Such self-protective and exonerating lying is a known commonplace among the Hutu killers—I have heard them myself—and among many others, especially among the Holocaust’s perpetrators. German after German who served in killing institutions would so routinely deny that he himself killed anyone that, if we were to believe each one’s testimony, then we would have to conclude that units that we know slaughtered on a given day hundreds or thousands of Jews (even by the perpetrators’ admission) actually killed very few, if any. Why? Because only a few, if any, of the units’ members admit to having themselves fired the shots. And in the Federal Republic of Germany’s own trials, thousands of perpetrators were proven guilty of willfully murdering Jews despite their vehement denials of culpability. Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of an Einsatzgruppe that slaughtered ninety thousand Jews in the Soviet Union, asserted emphatically at his trial at Nuremberg (ending in his conviction and hanging) that he was duty bound to follow orders and that is why he commanded his men to kill. That is what he told the world. Yet in a contemporaneous letter to his wife smuggled from prison, he revealed that his public protestations were nothing but a self-exonerating fabrication. In reality he was a convinced antisemite and a believing dedicated executioner. Jewry, even after the war, Ohlendorf confided to his wife, “has continued to sow hate; and it reaps hate again. . . . How else would one see it as anything but the work of demons who wage their battle against us?”29 Like the German perpetrators, eliminationist perpetrators in general present false, self-protective, and exonerating fronts to the world. But the truth is different. Asked whether the Hutu in prison are more sorry they killed Tutsi or that they did not exterminate them all, Marcel Munyabugingo, himself a killer, is clear about what they say when talking among themselves: “They still feel bad they did not succeed in killing everyone.”30 Élie Mizinge, one of the forthcoming Hutu perpetrators, elaborates. The killers “who keep saying that they weren’t there during the fatal moments, that they don’t remember a thing, that they lost their machetes and tripe like that, they are bowing down with the hope of evading punishment—while waiting to start all over again.” But what do the killers really think? What do they say among themselves? Élie explains: “Most of the killers are sorry they didn’t finish the job. They accuse themselves of negligence rather than wickedness.”31
In contrast to the transparently demonstrably false denials of culpability that perpetrators make after being defeated, when facing criminal prosecution, or when warding off social sanctions and condemnation, while committing their murderous and eliminationist acts they tell a different story:IN SOUTH-WEST AFRICA
Jan Cloete, a Cape Baster, working as a guide for the Germans: “A German soldier found a little Herero baby boy about nine months old lying in the bush. The child was crying. He brought it into the camp where I was. The soldiers formed a ring and started throwing the child to one another and catching it as if it were a ball. The child was terrified and hurt and was crying very much. After a time they got tired of this and one of the soldiers fixed his bayonet on his rifle and said he would catch the baby. The child was tossed into the air towards him and as it fell he caught it and transfixed the body with the bayonet. The child died in a few minutes and the incident was greeted with roars of laughter by the Germans, who seemed to think it was a great joke.”32
Leslie Bartlet, an Englishman living in the German colony, testified that the German soldiers “seemed to take a pride in wrecking vengeance on those unfortunate women. When the railway from Luderitzbucht to Keetmanshoop was started, gangs of prisoners, mostly women, scarcely able to walk from weakness and starvation were employed as labourers. They were brutally treated. I personally saw a gang of these prisoners, all women, carrying a heavy double line of rails with iron sleepers attached on their shoulders, and unable to bear the weight they fell. One woman fell under the rails which broke her leg and held it fast. The Schachtmeister [ganger], without causing the rail to be lifted, dragged the woman from under and threw her on one side, where she died untended. The general treatment was cruel, and many instances were told to me, but that which I have stated I personally saw.”33
IN TURKEY
E. H. Jones, a British prisoner of war, hearing the candid speech of the guards who had also slaughtered Armenians, reports: “The butchery had taken place in a valley some dozen miles outside the town. . . . Amongst our sentries were men who had slain men, women and children till their arms were too tired to strike. They boasted of it among themselves.”34
DURING THE HOLOCAUST
German Gestapo man Felix Landau recorded in his diary what transpired in Lviv, Ukraine: “We went to the citadel; there we saw things that few people have ever seen. At the entrance of the citadel there were [German] soldiers standing guard. They were holding clubs as thick as a man’s wrist and were lashing out and hitting anyone who crossed their path. The Jews were pouring out of the entrance. There were rows of Jews lying one on top of the other like pigs whimpering horribly. The Jews kept streaming out of the citadel completely covered in blood. We stopped and tried to see who was in charge of the Kommando. ‘Nobody.’ Someone had let the Jews go. They were just being hit out of rage and hatred.
“Nothing against that—only they should not let the Jews walk about in such a state. . . . Our work is over for today. Camaraderie is still good for the time being.”35
A German executioner testifies about a killing operation against Jews: “Next to me was the Policeman Koch. . . . He had to shoot a small boy of perhaps twelve years. We had been expressly told that we should hold the gun’s barrel eight inches from the head. Koch had apparently not done this, because while leaving the execution site, the other comrades laughed at me, because pieces of the child’s brains had spattered onto my sidearm and had stuck there. I first asked, why are you laughing, whereupon Koch, pointing to the brains on my sidearm, said: That’s from mine, he has stopped twitching. He said this in an obviously boastful tone. . . . I have experienced more obscenities of this kind.”36
IN BRITISH-OCCUPIED KENYA
Beatrice Gatonye, a Kikuyu woman forced to fingerprint the decomposing dead, explains: “The job we were told to do was just to torture us.” How so? “The flesh would come off in our hands and you couldn’t get it off of you. For days you would have this sticky substance attached to your skin, knowing that it was the skin of someone else. We never managed to get many fingerprints. Anyway, those white men in charge would just stand near us with their guns joking and laughing with each other and at us, smoking their cigarettes.”37
IN INDONESIA
A member of a left-wing youth organization who escaped being caught: “Another body was also thrown in, also headless. I couldn’t count how many headless corpses passed by me. Every time, the head was put in the gunny sack. Then I heard a shout from a voice I recognized and froze; it was Pak Mataim, our bicycle repairman who I think was illiterate. He seemed very thin, and he too was dragged along like a banana stalk. He moaned, begging for mercy, for his life to be spared. They laughed, mocking him. He was terrified. The rope around his feet was taken off, leaving his hands still tied. He cried, and because he couldn’t keep quiet, they plugged up his mouth with a clump of earth.
“Rejo went into action, and like lightning, his machete cut through the neck of his victim, the one-eyed, powerless, bicycle repairman. His head went into the sack.”38
IN BANGLADESH
Abdul Halim recounts Pakistani soldiers’ search for the parents of the local sheikh in his village: “Then they dragged me up to where the Sheikh’s father was sitting and repeated, ‘We shall shoot you in 10 minutes.’ Pointing to the Sheikh’s father I asked: ‘What’s the point of shooting him? He’s an old man and a Government pensioner.’ The soldiers replied, ‘Because he has produced a devil.’”39
IN BURUNDI
A Hutu survivor discusses the Tutsi’s views of the moral significance of not using bullets to kill Hutu: “But nothing frightens the Tutsi. They laughed while a man [was] in th
e process of dying. . . . Many, many manners were used. . . . It was said that the shot from a gun is the best death—the death of a soldier or of a Tutsi. This death, they said, is not designated for the Hutu.”40
IN CAMBODIA
Sophea Mouth describes a lurid scene he had to witness: “A man was holding a sharp ax rotated backward in his right hand, and with his left, he had a firm grip on another man’s shoulder. At the instant, the edge of the ax cut open the man’s chest. Blood spurted and I heard a roaring groan, loud enough to startle the animals. I stood there smiling deceitfully in shock because it was the first killing I had seen.
“After the cadre had opened up the man’s chest, he took out the liver. One man exclaimed, ‘One man’s liver is another man’s food.’ Then a second man quickly placed the liver on an old stump where he sliced it horizontally and fried it in a pan with pig grease above the fire that one of the cadres had built.
“When the liver was cooked, the cadre leader took out two bottles of rice-distilled whiskey, which they drank cheerfully. I was too young and the cadres didn’t allow me to participate in their celebration, although I had no desire to taste human liver.”41
Teap, a Khmer Rouge cadre, describes how the Khmer Rouge killers operated more generally and their candid speech among themselves: “They executed people like we kill fish. . . . They killed at night and didn’t have any responsibilities during the day. They just rested and ate well, much better than the people. . . . Their work began near dusk, when the soldiers would begin to sharpen their knives and axes. They’d roll up their pant legs and sleeves, put a scarf on their head and disappear. . . . When they returned, they would sometimes have blood stains on their clothes or even spots of blood on their faces. They went and bathed by [Rom’s] house, where I was guarding nearby and could overhear them. Sometimes they would return happy, laughing and shouting things like ‘That despicable one jumped well [when he was killed], did you see him?’ or ‘That despicable one fainted before he even reached the ditch’ or ‘There was another one who pissed so much that he completely soaked himself and even got you wet!’ . . . When they looked at their victims, they didn’t think they were killing fellow Khmer, just enemies.”42
IN GUATEMALA
Tomasa Osorio Chen recounts a scene from the ferocious Rio Negro massacre that included an enormous amount of raping, which she survived: “When the killing began, they tied them [the women] up and hit them to kill them. One of the women asked, ‘why are you killing me?’ She kicked the PAC [the civil patroller]. That PAC slit her in the stomach with a machete. When he slit her with the machete, the PAC wiped his hand on the machete and sucked on the blood.”43
IN BOSNIA IN A SERBIAN RAPE CAMP
Kadira, a Bosnian victim from the Doboj rape camp, recalls: “I saw about seven or eight little girls who died after they were raped. I saw how they took them away to be raped and then brought them back unconscious. They [the Serbs] threw them down in front of us, and we weren’t allowed to look at them; you had to keep looking at the floor the whole time. And then they’d announce: ‘Look, that’s what’ll happen to you too if you resist and disobey Serbian law.’” Kadira explains that the Serbs “wanted to kill us slowly, torture us to death, they wanted us to suffer, they wanted to show us in every way they could that they were stronger.” A second victim, Ifeta, concurs: The Serbs “didn’t want sex. They were gloating because they were humiliating Muslim women.”44
IN RWANDA
Fulgence Bunani, a Hutu killer, recalls his comrades’ laughter: “When we saw Tutsi wriggling like snakes in the marshes, it made the guys laugh. Some let them crawl awhile longer for more fun. But that was not the case for everybody. Some didn’t care one way or the other and didn’t bother with that mockery. If it was easier to catch them crawling, that was better, and that was all.”45
Patricia Musabyemaria, who had been incarcerated by Hutu in the interahamwe: “They ordered me to take Déo [her two-year-old son] to a pit latrine. When we got there, I saw that it was already full of corpses. I was to kill him myself but I refused. I pleaded with those who would kill him to allow me to go away before they macheted him. After a few minutes, I saw them looking for hoes to put the soil on my son’s body. They were boasting that ‘The father was the first in the pit. Now, let the son act as the lid.’”46
IN DARFUR
Masalit women recall the words of the Janjaweed perpetrators: “Slaves! Nubas! Do you have a god? Break the Ramadan! Even we with pale skins don’t observe the Ramadan. You, ugly black pretend . . . We are your god! Your god is Omar al-Bashir [Sudan’s Political Islamic president]” and “You blacks, you have spoilt the country! We are here to burn you. . . . We will kill your husbands and sons and we will sleep with you! You will be our wives!”47
The perpetrators’ speech and emotional displays convey their attitudes toward the ignominies, cruelties, and lethal blows they inflict on their victims. The perpetrators express their hatred for the victims. The perpetrators impart their conceptions of the victims as beings that deserve their fates. The perpetrators’ exclaim words of joy about their deeds. They gloat. They boast. They take pride in their deeds. They mock the victims and celebrate their deaths. And the perpetrators laugh, again and again we hear their laughter, at the victims’ suffering, at what they themselves are doing to them. As the reports from perpetrators themselves, bystanders, and surviving victims from one eliminationist assault to the next make clear, the perpetrators’ speech and emotional displays at the time they were handling, brutalizing, and killing their victims constitute overwhelming evidence that they were assenting and willing executioners.
Erwin Grafmann, a member of a unit of five hundred ordinary Germans (not SS men) that killed and deported to their deaths tens of thousands of Jews, reports that, after their commander, Papa Trapp, told them they did not have to kill, “I did not witness that a single one of my comrades said that he did not want to participate.” The rightness of killing Jews was so self-evident to them that “at the time, we did not give it any second thoughts at all.” Why? One of Grafmann’s comrades explains that to Jews, whom they deemed equivalent to bandits, “the cate-gory of human being was not applicable.”48 In South-West Africa four decades earlier, German soldiers took the initiative to confine twenty-five half-starved Herero “men, women and children and little girls” in a small enclosure of thorn bushes, surrounded and covered them with logs and branches, sprinkled the fuel with lamp oil, and burnt the Herero “to a cinder.” “I saw this personally,” says Hendrik Fraser, a Baster. “The Germans said ‘We should burn all these dogs and baboons in this fashion.’”49 “It became clear to us very quickly,” reports a Kikuyu survivor about the Kikuyu’s shared conclusions of the British generally, “that the British wanted to kill us, and those that were not killed were going to suffer. That was what those times were like. They just thought we were animals.” 50 Jesús Tecú Osorio, who lost his parents and many family members during the Rio Negro massacre in Guatemala and is now one of the country’s best-known human rights advocates, says about the obvious willingness of the perpetrators: “When they committed the acts, almost all acted with their own will. Perhaps they weren’t obligated, but during the massacres they could do whatever they wanted. They could rape the women. So at the massacre of Rio Negro, perhaps it was not their first experience. They could’ve had other experiences. So that day they acted very willingly. That is how I saw it that day.”51 Similarly, Cambodian survivors regularly describe the Khmer Rouge as wholly willing and impassioned mass murderers, declaiming the necessity of their deeds, including exterminating people for the sake of “Angkar,” a shorthand for the transformed and purified Cambodian society they sought to create. Rithy Uong endured four years under the Khmer Rouge in a mobile labor unit, so he encountered an enormous number of Khmer Rouge. He recounts the perpetrators telling the victims many things indicating they believed what they were doing to the victims right, even explicitly that “they enjoy it.” How does he know thi
s? His speech quickens and becomes emphatic: “Oh yes. They say they enjoy it. They just said you are, what we call . . . the wealthy people. You know, you believe in imperialism.” When being asked how many perpetrators said such things, Uong replies with animation and conviction, “All the Khmer. All the soldiers. All the people that watch us, they say that.”52 In Bosnia, Alisa Muratčauš, herself a rape victim and rape camp survivor, speaks authoritatively not only from her own experience but also on behalf of the six thousand members of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors in Sarajevo, of which she is president. They collectively have firsthand, intimate experience with an enormous number of Serbian perpetrators. Muratčauš describes the perpetrators as wholly willing and eager executioners and vocal about their approval, expressing their hatred and their desire to utterly rid Bosnia of Bosnians. “Definitely, definitely,” she says, referring to the perpetrators’ willingness, hatred for the victims, and use of rape as a political weapon. It was an “expression of hatred, definitely, all of these, all of these.”53 Anne, a Tutsi survivor captured hiding in the bush as Hutu used dogs to ferret out every last Tutsi, first had to watch as the Hutu “killed all my children in front of me and they slashed my right arm.” Then “while they were raping me, they were saying that they wanted to kill all Tutsi so that in the future all that would be left would be drawings to show that there were once a people called the Tutsi.”54 And why did the Hutu want to obliterate the Tutsi? Elie Ngarambe, a Hutu killer, explains that the killers “did not know that the [Tutsi] were human beings, because if they had thought about that they wouldn’t have killed them. Let me also include myself as someone who accepted it: I wouldn’t have accepted that they [the Tutsi] are human beings.” Ngarambe is emphatic about this being the common view and common knowledge: “As I was hearing it, I had the same perception as others at that time,” adding, as this was such a fact of Hutu society, that no Hutu “could swear and lie to you that he did not know that.” The effect of this, he explains: “It is a cloud that came into people’s hearts and covered them, and everything became dark, because to see someone standing in front of you without any energy and you hold your machete high or a club and hit him . . . it is something difficult that was done with a lot of anger and rage, I mean this genocide.”55
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