Finally, in the third modal treatments, perpetrators dispose of children as they do adults. When a political community conducts an all-out, unrestrained, eliminationist assault on a minority, the perpetrators tend to victimize children as if they were mere smaller adults. Nottingham, the former British district officer in Kenya, explains how the British, who certainly recognized that Kikuyu children had committed no transgression, could nevertheless treat children cruelly and murderously: “By the time that I’m talking of, the fact that a child was a child was almost irrelevant. The point was he was a Kikuyu.”126 This has been true for perpetrators assaulting targets deemed subhumans, existential enemies, or heretics—the German annihilators of the Herero and Nama, the Japanese in Nanjing and elsewhere, the Germans’ treatment of Poles, Russians, Sintis, Roma, and others, Britons’ mass incarceration of Kikuyu, the Khmer Rouge’s eliminationist slaughter or imprisonment of virtually all of Cambodian society, the Syrian slaughterers of Hama’s people, Saddam’s assault upon southern Iraq’s Marsh people and northern Iraq’s Kurds, the Sudanese killers in Darfur. In Guatemala, where the perpetrators’ cruelty toward children was, in general, widespread and acute, they particularly targeted boys, like men, according to the perpetrators themselves, to prevent Mayan society’s regeneration and future retribution against them:Well, they told my sister—since among the soldiers there was one who spoke our language—and he told my sister that they had to finish off all the men and all the male children in order to eliminate the guerrillas. “And why?” she asked, “and why are you killing the children?” “Because those wretches are going to come some day and screw us over.” That was their intention when they killed the little ones too.
Another Maya explains further: “The army’s plan was to get rid of the seeds. Even if it was a little one- or two-year-old child, they are all bad seeds, so they say. This was the army’s plan. This is what I have seen.”127 The brutal realpolitik behind the perpetrators’ treatment of existential enemies, and the utilitarian calculus perpetrators use for handling subhumans, together with the general disinhibition of internal restraints both mindsets produce, lead perpetrators to dispose of their victims’ children as they do their parents, often to ensure the “seeds” will never sprout, that their putative problems never regenerate. Neither social theory, realpolitik or brutal utilitarianism, gives the perpetrators any general reason to privilege children. The Guatemalan perpetrators generally did not (except for those they kidnapped and enslaved). Guatemala’s foremost forensic expert, Peccerelli, explains the perpetrators’ regular mode of killing children: “Yeah, basically swung [children] into rocks, trees, anything big and stable that you can smash a kid up against. The little older kids, the little heavier, harder to handle, they would just shoot and then the older ones a combination of everything, a combination of gunshot wounds and sharp force trauma.”128
These three modal ways in which perpetrators treat targeted groups’ children—exempting them, going “easy” on them with lesser eliminationist means, and treating them no differently from their parents—are instantly comprehensible, covering a normal range of options. There are two additional, less frequent, perpetrator means of treating children.
With the first, perpetrators hold children to be actually or potentially different, and better, than their parents’ fate. In some instances, owing to the perpetrators’ social theory, they treat children of groups targeted because of ethnicity or nationality radically differently from their parents. The Turks, conceiving of their existential enemies the Armenians not entirely coherently, an unstable agglomeration of a national/ethnic/religious-based hatred, nevertheless had a decidedly nonracist view of them. This permitted the Turks to think of young Armenian children as redeemable because they had not been, in a sense, Armenianized by being inculcated with an unalterable Armenian identity, cultural practices, or characteristics. In principle, the Turks could spare young Armenian children, allowing Turkish families to take them in, convert them to Islam, and raise them as Turks, which they did by the tens of thousands. The Turkish leadership enunciated this principle as policy when planning the exterminationist and eliminationist program. The fifth of their “Ten Commandments” for conducting the eliminationist assault: “Apply measures to exterminate all males under 50, priests and teachers, leave girls and children to be Islamized.”129 Although the Turks killed most Armenian girls and children—often cruelly and gleefully, such as by swinging them and smashing their heads—and although kidnapping children is barbaric, the Turks’ choice to spare such children’s lives reveals their social theory’s power to get them to substantially depart from their otherwise utter eliminationist brutality, and that the flow of fellow feeling and human pity was not indiscriminately dammed up in them. Allowing some Armenian children to live likely provided balm for some Turkish perpetrators’ consciences—they could tell themselves they were exterminating only those leaving them no choice. But without the social theory guiding them, at odds with the social theories informing many other eliminationist assaults’ perpetrators, they would not have allowed the Armenian children to live, albeit as Turks.
In this respect, and in forcing an enormous number of Armenian women to convert or to enter slavery, the Turks, exceptional among the perpetrators of our time’s mass murders and eliminations, resembled premodern times’ eliminationist warriors, who also incorporated the vanquished people’s children (and women) into their communities. In other instances, usually when eliminating heretics, perpetrators do not target children, as the Soviets did not for most of their victims, and the perpetrators of some of Latin Americans’ dirty wars against leftists did not. In these instances, the perpetrators could be seen as conceiving of the children as the Turks did of the Armenians. But instead, these are episodes of perpetrators being wrathful against particular adults because of their real or alleged individual beliefs or actions (and not because of ascriptive characteristics, such as ethnicity or nationality), which means that the perpetrators harbored no direct eliminationist animus toward their targets’ relatives, including their children.
The Germans, governed by their idiosyncratic racial-biological view of humanity, also stole children from the vanquished. But not from all the groups they were slaughtering or eliminating. The Nazis’ race theory held, bizarrely, that a person’s individual physiognomy governed his racial destiny, meaning that a Nordic-looking child born to Slavic parents, be they Poles, Ukrainians, or others, was of sound, indeed exalted biology, and should, indeed must, be incorporated into the master race’s community as one of its own. As Himmler confirmed in his 1943 speech to the SS leadership, “Whatever is available to us in good blood of our type, we will take for ourselves, that is, we will steal their children and bring them up with us, if necessary.”130 The Germans created an extensive, formal program to identify these individually putatively physiognomically privileged children, kidnap them, and deliver them to German families for adoption, and supposed master-race acculturation. They conducted modern times’ most extensive child kidnapping program to incorporate into the German racial body unknown thousands of such children.
Jewish children’s fate at the Germans’ hands was the opposite, constituting the other principal exception to the three modal ways perpetrators treat children. The German perpetrators did not subject Jewish children merely to their parents’ brutal and lethal fate, but often treated them worse. The added callousness, if not enjoyment, that perpetrators express just by subjecting children’s helpless and extra-vulnerable beings to the same privations as their parents was fully evident among the Germans. They inflicted enormous suffering on Jewish children by starving them, often to death (the Warsaw Ghetto camp’s official daily ration was 350 calories), forcing them into the ghettos’ hellish living conditions (the Warsaw Ghetto’s population density was, according to German statistics, initially six to seven people per room), deporting them, like their parents, packed like sardines in nearly airless, locked freight cars for days on end. They killed them me
rcilessly. But in several ways, the Germans’ ferocity and cruelty toward children exceeded even their treatment of Jewish adults.
The Germans often slaughtered Jewish children before their parents, leaving the adults alive for days, weeks, months, resulting in many Jews surviving the war without their children. In Auschwitz and other camps, they reflexively killed arriving Jewish children. When the Germans learned a Jewish woman was pregnant, they killed her immediately, often in a brutally cruel manner. This was officially conveyed in the infamous Jäger Report, an itemized accounting of the Germans’ and their local helpers’ slaughtering of 137,346 Jews in the comprehensive extermination program’s first months in Lithuania, which starts off: “Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved.” They left alive only those Jews needed as temporary workers. Karl Jäger, as if to allay possible concerns about the long-term consequences for the exterminationist project of temporarily enslaving these Jews, discusses in his report one of the Germans’ complementary eliminationist means: “I am of the view that the sterilization program of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterilization a Jewess becomes pregnant she will be liquidated.”131
The German perpetrators reacted with fury upon encountering a pregnant Jewish woman, putatively harboring the biological seed of the Germans’ undoing—their view of the gestating child. The sight of a pregnant Jew, carrying a future life, did not warm the Germans’ hearts but incited a heightened consciousness of danger threatening to multiply before their eyes. This also occurred when they came upon Jewish infants and young children during roundups and deportations. The Germans often killed them in the most gruesome manner, shooting them at point-blank range in their mothers’ arms or, after snatching them, swinging them by their heels to smash their heads against a tree or a building wall. This was the purest rage, having no purposeful domination or demonstration purpose. It was their hatred’s expression at coming across the symbol of their putative enemies’ future and hope, a threat born of the Germans’ hallucinatory sense of endangerment. An adult brutally killing another adult face-to-face involves an element of domination, establishing in the final second a clear, unalterable master and victim hierarchy that each recognizes before or even as the perpetrator strikes the final blow. But a young child, an infant, cannot comprehend this and therefore provide the psychic satisfaction perpetrators the world over take in looking into their victims’ eyes, reflecting back the perpetrators’ physical mastery and desired emotional and moral mastery. The Germans’ unsurpassed drive to destroy Jewish children—they slated every Jewish child for death—their extra ferocity and brutality toward them, and their obvious special, cruel satisfaction in inflicting cruelty on them, set them apart yet again. No exterminationist program has come close to matching the Germans’ systematic and obsessive killing of children, so much so that they devoted considerable resources to ferret out hidden Jewish children. This distinguishes the Germans even in the long history of annihilative and eliminationist assaults upon Jews, whose perpetrators’ fury rarely targeted children or systematically hunted and slaughtered them.
The Tutsi’s brutality toward Hutu children in Burundi and then, on a still broader scale, the Hutu’s brutality toward Tutsi children in Rwanda appear to have been kindred, exceeding even the baseline brutality and murderousness they showed adults. Similar to the Germans’ conception of Jews, Hutu and Tutsi each saw the other group’s children as the biological spawn of evil. The licentiousness and ritualized manner of each group’s slaughtering the other’s children bespoke an unusual viciousness exceeding even conventional eliminationist baselines used for adults. A Hutu survivor from Burundi recalls how girls, who would otherwise grow up to be fertile women, were, with unmistakable symbolism, killed—and by whom: “The [Tutsi] girls in secondary school, they killed each other. The Tutsi girls were given bamboos. They were made to kill by pushing the bamboo from below [from the vagina] to the mouth.” Another survivor recounts a second transparently symbolic manner of destruction: “There was a manner of cutting the stomach [of pregnant women]. Everything that was found in the interior was lifted out without cutting the cord. The cadaver of the mama, the cadaver of the baby, of the future, they rotted on the road. Not even a burial.” Formulated with tragic poetic insight, the “cadaver . . . of the future . . . rotted on the road.”132 A doctor who fled his hospital in Rwanda after Hutu slaughtered its 150 to 170 patients, including wounded children, explained why the Hutu killed a Tutsi nurse, seven months pregnant. Her crime, according to the murderers, was “she was carrying a Tutsi baby.”133 He did not need to add that for the Hutu the not-yet-born baby was guilty of only one thing: being Tutsi. The Hutu’s utter pitilessness and brutality toward Tutsi children did not mean they always treated the youngest with the excess cruelty they did adults. Precisely because babies have no understanding, these condign and vengeful torturers benefitted little from torturing them as they did adults. Babies, according to the perpetrator Alphonse, “were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away. But they were killed more quickly, because of their small size and because their suffering was of no use. They say that at the church in Nyamata they burned children with gasoline. Maybe it’s true, but that was just a few in the first-day turmoil. Afterward that did not last. In any case I noticed nothing more. The babies could not understand the way of the suffering, it was not worth lingering over them.”134
Setting out to annihilate or otherwise eliminate people considered to be demons can lead perpetrators to intensely focus their wrath on the children, representing the future race of demons, an unending threat.
Mass murder and elimination’s perpetrators’ comparative treatment of children is significant in multiple ways, beyond the most obvious fact, easily overlooked, that the dearth of systematic knowledge about the fate of children reminds us again that little analytical attention has been paid to exterminationist and eliminationist assaults, and that much knowledge has died with the victims.
First, and most significant, is the perpetrators’ disposition of the children themselves. Not that eliminationist perpetrators ever act well toward children or treat them with humanity, but some horrible fates are more horrible than others. Again, the Germans’ various eliminationist assaults during the Nazi period offer the greatest insight. Germans adopted most methods for treating children. They did not target German communists and other heretics’ children. They generally consigned Poles, Russians, and other putative subhumans’ children to their parents’ fates. They slaughtered and brutalized with particular thoroughness and relish the putative Jewish demons’ demonic children. They stole and reared as Germans victim peoples’ children, conforming in their personal physiognomy to the ideal of the master race according to the Germans’ crackpot racial-biological ideological and political accounting system.
Second, just as with eliminationist programs’ other central aspects, this aspect of the perpetrators’ conduct provides insight into their mindsets and motives. Not all cruelties are compatible with all mindsets and motives. The perpetrators’ excess cruelty, common in eliminationist and exterminationist onslaughts and so frequent in some as to be a constituent feature, glaringly falsifies all postulates denying the perpetrators’ approval of their deeds. This all but ignored analytical point is even much more evident regarding the perpetrators’ treatment of and cruelty toward children. All those said to be killing or expelling the victims against their will, or merely out of obedience or because of peer pressure to help their comrades, would not possibly descend on victims’ children with the perpetrators’ fury, willful excess brutality, and glee.
Third, the perpetrators’ enormously widespread cruelty toward children tells us some further specific things about perpetrators’ cruelty in general. It is obviously not Zimbardoian, not grounded in the social relations (guards facing recalcitrant prisoners) said to produce Zimbardoian cruelty. The children, posing n
o threat of resistance whatsoever, cannot possibly induce in the perpetrators the sense they must brutalize prisoners to control them. The perpetrators’ cruelty toward children is also Machiavellian, if at all, only rarely. The circumstances and character of the perpetrators’ cruelty toward children—perhaps only slightly less true of their cruelty toward adults—clarify their cruelty as an end in itself, for their satisfaction, without instrumental purpose. To the (considerable) extent that the perpetrators’ cruelty toward children is vengeful, this merely further demonstrates, or rather unambiguously demonstrates, the perpetrators’ thinking about the victims’ hallucinatory quality. Children cannot possibly have done anything tangibly bad to the perpetrators, their families, or their groups or nations. Only to mindsets, such as those of the German perpetrators, holding the victim’s putative evil spirit to be coursing through all the victims’ veins, would it make sense for perpetrators to feel such vengeful fury at the targeted group’s children.
Finally, the perpetrators’ slaughter of and cruelty toward children thoroughly belie their hollow self-exculpatory claims that they merely carry out a necessary task, or did not know they were acting wrongly or criminally, or had no choice, or any of the other postulates that they acted despite their lack of approval of the deed. Of course, their cruelty toward adults also belies their self-exculpatory claims, that they did not want to kill or expel or otherwise brutalize the victim peoples.
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