Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Argument
- 2 Ethnic Cleansing in Former Times
- 3 Two Versions of “We, the People”
- 4 Genocidal Democracies in the New World
- 5 Armenia, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 6 Armenia, II: Genocide
- 7 Nazis, I: Radicalization
- 8 Nazis, II: Fifteen Hundred Perpetrators
- 9 Nazis, III: Genocidal Careers
- 10 Germany's Allies and Auxiliaries
- 11 Communist Cleansing: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot
- 12 Yugoslavia, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 13 Yugoslavia, II: Murderous Cleansing
- 14 Rwanda, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 15 Rwanda, II: Genocide
- 16 Counterfactual Cases: India and Indonesia
- 17 Combating Ethnic Cleansing in the World Today
- Works Cited
- Index
10 - Germany's Allies and Auxiliaries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Argument
- 2 Ethnic Cleansing in Former Times
- 3 Two Versions of “We, the People”
- 4 Genocidal Democracies in the New World
- 5 Armenia, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 6 Armenia, II: Genocide
- 7 Nazis, I: Radicalization
- 8 Nazis, II: Fifteen Hundred Perpetrators
- 9 Nazis, III: Genocidal Careers
- 10 Germany's Allies and Auxiliaries
- 11 Communist Cleansing: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot
- 12 Yugoslavia, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 13 Yugoslavia, II: Murderous Cleansing
- 14 Rwanda, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 15 Rwanda, II: Genocide
- 16 Counterfactual Cases: India and Indonesia
- 17 Combating Ethnic Cleansing in the World Today
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Germans did not stand alone in the genocidal mire. There were many foreign perpetrators too. A million men from 15 countries joined the Waffen-SS and fought as soldiers at the front. Probably only a few of them were war criminals. I will discuss not them but those complicit in cold-blooded killing of unarmed people: collaborating regimes, auxiliary police forces, and concentration camp guards. I confine myself to East and Southeast Europe, areas ruled fairly directly by the Germans – Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and the Ukraine – and those ruled by their Axis allies – Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Slovakia. Unfortunately, there is much less evidence on them than on Germans. Among the few comparative studies, Helen Fein's Accounting for Genocide (1979) stands out. She explains the proportion of Jews killed in each country in terms of two variables: degrees of prior anti-Semitism and direct SS rule. She suggests that these two variables were often inversely related. In the Netherlands and Greece, at least 75 percent of the Jews were killed, whereas in Romania only about half were – although Romanian anti-Semitism was much stronger than that of the Dutch or Greeks. This was due, she says, to direct SS control in the latter countries but not in Romania. Since the Nazis were the keenest to kill Jews, and the SS was their leading killing machine, occupied countries saw more mass murder than allied ones.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Dark Side of DemocracyExplaining Ethnic Cleansing, pp. 279 - 317Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004