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Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe

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Fired of Hatred tells of the history of genocide, ethnic cleasining and forced deportation of ethnic groups in the 20th century. It deals with Nazi Holocaust, the most famous case of 20th century genocide and provides information that people might not know like how the Third Reich considered plans to move Jews to modern-day Israel and other locations like Madagascar. It also deals with genocide in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s which is still fresh in people's minds and helps to show the idea of 'never again' mentioned at the end of the second world war never fully materialized. One of the strong points of fires of hatred is that it sheds light on lesser known examples of genocide in the 20th century like that of the Greeks and Armenians in the Ottaman Empire and the treatment of Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia after the end of the second world war. It also deals with how the U.S.S.R brutally treated Chechnya an important section to better understand the current conflict in that region.

My only problem with the book is that it doesn't cover enough. It does a good job of covering what it has but neglects important things like the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 which was a large scale.

Despite its considerable faults, this book is a terrible indictment of our common humanity. Much of it traverses well-trod ground such as the Armenian and Jewish genocides and the more recent wars of the Yugoslav succession. Other chapters deal with the expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia and the Soviet deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars.
The book's strongest chapter chronicles the post-war expulsion of German civilians from Poland and Czechoslovakia, where German girls and women were routinely raped by their former neighbors and where the Soviets, who were notorious rapists themselves, were welcomed as comparative saviors by the Germans. The Germans of Bohemia, Silesia and Sudetenland are compared to the Jews caught between the marauding armies of Hitler and Stalin as they carved up Poland. Neither group knew where to go. Many ended up dying in concentration camps, robbed, humiliated and finally murdered. There is little to be proud of and much to be ashamed of in robbing, raping, humiliating and murdering unarmed women and children.
Naimark speaks of Serbs being ordered to rape Muslim women and Wehrmacht soldiers looking on with smirks on their faces as their Lithuanian, Ukranian and Latvian allies raped Jewish women. Naimark tells us of Polish, German, Czech and Turkish concentration camp guards going beyond rape and revelling in all kinds of unspeakable cruelties on their defenseless charges
Why do men do such things? Naimark, a Harvard University history professor, trots out a few glib sociological reasons. He blames conniving politicians, people like Hitler, Slobodan Milosovic and their cronies, people like the SS and Arkan's Serb Tigers. That, like most of the book, is too simplistic. The truth is that all of us are to blame. All of us are guilty. Good Samaritans, as this book makes plain, are a rare commodity when the dogs of war are let loose. Most of us prefer the sports pages to accounts of what the Hutus and Tutsis are doing to each other. They have lost their novelty value for us. Because their crimes are no longer novel, they no longer attract our attention. And even if they did, what would we do? Probably, if the evidence is anything to go by, nothing.
Naimark makes the point that the Armenian genocide was proclaimed in headlines around the world. Hitler's antipathy to the Jews was hardly a state secret. Stalin is one of history's greatest mass murderers and his treatment of the Chechens and Tatars could hardly have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with his ways.
The role of Winston Churchill and other Western leaders is less familiar. Naimark mentions how Churchill and Stalin briefly discussed the plight of the Sudetenland Germans; Churchill was willing to see two million of them die and the rest shoved into an impoverished Bavaria. In less than a minute, these two same men assigned Yugoslavia to the Soviets in return for Greece remaining within the British sphere of interest. The fates of millions didn't cause either of them to lose any sleep. Nor have the Germans or the Austrians lost much sleep over their cynical involvement in the carve-up of Yugoslavia.
We probably don't lose too much sleep either about these disputes in far-off European lands of which we know so little. That, of course, is the problem. For evil to triumph, it is just necessary for good people to do nothing. That, in a nutshell, has been the lesson both of Europe in the twentieth century and of this disturbing book, which reminds us of one of Europe's most permanent and invidious cancers.
The issue of preventable cancers is now back on the agenda as the world's press belatedly considers the use of depleted uranium against the Serbs. In the end, cancers and hatreds seem to be war's only legacies and our only common inheritances. Surely, as we go into a new millennium, we should be able to do better than to hate, rape and kill. This book suggests otherwise. Although many idealists may believe that peace is worth dying for, this book shows that many of the less idealistic believe that faith, fatherland and material advantage are all worth killing for. Rape, gang rape and rape murder were part of everyday life. Postscript: I air many of these issues in my new book.

This book is a good rundown of tragedies that befell people in Europe in the 20th century, and especially it is important that it reminds us of the Armenian genocide and the Greek catastrophe. However there exist two major problems with this text. The first is the use of the word 'ethnic cleansing' a term coind by americans to excuse the was in Bosnia and Kosovo, it was a term that was sopposed to embody racism and remind us of the Holocuast. However the term is disengenous and inaptly applied. Their is a difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing and their is a difference actually between ethnic cleansing and what happaned in Kosovo. No ethnicity was actually cleansed in Bosnia or Kosovo, rather religions assaulted eachother, same ethnicity, different religion.
The Armenians genocide and the Holocaust do not even compare with the Bosnia conflict. And Stalins deportation of the Ingush and Chechans, a truly ethnic cleansing operation, also is incomparable.

The second flaw is that huge tracts of cleansing are missed in this account. What of the pogroms and slaugthers that befell minorities in 1913, and again in the 1920s as maps were redrawn? What of the population transfers in Cyprus? What of Stalins genocide of the Russian Poles and Germans and many other peoples?

This is a worthwhile account but the reader must be cautioned to know that these incidents are very different, and that not every case of european 'cleansing' is brought to the surface here.

Seth J. Frantzman

Naimark's work is tour de force bound to brew controversy among policymakers and historians alike. This is a vital contribution to the burgeoning literature on nationalism...the consequences. Bravo.

I was interested mainly in the chapter about the so-called 'Armenian genocide'.
First of all, I'd like to thank Mr.Naimark for his effort to distinguish the Armenian genocide from Holocaust. But in my opinion these two massacres are so discrepant in intensity, in their goals and motives that we can hardly even compare them.
Talking about Holocaust, it was one single man - Hitler, who, (with the aid of his generls and officers of course), to fulfill his maniacal ambitions, started massacring jews. I can see no legal or political basis here to justify his inhumane acts. Nor was he personally or the German nation as a whole threatened by the jewish community. It was HItler's personal hostility towards jews that gave rise to the genocide.
As for the so-called Armenian genocide, I'd ask the readers to pay attention to the sources. You will not see any single direct Turkish account in the list. We can not rely solely on Armenian sources (or western sources based on Armenian accounts) if we are to come to some objectivity and clarification.
For me everything is clear. Armenian separatists wanted to create their independent state within Turkish lands. Two terrorist parties, Dashnaks and Hnchaks, were spreading terrorism and calling Armenians to use all possible methods to realize their historical dream - 'Great Armenia from the Black sea to the Caspian sea'. Was Turkey supposed to accept the violation of its territorial integrity? What would US do if tomorrow local Armenian community decided to establish an independent State on a certain US territory? That would not be a point for discussion and we can barely imagine that happening.
I'm not trying to convince people that there were no killings by Turkish soldiers. What i'm trying to say is that what we know today about those events is not even close to reality (especially figures).
Many of the victims died of hunger in other parts of the world, just like Greeks were dying in their camps in Greece. Women and children were given chance to stay in Turkey, with the only condition to subordinate to Turkish authorities and to respect local laws (which was not even an option for jews of the WW2).
Author also relates those events to the Islamic ideas of superiority. Here again i don't see any direct link between the religion and the fact that Turkish soldiers were defending their lands.
Armenians themselves have committed genocided in the 20th century. After they started being deported, many refugees moved to Caucasus. Very few today are aware of the ethnic cleansing committed by Armenian deportees against the muslim population of Baku (capital of Azerbaijan) at the beginning of the century. 90% of the latter were annihilated by Armenians.
Refering to a more recent history, Armenians massacred Azerbaijani population of the town of Khojaly in 1992. For more information visit the following website : [...]