Scrapple, Cupcakes
And the Night of Broken Glass
Nov. 9 was celebrated as World Adoption Day; World Freedom Day commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe; National Scrapple Day; and British Pudding Day.
Nov. 10 is saluted as International Accounting Day, National Marine Corps Birthday, National Vanilla Cupcake Day, Sesame Street Day, Area Code Day, Forget Me Not Day and World Science Day for Peace and Development.
But to many, Nov. 9–10 is not a day to enjoy scrapple or cupcakes, to think about area code or forget me nots, but a time to solemnly remember the event that is considered the start of the Nazi holocaust and the eventually murder of 6 million Jews. As with many darker moments in history, dates become lost in the haze and fog of the passage of time. And as time passes and memories fade, the possibility grows that newer and even more sinister events will develop. As Spanish philosopher George Santayana put it, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and as British statesman Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
The Nazi holocaust was one of many genocides where millions of people were systematically murdered because of their cultural or religious identities.
Just in the 20th Century, there was the Armenian genocide, Soviet collectivization resulting in the deaths of millions in Ukraine, the Soviet great terror which sent tens of thousands to death or to exile in gulags, Nazi, Soviet and Japanese genocides before and during World War II, communization of Eastern Europe which took a heavy toll on any opponents, China’s land reform that seized land and starved millions, Pakistani genocide, Cambodian genocide and Rwanda. The genocidal campaigns in Ukraine, and those committed by the Soviet Union, Nazis and Japanese are generally known but less is understood about the devastating genocides in Armenia, Pakistan, Cambodia and Rwanda.
During the days and nights of Nov. 9–10, 1938, enraged Nazis in Germany torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed around 100 Jews in a night that has become known as Kristallnacht or “Night of the Broken Glass.” The Nazis arrested around 30,000 Jewish men and sent them to the nascent Nazi concentration camps. Prior to Kristallnacht, Nazi policies were repressive but had been primarily nonviolent but after Kristallnacht, the strategy of the Nazis and conditions turned a fatal corner.
The events were triggered in the fall of 1938, when Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old ethnically Polish Jew who had been living in France, learned that the Nazis had exiled his parents to Poland from Hanover, Germany, where Herschel had been born and his family had lived for years. In retaliation, on Nov. 7, 1938, Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris. Hitler attended the funeral and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, seized on the assassination to rile Hitler’s supporters into an anti-Semitic frenzy.
The genocide in Bangladesh began on March 26, 1971, when the government of West Pakistan, now Pakistan, began what was to be a nine month long systematic military, genocidal campaign against Bengalis in East Pakistan who were calling for self-determination. During the so-called, Bangladesh Liberation War, members of the Pakistani Armed Forces and supporting pro-Pakistani Islamist militias from Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami pro Islam movement killed between 200,000 and 3,000,000 people and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women, according to Bangladeshi and Indian sources. Pakistan has consistently rejected claims that it had committed genocide and has labeled the accusations as propaganda against the Pakistan Army. The war resulted in the recognition of Bangladesh as a sovereign nation in 1972.
The Armenian genocide involved the systematic destruction of ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The blood letting was led by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and involved the mass murder of around one million Armenians, including many who died during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the simultaneous forced Islamization of Armenian women and children.
Armenia’s homeland was in the eastern provinces of Turkey and during and after World War I, the Ottoman Empire suffered a series of military defeats and territorial losses, leading to fear among CUP leaders that the Armenians would also attempt to break free of the Ottoman Empire.
Prior to World War I, Armenians were concentrated in Eastern Anatolia in a protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society. Ottoman leaders claimed that isolated indications of Armenian resistance was evidence of a coming widespread rebellion, leading to the excuse for mass deportation and genocide to avoid Armenian autonomy. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors were carried out by the Turkish nationalist movement during the Turkish War of Independence after World War I. As of 2021, 31 countries have recognized the genocide but the Turkish government continues to maintain that the deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action and not a genocide.
The Cambodian genocide from 1975 to 1979 was the systematic persecution and killing of 1.5 million to 2 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, the leader of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, formerly known as Cambodia. The genocide of nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s 1975 population was deemed necessary by Pol Pot as he pushed Cambodia towards a self-sufficient agrarian socialist society.
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had long been supported by the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Mao Zedong, which provided billions of dollars in military and economic aid. The Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975 with a goal of creating a socialist nation based on the policies of ultra-Maoism. To fulfill its goals, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and forced Cambodians to relocate to labor camps in the countryside, where mass executions, forced labor, physical abuse, malnutrition and disease were rampant. The massacres ended when the Vietnamese military invaded in 1978 and deposed the Khmer Rouge regime.
The Rwandan genocide was carried out during just 100 days of the Rwanda Civil War which went from April 7 to July 15, 1994. Members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group and some moderate Hutu and Twa, were slaughtered by armed militias. It is believed that around 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsis were killed and that the total death toll, including Hutu and Twa victims, was as high as 1.1 million.
Before the civil war began, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group composed mostly of Tutsi refugees, invaded northern Rwanda from their base in Uganda in 1994,setting the stage for civil war. Neither side won and Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana signed a truce with the RPF on Aug. 4, 1993. Habyarimana was assassinated on April 6, 1994, and the peace accords were canceled, leading to the start of the genocidal killings the following day when soldiers, police and militia executed key Tutsi and moderate Hutu military and political leaders. No country intervened to stop the killings and most of the victims were killed in their own villages or towns, many by their neighbors and fellow villagers. Hutu gangs and militias used machetes and rifles to kill while raping an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women. The RPF resumed the civil war and captured all government territory, ending the genocide.
These are but a few of the historical genocides that have generally been committed while the rest of the world watched, unwilling to get involved. Given the state of the human condition and the political and economic realities of the world, there will certainly be more. Hopefully, the next time, the rest of the world will step in to stop the carnage, hopefully.