad found two priests reduced to
complete impoverishment. It is probably a fair estimate that in 1939 two hun-
dred to three hundred churches were functioning in the Soviet Union, and no
more than three hundred to four hundred priests were conducting services.
Describing the situation through the 1930’s in the diocese of Rostov-on-
Don, Nikita Struve observed that the archbishop, Serafin, was exiled to the far
north, where he soon died. His vicar, Nicholas Ammasisky, was sent to the
steppes to graze a flock of sheep. He was arrested a second time and shot, but
miraculously recovered from his wounds. The former cathedral was trans-
formed into a zoo.
In Odessa, according to Dimitry Pospielovsky, where there had once been
forty-eight churches, Stalin allowed one to remain open. Apparently the great
eye doctor, Academician Filatov, had treated Stalin and asked, as a return fa-
vor, that one church be allowed in the city. Stalin, however, made no promise
to spare the priests. Each Sunday, and later just at Easter, a priest would appear
from the congregation and celebrate the liturgy, only to disappear into the
NKVD dungeons the following day. After all the priests who dared martyrdom
had disappeared, there remained a few deacons who could perform the entire
rite except for the eucharist. They likewise disappeared and were replaced by
psalmists, who in turn were liquidated. There remained only laypeople, who
prayed as best they could in the church. In the summer of 1939, then, the Rus-
sian Orthodox Church teetered on the edge of institutional destruction.

Impact of Event
In the late summer of 1939, an event occurred that was unrelated to Stalin’s
repression of the Russian Orthodox Church but which profoundly affected its
situation. Signed on August 23, 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact opened
the door to Soviet annexation of Eastern Poland in September of 1939 and of
130 Human Rights Violations

Joseph Stalin. (Library of Congress)

the Baltic states and Romanian Bessarabia and Northern Bubovina in 1940.
The annexations brought the Russian Orthodox Church millions of faithful
parishioners and thousands of active parishes, functioning churches, and
priests. The church also acquired monasteries, nunneries, seminaries, and
other resources.
Stalin Nearly Destroys Russian Orthodox Church 131

On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s armies attacked the Soviet Union and swept for-
ward on a thousand-mile front stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
Behind German lines, thousands more Orthodox churches were able to open
their doors and start serving believers living in pre-1939 Soviet territories,
most of whom had long been denied the opportunity to worship in a function-
ing church.
As soon as Hitler attacked, Metropolitan Sergius publicly rallied believers
to the defense of the Motherland. When German forces were advancing on
Moscow, however, Stalin ordered Sergius evacuated, and the head of the Rus-
sian church was sent by train to Ulyanovsk, a small provincial city seven hun-
dred kilometers east of the capital. Sergius was able to open some churches in
that region and consecrated a few bishops, thereby reconstituting diocesan
life along the Volga. By the spring of 1942, there were about a dozen Orthodox
prelates of episcopal rank.
On September 4, 1943, Stalin received Sergius and two other metropoli-
tans in the Kremlin. Stalin authorized the opening of more churches, con-
vents, seminaries, and theological academies, as well as allowing more bishops
and the elevation of a new patriarch. Four days later, nineteen bishops assem-
bled and elected Sergius as patriarch. By this time, Red Army forces were push-
ing the Germans back, and Stalin’s motives in his more supportive religious
policy probably revolved around the need for reliable leadership over the
thousands of Orthodox parishes which had been established under the Ger-
man occupation. Stalin probably also perceived an advantage in tapping
Russian pride and religious patriotism as Soviet rule was being reestablished
in the lands overrun by Hitler. The Russian Orthodox Church emerged from
the war with about fourteen thousand churches.
The travails of Orthodox believers in the Soviet Union did not end with the
country’s victory in World War II. Nikita Khrushchev launched another antire-
ligious assault in the 1959-1964 period, but even Khrushchev’s onslaught did
not reduce the Russian Orthodox Church to the desperate straits of 1939. Un-
der Mikhail Gorbachev, the church was permitted to reopen thousands of
parishes, scores of monasteries and nunneries, and a substantial number of
seminaries and theological training schools. A new law of freedom of con-
science was promulgated. While religious believers continued to encounter
problems and difficulties of various kinds, Soviet people found the opportu-
nity to worship, teach children religion, engage in charitable work, and per-
form other religious functions and duties to an extent not witnessed since the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
132 Human Rights Violations

Bibliography
Alekseev, Wasilli, and Theofanis G. Stavrou. The Great Revival: The Russian
Church Under German Occupation. Minneapolis, Minn.: Burgess, 1976. In
specialized publications written in Russian and French, Alekseev presented
firsthand and eyewitness accounts of the desperate straits through which
the Russian Orthodox Church was passing in 1939 and the church re-
vival experienced in German-occupied territories during World War II.
Alekseev and Stavrou present these and other valuable materials to English-
speaking readers here.
Anderson, Paul B. People, Church, and State in Modern Russia. New York:
Macmillan, 1944. This classic and insightful work was written by the dean of
American scholars on religion in the Soviet Union. Anderson played a cen-
tral role in drawing the Russian Orthodox Church into ecumenical cooper-
ation after World War II. Index.
Davis, Nathaniel. A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Or-
thodoxy. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995. A far-reaching and statisti-
cally detailed account of the history of the Russian Orthodoxy. Bibliog-
raphy.
Ellis, Jane. The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History. London:
Croom Helm, 1986. This work focuses on the then-present situation of the
Russian Orthodox Church and the rise and repression of Orthodox dis-
sent. It is therefore not a good source book for the agony and recovery of
the church before and during World War II. It is, however, the most recent
comprehensive description of churches, clergy, convents, theological edu-
cation, and other aspects of Orthodox church life. Bibliography and index.
Fletcher, William C. A Study in Survival: The Church in Russia, 1927-1943. New
York: Macmillan, 1965. Written by one of the most prolific and highly re-
spected American scholars on religion in the Soviet Union, this little book
carries the story of the Russian Orthodox Church’s travails through the
turnaround which followed Stalin’s reception of Metropolitan Sergius in
1943. Bibliography and index.
Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia. Crestwood,
N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998. An account of the history of the
Russian Orthodox Church from prehistory to current times.
__________. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917-1982. 2 vols.
Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1984. A highly sensitive and
deeply informed account, Struve’s book gives poignant and illuminating
vignettes of religious life in the Soviet Union in 1939. It also covers later
periods very well. Index.
Stalin Nearly Destroys Russian Orthodox Church 133

Struve, Nikita. Christians in Contemporary Russia. Translated by Lancelot

Sheppard and A. Manson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967. A
highly sensitive and deeply informed account, Struve’s book gives poignant
and illuminating vignettes of religious life in the Soviet Union in 1939. It
also covers later periods very well. Index.
Timasheff, Nicholas S. Religion in Soviet Russia, 1917-1942. New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1942. This work conveys Timasheff’s tough-minded and sharply
informed understanding of the realities of the situation of the Russian Or-
thodox Church before and during World War II. This is considered to be a
classic work.
Nathaniel Davis
Soviets Massacre Polish
Prisoners of War
Category of event: Atrocities and war crimes; prisoners’ rights
Time: 1940-1943
Locale: Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, Soviet Union

In the early spring of 1940, the Soviets executed more than four thousand Polish
prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest

Principal personages:
Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965), the prime minister of Great Britain
1940-1945 and 1951-1955)
Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), the Nazi minister of propaganda
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), the thirty-second president of the
United States (1933-1945)
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), the first secretary of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (1922-1953)

Summary of Event
On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed an agree-
ment that set the stage for the outbreak of World War II in Europe. The
agreement, in part, provided the basis for the dismemberment of Poland.
Shortly thereafter, on September 1, 1939, German armed forces attacked
Poland, and on September 17, the Soviet army moved into eastern Poland and
occupied its assigned portion of Polish territory. Under the weight of the
German onslaught and the Soviet invasion, Polish resistance collapsed, and
the remnants of Poland’s government fled the country.
Immediately after the termination of hostilities in Soviet-occupied Poland,
Soviet authorities began the forced deportation of approximately 1.2 million
Poles to areas within the Soviet Union. In addition, the Soviets captured more
than two hundred thousand members of the Polish armed forces. These pris-
oners were joined by thousands of Polish reservists arrested at home as well as
by soldiers who had initially escaped to Lithuania and Estonia only to be taken
by the Soviets after the Baltic states fell under Soviet control. In the final count,
approximately 250,000 members of the Polish armed forces, including about
134
Soviets Massacre Polish Prisoners of War 135

ten thousand officers, were placed in more than one hundred major Soviet
prison and labor camps.
The international situation changed dramatically on June 22, 1941, when
Germany launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Soon thereafter, the
Soviets and the Polish government-in-exile, located in London, reestablished
diplomatic relations and agreed that the Soviets would grant amnesty to those
Poles being held in the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, the new Polish embassy
in the Soviet Union took steps to organize a Polish army on Soviet soil com-
posed of those members of the Polish armed forces who were being held as
prisoners of war by the Soviets. Eventually, after these former prisoners had
been assembled by the new Polish military command in the Soviet Union, it
became clear that approximately fifteen thousand soldiers remained missing,
including some eight thousand officers. Indeed, only two of the fourteen gen-
eral officers and six of the three hundred high-ranking Polish staff officers
captured by the Soviet Army reported. Moreover, it was not just professional
officers who were missing: Hundreds of reservists, including doctors, lawyers,
educators, and journalists, were also missing. Investigations by Polish authori-
ties revealed that the missing individuals had been held at three camps: ap-
proximately sixty-five hundred men at Ostashkov, four thousand at Starobelsk,
and five thousand at Kozelsk. In late April and early May, 1940, troops from the
Soviet Union’s People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (the NKVD) had re-
moved in small groups all but 448 of the prisoners from the three camps. Inves-
tigations revealed that the men from Kozelsk had been taken by rail to a point
immediately west of Smolensk, but there they had disappeared. Indeed, of the
approximately fifteen thousand men originally held in these three camps,
only the 448 survived. Polish requests for information concerning the missing
soldiers were addressed to Soviet officials but were met with evasive and con-
tradictory responses. Nevertheless, between the summer of 1941 and the
spring of 1943, the Poles continued to attempt to ascertain the fate of the miss-
ing soldiers.
Meanwhile, in late February, 1943, German field police discovered the
mass graves of several thousand individuals, apparently Polish officers, in the
Katyn Forest about ten miles west of Smolensk. Prior to the German capture of
the area in 1941, the Katyn Forest had been controlled by the NKVD. This in-
formation was transmitted to Berlin, where Nazi officials recognized the pro-
paganda value of this discovery and moved to capitalize upon the opportunity.
Consequently, on April 13, 1943, German radio announced that Soviet au-
thorities had executed thousands of Polish prisoners of war. The Germans
quickly followed this announcement by inviting a series of specially chartered
136 Human Rights Violations

international groups to examine the site and report their conclusions. Three
investigatory commissions were formed under German sponsorship. First, an
international commission was formed, drawing distinguished specialists in the
field of forensic medicine from twelve European countries other than Nazi
Germany. On April 28, 1943, the members of this commission began their
three-day investigation of the grave sites in the Katyn Forest. While there, they
examined 982 corpses already exhumed by German authorities and 9 that had
been hitherto untouched and were randomly selected by the commission.
During their investigation, the members of the group had complete freedom
to move throughout the area and enjoyed the full cooperation of the Germans
at the site. Simultaneously, the Germans invited a medical delegation from the
Polish Red Cross in German-occupied Poland to conduct a second investiga-
tion in the Katyn Forest. Without the knowledge of the German authorities,
the Polish underground infiltrated the Polish Red Cross group. The Polish
team remained at the site for five weeks, during which it, like the international
commission, was given full German support as well as freedom of movement
around the site, including authority to photograph whatever it wished. Finally,
a specially formed German medical team was sent to Katyn. In addition to
these three teams, journalists from Germany, German-occupied Europe, and
neutral European states visited the Katyn Forest, as did German-sponsored
Polish and Allied prisoner-of-war delegations.
The German authorities, the various medical commissions, and the other
visitors to the area found more than four thousand corpses buried in eight six-
to-eleven-foot-deep mass graves. In addition to the bodies actually found,
some analysts have speculated that there may be more than three hundred
more undiscovered Polish corpses in the forest. In any case, all but twenty-two
of the bodies were clad in Polish uniforms and were piled face down in layers.
Many, especially the younger men, had had their greatcoats tied over their
heads with ropes connected tightly to their hands, which were tightly bound
behind their backs. As a result, any movement of the hands would serve to
tighten the ropes that secured the greatcoats at the neck. In addition, many
bore bayonet wounds. All, however, had been shot through the head in a
similar manner. Finally, the individual graves of two Polish general officers,
in uniform, were also located in the forest.
Based upon a variety of evidence collected at the site, the three German-
sponsored commissions independently reached similar conclusions. They
agreed that the Polish prisoners had been executed and buried about three
years prior to their exhumation. In other words, they had been murdered in
the spring of 1940. Since this was more than a year prior to the German inva-
Soviets Massacre Polish Prisoners of War 137

sion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, and since the Katyn Forest was under
the control of the NKVD at the time of the killings, the conclusion of the com-
missions was that Soviet authorities had killed the Polish prisoners. The con-
clusions of the three German-sponsored commissions were confirmed and
further supplemented by additional evidence supplied by the families of the
dead soldiers and by the survivors of Camp Kozelsk. This additional material
clearly established that the Polish soldiers found in the forest were the missing
prisoners from Camp Kozelsk. Finally, the fact that the Germans fully cooper-
ated with the investigators at the Katyn Forest site and subsequently attempted
to preserve the evidence of the atrocity suggested that the Nazis were not the
murderers.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union denied the German accusations and charged
that the Nazis had themselves committed the crime. On April 15, 1943, two
days after the initial German radio broadcast announcing the discovery of the
mass graves, the Soviets stated that the Polish prisoners had been seized by
invading Nazis during the summer of 1941 and, subsequently, the Nazis had
executed them. After the capture of the Smolensk region, the Soviet author-
ities organized a special Soviet commission to investigate the Katyn Forest
murders. The Soviet team was composed exclusively of Soviet medical experts;
no international medical experts were asked to participate. Predictably, given
the official title of the Soviet investigatory team, “The Special Commission for
Ascertaining and Investigating the Circumstances of the Shooting of Polish
Officer Prisoners by the German-Fascist Invaders in the Katyn Forest,” the So-
viet team concluded that the Germans had murdered the Poles between Sep-
tember and December of 1941. The Soviets claimed to have found nine docu-
ments on the bodies bearing dates after May, 1940. In view of the fact that most
of the bodies had been previously and extremely carefully searched by the
German-sponsored commissions, most observers discounted these so-called
finds as fabrications.
Following World War II, the Katyn Forest atrocity was inconclusively exam-
ined at the Nuremberg Trials, and later, in considerable detail, from 1951 to
1952 by a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Notwithstanding
continued Soviet denials of guilt and assertions that the Germans were respon-
sible, virtually all analysts outside the communist countries concluded that the
Soviets had killed the Polish prisoners found in the Katyn Forest. Finally, in
1990, fifty years after committing the atrocity, the Soviets acknowledged that
the NKVD had murdered the men.
Two questions remained, however, even after the establishment of Soviet
guilt for the Katyn atrocity. First, what happened to the more than ten thou-
138 Human Rights Violations

sand Poles held at Camps Starobelsk and Ostashkov? Apparently these men
were also killed by the NKVD, although their exact fate remained unclear. Sec-
ond, why were 448 men from Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobelsk allowed to
live? It would seem that the NKVD selected those individuals who appeared to
be procommunist, were susceptible to Soviet propaganda, or who, by virtue
of their background, were deemed worthy of selection for survival.

Impact of Event
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels immediately recognized the
significance of the Katyn Forest discovery and took special efforts to make cer-
tain that Germany derived the fullest propaganda dividends from the Soviet
atrocity. For example, the German-controlled media in Poland provided ex-
tensive coverage of the Katyn Forest investigations. The Nazi media argued
that Jewish Bolshevism was responsible for the atrocity. Hence, the Poles were
told that they must look to the Germans for protection against the ruthless
Soviets. Moreover, the extensive daily coverage, extending from April 14 to
August 4, 1943, coincided with the Nazi massacre of the Warsaw ghetto, the
latter extending from mid-April to mid-May, 1943.
In addition to attempting to influence Polish public opinion, the Germans
intended to use the atrocity to split the Allied cause. There, however, the Ger-
mans unwittingly assisted Moscow in the latter’s policy objectives. Immediately
following the German announcement of the discovery of the mass graves in
the Katyn Forest, on April 15, 1943, the Polish government-in-exile in London
decided to call upon the International Red Cross to conduct a full investiga-
tion. The following day, the British press reported this decision. On April 17, a
spokesperson for the Polish government-in-exile confirmed the decision and,
that same day, the Poles formally made their request to officials of the Interna-
tional Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland. Meanwhile, in Berlin, acting upon a
British press story predicting the Polish request to the Red Cross, but prior to
the formal request itself, Goebbels decided to embarrass the Poles by issuing a
second German request to the International Red Cross to investigate the
atrocity. The timing of the German request was designed to coincide with the
Polish request, thereby making it appear that the London Poles and Berlin
were acting in concert. Thus, the German request was handed to the represen-
tatives of the International Red Cross in Geneva less than one hour prior to the
Polish appeal. For its part, the International Red Cross responded that it
would conduct an investigation provided that the Soviet Union joined with the
Poles and Germany in requesting such an investigation. The Soviet Union, of
course, did not agree to join in the request.
Soviets Massacre Polish Prisoners of War 139

The appearance of Polish-German cooperation in requesting the investiga-

tion provided Soviet leader Joseph Stalin with an opportunity to cut his ties
with the London Poles in favor of his own Moscow-sponsored Union of Polish
Patriots. Thus, not only did the Soviets fail to request an investigation by the In-
ternational Red Cross, but on April 19, 1943, the Soviet media also denounced
members of the Polish government-in-exile for collusion with the Nazis in per-
petuating the so-called Nazi-fabricated allegations that the Soviet Union was
responsible for the Katyn atrocity. This theme was in turn repeated by the pro-
Soviet media outside the Soviet Union. The free Polish media responded that
the Polish government-in-exile was merely seeking answers to questions as to
what had happened in Katyn Forest.
Nevertheless, on April 21, 1943, Stalin informed British prime minister
Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt that the Soviets had
decided to sever relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London.
Churchill and Roosevelt responded by appealing to Stalin not to risk the unity
of the Allied cause by breaking relations with the London Poles, while Chur-
chill appealed to the Polish leaders in London to drop the entire matter. Not-
withstanding British and American appeals, however, on April 26, 1943, the
Soviets notified the Polish ambassador in Moscow of the Soviet government’s
decision to break relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London.
Subsequently, despite the fact that the London Poles, under pressure from the
British, withdrew their request to the International Red Cross for a neutral in-
vestigation the day after the severance of Soviet-Polish relations, the Soviet
Union remained firm in its decision to break relations.
Clearly, Stalin had decided to use the Polish government-in-exile’s re-
sponse to the German announcement of the Katyn discovery as his excuse to
dispose of the independent Polish authorities in London in favor of the Soviet-
backed Poles. Indeed, the latter would ultimately serve as a central component
in the satellite regime erected by the Soviet Union in postwar Poland. Thus,
the massacre of more than four thousand Polish prisoners of war by the Soviet
NKVD in the Katyn Forest and the disappearance and presumed execution of
another ten thousand Polish prisoners not only deprived Poland of a signifi-
cant element of the prewar Polish elite but also was ultimately used to advance
successfully Soviet objectives in postwar Eastern Europe.

Bibliography
Abarinov, Vladimir. The Murderers of Katyn. New York: Hippocrene Books,
1993. Recently translated, this book, written by a Soviet journalist, is one
of the first comprehensive accounts of the massacre.
140 Human Rights Violations

Lauck, John H. Katyn Killings: In the Record. Clifton, N.J.: Kingston Press, 1988.
A comprehensive overview of the events leading up to the massacre and the
various investigations that followed, especially the hearings of the select
commi