It Did Happen Again

“Never Again”. Inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp put this phrase on a handmade sign right after they were liberated by the United States Army on April 11th, 1945. Buchenwald was a labor camp, not a death camp and thus was not a part of the Final Solution. However, this phrase quickly came associated with the Holocaust and even with the genocide in general. Any genocide.

Unfortunately, it did happen again – and very soon. Right after the end of the war in Europe, Stalin and its puppets in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia (the latter was actually more an ally than a puppet) commenced the program of total ethnical cleansing of these territories of its German population which lasted until 1950.

In terms of the number of deportees (14 million), this program dwarfed the Holocaust. According to official estimates by the German government and the German Red Cross, two million civilians died during these deportations (half of the Holocaust death toll).

It was a true genocide as these civilians were deported and murdered (often brutally) not because of what they did (they have not committed any crime), but because of who they were. Only because they were Germans. Right during the (in)famous IMT Nuremberg trial.

In just three years (1958-1961) Mao Zedong and his henchmen brutally murdered over 2.5 million Chinese. It was not a genocide; it was a democide, but the essence was the same. Men, women and even children have been murdered not because they have committed any crime (they didn’t), but because they belonged to a certain social group marked for annihilation by the Communist government.

Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and his cronies carried out another democide, murdering between 1.4 million and 2.2 million in Cambodia in 1975-1979 (one of every four of Cambodians). And in 1994 the world witnessed a ‘classic’ genocide in Rwanda of the Tutsi tribe by the majority Hutu.

During approximately 100-day period from April 7 to mid-July 1994, an estimated one million Tutsi were killed (about as many as died in Auschwitz), constituting as much as 70% of the Tutsi and 20% of Rwanda’s total population. Two out of three…

Lesser genocides and democides (in terms of numbers of victims) occurred in North Korea, Vietnam, Nigeria, Iraq, Ethiopia, Sudan, Guatemala, Indonesia, Burundi, Bangladesh and Equatorial Guinea.