The Witness to Genocide in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

When we read that the Assyrian or Babylonian Government “carried into captivity” such and such a broken people or tribe, we hardly seize the meaning of the statement. Even when we see the process portrayed with grim realism on the conqueror’s bas-reliefs, it does not penetrate our imagination to the quick. But now we know. It has happened in our world, and the Assyrians’ crime was not so fiendish as the Turks’. “Organized and effective massacre” – that is what such a deportation means, and that must always have been its implication. Arnold J. Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (1916)

When the British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote his condemnation of what was not yet called the Armenian genocide in 1916, he sought to define an ancient crime in new terms for which he struggled to find adequate words, employing “organized” and “effective” to compound the impact of “massacre.” Not quite thirty years later, the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the neologism genocide to name a crime – the slaughter of European Jews – that could not be reduced to mass murder. For Lemkin, the essence of genocide was a “systematic attack on a group of people and its cultural identity: [it was a crime] against difference itself.”1 Lemkin’s view was pared down in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: for political and legal reasons, the drafters defined the violation to encompass only the physical destruction of specific groups, emphasizing the planned and deliberate nature of the killing over its assault on cultural identity, as if literal and cultural annihilation were not related.2 It was not until the western reception of Holocaust victim testimony in the 1970s and 80s that public discourse defined genocide as radically transgressive and incommensurable, transforming the animus that motivated the killing and the unfathomable cultural and linguistic loss it engendered into a phenomenon whose meaning transcended physical destruction.

This essay addresses two episodes in the history of how genocide became the most radical moral transgression conceivable and on what terms it differed from other forms of mass violence, including war. It asks how, as this distinction became increasingly legible to a broader public, the Holocaust of European Jewry became the paradigm of genocidal murder. It thus analyzes a longer history not only of how mass murder was distinguished in public discourse from what Lemkin would eventually term genocide, but also how the meaning the western public attributed to genocide changed over time and defined which victims mattered and why.

Scholars tell two different stories about the significance of this distinction between genocide and mass murder, both of which focus on the Holocaust: the first begins with victim testimony during the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and ends by reference to the outsize role played by victim trauma in contemporary political and social life – in the so-called sacralization of Holocaust survivors – and in genocide prosecution.3 It is recounted as the rise and fall of the Holocaust, from belated recognition in the 1960s to iconic status during the 1980s and fallen idol a decade later, when Holocaust memory was packaged, sold, and exported so widely for consumption that one scholar dubbed the period the “era of the witness.”4 Victims initially struggled for acknowledgment, but as their experience was belatedly recognized the Holocaust came to be viewed as a distinct, radical, and unprecedented form of collective violence. In the end, however, the narrative ends on a sour note: Holocaust memory was evacuated of substance and transformed into a secular religion.

The second story is a political and legal history of how the Allied powers, fearful of legitimating violations of state sovereignty as well as legal claims against their leaders and empires, depoliticized genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention. They reduced its application to the intentional physical destruction of a racial, ethnic, or religious group motivated by its members’ identity, a definition that excluded murders of political opponents, expulsions, cultural destruction, and other politically motivated acts. The Allies differentiated such political acts, rationalized in the name of state security, from the Holocaust, using the language of “civilization” and violations of “human conscience” to cast the event as the uniquely evil extermination of millions of innocents for no reason other than who they were. Victim groups, and Lemkin himself, supported the Great Powers as their best hope for a Jewish state in Palestine. They too proffered the uniqueness narrative, which remains pervasive and positions the Holocaust with and “above” genocide, as the paradigmatic “crime of crimes.”5

Both these narratives ultimately explain the cultural and political significance accorded to genocide over time by invoking the role of Holocaust memory and its effects on contemporary culture: one view contends that its global reception transformed a singular event into kitsch, and the other that its ostensible singularity blotted out the recognition of past and ongoing imperialist crimes as genocides. Both concur that the Holocaust has been dehistoricized: it has either been turned into an icon of evil that reduces its complexity and meaning or elevated into a paradigm of genocide for political reasons.

I treat the Holocaust survivor as the crystallization of a “witness to genocide” with prior rhetorical incarnations in the long twentieth century. I analyze two European interwar (1919–1939) trials, using them as microcosms of historical and conceptual developments that were to become essential to making a distinction between the moral transgression of mass murder and that of genocide. Rather than use the Holocaust as a point of departure, I focus on how the symbolic power of the witness tracks the history of how Western Europeans constructed the cultural rather than legal meaning of mass violence, and how local terrorism against ethnic groups was first rendered distinct, albeit still within an older vocabulary of moral transgression, including allusions to barbarism and violations of “human conscience.”

I make two arguments: that trial narratives both gave victims’ voices credibility and integrated them into broad normative moral communities; and that the making of “moral witnesses” to genocide was part of a process of cultural redemption that managed audiences’ desire for moral absolution and cast victims as absolutely innocent.6 The Eichmann trial and its afterlife exemplified the most highly significant iteration of these phenomena in a new language. The meaning attributed to the Holocaust and the Holocaust survivor was not merely a political or legal process, but a complex cultural development that both reiterated Western hegemony and incorporated victims into a narrative that victims shaped but did not define. This cultural legacy demarcates the difference between the Holocaust and other genocides.7

I recount the trial, in 1921, of Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian avenger of what was not yet named the Armenian genocide, and, in 1927, of Scholem Schwarzbard, a Jewish avenger of the Ukrainian pogroms of 1918–19. Both were accused of murder, Tehlirian of assassinating an Ottoman official responsible for ordering the Armenian genocide, and Schwarzbard of shooting the alleged instigator of the Ukrainian pogroms. These were the first major trials in Western Europe featuring victims of interethnic violence and state-sponsored mass atrocities in central roles. They caught the young Lemkin’s attention and shaped his thinking about genocide. Hannah Arendt claimed that they illustrated the importance of an international criminal court.8 Lawyers used the trials to bring the Armenian genocide and the Ukrainian pogroms into Western public view even though the defendants were themselves accused of murder. Like the Eichmann trial forty years later, the proceedings spotlighted mass atrocities, used victim testimony in highly unusual if defensible ways, put victims center stage to teach the public about their plights, and provided multilingual forums for their revelations. Both defendants were acquitted after juries heard blood-curdling accounts of the Armenian massacres and the military invasions of Ukrainian villages. The verdicts decreed that the shooters had momentarily lost control of their free will, in both cases because the defense showcased the atrocities that had pushed each man to lose his composure rather than the murders they had committed.

Lemkin mentioned both trials in the same breath, referring to the “absence,” as he put it, of “any law for the unification of moral standards in relation to the destruction of national, racial, and religious groups.”9 Lemkin believed that Tehlirian “had acted as the self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind,” but worried about the implications of extralegal vengeance. But he was so moved a few...