Victims: Perceptions of Harm in Modern European War and Violence (The History and Theory of International Law) 0192897721, 9780192897725

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VICTIMS

T H E H I S T O RY A N D T H E O RY O F I N T E R NAT IO NA L L AW General Editors N EHA L BHUTA Chair in International Law, University of Edinburgh A N THON Y PAG DE N Distinguished Professor, University of California Los Angeles BEN JA MIN STR AUM AN N ERC Professor of History, University of Zurich In the past few decades the understanding of the relationship between nations has undergone a radical transformation. The role of the traditional nation-​state is diminishing, along with many of the traditional vocabularies which were once used to describe what has been called, ever since Jeremy Bentham coined the phrase in 1780, “international law.” The older boundaries between states are growing ever more fluid, new conceptions and new languages have emerged which are slowly coming to replace the image of a world of sovereign independent nation states which has dominated the study of international relations since the early nineteenth century. This redefinition of the international arena demands a new understanding of classical and contemporary questions in international and legal theory. It is the editors’ conviction that the best way to achieve this is by bridging the traditional divide between international legal theory, intellectual history, and legal and political history. The aim of the series, therefore, is to provide a forum for historical studies, from classical antiquity to the twenty-​first century, that are theoretically-​informed and for philosophical work that is historically conscious, in the hope that a new vision of the rapidly evolving international world, its past and its possible future, may emerge. PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES Sepúlveda on the Spanish Invasion of the Americas Defending Empire, Debating Las Casas Luke Glanville, David Lupher, Maya Feile Tomes The World Bank’s Lawyers The Life of International Law as Institutional Practice Dimitri Van Den Meerssche Preparing for War The Making of the Geneva Conventions Boyd van Dijk The Invention of Custom Natural Law and the Law of Nations, ca. 1550–​1750 Francesca Iurlaro The Right of Sovereignty Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations Daniel Lee Jews, Sovereignty, and International Law Ideology and Ambivalence in Early Israeli Legal Diplomacy Rotem Giladi

Victims Perceptions of Harm in Modern European War and Violence S V E N JA G O LT E R M A N N Translated by

B E L I N DA C O O P E R

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Svenja Goltermann 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Public sector information reproduced under Open Government Licence v3.0 (http://​www.natio​nala​rchi​ves.gov.uk/​doc/​open-​gov​ernm​ent-​lice​nce/​open-​gov​ernm​ent-​lice​nce.htm) Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023943524 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​289772–​5 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192897725.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Series Editor’s Preface The concept of a victim seems natural enough. Where there are violations of rights, surely there must be victims? Where there is unlawful or unjustifiable harm and violence, are those who suffer its consequences not obviously victims, entitled to reparation? In this succinct but comprehensive social and cultural history of the concept, Professor Svenja Goltermann challenges any easy assumptions about the historical inevitability and continuity of our concept of victim. “Victimhood” even today can easily be used as a term of disdain and denigration—​connoting a lack of agency, an appeal for sympathy, and an intimation of helplessness and innocence. But equally, to be a victim of a certain kind of violence and harm carries with it a legal status which is a corollary of the legal rights and duties violated. Thus, the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) mentions “victims” no less than forty times, beginning with the preambular declaration that its signatories are “mindful that during this [twentieth] century millions of children, women and men have been victims of unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity.” Victims within the ICC legal framework are entitled to protection, participation, and reparation in the course of proceedings, and the extent of legal rights accorded to victims by the court was regarded as path-​breaking. Victims, then, appear to be moving to the center of a law and politics concerned to regulate, restrain, and punish certain excesses of organized armed violence. Victims embody and emblazon the calls for justice for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. Victims, it would seem, are the alpha and omega of why we must intervene in unimaginable suffering, rather than grubby self-​interest or venal raison d’état. In light of the consequences of these legal, political, and moral discourses for the organization and distribution of power in international society, critical interest in them has grown exponentially over the last twenty-​five years—​hitched closely to the parallel interest in discourses and practices of humanitarianism in international affairs. But no study devoted to the historicity of the concept of victim has appeared in English.

vi  Series Editor’s Preface This translation of Professor Goltermann’s German monograph of 2017—​ably translated by Dr Belinda Cooper—​is thus a welcome and valuable contribution to our understanding. In her book, Professor Goltermann unites a wealth of cultural, social, intellectual, and legal history to provide a nuanced and rich account of how we came to use the term “victim” as we currently do. It starts with victims of war, and is rooted in the emerging interest to both count and treat the dead and wounded in order to rationalize military strategy and policy. It later becomes a category recovered from disapprobation and shame (to be a victim was in some sense to have been weak and vulnerable) to a heroic label attached to returning veterans of World War I—​they had sacrificed for the state and nation, and now the state and nation had to repair that sacrifice by providing social security and social rights. A new and distinct phase in the history of the concept develops after 1945: the place of the victim in studies of crime and society (criminology) is transformed through an academic movement which repudiates the sexual and racial stereotypes which shaped interest in victims as principally objects of blame for sexual violence. The trend accelerates through the 1970s and 1980s, resulting in normative developments at the international level which “aimed at bolstering aid to crime victims, granting them more rights in the legal process, and meeting the needs of people harmed by crime through restitution and compensation.” Professor Goltermann astutely draws the connection between this development and the burgeoning politics and practice of international human rights activism centered on the critique of state-​sponsored violence by Latin American dictatorships and South Africa’s apartheid regimes—​state abuse of power now also had its victims, victims of human rights violations entitled to justice and reparation. A fascinating turn in the story is the parallel and ultimately intersecting development of post-​traumatic stress disorder, as a psychological diagnosis highly significant in the treatment of both soldiers and civilians exposed to the consequences of war. It is a story that starts with Vietnam combat veterans, whose conduct and experiences in war may have itself inflicted suffering on others; but the experience of war becomes a cause of trauma itself, and bearers of trauma become victims—​ even if they might have been perpetrators. The general condition of armed conflict makes almost everyone a victim in a certain sense. The category of child soldier perhaps exemplifies this perpetrator as victim, and their diagnosed traumas—​a synecdoche for a loss of innocence as much as an experience of harming and being harmed—​represent the way in which victim has become not only a multi-​valent moral and political category, but also a many-​sided legal concept. This book, written in an accessible way but deeply scholarly, is an illuminating excavation of a critical concept of our times. Nehal Bhuta Edinburgh June 2023

Acknowledgments When a book is coming into being, there are many moments when you are very aware that you could never bring it to fruition alone. I would therefore like to thank many people, not all of whom can be mentioned by name; they include those who encouraged the research project with their questions and ideas after lectures, as well as those who stood by me with their friendship during these past years. For books require, among many other things, a great deal of strength, which does not come from scholarship alone. I am especially grateful to a number of people who assisted this book’s progress in many different ways and at different times during the last eight years—​by giving me the opportunity to present the book project at colloquiums; believing in the project and discussing ideas with me; aiding my research, reading chapters or even the entire manuscript, and providing insightful comments; and in general, engaging me in productive discussions on many subjects, from which I, and indirectly this book, benefited. And some showed great patience as the book devoured my time. I would like to sincerely thank Brigitta Bernet, Antoinette de Boer, Lucien Duc, Kijan Malte Espahangizi, Peter-​Tim Fritz, Michael Geyer, Constantin Goschler, Jascha Goltermann, Lukas Goltermann, Maya Goltermann, Nils Goltermann, Bernd Greiner, Bettina Greiner, Ulrich Herbert, Lucia Hermann, Lucian Hölschler, Hans Joas, Ulrike Jureit, Rita Kesselbrink, Gesine Krüger, Lea Küng, Jörn Leonhard, Hanne Lessau, Thomas Lüddeckens, Sandra Mass, Lutz Niethammer, Raffaela Pfaff, Anna Piepiorka, Karin Plouze, Annelie Ramsbrock, Phillip Sarasin, Sylvia Sasse, Ulrich Schnyder, Cécile Stehrenberger, Janosch Steuwer, Margit Szöllösi-​Janze, Tamara Ann Tinner, Michael Wildt, Lutz Wingert, and Bettina Zangerl. I would also like to single out the support of the team at my Lehrstuhl at the university, especially during the writing phase, which was fantastic in every way. Janosch Steuwer, who is a careful, thoughtful reader, contributed greatly to that. I also owe special thanks to my editor at the S. Fischer Verlag, Tanja Hommen, who chaperoned the transformation of the manuscript into book form with great dedication. Karin Hielscher prepared the index with great care. The Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung supported the early stages of the project, for which I would like to express my gratitude. Finally, I am most grateful to Philipp Sarasin for every day together. Berlin, 14 August 2017

viii Acknowledgments I owe a debt of gratitude for the English translation of this book. My thanks are due first of all to Benjamin Straumann, who “discovered” the book for the series “History and Theory of International Law” and thus set in motion the whole idea of a translation. I am extremely grateful to him, Nehal Bhuta and Anthony Pagden, the editors, for including this book in the series. I am also very grateful to the anonymous readers who were so forthright in their support of this idea and whose comments were most valuable in the editing of this book. I also thank Merel Alstein, Robert Cavooris, and Kathryn Plunkett from Oxford University Press for their excellent, professional efforts on behalf of the publisher. Belinda Cooper, who agreed to take on the translation of this book, was indispensable. I happily admit that I consider this quite a stroke of luck. She enriched the book in many ways—​through her attention to detail, her feel for language, and her scholarly expertise in the field of international law. I thank her very much for this. The same is true of Julia Stieglmeier, who helped to prepare the publication, assembled the index, and read the entire English version with care. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Lucia Villiger, who insisted with charming vehemence, as soon as the German version appeared, that an English version was necessary. I am not sure I would have taken on this challenge if not for her early insistence and the enthusiastic encouragement that quietly accompanied me during the past years. Oliver Diggelmann’s and Philipp Sarasin’s readings of the book had a similar effect. For this encouragement, which is what ultimately keeps us going, I am very grateful to both of them. Berlin, 7 November 2022

Contents List of Figures  Abbreviations 

1. Introduction: On the Historicity of Victimhood 

xi xiii

1

2. Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–​1914)  Introduction  State Pragmatism and Bureaucratic Recording of the Dead  Avoiding Death: Hygiene and Statistics of War  Changing Ways of Mourning and Identifying the Individual 

14 14 18 26 40

3. Efforts in International Law: The “Civilization” of War (1864–​1977)  Introduction  The Humanization of War: Regulation and Experimentation  Legitimate and Illegitimate Use of Violence  Seeking Evidence: Violations of the Laws of War and the Emergence of Investigative Commissions 

51 51 55 65 78

4. Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–​1945)  Introduction  Medicine and the Hosts of the Disabled  Material Compensation and the Symbolic Recognition of the Victim 

91 91 97 105

5. Trauma and Morality (1945–​2015)  Introduction  Despised Victims: Victimology and the Emergence of Victims’ Rights  Post-​Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Spread of Innocence  Blocked Histories 

116 116 121 134 146

6. Conclusion 

161

Bibliography  Index 

167 201

List of Figures 2.1 Map of soldiers’ graves of World War I

15

3.1 On the effects of projectiles on the human body

62

4.1 Werner Kramp, 1915

93

5.1 Official poster of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

153

Abbreviations ARC CEIP DSM ICC ICRC ILO LRA PTSD SPD TRC UN WHO

American Red Cross Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders International Criminal Court International Committee of the Red Cross International Labour Organization Lord’s Resistance Army (rebel group Uganda) post-​traumatic stress disorder Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) Truth and Reconciliation Commission United Nations World Health Organization

1

Introduction: On the Historicity of Victimhood Five months, three sites. The first is a beach in Turkey on 2 September 2015, the day Alan Kurdi died. Two-​year-​old Alan, a refugee fleeing Syria, drowned in the Mediterranean when his overloaded boat sank. For months there had been stories about refugees dying in transit, and there would be more stories of people drowning or dying in other ways while trying to flee. We knew them only as statistics. But the news of Alan’s death echoed around the world; anyone who opened a newspaper or listened to the news in early September 2015 knew this child’s name. We also had an image of him—​more precisely, a photo of his small body, dressed in a red t-​shirt and short dark blue pants, lying dead on the beach, on his belly, face down in the sand. Numerous reports spoke of how moving and even shattering the photo was.1 It was a direct reminder that countless refugees were victims—​of Islamic violence, civil war, unscrupulous smugglers, and irresponsible refugee policies. Opinions differed on who was responsible, but these differences did not affect the wave of concern and demands for help that government representatives in Europe could not avoid. In a few months, however, the dismay over the refugees’ distress had already faded, although the number of refugees had not abated. In many places, the mood had even shifted or turned ambivalent. No one spoke anymore of Alan, the child whose photo had supposedly made the refugees’ distress so palpable. A second site is Dubai on 17 January 2016. Muhammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of the Emirate of Dubai and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, received a high-​level delegation from the United Nations presided over by the Secretary General at the time, Ban Ki-​moon. The problem discussed by this group was highly relevant internationally: the billions of dollars in humanitarian aid required to care for people in need as a result of war and other disasters. The UN expert group presented a report containing precise figures. For example, between 2000 and 2015, the volume of humanitarian aid rose from 2 to nearly 25 billion dollars per year, but an additional 15 billion dollars were needed each year to support those in need. The number of these people was immense, according to the

1 The strategy of presenting dead or suffering children in photos in order to mobilize emotional reactions in the context of war has a long history. See, e.g., Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, “‘A Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child’: Humanitarian Photography and NGO Media Strategies in Historical Perspective,” International Review of the Red Cross 97, no. 900 (2015): 1121–​1155.

Victims. Svenja Goltermann, Oxford University Press. © Svenja Goltermann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192897725.003.0001

2  Victims. Perceptions of Harm report: in 2014 alone, 42,500 people were displaced by violence and other conflicts, and 53,000 per day were forced to leave their homes due to natural disasters. There had already been cuts in supply: in 2015, food rations were reduced for 1.6 million Syrian refugees. Elsewhere, too, the UN’s humanitarian aid for men, women, and children apparently could not be maintained at sufficient levels.2 When Ban Ki-​ moon appeared before the press in Dubai on 17 January to announce the report’s most important findings, he spoke of an “age of mega-​crises,” given the current wars and emergencies throughout the world. He said it could be expected that, today and in the future, 125 million people would require humanitarian aid each year. The necessary volume of funding announced by the Secretary General was so high that it even rated a headline in the International Business Times: “World Needs $40 Billion a Year in Humanitarian Aid for Victims of Armed Conflicts, Natural Disasters.”3 A third site: On 25 January 2016, Dominic Ongwen appeared before the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Ongwen was a former brigade commander of the Ugandan rebel organization Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony, which hoped to create a Christian theocracy. Kony’s Christian fundamentalists had terrorized the civilian population since the 1980s, killing an estimated 100,000 people and kidnapping at least 50,000 children. In 2002, Ongwen led one of the terror commandos that killed more than 2,000 people in northern Uganda. He was officially indicted in 2005 for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ongwen, now in his forties, had not only ordered these crimes; in some cases he had committed them himself. They included murder, mutilation, slavery, and pillage, the media explained as the trial began. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung even used the term “massacre,” which is clearly a crime.4 Still, the newspaper did not characterize Ongwen only as a perpetrator; its report was titled “Both Victim and Perpetrator.” Ongwen had himself been kidnapped by the LRA, supposedly when he was only thirteen years old, and forced to become a child soldier.5 His

2 “High-​ Level Panel On Humanitarian Financing Report Launches in Dubai, UAE,” https://​ uaeun.org/​high-​level-​panel-​on-​human​itar​ian-​financ​ing-​rep​ort-​launc​hes-​in-​dubai-​uae/​ (accessed 1 September 2023). For the report, see “Too important to fail—​addressing the humanitarian financial gap,” January 2016, chrome-​extension://​efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/​https://​inter​agen​cyst​andi​ ngco​mmit​tee.org/​sys​tem/​files/​hlp_​report_​too_​important_​to_​failgcoaddressing_​the​_​hum​anit​aria​n_​fi​ nanc​ing_​gap.pdf (accessed 1 September 2023). 3 Anon, “World Needs $ 40 Billion a Year in Humanitarian Aid for Victims of Armed Conflicts, Natural Disasters,” International Business Times, 17 January 2016. 4 David Singer, “Opfer und Täter zugleich: Auftakt des Prozesses gegen einen der berüchtigtsten Rebellenführer Afrikas,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 22 January 2016, 7. 5 David M. Rosen, Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination: From Patriots to Victims (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), has shown how the view of children used as soldiers changed in the trans-​Atlantic world during the twentieth century. On Eastern Europe, see, e.g., Olga Kucherenko, Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a more specific view of the category of child soldiers in international humanitarian law at the end of the twentieth century, see Mark A. Drumbl, Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Introduction: On the Historicity of Victimhood  3 brother therefore publicly asked that he be pardoned, as he was not a perpetrator, but a victim who had had no other choice. This argument did not convince the International Criminal Court (ICC), which in early 2021 sentenced Ongwen to twenty-​five years’ imprisonment for war crimes; however, it refrained from imposing the harshest sentence, arguing that Ongwen had suffered violence as a child and was also a victim. It was the first time a former child soldier from Uganda had been convicted by the ICC. The tenor of reporting on the case in German-​speaking countries also shifted slightly, making him the perpetrator who was also a victim. In Europe today, child soldiers in Africa are widely regarded as “Killers who are first of all victims.”6 These three “sites” appeared in the mass media in a variety of articles that portrayed “victims” in differing ways. One could point to other stories as well in which people—​men, women, and children—​have been referred to as “victims” because they either died unnatural deaths or suffered physical violence or some other major disaster. One need not look far to find these accounts. Again and again, we read of exhumations that allow us to give names to the dead from long forgotten wars or periods of terror. Journalists always identify these bodies as “victims.” The term has meanwhile become a broad umbrella that covers many types of death: over 500,000 Spanish Republicans who are still considered missing; hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers whom the government has declared must be found so they may finally be interred with dignity; Polish anti-​Communists who disappeared without a trace under Stalin and have now been discovered in mass graves. Then there is the entire arena of non-​state violence: women, girls, and even boys who suffer rape and sexual abuse; people who endure psychological terror, humiliation, and other forms of marginalization at work or in school; those injured or killed in traffic accidents; and those who cannot tolerate street noise, the sound of windmills, or other environmental stress. All appear in the media today as “victims,” and they are not the only ones. The sites described at the beginning of this introduction represent a phenomenon that can no longer be denied: the attribution of victimhood is far more widespread today in public discourse than was the case fifteen years ago, when the term might have been applied to the dead, but far less often to the living.7 This development is not always viewed positively, though criticism comes from many different 6 Corina Fistarol, “Die Killer, die zuerst mal Opfer sind,” WOZ. Die Wochenzeitung, 11 June 2015, 15–​ 17. The description of child soldiers as primarily (or even exclusively) victims can be found today in a whole range of NGOs. For a plea for a more nuanced debate, see, e.g., Ilse Derluyn, Wouter Vandenhole, Stephan Parmentier et al., “Victims and/​or Perpetrators? Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Child Soldiers,” BMC International Health and Human Rights 15 (2015): 28. 7 See, e.g., Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Carolyn J. Dean, Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016); on Spain, Gabriel Gatti, “Presentación: Un mundo de víctimas,” in Un mundo de víctimas, edited by Gabriel Gatti et al. (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2017), 5–​24, 7; he dates the increase in attributions of victimhood, in this case, to the end of the twentieth century.

4  Victims. Perceptions of Harm sources: those who have themselves suffered violence and are tired of being seen only as victims; therapists who advocate, in guidebooks and training programs, for the concept of “resilience,” which they argue better enables people to survive and overcome extreme stress situations than the victim role; and critics of the welfare state, who mobilize against victims’ claims. In addition, a variety of authors have vented their annoyance at the increase in ascriptions of victimhood. There is no lack of polemics here. For example, in his recent book, “Die Opferfalle” (The Victim Trap), Daniele Giglioli states, “The victim is the hero of our times.” He goes on to argue provocatively, “Being a victim lends prestige, gains attention, assures and fosters recognition, and powerfully creates identity, rights, self-​esteem. It immunizes against criticism and guarantees innocence beyond any reasonable doubt. How could a victim be guilty, or even responsible for anything?”8 These are exaggerations with a kernel of truth. It is true that people who call themselves victims are not necessarily weak; the status of victim can be an extremely powerful one. It is also true that ascriptions of victimhood and the generation of attention and recognition are closely linked. Often, it is not enough that people are in need, oppressed, or persecuted. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman argue that, in the so-​called Western world, an economy of attention has developed that all but requires self-​definition as a victim in order for suffering to be noticed.9 And finally, it is also true that, when people are described as victims, the question arises, implicitly or explicitly, of who is responsible for the harm they have suffered. Ascriptions of victimhood always revolve around the problem of responsibility. But does that mean the “victim” is the “hero of our times”? Not at all. It is true that describing oneself, or another, as a victim has been remarkably popular in recent times. But people who claim for themselves the right to victimhood (or claim this for others) have nothing that brings them even close to the status of “hero.” Victimhood implies passivity; recognizing it very much depends on whether the persons harmed can plausibly show (or have shown of them) that they were harmed through no fault of their own. Only victimization that occurs because of something—​such as martyrdom—​might be termed heroic, because it contains an active element. This can also be applied to suffering. Suffering for something may be accepted—​for religious or political reasons, or because society expects it. Many examples of this may be found in the history of collective violence in Europe, until well into the twentieth century. During World War I, for example, German Catholics declared that dying on the battlefield was the will of God; French intellectuals propagated death as a sacrifice “pour la France et pour Dieu.”10 Even after the 8 Daniele Giglioli, Die Opferfalle: Wie die Vergangenheit die Zukunft fesselt (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2016). 9 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 279. See also Jean-​Michel Chaumont, Die Konkurrenz der Opfer: Genozid, Identität und Anerkennung (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 2001). 10 See Claudia Schlager, Kult und Krieg: Herz Jesu—​ Sacré Cœur—​ Christus Rex in deutsch-​ französischen Vergleich 1914–​1925 (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde e.V, 2011), 197f.

Introduction: On the Historicity of Victimhood  5 end of World War II, the idea of heroic sacrifice lived on, for example in commemorations of the French Résistance or the Italian Resistenza. It was even found in official commemorations of the murdered Jews in postwar Czechoslovakia (among other places). Jewish communities emphasized their resistance, even saying that murdered Jews had “fallen in battle” because they were actually fighters against Nazism. They were therefore commemorated as “heroes.”11 In the decade following the war, being identified solely as victims evoked a sense of shame in the minds of many Jewish survivors.12 A similar situation could be observed for decades in the Soviet and later Russian culture of commemoration in regard to World War II. The model was heroic sacrifice, and therefore active fighters were memorialized.13 For many people—​especially in Asian and African countries—​characterizing someone as a passive victim, especially a man, continues to be problematic, as it is considered disparaging. It is true that recent decades have witnessed a rapid increase in the ascription of victimhood—​probably in much of the world.14 But we should not ignore these other stories of heroic sacrifice. They remind us that death and suffering can be viewed through a wide variety of interpretive lenses, and that these are historically mutable.15 Who in Germany today would invoke the heroic sacrifice of those who fell in World War I? In Germany and, to a certain extent, in other Western European countries, those who died in that war have long since come to be viewed as its victims. Similarly, in Western Europe today, it is all but unthinkable not to see those murdered by the Nazis as victims of crimes against humanity, and no stigma attaches to this designation. This may seem evident to us today. But the fact of this shift in interpretation makes it clear that there is no interpretive automatism in the experience of violence and suffering. 11 Peter Hallama, Nationale Helden und jüdische Opfer: Tschechische Repräsentationen des Holocaust (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 168–​162. 12 See, e.g., Chaumont, Konkurrenz, 31f.; Michael Schwartz, “Victim Identities and the Dynamics of ‘Authentication’: Patterns of Shaping, Ranking, and Reassessment,” in Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War: Narratives from Europe and East Asia, edited by Randall Hansen, Achim Saupe, Andreas Wirsching et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021): 50–​78, 56; Carolyn Janice Dean, The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 88. 13 See the pieces in K. Erik Franzen and Martin Schulze Wessel (eds.), Opfernarrative: Konkurrenzen und Deutungskämpfe in Deutschland und im östlichen Europa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012). In the post-​Soviet period, in contrast, the situation in the successor states differed widely: See Julie Fedor, Markku Kangaspuro, Jussi Lassila et al. (eds.), War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017). 14 This development has so far been illuminated primarily in studies dealing with public memory of World War II and the problem of self-​victimization, or in considering transitional justice processes. See, e.g., Randall Hansen, Achim Saupe, Andreas Wirsching et al., Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War: Narratives from Europe and East Asia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021); Thorsten Bonacker, “Global Victimhood: On the Charisma of the Victim in Transitional Justice Processes,” World Political Science 9, no. 1 (2013): 97–​129; Timothy Williams, “Perpetrator-​ Victims: How Universal Victimhood in Cambodia Impacts Transitional Justice Measures,” in Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice. Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling, edited by Nanci Adler (Princeton, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 194–​212. 15 Caroline Arni and Marian Füssel (eds.), Leiden (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015).

6  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Historians who have dealt with the history of restitution know this. In the field of restitution for victims of Nazi persecution, for example, the set of officially recognized victim groups has been far from stable over the last five decades. For a long time, homosexuals and those who had been forcibly sterilized were not included at all, while Sinti and Roma were included only to a limited extent. None of the former Nazi persecutees who lived in countries with whom West Germany had no diplomatic relations during the Cold War were granted official recognition as victims.16 Since the mid-​1980s, international organizations, including the UN, have produced various definitions of “victim,” based on an extremely broad understanding of the term.17 Yet there is still no certainty regarding who has the right to compensation as a victim.18 In fact, heated debates on this issue have continued in post-​dictatorship and post-​authoritarian states. These include, for example, the disagreements in South Africa since the official end of the apartheid regime. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s definition of victims, which made access to reparations payments possible for victims of the regime, has been criticized as too narrow by many former dissidents since the mid-​1990s.19 They are still protesting today. This case well illustrates the ways in which ascriptions of victimhood have been, and continue to be, politically contentious. Who is officially recognized as a victim continues to be a question of power relations. It is quite possible that the structure of these power relations is currently undergoing fundamental change. The growing critique of the “culture of victimhood,” often with neoliberal overtones, creates at least the impression that the “victim boom” may have already subsided (in the United States, for example) or begun to subside, as in large parts of Western Europe.20 This would have cultural and social implications as well as concrete political consequences. This book is therefore conceived as an intervention in a process and a discussion that are both in urgent need of reflection. However, its focus is not on the current debate about victims. 16 Regula Ludi, Reparations for Nazi Victims on Postwar Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Constantin Goschler (ed.), Compensation in Practice: The Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” and the Legacy of Forced Labour during the Third Reich (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2017); Constantin Goschler, Schuld und Schulden: Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-​Verfolgte seit 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005); Ulrich Herbert, “Nicht entschädigungsfähig? Die Wiedergutmachungsansprüche der Ausländer,” in Wiedergutmachung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, edited by Ludolf Herbst and Constantin Goschler (Oldenbourg, 1989), 273–​302; Henning Borggräfe, Zwangsarbeiterentschädigung: Vom Streit um “vergessene Opfer” zur Selbstaussöhnung der Deutschen (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014). 17 UN General Assembly, Resolution 60/​147, Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law of 16 December 2005: Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law, A/​RES/​60/​147, https://​docume​nts.un.org/​ (accessed 13 January 2022). 18 See Erica Bouris, Complex Political Victims (Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, 2007), 8f. 19 Christopher J. Colvin, “Ambivalent Narrations: Pursuing the Political through Traumatic Storytelling,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 27, no. 1 (2004): 72–​89. 20 On the US, see, e.g., Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

Introduction: On the Historicity of Victimhood  7 It is high time for a historical analysis that asks why it is sometimes plausible, and even perhaps necessary, for individuals and groups to define themselves as victims. Only a long-​term historical perspective can show that this is not an unreasonable question. Numerous examples can be found in the nineteenth century alone—​and certainly before that—​of people in Europe and elsewhere suffering massive hardship, persecution, and atrocity without being described as victims of hardship or illegitimate force or violence. The large number of studies that illuminate the emergence of modern humanitarianism since the end of the eighteenth century may, at first glance, create a different impression. For example, from the mid-​eighteenth century on, abolitionists argued passionately and in growing numbers for the elimination of slavery. Nevertheless, the anti-​slavery movement cannot simply be interpreted as the starting point of a new humanitarian sensitivity to human suffering or an expression of growing disgust with violence and oppression.21 The movement was much too disparate for that, the interests involved too variable; above all, however, the abolitionists did not, as a rule, question the idea of the superiority of the white “race” and its supposed civilizing mission. The campaign against slavery and the colonial occupation of the African continent, which as we know included the use of various forms of violence, went practically hand in hand.22 Indeed, in the nineteenth century, European settlers appropriated territory and property in many parts of the non-​European world, not hesitating to displace and forcibly deport indigenous communities.23 Tens of thousands of Indians were deprived of the 21 See, e.g., Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–​1848 (London, New York, NY: Verso, 1988), 517–​550; Thomas Bender (ed.), The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 456. 22 See, e.g., Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, “Colonization and Humanitarianism.: Histories, Geographies and Biographies,” in Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance. Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-​Century British Empire, edited by Alan Lester and Fae Dussart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–​36; Jürgen Osterhammel, “ ‘The Great Work of Uplifting Mankind’: Zivilisierungsmission und Moderne,” in Zivilisierungsmissionen. Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Boris Barth and Jürgen Osterhammel (Constance: UVK-​Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005), 363–​426; Suzanne Miers and Richard L. Roberts (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Martin A. Klein, “Introduction: Modern European Expansion and Traditional Servitude in Africa and Asia,” in Breaking the Chains. Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia, edited by Martin A. Klein (Madison, London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 3–​36. On France’s process: Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–​1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 94–​106; Alice L. Conklin, “Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–​1914,” in Economics and Politics, edited by Sarah Stockwell (London, New York: Routledge, 2016), 393–​416. On the Italian process: Amalia Ribi Forclaz, Humanitarian Imperialism: The Politics of Anti-​Slavery Activism, 1880–​ 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On the English abolitionists: Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Antislavery Expedition to the River Niger 1841–​1842 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 23 Christopher Bayly, Die Geburt der modernen Welt: Eine Globalgeschichte 1780–​1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2004), 541–​563; Michael Schwartz, Ethnische “Säuberungen” in der Moderne: Globale Wechselwirkungen nationalistischer und rassistischer Gewaltpolitik im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013), 185–​233.

8  Victims. Perceptions of Harm ability to sustain themselves, and the settlers allowed thousands upon thousands to perish; at the time, their suffering did not trouble many Europeans.24 But even on the European continent, until the mid-​nineteenth century it was quite uncommon to describe people as victims of violence, disaster, or other hardship.25 An example is the famines in early nineteenth-​century Europe. At the time, the starving were considered shameful; their hunger was believed to be their own fault.26 Some interpreted starvation as divine punishment for sin, while others subscribed to the ideas of the economist Thomas Malthus, whose population theories provided an argument for not helping those unable to feed themselves and their families.27 These arguments were not silenced even by the devastating famine that befell Ireland between 1846 and 1852 as a result of crop failures, costing over a million lives—​a twelfth of the Irish population.28 There were certainly protests against the policies of the British government, which continued to import grain from Ireland for its own use, and there was no dearth of donations for the starving Irish, including considerable amounts from the Ottoman Empire.29 But the assumption that the starving had no moral responsibility for their situation—​that they were victims of conditions over which they had no control, and which might even be the fault of others—​only became prevalent to a greater degree in the last third of the nineteenth century.30 One reason was certainly the growing strength of the organized workers’ movement. But anyone expecting to find the familiar twentieth-​century idea of workers as victims of capitalism in the nineteenth century will be disappointed.31 For Karl Marx, “victim” in that sense was not part of 24 See Alastair Davidson, The Immutable Laws of Mankind: The Struggle For Universal Human Rights (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2012), 357–​363; Aram Mattioli, Verlorene Welten: Eine Geschichte der Indianer Nordamerikas 1700–​1910 (Stuttgart: Klett-​Cotta, 2017); Suzan Shown Harjo, Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2014). 25 This does not mean that there were no ascriptions of victimhood at all. In the context of the French Revolution, for example, there was occasional mention of “victimes de la révolution,” as well as “victimes de la justice.” See Harriet Rudolph, “Geschichte(n) der Sieger? Historische Opferforschung und ihr epochenübergreifendes Erkenntnispotential,” in Opfer. Dynamiken der Viktimisierung vom 17. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, edited by Harriet Rudolph and Isabella von Treskow (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020), 21–​40, 26f. 26 James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 27 Ibid., 3f., 10–​13. 28 Charlotte Boyce, “Representing the ‘Hungry Forties’ in Image and Verse: The Politics of Hunger in Early-​Victorian Illustrated Periodicals,” Victorian Literature and Culture 40, no. 2 (2012): 421–​ 449; Christine Kinealy, The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion (London: Macmillan Education UK, 2002). 29 Semih Çelik, “Between History of Humanitarianism and Humanitarianization of History: A Discussion on Ottoman Help for the Victims of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–​1852,” Werkstatt Geschichte 68 (2014): 13–​27; Christine Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: The Kindness of Strangers (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013). 30 Vernon, Hunger, 17–​40. 31 The idea that workers were victims of capitalism was found, for example, during the revolution of 1918–​19. See Gerhard Engel, Bärbel Holtz, Gaby Huch et al. (eds.), Groß-​Berliner Arbeiter-​ und Soldatenräte in der Revolution 1918/​19: Dokumente der Vollversammlungen und des Vollzugsrates. Vom 1. Reichsrätekongreß bis zum Generalstreikbeschluß am 3. März 1919 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 142.

Introduction: On the Historicity of Victimhood  9 the systematic language of struggle.32 The workers, the proletariat, were instead called upon to make sacrifices.33 That was revolutionary pathos, and it could be heard from communists and socialists until well into the twentieth century.34 In this view, capitalism and finance capital might indeed turn workers into victims, but these workers were at the same time expected to make active sacrifices for the class struggle.35 Finally, there is the broad arena of war. The way we speak of people who have lost their lives in wartime has also changed radically over the past two hundred years. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we find little reference to soldiers or even civilians as victims of war, although enormous numbers of people were harmed and killed in conflict. This may seem surprising. Many people are still aware of the considerable suffering connected with the French revolutionary wars and the subsequent Napoleonic wars from 1792 to 1815. There exists a wealth of scholarly and popular portrayals of these wars and specific battles, in which a total of 4 million soldiers lost their lives.36 Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example, has gone through many editions and been made into a number of movies since its publication in 1869. Francisco de Goya’s etchings from the cycle “Disasters of War,” stemming primarily from the period of the Spanish war of independence against Napoleon (though they did not appear until 1863), are also well known. But believing that these depictions of war represent an obvious contemporary desire to draw attention to war’s victims—​with critical intent—​would be imposing our own ideas of how the effects of war on human beings should be interpreted. These have little to do with the nineteenth-​century’s point of view. No doubt, war was horrible even to Tolstoy. But from his point of view, it was also unavoidable, “a periodically recurring plague” that could not be influenced even by great military strategists.37 War and Peace can be read as a critique of Napoleon and his boundless hubris.38 Written after Russia’s loss in the Crimean War, the book also aimed to remind

32 I thank Lucien Duc, whose research in this as-​yet unstudied field has produced important insights. 33 In German, the word “Opfer” holds two different meanings: the act of sacrifice or self-​sacrifice, and the experience of violence for which one is not oneself responsible. English has two words for this, sacrifice and victim; French uses sacrifice and victime. 34 This is shown impressively, for example, in the funeral march “Undying Sacrifice,” a song written after the Russian Revolution and translated during World War I into German and other languages, which became one of the best-​known songs of the workers’ movement. The song laments the dead who fell in the struggle for communism, but turns sorrow and pain into the defiant commitment not to allow their “undying sacrifice” to be forgotten even after the victory of communism. 35 Ernst Hanisch, Der große Illusionist: Otto Bauer (1881–​1938) (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011), 234ff. 36 See, e.g., Andreas Platthaus, 1813: Die Völkerschlacht und das Ende der alten Welt (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2013); Johannes Willms, Waterloo: Napoleons letzte Schlacht (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2015); Adam Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleons Feldzug in Russland (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012). 37 Olaf Rose, Carl von Clausewitz: Wirkungsgeschichte seines Werkes in Rußland und der Sowjetunion 1836–​1991 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), 80. 38 Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj, Krieg und Frieden, vol. 1 (Munich: Hanser, 2010), 510, 513; ibid., vol. 2, 49, 351–​362, 477–​481.

10  Victims. Perceptions of Harm the defeated nation of its successes in the wars against Napoleon.39 But Tolstoy’s epic did not fundamentally call war into question. This was not even true of those who strove in the nineteenth century to “civilize” war through international law.40 Tolstoy did write about “victims,” but only in the context of the painful yet necessary sacrifices his various protagonists had to make in the war.41 Goya’s scenes of war are no less complex, if we consider his etchings in the concrete historical and art-​historical context in which they were created. The horrific wartime scenes that Goya portrayed with great intensity are not simply about the fate of a civilian population passively and innocently subjected to the horrors of war. His motif was a very specific situation. The battle against the Napoleonic invaders did not involve regular armies facing each other; instead, many Spaniards followed the call to take up arms and confront the Napoleonic troops as partisans. Goya, who had not himself been present on the field of battle, was literally picturing the horrors of a war that went beyond conventional warfare. Art historians have noted that his depiction of partisans suggests an ambivalent attitude toward these figures, alternating between fascination and fear.42 In any case, however, the partisans were an attractive motif to Goya from a purely artistic point of view. They helped him escape the established artistic conventions to which he was forced to submit as a commissioned artist and official court painter. In this sense, “Disasters of War” was primarily an act through which Goya was able to win for himself the “freedom of irregularity.”43 Goya’s print cycle and Tolstoy’s War and Peace illustrate how limited it would be to see in representations of suffering merely a reference to innocent, passive victims. Our contemporary understanding of victimhood cannot just be transferred to other epochs or distant geographic contexts. It can even be problematic to describe people suffering or killed in earlier centuries simply as “victims of violence.” This is not merely a question of linguistic formulations. It addresses the fact that speaking of human beings as victims of war and violence is connected to specific, historically mutable ideas of the ways in which people were involved in violence, what the experience of violence meant for men, women, and children and how it affected them, and how violence influenced their emotions and perhaps also their later behavior. Violence has no timeless anthropological meaning; it must be historicized, along with the effects on people’s lives that we attribute to it. This includes 39 See German Werth, Der Krimkrieg: Geburtsstunde der Weltmacht Rußland (Erlangen: Straube, 1989), 310; Frank Becker, Bilder von Krieg und Nation: Die Einigungskriege in der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit Deutschlands 1864–​1913 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), 69. 40 See Chapter 2 for details. 41 This is especially clear in the English translation, which contains the term “victim” (of something) in only four places, where it is used to characterized inferiority. The concept of “sacrifice” (for something), in contrast, is used frequently. 42 See Godehard Janzing, “Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Graphik: Krieg als Capricho bei Francisco de Goya,” in Schlachtfelder. Codierung von Gewalt im medialen Wandel, edited by Steffen Martus, Marina Münkler, and Werner Röcke (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003), 51–​65. 43 Ibid., 60.

Introduction: On the Historicity of Victimhood  11 ascribing to someone the status of a victim of violence. This “victim” is a figure that has become historical and has a historical “location.” Although the figure of the victim may be found in various contexts since the Enlightenment,44 this location lies mainly in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. This book will explore the history of this figure and its emergence, in order to determine how the status of victim took on such a widespread and plausible interpretation. However, ascriptions of victimhood take place today in such varied contexts that it is necessary to establish a thematic focus. Here it is the field of war—​though with the assumption that the figure of the victim of war can serve as an example of the functions and perceptions of victimhood more generally in the modern age. Nevertheless, my attempt at an explanation must necessarily be more modest; this cannot be a comprehensive history of victimhood. From a conceptual perspective, my approach is less modest. I start with the assumption that the disastrous world wars of the twentieth century are not enough, on their own, to explain why ascriptions of victimhood—​even if we look only at war—​had increased to such an extent by the turn of the century. The historian Dieter Langewische has shown, on the basis of statistical data on war from all epochs and around the world, that there has been no increase in wartime violence, if one “measures this against the share of the population that takes part in war and is killed or wounded in it.”45 It will become clear in Chapter 2 that this data is not entirely unproblematic. But even if we accept estimates, they provide a strong argument for the fact that particular attention to people who have suffered violence cannot be explained by the numbers of dead and wounded alone. I therefore argue that the phenomenon of increasing ascriptions of victimhood, which today refer no longer only to the dead, but also to the living, should be reconsidered as a history of changing perceptions. To reconstruct this, the following study will consider an extended period of time, from the eighteenth century to the present. The geographic focus is Europe—​without presuming to draw conclusions on how suffering and death are perceived and interpreted in other regions of the world. In other words, the issue is the genealogy of the passive victim of war, as it is spoken of in Europe. This means uncovering some of the essential conditions for historical processes that engendered the figure and the specific perception of the victim from the second half of the nineteenth century. This perspective is radically different from that of many other studies of victims of war and violence, which generally revolve around political debates about coming to terms with the past or

44 See Harriet Rudolph and Isabella von Treskow (eds.), Opfer: Dynamiken der Viktimisierung vom 17. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020); Fabian Klose, In the Cause of Humanity: A History of Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 45 Dieter Langewiesche, “Eskalierte Kriegsgewalt im Laufe der Geschichte?,” in Moderne Zeiten? Krieg, Revolution und Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Jörg Baberowski (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 12–​36, 15.

12  Victims. Perceptions of Harm the phenomenon of memory. My perspective begins earlier, by inquiring into the preconditions for the commemoration of people as victims and the debates about the past—​without telling a linear story. The category of “knowledge” plays an important role here. One of my central theses is that the current attention to victims of violence, as well as the self-​ definition as victim, were and are linked to the production, distribution, and establishment of knowledge, especially legal and medical knowledge. Evidence of this is provided by studies in a variety of fields: in the history of “victimology,” for example, originally a branch of criminology that emerged after 1945 and has since repeatedly changed the concept of the “crime victim”;46 and on the concept of psychic trauma, which since the 1970s has considerably altered perceptions of suffering and contributed greatly to destigmatizing the ascription of victimhood to the living and survivors.47 Taking the category of “knowledge” seriously in this way does have consequences. “Knowledge” is not static; it always has a history, as do the bodies and psyches that engender it and from which it arises. If one follows this argument, one departs from a timeless, essentialist understanding of the “victim.” This is not to deny at all that people experience pain when their bodies or psyches are harmed. It does mean that physical and emotional suffering can be analyzed in differing interpretive contexts—​contexts that have changed historically. I therefore insist in this book on the historicity of victimhood.48 In this sense, I conceive of the figure of the victim logically as the result of historically mutable ascriptions, by the people affected themselves and by others, that relate in turn to specific knowledge. This makes it possible to place the geographic focus on Europe without being Eurocentric. However, this book will also illuminate the Eurocentric character of the process of determining who was a victim. The next four chapters revolve around four paradigmatic shifts that were necessary for a specific interpretative understanding to emerge in the field of war, which in turn engendered the perception of victimhood by victims themselves and by others. Chapter 2 begins with the aspirations and practices of recording, documenting, and identifying that developed at the end of the eighteenth century in the civil service, law, and medicine. Chapter 3 addresses the efforts to “civilize” war that began in the second half of the nineteenth century, while Chapter 4 is devoted to the expansion and differentiation of public benefits that began with World War I. Finally, Chapter 5 deals with the effects of the concept of trauma since the last third of the twentieth century, which have been far-​reaching and ongoing. It 46 See David von Mayenburg, “ ‘Geborene Opfer’: Bausteine für eine Geschichte der Viktimologie—​ Das Beispiel Hans von Hentig,” Rechtsgeschichte 14 (2009): 122–​147. 47 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma; Bonacker, “Global Victimhood”; Gatti, “mundo de víctimas,” 10f., also assumes that changing classifications and perceptions of “suffering” play an important role in expanding the ascription of victimhood (10f.). 48 See also Gatti, “mundo de víctimas.”

Introduction: On the Historicity of Victimhood  13 has affected our idea of what burdens human beings are capable of bearing and changed our views of what violence actually means and what it includes. All of these historical stages are crucial to the history of perceptions of victimhood. However, this history is not linear and cannot be told purely as a history of progress. It is true that the history of victimhood is linked to humanitarian intentions; but it was, and is, just as much a history of the legitimation of violence, and it is just as closely related, in complex ways, to the history of power. The figure of the passive victim is therefore ambivalent. My objective is to make this visible. The book thus contributes to historical reflection on a phenomenon whose future is currently being renegotiated.

2

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–​1914) Introduction Stored in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva is a file with the call number “C G1 A 38-​05,” one of an enormous number of files on World War I and the immediate postwar period.1 The combination of letters and numbers represents a system—​a structure in the archive itself, but also an attempt to systematize a historical event: World War I. And yet, file C G1 A 38-​05 itself is a loose collection of fragments from the years 1915 to 1919. They include single, largely unrelated letters from state and private institutions in France, Great Britain, and Germany concerning lists of dead soldiers and lists and photos of graves, either requested or already sent from Western or Eastern Europe. In these files, one occasionally runs across newspaper articles—​reports on funerals with honor, newly opened cemeteries for British, American, French, and German soldiers, and war memorials for soldiers from New Zealand and Australia who lost their lives on the Western Front. There are also two photo albums with carefully mounted photographs of soldiers’ graves, German in one album, English in the other. Some of these graves are clearly still spread across the countryside; others are located in cemeteries and richly ornamented. Drawings are glued between the pages—​plans of cemeteries, with each grave neatly noted and numbered. A single, slightly yellowed card is included (see Figure 2.1). At some point, someone traced part of the front between German and French troops; small crosses on it indicate graves, most of them numbered. A few documents farther on, an article from early 1919 sticks out. It pictures a model of a folding frame made of cardboard; the accompanying text tells us that such frames would be sent in the future to all American families who had lost a relative fighting on the Western Front. On the left inner side, the name, rank, and deployment of the deceased would be entered, and on the right, a photo of the grave would be attached. The photos were to be taken by the American Red Cross, which had been asked by the US War Department to take pictures of every identifiable grave of a US soldier killed in France. According to the article, the photographic 1 Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, C G1 A 38-​05. The ICRC archival material for World War I contains around sixty linear meters.

Victims. Svenja Goltermann, Oxford University Press. © Svenja Goltermann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192897725.003.0002

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  15

Figure 2.1  Map of soldiers’ graves of World War Ia aArchives of the ICRC, C G1 A 38-​05, II, album photographique.

work was now going more quickly, and some 7,000 photographs could be expected each month. Letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, and cards were sorted by the archive in an attempt to make order. In fact, the thematic overlap is not hard to discern: its subject is the soldier who died abroad, his gravesite, and the search for it. Nevertheless, these documents, rarely connected with one another themselves, are only scattered pieces of a machinery of information that once existed. They suggest considerable efforts made by various parties in various countries during World War I to identify soldiers killed in action, find their graves, rebury them in cemeteries, and inform their families of the exact locations of these distant final resting places. They point to the enormous efforts made to identify, as far as possible, every single dead person (or his remains). During World War I, this theoretically involved more than 9 million soldiers, the vast majority of whom died on the European continent.2 The documents in file C G1 A 38-​05 are therefore primarily the remnants of a gigantic attempt, even during the war but mainly afterwards, to bring order to this millionfold carnage. They point to one thing in particular: the unimaginable chaos of death. Comprehensive electronic databases exist today, generally set up by war graves organizations, that make it possible for private persons to search directly for war 2 Rüdiger Overmans, “Kriegsverluste,” in Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, edited by Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014), 663–​666, 663.

16  Victims. Perceptions of Harm dead (mainly soldiers) on the internet and to find the exact locations of their graves or of memorials that bear their names.3 The number of entries is already in the millions: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission gives a figure of more than 1.7 million entries for both world wars, while the German War Graves Commission estimates over 4.7 million. And yet the concrete work of searching, exhuming, and identifying is not yet complete, especially in Eastern Europe. The German Commission alone has identified and reburied more than 850,000 war dead in the region since 1991.4 The Cold War, which made the necessary bilateral treaties much more difficult, had to end first. These activities are part of the extensive work of remembrance carried out by war graves organizations at the behest of their governments. But they also reflect the belief that a state must be able to account for the whereabouts of its soldiers and inform their families of their deaths. There is consensus on this at the international level, at least theoretically. The UN General Assembly acknowledged as much when it passed Resolution 3220, noting that the “desire to know the fate of loved ones lost in armed conflicts is a basic human need.”5 In 1977, this was formulated even more clearly in Article 32 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which no longer spoke of a “desire,” but emphasized a “right of families to know the fate of their relatives.”6 This “right,” which at the time referred only to information as to the whereabouts of soldiers in international conflicts, has since been expanded: Under the heading of the “right to truth,” it has for some years now also extended to whether the missing or dead—​including civilians—​were “victims” of war crimes or crimes against humanity.7 These claims and norms are a relatively recent phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, the situation in Europe and the United States was very different. During the American Civil War, the bodies of fallen soldiers were often left lying on the field of battle, plundered by scavengers and left to the animals; others disappeared 3 Typical examples are the databases of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (https://​www. cwgc.org/​who-​we-​are/​, accessed 21 January 2022), the Volksbund deutscher Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. (https://​www.volksb​und.de/​erinn​ern-​geden​ken/​graeb​ersu​che-​onl​ine, accessed 21 January 2022), the Projekts Les sépultures de guerre of the French Ministry of Defense (http://​www.memoi​rede​shom​mes. sga.defe​nse.gouv.fr/​fr/​arti​cle.php?larub=​44, accessed 21 January 2022), and the Dutch Oorlogsgraven Stichting (https://​oor​logs​grav​enst​icht​ing.nl/​, accessed 21 January 2022). 4 Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V.—​Eine Kurzdarstellung, https://​www.volksb​und. de/​volksb​und.html, accessed 21 January 2022. 5 UN General Assembly, Resolution 3220 (XXIX), Assistance and Co-​Operation in Accounting for Persons who are Missing or Dead in Armed Conflict, 6. 11. 1974, A/​RES/​3220 (XXIX), https://​docume​ nts.un.org/​, accessed 21 January 2022. 6 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), Geneva 8 June 1977, https://​www.ohchr.org/​en/​ inst​rume​nts-​mec​hani​sms/​inst​rume​nts/​proto​col-​add​itio​nal-​gen​eva-​conv​enti​ons-​12-​aug​ust-​1949-​ and-​0, accessed 4 November 2022. 7 UN General Assembly, Resolution 68/​165, Right to the Truth, 18.12.2013, A/​RES/​68/​165, https://​ docume​nts.un.org/​, accessed 21 January 2022. On the emergence and the extent of this norm, see Melanie Klinkner and Howard Davis, The Right to the Truth in International Law: Victims’ Rights in Human Rights and International Criminal Law (London: Routledge, 2020).

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  17 into hurriedly dug, anonymous mass graves.8 The same was true of the wars fought by Europeans on their own and other continents until well into the second half of the nineteenth century.9 A fundamental change in this situation was first demonstrated in the context of World War I by representations of death that appeared either for the first time or in dimensions far greater than in the past. These took the form of enormous soldiers’ cemeteries, sometimes including thousands of individual graves identified by name (though excluding soldiers from the colonies);10 monuments with long engraved lists of names of soldiers whose remains could not be identified; and finally, large national memorials—​tombs of “unknown soldiers” erected in London, Paris, Belgium, the US, Italy, Greece, Austria, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia.11 This clearly illustrates the interests of the respective governments in publicly expressing their desire to identify each corpse, so as to bury every single dead soldier with a name and thereby recognize him as a person. This interest did not begin with World War I, however. Its history begins earlier, going back in part to the late eighteenth century. It is a complex history of the production and dissemination of knowledge around the development of practices for recording, documenting, and identifying the war dead. In the nineteenth century, this focused only on dead soldiers,12 and these practices were driven by various actors with very disparate interests and needs. They included the state and the bureaucracy, doctors and social reformist philanthropists, as well as the families of soldiers who were serving. The history of these practices is woven into a variety of contexts; they are part of a history of the emerging legally based welfare state, but also of bureaucratization, democratization, and humanitarianism, as well as the 8 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2009). 9 Carina Kinz, Vergessene Opfer? Kasseler Skelettfunde und die Geschichte der napoleonischen Kriege (Kassel: Kassel University Press GmbH, 2016), 26–​ 29; Ute Planert, Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg: Frankreichs Kriege und der deutsche Süden. Alltag—​Wahrnehmung—​Deutung 1792–​ 1841 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 624. Source documents from that period show that battlefields provided a rich yield for dealers searching for bones to sell in England and other countries. Processed into bone meal, they were an important source of agricultural fertilizer until the mid-​nineteenth century. See, e.g., Otto Ule, “Die Abfälle in der Industrie,” Die Natur: Zeitung zur Verbreitung naturwissenschaftlicher Kenntniß und Naturanschauung für Leser aller Stände, 14 (1865), 209–​211, 211. See also Nigel C. Hunt, Landscapes of Trauma: The Psychology of the Battlefield (London: Routledge, 2020), 117. 10 Michèle Barrett, “Subalterns at War: First World War Colonial Forces and the Politics of the Imperials War Graves Commission,” Interventions 9, no. 3 (2007): 451–​474. 11 K. S. Inglis, “Entombing Unknown Soldiers: From London, Paris to Baghdad,” History and Memory 5, no. 2 (1993): 7–​31. 12 Another attempt to illuminate the history of the “right to truth” is the collection by José Brunner and Daniel Stahl (eds.), Recht auf Wahrheit: Zur Genese eines neuen Menschenrechts (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016). The chapters are limited to the twentieth century. Efforts to systematically record civilians who had “disappeared” or been murdered in the context of wars actually followed much later, and on an international level only in connection with WWII. See Bernd J. Zimmer, International Tracing Service Arolsen: Von der Vermisstensuche zur Haftbescheinigung. Die Organisationsgeschichte eines “ungewollten Kindes” während der Besatzungszeit (Bad Arolsen: Waldeckischer Geschichtsverein, 2011).

18  Victims. Perceptions of Harm history of death. These practices of recording, documenting, and identifying, however, did not automatically produce an awareness that dead soldiers were victims of war. During the “long” nineteenth century, speaking about their sacrifice took the fore. Nevertheless, these practices were central to the spread of victim discourse, with which we are still confronted to this day.

State Pragmatism and Bureaucratic Recording of the Dead We cannot precisely reconstruct when the states of Europe developed an interest in recording the numbers of their war dead. In Italy, England, and France, there is evidence of this in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, at the time, rulers limited themselves to counting dead noblemen, in order to commend them for their chivalrous service in battle. States long found a precise count of all war dead to be of lesser importance.13 This is less surprising than it may at first seem. After all, even a phenomenon as unremarkable as interest in numbers has a history, as studies of the emergence of statistics and a numbers-​oriented understanding of facts has shown.14 Counting is not a “natural” process for comprehending reality, not even when it involves counting people. We know of some individual, local tallying of the dead related to specific situations—​such as monitoring plague epidemics15—​and sometimes of the living in the early modern period. This generally happened in cities, starting in the fifteenth century.16 But although cities already had the administrative power to carry out frequent and complete tallies of their inhabitants at the beginning of the modern era, they generally did not do so until the eighteenth century. The idea that all the residents of a city, let alone a state, could be conceived of as a unit and counted, and the numbers “processed,” without considering their class or sex developed only gradually in early modern Europe.17 An important reason for this is that, in the seventeenth century, numbers came to be seen as “facts” that various actors, including the state, viewed as more than just unconnected individual observations. In seventeenth-​century England, this process was impelled by the emergence of political arithmetic; in Sweden, the German states, and France, various statistical processes developed and were more 13 John Gagné, “Counting the Dead: Traditions of Enumeration and the Italian Wars,” Renaissance Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2014): 791–​840. 14 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Alain Desrosières, Die Politik der großen Zahlen: Eine Geschichte der statistischen Denkweise (Berlin: Springer, 2005), 7–​18. 15 Gagné, “Counting the Dead,” 810. 16 Justus Nipperdey, Die Erfindung der Bevölkerungspolitik: Staat, politische Theorie und Population in der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 140f. 17 Lars Behrisch, “Zu viele Informationen! Die Aggregierung von Wissen in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Information in der Frühen Neuzeit. Status, Bestände, Strategien, edited by Arndt Brendecke, Markus Friedrich, and Susanne Friedrich (Berlin: Lit, 2008), 455–​473, 463.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  19 widely applied. The early modern state, with its expanding institutions of government and administration, increasingly made use of this tool in order to more precisely record and control a newly emerging object—​the “population” of its own political space. By the start of the nineteenth century, quantification and modern statistics had become established in Europe as a means of describing and monitoring the population. From then on, numbers were taken as the basis for political decision-​making.18 In the course of the century, confidence in statistical thinking also fostered the much farther-​reaching belief that statistics were “experience expressed in exact numbers.”19 The increasing interest in numbers, which made various groups of experts—​in economics and healthcare, for example—​important to the state, included the recording of deaths, though generally only if it provided evidence of health risks to the living. The state’s interest in numbers was oriented toward the living and their importance as a state resource.20 The majority of war dead did not fall into this category—​certainly not dead soldiers, who, in the early modern estate-​based society, did not even possess value to the state as a symbolic resource. Early modern armies consisted primarily of mercenaries recruited from outside their own countries. As long as the financial means were available, losses could be offset relatively easily. The connection between actual population size and military strength was not close enough to make it necessary to pay attention to an army’s mortality rate.21 Nothing suggests that this situation changed as a result of conscription itself, first introduced by France in 1793, Prussia in 1803, and Bavaria in 1805 in the context of their wars of revolution and liberation. The “nation under arms” that would often be invoked later was not the starting point for an increased state interest in counting dead soldiers. Conscription did promote an interest in quantification, but at first only in order to determine the number of people fit for military service out of the total population. The emergence of military statistics in the first half of the nineteenth century should be viewed in this context.22 Otherwise, for the states, conscription led primarily to a comfortable recruitment potential that exceeded the army’s actual needs. Therefore, in France and the German states, wealthy citizens could buy their own or their sons’ freedom from conscription.23 For the same 18 On the situation in Germany and France, see Lars Behrisch, Die Berechnung der Glückseligkeit: Statistik und Politik in Deutschland und Frankreich im späten Ancien Régime (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2016). On the situation in Great Britain, see Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 370–​328. 19 Adolf Wernher, Die Bestattung der Toten: In Bezug auf Hygiene, geschichtliche Entwicklung und gesetzliche Bestimmungen (Hamburg: Severus, 2010) (first pub. Gießen 1880), 111. 20 Jörg Vögele, “Amtliche Statistik zwischen Staat und Wissenschaft im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert,” in Verwaltete Gesundheit. Konzepte der Gesundheitsberichterstattung in der Diskussion, edited by Joseph Kuhn and Jan Böcken (Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse, 2009), 35–​54. 21 Heinrich Hartmann, The Body Populace: Military Statistics and Demography in Europe before the First World War (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), 1f. 22 Ibid., 6ff. 23 On Prussia: Heinz Stübig, “Die Wehrverfassung Preußens in der Reformzeit: Wehrpflicht im Spannungsfeld von Restauration und Revolution 1815–​1860,” in Die Wehrpflicht: Entstehung,

20  Victims. Perceptions of Harm reason, the names of soldiers who did not return from battle or died of disease were simply stricken from the lists of troops. Only those who remained were counted. Their number was important in determining the size of the losses that had to be offset. Nevertheless, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the governments of some Western European countries began to show growing interest in obtaining exact data on dead soldiers. This had nothing to do with concern for human life, nor was it due to a humanitarian desire to inform soldiers’ families directly of their deaths. These sorts of moral considerations were not relevant to governments until well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The reason was a different one: in the context of revolutions and wars of liberation, governments found it necessary to intervene to deal with the material and symbolic consequences of war, specifically through changes in inheritance laws, relief payments to survivors, and the practice of public commemoration. In Europe this was not yet a general development, but involved situational measures limited to specific countries, which then recurred in various forms in other countries throughout the nineteenth century. It is clear, however, that the bureaucracy of the developing administrative state now had to record the names of deceased soldiers in more reliable fashion.24 In the case of Great Britain, we know the exact date when this point was reached. In 1797, commanding officers were ordered to relay the names of all war dead to the Secretary of State for War, as the government found it necessary to improve benefits for the survivors of its sailors and soldiers. The growing financial burden on local governments played a role, a result of the fact that many families had been impoverished by the war. More important, however, was the fact that Great Britain had an unprecedented need for recruits in the war against France, which it was unable to meet; hundreds of thousands more soldiers were required.25 Given the miserable conditions in the army and navy at the time, far too few men were willing to serve for life. In earlier times, the government had offset such deficits with the help of impressment. But since civil rights were increasingly the focus of public debate, and their social status had shifted, this method had become problematic. Under these conditions, the government could only solve its problem by creating new incentives. Terms of service were shortened and pay improved. Above all, the state

Erscheinungsformen und politisch-​militärische Wirkung, edited by Roland Förster (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994), 39–​54, 40f., and Werner Benecke, Militär, Reform und Gesellschaft im Zarenreich: Die Wehrpflicht in Russland 1874–​1914 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 26f. On Russia, see ibid., 30f. 24 Gilpin Faust, Republic of Suffering, 102ff. 25 Between Great Britain’s entry into the Coalition War against France in 1793 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Great Britain needed to recruit approximately an additional 1 million men into the army (around 750,000) and navy (around 240,000). See Patricia Y. C. E. Lin, “Citizenship, Military Families, and the Creation of a New Definition of ‘Deserving Poor’ in Britain, 1793–​1815,” Social Politics 7, no. 1 (2000): 5–​46, 9.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  21 took measures to provide the families of soldiers and sailors with better material support during their absence or in case of their death.26 Other Western and Central European states, such as France, Prussia, Wurttemberg, and Baden, began to focus more strongly on survivor benefits. They improved the rudimentary support payments for families of officers and extended these to some degree to survivors of ordinary soldiers.27 France certainly went farthest, but both the categories of beneficiaries and the amounts of benefits changed frequently. In 1803, for example, the French government decided that pensions would be paid in future only to widows whose husbands had either fallen in battle or died within six months of being wounded. Since most soldiers died of disease, the majority of survivors were no longer entitled.28 Other countries generally only paid a one-​time benefit, even to surviving dependents of officers. Prussia, for example, only granted so-​called grace pay (Gnadengehalt), which meant the family of the dead man could receive his wages for a month after his decease. In Baden, an analogous payment that continued for three months was aptly named a “death quarter” (Sterbequartal). Support payments were also available for the survivors of “ordinary” soldiers, but they were calculated based on their much lower wages.29 This state intervention in military support and welfare brought only minor relief to most survivors. Nevertheless, for many of them it marked the first time they were able to petition for support at all. Still, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the state had taken no more than these first minor steps to protect widows and orphans of deceased soldiers from existential misery. More than a hundred years had to pass before most European countries would place support for their soldiers’

26 Patricia Y. C. E. Lin, “Caring for the Nation’s Families: British Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families and the State, 1793–​1815,” in Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–​1820, edited by Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann, and Jane Rendall (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009), 99–​117, 107f. Jennine Hurl-​Eamon, Marriage and the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century: “The Girl I Left Behind Me” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), shows that this demand for increased assistance to families of “ordinary” soldiers had been raised with great urgency for a number of decades, in part by wives. 27 Thomas Cardoza, Intrepid Women: Cantinères and Vivandières of the French Army (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Isser Woloch, The French Veteran from the Revolution to the Restoration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Planert, Mythos, 324, 622. See also Mary Elizabeth Ailes, “Wars, Widows, and State Formation in 17th-​Century Sweden,” Scandinavian Journal of History 31, no. 1 (2006): 17–​34; Verena Pawlowsky and Harald Wendelin, Die Wunden des Staates: Kriegsopfer und Sozialstaat in Österreich 1914–​1938 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015), 52–​ 61; Pierluigi Pironti, Kriegsopfer und Staat: Sozialpolitik für Invaliden, Witwen und Waisen des Ersten Weltkriegs in Deutschland und Italien (1914–​1924) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015), 68–​95; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, “Social Misfits: Veterans and Soldiers? Families in Servile Russia,” Journal of Military History 59, no. 2 (1995): 215–​235. 28 Cardoza, Intrepid Women, 85f. 29 W. Berlin (ed.), Das Pensions-​Wesen im Königreich Preußen: Sammlung der Reglements und Verordnungen über die Pensionirung der Officiere und der übrigen Militair-​Personen vom Feldwebel abwärts sowie der unmittelbaren und mittelbaren Staatsbeamten (Magdeburg: Baensch, 1857), 136f; Stefan Andreas Moebus, “Die soziale Versorgung im badischen Heerwesen und ihre Politik 1771 bis 1848/​ 53: Soziale Verpflichtung oder staatspolitisches Kalkül?” (PhD, Heidelberg University, 2011), 164f.

22  Victims. Perceptions of Harm survivors on a more or less solid footing. Substantial change occurred, essentially, only in the context of World War I. This development was preceded by crucial changes. The central question throughout the nineteenth century was whether those nominally entitled to benefits were even likely to find out that their husbands, sons, brothers, or fathers serving in the army or navy had died in some distant place. This is easily forgotten, given the fact that we now have plausible figures for the dead in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Great Britain alone lost some 315,000 soldiers and sailors in twenty-​two years of war.30 More than 900,000 men in the French army are thought to have lost their lives.31 It is believed that at least another 3.5 million dead soldiers were split among the other countries that took part in that war. But the largest portion of these men simply counted as “missing.” No one saw their bodies or officially certified their deaths.32 Above all, however, there was a dearth of institutionalized systems that would have ensured the conveyance of death notices to families. In Russia, no such systems seem to have existed at all,33 and the situation was not much better in Western and Central Europe. Prussia at least provided for temporarily posting the names of fallen soldiers in cities and towns. Strictly speaking, this was nothing more than an administrative act. It served the requirement that, following the officially confirmed death of a soldier, the family should be able to claim their right to a one-​time payment of grace pay within four weeks.34 However, it cannot be determined with even approximate certainty how many of the names of dead soldiers actually found their way to the relevant authorities. Nevertheless, by 1800, the machinery for collecting information about dead soldiers was beginning to gear up in a number of countries. Where these measures were expanded, as in Great Britain, they generated a need for additional data. The British government at first only ordered their officers to relay the names of the dead to the War Ministry. When the government introduced a new procedure twelve years later, in 1809, that actually gave survivors the opportunity to petition to have their deceased relatives’ property transferred to them, the authorities needed more comprehensive information. Officers were therefore required to inform the 30 Lin, “Citizenship, Military Families,” 9f. 31 David Gates, The Napoleonic Wars 1803–​1815 (London: Arnold, 1997), 272. On detailed quantitative listings of the dead in various wars, see Digby George Smith, The Greenhill Napoleonic Wars Data Book: Actions and Losses in Personnel, Colours, Standards and Artillery, 1792–​1815 (London: Greenhill Books, 1998). 32 There were 530,000 missing in the French army following the Napoleonic Wars. See Gregory Fremont-​Barnes, The Encyclopedia of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: A Political, Social, and Military History (Santa Barbara: ABC-​Clio, 2006), 577f, and Jacques Houdaille, “Pertes de l’Armée de Terre sous le Premier Empire, d’après les Registres Matricules,” Population 27, no. 1 (1972): 27–​50. On the problem of the missing in general, see Smith, Greenhill Napoleonic Wars Data Book, 11–​13, which also records the numbers of missing in specific battles. 33 Kimerling Wirtschafter, “Social Misfits,” 228. 34 See, e.g., Anon, “Regulativ über die Gewährung des Gnadengehalts an die Hinterbliebenen verstorbener Offiziere und Militärbeamter (28. 04. 1843),” Allgemeine Militär-​Zeitung, 2 April 1844, 313–​316.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  23 authorities of the extent of the soldiers’ debts and assets; in addition, they were to report the exact circumstances of the death and the name of the person the soldier had provided as next of kin.35 Military hospitals faced similar requirements; in the course of the nineteenth century, they became the most important sources of information on soldiers’ whereabouts. Official directives from the time of the Coalition Wars initiated this development, requiring military hospitals to keep much more extensive information on the deceased than had heretofore been the norm in death registers. Until that time, these had only been the basis for calculating the so-​called military hospital economy and a means to check on the work of field surgeons.36 Now, however, the new need for information in order to regulate inheritances expanded the epistemic status of these lists, while also requiring more comprehensive and different data about the dead. The new rules included precise instructions, from full name and place of birth, last rank, and the exact circumstances of death to information on the possessions the deceased had had upon arriving at the hospital and had perhaps taken to his grave. All this was to be recorded on a death certificate, “written on half a sheet.” The use of a printed form that was supplied to the military hospital was intended to ensure that “complete equality exists and paperwork is avoided.”37 Legibility and clarity, as well as selected information, were necessary in order for the authorities to be able to process the data efficiently. In other words, the needs of the institution were crucial in determining which information on dead soldiers was considered significant and worth passing on. These government measures initiated in the area of survivor benefits, which involved inheritance and property regulations and lent additional urgency to establishing marital status, were not without influence on the ways in which information about dead soldiers was obtained. However, the new decrees and forms alone were not enough to ensure that this information would be successfully recorded. In fact, it would be a lengthy, difficult process. At first, nowhere did supplying the state authorities with the necessary personal data function as required by law. British officers, for example, often did not provide their information with sufficient care, if they sent reports at all.38 The Prussian authorities also had to address the fact that doctors in military hospitals did not comply adequately with their duty to record names and other information about the dead. An official directive in September 1813 criticized the fact that “it often happens that the submitted death certificates of soldiers who died in military hospitals have to be sent 35 Lin, “Nation’s Families,” 107f. 36 See the rules and forms for field hospitals in Johann Georg Krünitz, Oekonomisch-​technische Encyklopädie, oder allgemeines System der Staats-​, Stadt-​, Haus-​und Land-​Wirtschaft, und der Kunst-​ Geschichte, in alphabetischer Ordnung: 51. Teil: Kriegs-​Lager bis Kriegs-​Schäden (Berlin: Pauli, 1790), 383–​385, 408–​417. 37 Sammlung einzelner Vorschriften, Dienstanweisungen und sonstiger Ausarbeitungen über die Verwaltung der Lazarethe bei der Königl. Preußischen Armee, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1815), 127f., 135f. 38 Lin, “Nation’s Families,” 100.

24  Victims. Perceptions of Harm back because the dead person’s place of birth is either incorrect or, if unknown, is not more precisely designated according to the office or district where it is located.”39 Incorrect or inadequate information was not the only problem. More serious was the fact that military hospitals apparently often failed even to issue death certificates for soldiers and forward them to the relevant government authorities.40 For the state and its military and civilian authorities, these problems created a continuing need for regulation. In Prussia, this was reflected at the time of the Coalition Wars (1792–​1815) in various directives regarding which data doctors were supposed to record on soldiers’ death certificates and at what intervals which types of documentation had to be relayed to higher-​level or other relevant bodies, especially courts.41 Nevertheless, in Prussia and the other belligerent countries, the fact remained that at the end of this war, state authorities were still only able to say that numerous soldiers were “missing.” Recording information about them continued to be difficult, for a variety of reasons. Countless soldiers died of disease in towns and cities where they were abandoned by their armies. Others may have died on the battlefield, but no one identified the bodies that were left behind. In order to avoid the outbreak of disease, it was advisable in any case to burn the bodies as quickly as possible or bury them in mass graves. The residents of nearby towns, who were often forced to carry out this work, were unable to identify the dead. For many relatives, who had long been awaiting the return of their husbands, sons, fathers, or brothers, this led to considerable uncertainty regarding the health of the missing, their own marital status (which led to wives being refused permission to remarry, which would have assured their livelihoods), and often also property and inheritance issues. This uncertainty might have been connected in many cases with pain and sadness over the loss. In every case, however, it had concrete material, social, and economic effects that went far beyond the immediate family and could be felt by many people.42

39 Sammlung, 298. 40 Ibid., 291. 41 Ibid., 283f., 291, 298. 42 In general, the formal status of wives depended on their husband’s status. Remarriage after the husband’s death was only possible in most countries with proof of the husband’s death. On the situation in Russia, see, e.g., Kimerling Wirtschafter, “Social Misfits,” 230; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, “Soldiers’ Children, 1719–​1856: A Study of Social Engineering in Imperial Russia,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 30 (1982): 61–​136. On the situation in France, see A. Dressel, Die Bestimmungen über Verschollenheit und Todeserklärung im Code Civil, im Pr. Allgemeinen Landrecht und im Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuch für das Deutsche Reich: Eine vergleichende Darstellung (Berlin, 1902), 65f. On the situation in Prussia, see ibid., 66f. On the legal situation in different countries regarding family, inheritance, and marriage law in the course of the nineteenth century, see Helmut Dressel (ed.), Handbuch der Rechtsquellen und Literatur der neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte, vol. 3 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1973–​1988): on Italy, 324–​364, on Spain, 591–​613, on Portugal, 798–​801, on France, 908–​997, on Belgium, 1111–​1137, on the Netherlands, 1323–​1158, on the individual German states, 1627–​1701, on Austria, 1804–​1806, on the Baltics, 2092, on Poland, 2119–​2124, on Hungary, 2185–​2196, on England, 2264–​2280, on Russia, 2300. On the problem of parental violence in France and Prussia, see Dressel, Bestimmungen, 76–​82.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  25 In such situations, the pressure for clarity was considerable, and governments had to act. Only they could establish conditions for officially declaring as dead those missing persons whose deaths had not been documented—​particularly before the time period foreseen by the laws in force, which only provided for such a possibility after many years, for example ten in Prussia.43 There are no figures on the number of surviving dependents who demanded to have the missing declared dead. It is clear, in any case, that the belligerent countries felt called upon to pass laws to permit this before the established period. Prussia was one of them. Between 1810 and 1828, the government issued four laws of this type, and also made it possible to dissolve marriages through special regulation. These laws primarily affected a particular cohort and contained various limitations. Only the last of the four laws established that all members of the military who had gone missing in wars between 1806 and 1815 could be declared dead by a court, as long as there was proof that “the missing person had taken part in the war in some form.”44 This decision was not taken until thirteen years of peace had passed since the end of the war in 1815. Unlike the previous laws, the last one, adopted in 1828, gave little indication of how hesitant governments had been to adopt and elaborate these special laws. Even in the context of war, when soldiers or other military personnel disappeared, governments did not automatically assume that they were actually dead. There were a number of reasons for this hesitation: War zones were sometimes far apart, the whereabouts of prisoners were often unknown, and communication in general was often problematic. In addition, until well into the nineteenth century, distrust of soldiers due to their low social status fostered fears that the missing might have deserted. There were also warnings about “greedy relatives.” The problem could also be formulated more prosaically as a legal one: it was necessary to ensure that the missing would retain their legal rights, should they turn out to be alive.45 The demands on the state and its courts, which were at the same time being confronted with families’ needs for a new, clearer legal situation, were understandably complex. The questions raised in this context were therefore anything but banal: How could one establish with certainty that the missing were actually dead? Whose information was so trustworthy that it could be found to have “the force of complete proof ”?46 The Prussian government ascribed this status to the so-​called 43 On Prussia, see Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten, Part II, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1806), 451 and Dressel, Bestimmungen, 28–​38. In France, families could apply for a missing person’s declaration from a court of first instance four years after their last news of the missing person. If the missing person had someone authorized to act for them, the declaration could only be applied for after ten years. See ibid., 26f. 44 Ergänzungen und Erläuterungen des Allgemeinen Landrechts für die Preußischen Staaten durch Gesetzgebung und Wissenschaft, 4th ed. (Berlin, 1858), 54. 45 See, e.g., the debate on a draft law on declaring the death of persons who took part in wars during the years 1864 to 1866. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen der durch die Allerhöchste Verordnung vom 7. November 1867 einberufenen beiden Häuser des Landtages (Berlin, 1868), 13–​27, and the appendices on negotiations in the houses of the state parliament. 46 Ergänzungen und Erläuterungen des Allgemeinen Landrechts, 54.

26  Victims. Perceptions of Harm “Meyer lists,” drawn up between 1818 and 1822 by former Lieutenant Heinrich Meyer. In 1818, Meyer was officially tasked with investigating the fate of 16,000 soldiers in Russia who were believed to have been missing since the so-​called Russia campaign six years earlier. With the help of his research, deaths could be reliably certified in thousands of cases, and the identities of the dead established; Meyer was even able to confirm in many cases that soldiers were still alive.47 If neither could be determined, a witness had to be found who would state under oath that the missing “had fallen in action” or been taken to a military hospital.48 But finding a witness of this type was far from simple.

Avoiding Death: Hygiene and Statistics of War In the course of the nineteenth century, military doctors who cared for soldiers, along with philanthropists interested in social reform, also began to show an interest in establishing new practices for gaining knowledge about the death of soldiers. The latter were new actors in the field of medicine and healthcare. Starting in the mid-​nineteenth century, they advocated for improved care of sick and wounded soldiers and called public and political attention to the issue. We think almost automatically of figures such as Florence Nightingale of Britain, Henri Dunant of Switzerland, and Clara Barton of the United States, all of whom are known for criticizing the wholly inadequate medical care of soldiers in the 1850s and early 1860s.49 Their names are associated today more than anyone else’s with active efforts to change these conditions. Nightingale is for many the symbol of the fight for reform of the British medical corps; Dunant is known as the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which came into being in 1863 as the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded. Clara Barton is associated with the creation of the Office of Correspondence after the American Civil War—​ probably the first such office worldwide—​and with the founding of the American Red Cross. Nightingale, Dunant, and Barton have become icons of humanitarianism in their respective countries. They have thus become part of the national 47 Wolfgang Schmidt, “ ‘Das Elend, worin sich unsere gute Armee befinden, kann blatterdings nicht beschrieben werden’: Leiden und Instrumentalisierung im Rußlandfeldzug von 1812 umgekommenen Bayern,” in Bayern und Osteuropa: Aus der Geschichte der Beziehungen Bayerns, Frankens und Schwabens mit Rußland, der Ukraine und Weißrußland, edited by Hermann Beyer-​Thoma (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 221–​264, 239. 48 Stenographische Berichte, Annexes. 49 See, e.g., Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend (London: Viking, 2008); Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland, and the History of the Red Cross (London: Carroll & Graf, 1999); John F. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996); Julia F. Irvin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Margaret Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy. The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  27 self-​definition of those countries, which allows them to assure themselves of their supposed “humanitarian traditions.”50 This viewpoint continues to be presented and supported in popular science writings. Historians, however, now agree that there is no linear history of humanitarianism leading directly from the humanitarian engagement of the nineteenth century to current manifestations of humanitarian action.51 This is true even if we take the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross as the starting point of a new regime of humanitarian aid aimed at creating permanent organizational structures at the national and international levels. The adoption of changing codifications of international humanitarian law, which were always controversial and were never put into practice unconditionally, indicates in itself that the history of humanitarian aid is permeated by gaps and conflicts. As an example, international humanitarian law, beginning in 1864 and for decades thereafter, applied only to the so-​called civilized world and to interstate wars;52 I will return to this later. Nor can one speak of a uniform history of humanitarianism on other levels. Humanitarian actors’ notions of which suffering and whose suffering were worth their attention was not static: they were dependent on the times and the situation. The claim to universality of humanitarian principles, which began in the second half of the twentieth century to be more and more connected with human rights principles,53 can lead us to forget that this was the case. Yet there are many examples of changes. The humanitarian engagement of the Red Cross organizations was at first limited to wartime and dealt primarily with the suffering of male soldiers—​their physical suffering, to be precise. Humanitarian aid for civilians who were suffering or in existential distress, in the context of war or independently of it, did not come to be significantly organized—​going beyond the Red Cross—​until after World War I, when various institutional structures were created, at least in Europe.54 These

50 See, e.g., Barbara Helbling, Eine Schweiz für die Schule: Nationale Identität und kulturelle Vielfalt in den Schweizer Lesebüchern seit 1990 (Zurich: Chronos, 1994), 214, 311, 335. 51 See, e.g., Fabian Klose, In The Cause of Humanity: A History of Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Rebecca Gill, Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870–​1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Alan Lester and Fae Dussart (eds.), Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth-​ Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Johannes Paulmann, “Conjunctures in the History of International Humanitarian Aid during the Twentieth Century,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 4, no. 2 (2013): 215–​238. 52 See, e.g., Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Frédéric Mégret, “From ‘Savages’ to ‘Unlawful Combatants’: A Postcolonial Look at International Humanitarian Law’s ‘Other’,” in International Law and Its Others, edited by Anne Orford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 265–​317. 53 See, e.g., Gerd Oberleitner, Human Rights in Armed Conflict: Law, Practice, Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 44ff; Samuel Moyn, “Human Right and Humanitarianization,” in Humanitarianism and Human Rights: A World of Differences?, edited by Michael N. Barnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 33–​48. 54 See Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–​ 1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

28  Victims. Perceptions of Harm structures were crucial in permitting the development of broad-​based, widespread, and above all effective humanitarian activities in the course of the twentieth century. But they were never a guarantee that humanitarian relief would actually be set in motion when human beings, especially “strangers,” needed it. The motivations for humanitarian engagement were always varied. Religious views, ideological convictions, and political and strategic considerations might activate it, but could also limit it. This is not the place to fully describe the development of this humanitarian field, its diversification, and its concrete design in the period starting in the mid-​ nineteenth century, although the history of perceptions of war and violence has gained significantly from it. It is more important here to explore this attention to suffering, sick, and dying soldiers from the perspective of the history of knowledge, and to focus on the medical field, for the way in which doctors—​at the time mainly surgeons—​explained the emergence of disease and the course of illness was crucial to how the suffering and death of soldiers would be perceived and interpreted in society. Prevailing medical knowledge did not, it is true, prescribe how politicians and society reacted to death in wartime. But it was fundamental to whether and in what way sickness and death were perceived and formulated as a problem. In this sense, the question of whether any deaths during war were avoidable depended on medical knowledge and was always time-​specific. Concepts of illness played a major role, for they always affected the interpretation of who was responsible for the outbreak and the course of disease. Could the sick themselves possibly be responsible, because their lifestyle had provoked God’s wrath and led him to punish them with illness? In early eighteenth-​century Europe, medical science, often still religiously tinged, permitted such interpretations.55 In the following century, however, the British government found itself taking political blame from the public for the suffering and death of sick and wounded soldiers in Crimea.56 Numerous articles in The Times accused the government of subjecting soldiers, especially the sick and wounded, to a terrible supply situation that caused unnecessary suffering and death. The critics were convinced that more adequate medical facilities and improved hygiene in the military and its hospitals would have prevented many of these deaths.57 55 See Robert Jütte, Krankheit und Gesundheit in der Frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013), 91–​92. 56 Rolf Ahmann, “Vom Krimkrieg zur ‘Policy of Non-​Intervention’: Außenpolitik und öffentliche Meinung in Großbritannien 1853–​1866,” in Außenpolitik im Medienzeitalter: Vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Frank Bösch and Peter Hoeres (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 39–​72; Frank Becker, “Der ‘vorgeschobene Posten’ als ‘verlorener Posten’? William Howard Russell und die britische Berichterstattung vom Krimkrieg,” in Der Krimkrieg als erster europäischer Medienkrieg, edited by Georg Maag (Berlin: Lit, 2010), 221–​234; Ute Daniel (ed.), Augenzeugen: Kriegsberichterstattung vom 18. zum 21. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). 57 An example of this: Anon, “The Descriptions Recently Given of the Condition,” The Times, 16 Oct. 1884; Anon, “The Siege of Sebastopol,” The Times, 1 Feb. 1855.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  29 It is not true that medicine first began to set the stage for these views in the course of the nineteenth century, though classical narratives on the history of humanitarianism that begin in the mid-​nineteenth century often create this impression. They frequently start with the indignant response of socially reformist philanthropists to the terrible medical care of soldiers, as though these responses had come at the beginning of every effort to protect soldiers from death.58 But this is a distorted picture. More recent scholarship in medical history and the history of knowledge makes this clear, especially studies of colonial medicine in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This research is most advanced for the British Empire. Overall, these studies provide impressive evidence that military and colonial doctors in this period were already showing a marked interest in lowering the morbidity and mortality rates of European soldiers.59 These rates were far higher in tropical regions than on the European continent. The British and French experienced this in America, the Caribbean, and India during the “long” eighteenth century. However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was West Africa that had a reputation as “the white man’s grave.” There the death rate of British soldiers from disease averaged over 50 percent annually, while in the Caribbean it was around 15 percent.60 A history that attempts to determine when and how the health and deaths of soldiers began to be seen as a problem must therefore begin with colonies and overseas wars, and not on the European continent. Doctors in the colonies were confronted with a multitude of medical problems. Most central were all the diseases and epidemics that played a subordinate role on the European continent until the early nineteenth century, because they barely existed or appeared only in harmless variants: yellow fever, for example, as well as malaria and so-​called genuine cholera, cholera asiatica, to name only the most important ones.61 The simple fact that these illnesses and diseases—​at the time almost all called “fevers”—​emerged 58 See, e.g., François Bugnion, Le Comité International de la Croix-​Rouge et la protection des victimes de la guerre (Genève: Comité International de la Croix-​Rouge, 1994); Hans Haug, Rotes Kreuz: Werden—​ Gestalt—​Wirken (Bern: Huber, 1966). 59 See, e.g., Erica Charters, Disease, War, and the Imperial State: The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years’ War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). John Robert McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Wendy D. Churchill, “Efficient, Efficacious and Humane Responses to Non-​ European Bodies in British Military Medicine, 1780–​1815,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 2 (2012): 137–​158; Mark Harrison, Climates & Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–​1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Roberto Zaugg, “Guerre, maladie et empire: Les services de santé militaires en situation coloniale pendant le long XIXe siècle,” Histoire, médecine et santé 10 (2016): 9–​16; Roberto Zaugg and Andrea Graf, “Guerres Napoléoniennes, savoirs médicaux, anthropologie raciale: Le médecin militaire Antonio Savaresi entre Égypte, Caraïbes et Italie,” Histoire, médecine et santé 10 (2016): 17–​43. 60 Harrison, Climates & Constitutions, 16. 61 Catherine Kelly, War and the Militarization of the British Army Medicine, 1793–​ 1830 (London: Routledge, 2011), especially 51ff.; William B. Cohen, “Malaria and French Imperialism,” Journal of African History 24, no. 1 (1983): 23–​36; Michael A. Osborne, The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), especially 77–​109.

30  Victims. Perceptions of Harm frequently in certain regions and, it was believed, always proceeded aggressively, demanded an explanation. It was equally important, however, for the doctors to understand why various diseases spread so differently among soldiers from different backgrounds. This was observed in familiar illnesses that were also common abroad. For example, during the Seven Years’ War fought by the European great powers in North America, the Caribbean, and India between 1756 and 1763, regular British soldiers deployed to North America suffered far more frequently from typhus and scurvy than their Anglo-​American counterparts. For smallpox, however, the findings were reversed: it had devastating effects on the settler combatants, who—​remarkably, in the doctors’ view—​were just as susceptible as the indigenous North American population.62 In colonial India, it even emerged that European soldiers not only suffered far more frequently from sexually transmitted diseases than soldiers in their home countries; their infection rate was also significantly higher than among the Sepoy, the Indian soldiers.63 The difference was even more pronounced for yellow fever, malaria, and cholera, to which European soldiers proved far more susceptible. From the perspective of colonial doctors, who in this case were in agreement with military commanders and government officials, this imbalance posed a considerable threat to their own troops’ military strength, to colonial expansion, and in the end perhaps even to the existence of the entire empire. It therefore seemed particularly urgent to determine the causes of disease. For this purpose, military doctors in the Caribbean and India undertook precise observations of the spread and course of diseases. The results strengthened their conviction that there was a direct connection between climate and the susceptibility to disease of British and French soldiers.64 This thesis was based on neo-​Hippocratic medical concepts that had begun to develop on the European continent, at first especially in England and France, since the end of the seventeenth century. They presumed that the environment—​the prevailing climate, air, water, and composition of the soil—​as well as nutrition had a significant influence on health and disease.65 But it was the military and colonial doctors who supplied the empirical material that refined these interpretations, supported them more broadly, and kept them present in medical discourse in Europe for decades.66 Their activities in the colonies not only gave them the advantage of being able to observe the course of disease in other climatic environments; they could also perform 62 Charters, Disease, 18–​52. 63 See Erica Wald, Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780–​ 1868 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Douglas M. Peers, “Soldiers, Surgeons and the Campaign to Combat Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Colonial India, 1805–​1860,” Medical History 42, no. 2 (1998): 137–​160. 64 On France, see Zaugg and Graf, “Guerres Napoléoniennes,” 21. 65 See, e.g., Pratik Chakrabarti, Medicine and Empire 1600–​1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 62ff; Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 153–​156. 66 See, e.g., Mark Harrison, “Tropical Medicine in Nineteenth-​Century India,” British Journal for the History of Science 25, no. 3 (1992): 299–​318; following on this, see Harald Fischer-​Tiné, Pidgin-​ Knowledge: Wissen und Kolonialismus (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2013), 15–​28.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  31 medical experiments on slaves and soldiers, test new methods of prevention and alleviation of disease, and keep precise records.67 A whole range of dietetic recommendations to prevent and treat sickness were derived from these activities; they became part of the debate on medical theory regarding the significance of hygiene for the health of soldiers, and were present in Europe to some extent until the end of the nineteenth century. It was crucial to these efforts for some military doctors to write down and publish the medical and hygienic knowledge that they had amassed in colonial contexts.68 An especially prominent example is Dr. James Lind, who was educated in Edinburgh. He served in the British Navy in the 1740s, and his writing earned him a reputation as one of the greatest experts in his field. His study of scurvy in 1753, “A Treatise of the Scurvy,” based on his medical observations and experiments overseas during the Seven Years’ War, laid the foundation for this reputation. Lind came to the conclusion that scurvy could be attributed to heavy perspiration. Perspiration was evidence that poisoned bodily fluids were harming the body, he believed; this could be promoted by polluted air and bad food, such as salted meat. Lind recommended eating vegetables and fruits and drinking vinegar in order to regulate bodily fluids. Since scurvy results from a lack of vitamin C, as was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, Lind’s therapy was partially correct, although he wrongly interpreted the cause of the disease. However, contemporaries were persuaded by his theory. It was compatible with the miasma theory common at the time, which connected disease with harmful environmental influences; in addition, other doctors also inclined toward the idea of ascribing illness to perspiration. Lind’s treatise on the treatment of scurvy thus met with general approval. His 1768 “Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates,” in which he discussed dangers to health in various parts of the world, was even more successful. Lind not only dealt with substantial empirical material collected by military doctors in the colonies; in this work, which recommended various measures to prevent and alleviate disease, he also explicitly addressed a broad audience of emigrants. This assured the book a positive reception, and it was even translated into a number of languages.69 Only a few decades passed before readers in the home countries had access to a large body of literature in which the colonies were presented as a dangerous geographical area where considerable risks to health lay in wait. However, until well into the nineteenth century, military and colonial medicine presumed the existence of a capacity for physical adaptability that allowed soldiers as well as civilians to 67 See Londa L. Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-​ Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). 68 See, e.g., Zaugg and Graf, “Guerres Napoléoniennes,” 24. 69 See Erica Charters, “Military Medicine and the Ethics of War: British Colonial Warfare during the Seven Years War (1756–​63),” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 27, no. 2 (2010): 273–​298, 22ff., 57ff.; Chakrabarti, Medicine and Empire, 43ff.

32  Victims. Perceptions of Harm develop immunity to disease after an acclimatization phase.70 The British Empire’s stationing policies therefore provided that regiments were to be left in the colonies as long as possible. After all, the climate theory suggested that newly arrived soldiers faced a greater danger of dying of disease than soldiers who had been exposed to climatic influences for a longer period. Keeping soldiers in the colonies longer therefore prevented unnecessary waste of resources on soldiers’ lives.71 This was not the only conclusion drawn from the climate theory in the colonial context. Military and colonial doctors developed numerous very concrete recommendations for soldiers (as well as civilians) on how to behave so as not to endanger their health unnecessarily. The main piece of advice to Europeans was to avoid hard physical labor upon arrival in the colonies, as they were not yet accustomed to the hot climate. Military and colonial doctors therefore recommended having the natives do this sort of work, as they had proven resistant to the deadly “fevers” in these regions.72 The aforementioned James Lind also argued along these lines. Writing in 1768, he warned emphatically against sending soldiers to the colonies to chop wood. Many of them had sickened and sometimes died from such work, which necessarily sent them into “unhealthy” areas. He stressed that “if the purchasing of negroes on the coast of Guinea can be justified, it must be from the absolute necessity of employing them in such services as this is.” He added that it did not comport with “British humanity to assign such employments to a regiment of gallant soldiers, or to a company of brave seamen.”73 This was not yet the biological racism familiar from the nineteenth century. To the climate theorists, the recommendation to use natives instead of Europeans for hard labor did not imply a value judgment—​at least not in the sense of a racial hierarchy. According to their theory, the natives were simply acclimated, and therefore not endangered; using them for difficult work that was dangerous in the tropics was, in this view, a type of prophylactic measure to protect those who were evidently in danger from disease and death. Nevertheless, the climate theorists promoted and legitimized the presumption—​and the accompanying practice—​that different things could be expected, naturally, as it were, from “white” Europeans and “blacks” on the basis of their physical constitutions, and that ultimately there was a difference between the “races.”74 This would have consequences for many decades for the way these bodies were treated, including in the context of war. 70 Mark Harrison, “ ‘The Tender Frame of Man’: Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–​1860,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 1 (1996): 68–​93, 73ff.; Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 45ff., 66. 71 Roger Norman Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 299. 72 See Erica Charters, “Making Bodies Modern: Race, Medicine and the Colonial Soldier in the Mid-​ Eighteenth Century,” Patterns of Prejudice 46, 3–​4 (2012): 214–​231, 227ff. 73 James Lind, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1771), 134. 74 See, e.g., Zaugg and Graf, “Guerres Napoléoniennes,” 37.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  33 This was beginning to be clear in the late eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, some colonial powers had already begun to employ native auxiliaries on occasion in order to secure their colonial rule. However, they never treated these units as equal to their own soldiers.75 Starting in the mid-​eighteenth century, military doctors committed to the climate-​theoretical, neo-​Hippocratic approach began to lend this practice additional plausibility. An example can be found in the West Indies, where, at the recommendation of military doctors, officers employed Black people—​they called them “Negroes”—​to relieve white British soldiers of difficult physical labor and protect their health.76 (As it happened, French generals acted similarly in requesting “Arab” soldiers for the Caribbean.) However, the slave rebellions in Grenada and St. Vincent in 1795 led decision-​makers in London to recruit larger numbers of African slaves, for political reasons. In this case, it was pure self-​protection to raise their status to that of soldiers and integrate them into the war against France.77 Overall, the suggestions from military doctors, based in climate theory, regarding how native people could best be employed promoted the different utilization of European and non-​European bodies for “superior” and “inferior” work. To Europeans, who believed they were more “civilized” than those they colonized, it made sense to ascribe differing values to the respective bodies as well. But military doctors, at least, did not therefore conclude that they had no need to be concerned with the health of the colonial soldiers, whom they called “Negroes,” “Africans,” or “blacks.” They were interested in strengthening the efficiency and defensive capability of the army. To reduce the morbidity and mortality of European soldiers, it was essential to be able to rely on healthy and efficient native troops. As Inspector General of the military hospitals, William Fergusson visited the island of Martinique at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He found that many African recruits from Sierra Leone who had been transported to the West Indies had died because their environment and nutrition changed too rapidly. In his view, the Africans did not need the same rations of salted meat and rum as the British soldiers stationed in the West Indies. Their nutrition, he believed, had to be adjusted to their habits and oriented around vegetarian food. This was “fundamental to any young growing animal,” he explained; the young African body also needed it, as it would otherwise become ill or could not develop correctly.78

75 See Marian Füssel, “Die Politik der Unsicherheit: Sicherheit, Gewalt und Expansion in den britischen Kolonien im Siebenjährigen Krieg,” in Sicherheit in der Frühen Neuzeit: Norm, Praxis, Repräsentation, edited by Christoph Kampmann and Ulrich Niggemann (Cologne: Böhlau, 2013), 299–​ 312, 301. On the British Army in the West Indies and the use of slaves, see Buckley, British Army. 76 Charters, “Making Bodies,” 228ff.; Churchill, “British Military Medicine” 139ff.;Timothy James Lockley, Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments, 1795–​ 1874 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 77 See Buckley, British Army, 269f. 78 See Churchill, “British Military Medicine,” 140ff., 143.

34  Victims. Perceptions of Harm These observations seem disturbing today. In the early nineteenth century, however, they were serious statements that seemed accurate within the scope of medical and hygienic knowledge about the origins of disease. As such, they provide insight into developing concepts of the “nature” of human beings, their “essence,” and their needs. In addition, only if we acknowledge these statements does it become clear that a difference in the treatment of natives of the colonies and Europeans was embedded in the efforts to ensure the health of soldiers in the nineteenth century. This is not apparent in classical narratives of the history of humanitarian aid that focus only on Europe. Ironically, the attention the colonial powers paid to the health of their soldiers was comparatively broad-​based. When the British Ministry of War in 1835 mandated a comprehensive investigation of the extent and causes of morbidity and mortality among soldiers in the West Indies, it expected to be informed about all the troops, including colonial soldiers. This was illustrated in a “Statistical Report on the Sickness, Invaliding and Mortality Among the Troops in the West Indies” published three years later: tables for every single colony in the region listed how many “black” and “white” soldiers had belonged to the troops stationed there over the previous eighteen years and how many of them had died of what diseases. With the same meticulous care, the report traced how many “white” and “black” members of the troops had been hospitalized annually since 1817, and how many had died. Overall, in only a few places did the report concentrate only on “white” soldiers. These passages were especially telling because they involved either officers, none of whom were “black,” or invalids, who were “unfit for active service” and had to be sent home.79 Certainly this largely equal consideration of all members of the troops does not point to an equal valuing of lives, let alone to humanitarian motives. The reasons were more practical: The high rates of illness and death generated costs that cannot be underestimated. The colonial powers therefore not only calculated precisely how much it cost to send soldiers to the colonies and supply them once there; they also determined the annual costs, based on morbidity rates among European soldiers, of medical care in hospitals, which were considered part of the state’s financial losses.80 In addition, the Ministry of War hoped that studying morbidity and mortality rates in the West Indies would help to find an explanation for them. But this meant testing the existing assumptions of military medicine. For decades, military doctors had explained the high mortality rates among “white” soldiers through the climate theory, reinforced by observations of “blacks.” From the point of view of medical theory, it made sense that the “Statistical Report” made comparisons between soldiers of various backgrounds. The very 79 See, e.g., Statistical Report on the Sickness, Mortality, & Invaliding among the Troops in the West Indies (London, 1983). 80 See Curtin, Death by Migration, 4f., referring here to colonial India and Algeria.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  35 comprehensive study submitted by the authors, military doctor Henry Marshall and officer and statistician Alexander M. Tulloch, was impressive in many respects. It was, after all, based on data and medical observations gathered by the Ministry of War since 1816—​over 160 folios! This was such an immense wealth of material that the War Ministry had found it necessary to seek authors who were willing and able to apply statistical methods and present the data in highly aggregated form.81 The analysis was very nuanced and impressive. Numerous tables made it clear for the first time how morbidity and mortality had developed over a longer period of time and made various comparisons possible: between “black” and “white,” and among various diseases, specific islands, and even villages.82 All this was certainly interesting. What the “Statistical Report” did not provide, however, and indeed was even less able to provide after evaluation of the data than it might have before, was an explanation for the figures it presented. It did confirm some of the earlier observations, especially in regard to the higher mortality rate among “white troops.” But the long-​term study, with its many different opportunities to compare figures and connect information, left few of the previous certainties intact. Marshall and Tulloch’s analysis produced numerous “facts” that refuted, in particular, the common assumption that the high rates of illness and death among “Europeans” were a result of climate. From the authors’ point of view, this was contradicted, for example, by the finding that the temperatures in Antigua and Barbados were much higher than in Jamaica and the Bahamas, but rates of illness in the two latter colonies were many times higher than in the former. In addition, fever epidemics had a number of times raged most severely in the cooler winter months. In general, the mortality rate showed considerable fluctuation from year to year, which could not be related to climate. The report provided other examples as well, and the conclusion Marshall and Tulloch drew at the end of their study was appropriately harsh: many assumptions that had been developed until then about the causes of sickness and death in the West Indies were based on “very flawed evidence.” They could not, in any case, be “made consistent in any way” with the “facts” arising out of their own analysis.83 In their 1838 “Statistical Report,” Marshall and Tulloch for all practical purposes dismantled the climate-​theory justification for the mortality rates in the West Indies. Nevertheless, they firmly refused to present an alternative theory to explain the problem. They argued that, upon closer inspection, such a theory would probably prove just as unable to withstand questioning as the previous ones. Since traditional theories were based on error, it could not be assumed that others would be developed that were closer to the truth.84



81

Statistical Report on the Sickness (1838), III. See also Lockley, Military Medicine, 113ff. 83 Statistical Report on the Sickness (1838) 101ff., 101. 84 Ibid., 103. 82

36  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Today we know that this quite adequately describes the state of medical knowledge until well into the last third of the nineteenth century. It was not until the advent of bacteriology and the identification of microbes as the source of disease, which was at first quite contentious and is linked in Western Europe with the names Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch and in Eastern Europe with Ilya Mechnikov, that a completely different path was taken. It was bacteriology that made it possible to trace infectious disease back to individual pathogens. As a result, diseases such as malaria (1881), tuberculosis (1882), cholera (1884), and plague (1894) were conceptualized in a whole new way even before the turn of the twentieth century.85 Until then, medicine had not been able to attribute illness so definitely to a single factor. The explanations for disease were fundamentally multifactorial: climate, air, water, composition of the soil—​everything present in the “environment” acted on bodily fluids and could therefore be a cause of illness. The remaining task, from the medical profession’s point of view, was determining how much weight to give these various factors. Thus the attitude displayed in Marshall and Tulloch’s 1838 “Statistical Report” was paradigmatic for the situation in which medicine found itself at the time. It was therefore fitting that Tulloch immediately began additional statistical studies devoted to the same problem of morbidity and mortality among soldiers and sailors in England and North America, Africa, and Asia.86 He was not the only one to do so. The use of statistics, a methodology that had still been fiercely attacked by many doctors at the turn of the nineteenth century, had found its way into military medicine.87 This was evident earlier in the British Empire, the US, and France than in other countries.88 This new appreciation of statistical methods in military medicine had a range of consequences that, in the medium term, affected how and in what ways soldiers’ mortality could be—​and was—​addressed in medicine, politics, and society. Some effects could be observed more immediately than others. These included recommendations to Parliament and the government on how to improve military medicine. In particular, the “Statistical Report” recommended hygienic measures, such as changes in nutrition and quartering. Statistical evaluations of newly recorded 85 See Philipp Sarasin, Silvia Berger, Marianne Hänseler et al. (eds.), Bakteriologie und Moderne: Studien zur Biopolitik des Unsichtbaren; 1870–​1920 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007); Silvia Berger, Bakterien in Krieg und Frieden: Eine Geschichte der medizinischen Bakteriologie in Deutschland 1890–​1933 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009). 86 Alexander M. Tulloch, “Comparison of the Sickness, Mortality, and Prevailing Disease among Seamen and Soldiers, as Shown by the Naval and Military Statistical Reports,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 4, no. 1 (1841): 1–​16, Alexander M. Tulloch, “On the Mortality among Her Majesty’s Troops Serving in the Colonies during the Years 1844 and 1845,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 10, no. 3 (1847): 252–​259. 87 Graham T. Balfour, “Comparison of the Sickness, Mortality, and Prevailing Diseases among Seamen and Soldiers, as Shown by the Naval and Military Statistical Reports,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 8, no. 1 (1845): 77–​86. 88 See Hartmann, Body Populace, 27ff.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  37 data reinforced the impression that these were promising interventions. For example, it was found that soldiers were less likely to die of dysentery when their nutrition and housing were improved.89 Thus the recommendations in the “Statistical Report” did not fall on deaf ears, although the authors had hoped for greater attention to hygiene. In fact, the British government responded with caution. Military hygiene met resistance not only in the political realm, however. It was also controversial among doctors and the military—​not only in England. On the European continent, advocates of military and wartime hygiene were even confronted, in the late 1860s, by concerns that wartime hygiene was a purely “fictional theory” consisting of “empty hypotheses.” Above all, they found themselves under pressure to provide proof that consistent attention to military-​hygienic principles would be “rewarded with greater efficiency in the army.”90 Nevertheless, statisticians and hygienists were hardly isolated among military doctors. By the mid-​nineteenth century, the hygiene movement had long since taken root. Its concepts for a hygienic lifestyle had been popularized, and the engagement of hygienists in the field of public health was firmly established. This was especially true of the health movement in large cities, in which sanitation and sewer systems were already being eagerly discussed. Hygienists argued that numerous deaths could be prevented in this way in cities, especially in impoverished areas, and they undertook thorough investigations, including statistical studies, in urban areas. A particularly prominent role was played in England by the Sanitary Movement, which in the early 1840s developed comprehensive recommendations for sanitary measures in London’s impoverished quarters. Their hygienic program garnered a strong response, as it promised to facilitate the care of the poor and reduce social tensions through greater protection from epidemics. Above all, the health movement reinforced the conviction that cleanliness was a central characteristic of “civilized” nations.91 Moreover, starting in the mid-​nineteenth century, statistics were clearly on the ascendant. Many European countries had established statistical offices; in 1853, support was so strong that statisticians networked officially at an International Statistical Congress in Brussels. Ten years later, five international congresses had already been held. They dealt with a broad range of issues, but data on morbidity and mortality in the military was important to statisticians for two reasons: first, in order to more precisely measure the development of national defense capabilities, 89 Balfour, “Comparison,” 85f. 90 Alexander Ochwadt, Beiträge zur Militair-​Hygiene im Kriege und im Frieden (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1848), X, 10. 91 See, e.g., Michelle Elizabeth Allen, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008); Anne Irmgard Hardy, Ärzte, Ingenieure und städtische Gesundheit: Medizinische Theorien in der Hygienebewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005); Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765–​1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).

38  Victims. Perceptions of Harm particularly in comparison with other countries; and second, because they hoped to use data about the military as a means to gain information about the health of the population as a whole. There was no other group for whom so much regularly collected data was available regarding issues of health.92 These overall trends help to explain the indignation that arose in England when the press made it known that large numbers of British soldiers had died in Crimea in the mid-​1850s because of wholly insufficient supplies. It was still unquestioned that soldiers frequently died of disease during war. But knowledge of hygiene had stabilized to the point that deaths from illness were no longer taken entirely for granted. Proper prevention made deaths avoidable; at the start of the Crimean War, even the director-​general of the Army Medical Department at the time, Dr. Andrew Smith, was convinced of this. In April 1854, he noted the urgent necessity of fitting soldiers’ clothing to the particular climatic conditions of war zones, where troops were subjected to extreme heat and cold. If governments did not respond to this, he insisted, “sickness, and undue sickness will be the result.”93 Military doctors had been making recommendations to government officials on how to reduce mortality among soldiers for at least a hundred years. When the Crimean War broke out in 1854, however, their tone became harsher. The air of the advice was no longer speculative and cautious. Those pointing to “undue sickness” were underscoring the government’s responsibility for sickness and death if it did not take comprehensive preventive hygienic measures. “Undue” death in war had become a political problem. The story of Florence Nightingale and her efforts regarding soldiers’ health fits seamlessly into this development. The very fact that she was sent to Crimea was a result of the political pressure that resulted once the terrible health conditions of the British soldiers there became known. Nightingale in turn acted on the basis of prevailing hygienic knowledge. Because of her training as a statistician, she found it imperative to keep meticulous lists of health impairments and deaths in field hospitals. We know that she used the statistical evaluations that came out of this work as empirical material after the Crimean War to convince the government of the necessity of fundamentally reforming Britain’s military-​medical regime.94 Nevertheless, the British government did not immediately initiate a reform of British military medicine. Nightingale’s data and statistical calculations alone did not persuade them. They were only willing to adopt reforms once Nightingale produced a series of diagrams to illustrate her arguments, using various comparisons that she was able to make visually accessible. One of the diagrams, for example, 92 See Hartmann, Body Populace. 93 Wellcome Institute, London, RAMC 524/​14/​1. 94 James Crossland, War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1953–​ 1914 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 18; M. Eileen Magnello, “The Passionate Statistician,” in Notes on Nightingale: The Influence and Legacy of a Nursing Icon, edited by Sioban Nelson and Anne Marie Rafferty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 115–​129.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  39 showed that even Manchester, verifiably one of the least healthy cities in England, had a lower mortality rate than military hospitals in Crimea. She used another diagram for a comparison with the military hospital in London. It not only showed that mortality was much lower there than in field hospitals in Crimea, but also documented the fact that Nightingale had succeeded in lowering the mortality rate in Crimea to almost equal the level in London once she introduced hygienic measures. Statisticians held her in high regard because of these diagrams. The fact that the government relented shows that this type of presentation had an effect even on politicians and high-​level officials. In the context of a history of the perception of war, Nightingale’s diagrams—​ even if they only appeared in the British context—​are interesting and important to the history of knowledge and of media. They stand for a specific, at the time new, form of graphic representation with which sickness and death could be made visible—​a form that, however, was conditioned on the recording of data on mortality and morbidity in field hospitals. More relevant in the long term, however, was the fact that, in the mid-​nineteenth century, newspapers in the belligerent European countries began to publish lists based on the systematic collection of medical data in field hospitals and to reveal information about wounded, sick, and dead soldiers. Looking at the entire nineteenth century, we can see that this was linked to a new public visibility of the consequences of war. The lists newspapers published to inform the public about soldiers’ deaths became increasingly differentiated, and therefore longer. While in the context of the Napoleonic Wars they had been limited to the names of deceased generals, now the English press published long lists that were not limited to either officers or death. For officers, they distinguished between “casualties” and the “dangerously ill,” or in the German press between the “severely wounded” and the “slightly wounded.” For ordinary soldiers, the lists even provided information on the illnesses they died of.95 At the time of the South African War between the British and the Boers (1899–​1902), the lists again contained precise information on the diseases and wounds of invalided or deceased British soldiers.96 These lists were brief records of the suffering and death of soldiers in wartime, which gave readers a different level of knowledge of the events in war than had previously been publicly available. Nevertheless, this does not mean that sick, wounded, or dead soldiers were now seen, and described, as victims of war. Statements from the time do not allow us to conclude that this was a widespread way of speaking about them, even if it was completely uncontested that war was 95 An example of this: The Times, 13 Sept. 1855; Militair-​Wochenblatt 49, no. 11, 19 March 1864, enclosed “Verlustliste des Königlich Preußischen kombinierten Armee-​Korps vom 23. Februar bis 2. März 1864.” 96 An example of this: The Times, 10 Dec. 1901; The Times, 20 July 1901, 13. Verlust-​Listen der Königlich Preußischen Armee und der Großherzoglich Badischen Division aus dem Feldzuge 1870–​1871 (Berlin, 1870) are similar.

40  Victims. Perceptions of Harm linked with suffering. However, not all suffering was taken for granted in the same way as before. It is thus not surprising that, as the nineteenth century ended, soldiers were at least beginning to be classified as victims of war when they died of diseases that were seen to be avoidable. Military doctors began to note the “terrible numbers of victims” that earlier wars had cost because of insufficient knowledge of how to adequately care for the troops, or because their care had been neglected. The fact that victims were spoken of in this sense shows that medical care of soldiers was part of the contemporary discourse on the humanization of war (more on this below). Moral arguments presented to the government also played a role. Ensuring the extensive generation of data on the state of soldiers’ health now seemed imperative because, considering the “feelings and fears” of those who remained behind, it was a simple “question of decency” to provide regular and precise information on the war dead.97

Changing Ways of Mourning and Identifying the Individual The families of soldiers in nineteenth-​century Europe certainly felt a need to be more accurately informed about the deaths of soldiers. Until well into the nineteenth century, however, families were rarely informed by the state when a soldier died in war. Nor was there any infrastructure within the government, or legitimized by the state, for informing families when a soldier ended up in a field hospital or prison of war. This kind of news was spread in other ways. As a rule, returning soldiers reported orally, or might even bring letters. But the number of those who received written notification was extremely limited in Europe until the introduction of universal conscription, which turned citizens into soldiers. One reason for this was that only a small number of soldiers was able to read and write (this was also true of their relatives).98 Because written evidence is lacking, we know very little before the nineteenth century about the feelings of people from the lower classes when their menfolk failed to return from war. One may assume that mothers and fathers grieved; however, there was little room for sentimentality in their lives. When men did not return from war, their wives and children generally faced lasting hunger and poverty. In addition, the bourgeois idea of marrying for love, as well as the bourgeois ideal of family, only slowly began to form in the late eighteenth century. It is therefore not easy to determine the feelings with which relatives of soldiers reacted at the turn of the nineteenth century to their absence or death. 97 William Barwick Hodge, “On the Mortality Arising from Military Operations,” Assurance Magazine, and the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries 7, no. 4 (1857): 80–​90, 81. 98 On views of literacy and changing writing practices, see Isa Schikorsky, Private Schriftlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des alltäglichen Sprachverhaltens “kleiner Leute” (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990).

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  41 In his 1977 history of death, French historian Philippe Ariès drew attention to the fact that attitudes toward dying and death changed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but his focus was ultimately on the Middle Ages and the early modern era in Western European countries.99 It has meanwhile become clear, however, that there is much evidence for his assumption. The need of families to know exactly how someone had died and where they were buried began during the nineteenth century to develop into a broader concern. The same could be said for the need to remember every deceased person by name and to label graves with the names of the dead. This may be difficult to imagine from today’s perspective. Yet in his brilliant cultural history of mortal remains, to which we owe important insights into this process, the American historian Thomas Laqueur came to the conclusion that “[b]‌illions and billions of the dead—​at least 90 percent and probably nearer to 95 percent of all those who ever died—​have disappeared without leaving a name behind.”100 The reasons for this shift are complex, as Laqueur shows; various factors and narratives played a role, mainly emerging in civilian life. At least five aspects can be named here. First, hygienists contributed significantly to the fact that, starting in the late eighteenth century, attitudes gradually changed in almost all European states toward where and how the dead were to be buried. Mass graves, the hygienists warned, were dangerous to public health; dense clusters of bodies produced gasses that led to outbreaks of typhus and cholera. The crowded urban church cemeteries about which doctors had long warned were called massively into question, not least due to the collective graves that had to be reopened to receive each new body.Many political reformers were striving to find a more rational way of dealing with the dead, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, and perhaps even to establish a “right to one’s own grave,” which was introduced theoretically with the Napoleonic reforms; so these hygienic concerns were used to close or level numerous churchyards. In the future, cemeteries would be located outside of cities and would be large enough so that many more of the dead could be buried in individual graves. Burying them in rows now became the norm in every country—​a concept advocated by the French revolutionaries in 1792. The hygienic reordering of the cemetery could thus be read politically, although social differences remained visible even after the reorganization of burial sites.101 A second point was the discrediting of poverty that began around 1830. In its wake, municipalities and those involved in civic charity distanced themselves from

99 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 100 Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 431. 101 See Thomas Kselman, Death and Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 183ff.; the mention of graves in rows is in George L. Mosse, “National Cemeteries and National Revival: The Cult of the Fallen Soldiers in Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 1 (1979): 1–​20, 9.

42  Victims. Perceptions of Harm the former custom of making a respectable burial possible for the poor when they died. The new paupers’ graves, in which the dead body was placed without a gravestone or name, unable to be located by the public, became the epitome of shame and the opposite of a worthy burial that made room for the dead and commemorated the person by name. More than ever, a pauper’s burial became a degradation, for the family as well as the deceased. It became a disgrace that all classes, including the poor, have since done everything in their power to avoid.102 Third, in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, new narrative styles about death developed in the literary marketplace. Tales of the deathbed became widespread and were no longer merely about religion, but about the final movements and words of what was usually an elderly or sick person. These stories can be found in novels, but they also entered into journalism, not least war reporting, as can be seen in articles from The Times during the Crimean War. “By the middle of the nineteenth century, writing and reading the ordinary dead had become culturally possible, even necessary,” writes Laqueur. Specific desires and practices in speaking about death developed in these ways, and letters from World War I were still influenced by them.103 Fourth, the state itself had affected the meaning of death and names through various political decisions since the turn of the nineteenth century. Changes in inheritance laws and relief payments, as mentioned earlier, created a new need for names and data in the developing state bureaucracy. This was not, however, their only effect. Through these changes, the state granted not only the living but also the dead a new worth; it lent the death of the lower classes, in particular, a different significance. Still, there was as little equality among the dead as among the living. Once again, the British Empire can serve as an example. In the early nineteenth century, it had in fact improved inheritance and relief laws for the families of soldiers and sailors. However, once the government introduced the category of the “deserving poor” as part of its new, nationally organized poor laws, support was only paid to people who contributed to the good of the nation—​which in the government’s view, in wartime, meant serving in the military. If a wife sought relief while her husband was away or after his death, it was not only her need that was determinative. Under the new poor laws, the crucial question was whether she was the wife of a man who merited this relief because of his service in the British army.104 Thus Great Britain introduced a moral dimension into its poor laws. In consequence, the lives of needy women were reckoned to be worth less than the “dignified” deaths of their husbands. In addition, since the category of the “deserving poor” determined the value of a man’s life (and that of his wife as a dependent), speaking of death



102

See Laqueur, Work, 312ff. See ibid., 412. 104 Lin, “Citizenship, Military Families,” 5–​9. 103

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  43 also required a specific language in order to grant his life some sort of respect, and therefore givemeaning to his death. This was equally true of the political death cult that states reframed in the context of the wars of revolution: governments for the first time required that the names of all soldiers who had lost their lives in war be recorded individually on memorials, without emphasizing distinctions of rank. This new form of political death cult no longer recognized only the achievements of generals. The individual soldier had become worthy of a memorial—​although only because he was willing, as it was commonly expressed, to sacrifice his life for a higher cause (the King, the fatherland, the nation) and risk death defending it. Prussia was one of the first states to claim this officially, when a regulation was introduced on a new form of memorialization. In 1813, Friedrich Wilhelm III obliged local governments to affix memorial tablets to their churches listing the names of all the dead. Additional rules and measures adopted by the government followed, such as the establishment of an official memorial day in 1816.105 As we know, while state monuments proclaimed the willingness of the war dead to sacrifice their lives, this imputation did not reflect a universal desire to make that sacrifice on the part of those who had died. To put it more bluntly, the government took the names of the dead, which in a sense bore personal witness to their sacrifice, and used them for its own purposes. But although commemorating the dead by name and extolling their deaths as secular sacrifices had not previously been the norm, the state’s foray into this new death cult was not in vain. A fifth point: it aligned with the aspiration of members of the bourgeois middle class to put their lives on the line for the sake of the fatherland, a desire formed in the course of the Napoleonic wars. After this, citizens increasingly considered a willingness to sacrifice for the fatherland to be a “civic virtue” and the highest duty of every citizen.106 Overall, these developments indicate the various elements and forces that ensured that hundreds of thousands of people of various classes would no longer deem it acceptable for soldiers who died in wartime to simply be allowed to disappear into mass graves somewhere, without dignified, identifiable gravesites that commemorated and honored the deceased. Thomas Laqueur even speaks of a “new emotional economy,”107 though primarily in reference to World War I. In that war, the deaths of millions became such a great moral and political force that many governments could no longer avoid addressing the personal and emotional needs of those left behind to a greater degree than they had in the past. Concretely, this meant, first of all, supporting non-​governmental organizations in building an 105 Manfred Hettling and Jörg Echternkamp, “Heroisierung und Opferstilisierung: Grundelemente des Gefallenengedenkens von 1918 bis heute,” in Gefallenengedenken im globalen Vergleich: Nationale Tradition, politische Legitimation und Individualisierung der Erinnerung, edited by Manfred Hettling and Jörg Echternkamp (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013), 123–​158,, 128ff. 106 See ibid., 124. 107 Laqueur, Work, 463.

44  Victims. Perceptions of Harm infrastructure to inform soldiers’ relatives of their fates. Governments also supported extensive efforts to build cemeteries in which the mortal remains of soldiers would be buried in individual graves and labeled with their names whenever possible. As I suggested earlier, this required tremendous efforts, which will be discussed farther on. But we must first return to the second half of the nineteenth century, for it is otherwise impossible to adequately explain the social and political demands for dealing with the war dead that surfaced powerfully in World War I. In fact, the erection of war graves in Europe began with the Crimean War,108 and the introduction of identification tags for soldiers was already on the agenda by 1867. Both phenomena have been considered by researchers interested in the cultural history of war. However, identification tags are generally mentioned only briefly; the efforts to identify soldiers are just “there,” as though states had simply called this now-​common practice into being without preconditions. For a long time, one would have gotten the same impression in regard to the construction of war graves; scholars concentrated either on the soldiers’ cemeteries that emerged in the context of World War I or studied the American Civil War, which brought forth Arlington National Cemetery—​not only the first, but also the most significant, national cemetery for soldiers in the nineteenth century. The World War I soldiers’ cemeteries, with dimensions and layouts that are impressive to this day, seemed to be the first to follow the same pattern. One can still read today that it was not until World War I that European states made the same efforts as the United States in regard to their deceased soldiers by making possible their burial in military cemeteries. The second half of the nineteenth century, however, offers a different history. It becomes visible if we consider the shorter and relatively less bloody wars that played out in Europe in these decades. In the course of these wars, some attempts were already made to foster a new approach to deceased soldiers through the creation of soldiers’ graves; however, the effects remained local. In the case of the Crimean War, they even left very few material traces that are still visible today. It is nevertheless the Crimean War that is interesting in this context. Many war graves appeared on the British, French, and Russian sides, and it was not necessarily the governments themselves that established them.109 Soldiers themselves took the initiative, making clear what they considered the proper way to treat deceased soldiers: through burial in individual graves furnished with a stone or cross, and if possible an inscription. Doctors and nurses who served in military hospitals

108 Andrew Prescott Keating, “British Soldiers’ Graves in the Crimea and the Origins of Modern War Commemoration,” in Ordnance: War +​Architecture & Space, edited by Gary A. Boyd and Denis Linehan (London: Routledge, 2013), 223–​237. 109 Andrew Prescott Keating, “The Empire of the Dead: British Burial Abroad and the Formation of National Identity” (PhD, 2001). The reference to the French and Russian graves is from the official “Report on the Crimean Cemeteries” submitted to the British Parliament in 1873 by John Adye and George Gordon (see ibid., 90ff.).

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  45 in Crimea apparently felt the same way.110 The burial culture that had become the norm in civilian life over the previous fifty years had also to apply to those who had died in war; that was at least the aspiration that soldiers articulated with these practices. On the British side alone, at least 130 cemeteries were established in the area around Sevastopol and Balaklava for soldiers who had died in combat or of disease.111 The British government also took action, though cautiously and in small steps: sixteen years after the end of the war, it still could not ensure proper care of the Crimean graves. Only when it was approached from various directions and told that the cemeteries were deteriorating, and not only the media but also Parliament made it clear that they disapproved of the situation, did the government take further measures. In 1872, it sent two members of the military to inspect the condition of every soldiers’ cemetery, submit an official report, and make recommendations on how best to ensure the care of soldiers’ graves.112 These efforts seem sluggish. In fact, the British government at the time had no feasible plan to ensure the care of cemeteries. One is tempted to conclude that they had underestimated the whole problem. But this fails to recognize that the situation was a new one that could not be mastered overnight. Even in civilian life, since the 1820s it had only slowly become a normal practice to build “national” cemeteries in other countries; these were facilitated by binational treaties, which were necessary in order to build cemeteries on the territory of foreign states.113 Property questions had to be clarified; one could not simply occupy land, including soldiers’ cemeteries, especially if their existence was to be ensured in perpetuity.114 In the colonies, this problem was easier to deal with for the colonial powers, such as Great Britain: after the so-​called Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in India, British settlers took charge of the dead British soldiers and gave them, like the murdered civilians, “proper” burials in cemeteries they had already set up for themselves as British citizens and Christians.115 Different means had to be found for interstate wars, however, and it was not only Great Britain that was challenged to find a solution. The societal need for dignified soldiers’ funerals developed at a rapid pace in many European countries after the Crimean War, including France, Italy, and the German states. The press played a crucial role. Not only did it convey information about the existence of distant 110 Ibid., 79. 111 Ibid., 90. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid., 44–​48. 114 This is clear, for example, in the discussion between representatives of the Russian and Ottoman empires at the Berlin Congress of 1878. At that time, there was still no agreement on the exact site of the cemetery that was to be built in Shipka for Russian soldiers from the Russo-​Turkish war; it was politically controversial. See Imanuel Geiss (ed.), Der Berliner Kongress 1878: Protokolle und Materialien (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1978), 344f. 115 See Keating, “Empire of the Dead”, 93.

46  Victims. Perceptions of Harm graves of fallen soldiers, but also idealized images of “proper” soldiers’ graves and Christian burials found their way into reports on the war. These fueled expectations that states had a moral obligation to give dignified graves to soldiers who had lost their lives in war, and to maintain them. This expectation was directed at governments (though not only at them), and those governments were well advised to consider it a duty. In Great Britain, for example, it was soon said that “[a]‌country which did not honour its dead was not able to take care of the living.”116 Regard for fallen soldiers was a serious matter, much more so than it had been a hundred years earlier. A government that dared to deny these dead their respect risked losing the respect of its citizens. Most European states that waged war during the second half of the nineteenth century did not let that happen, and why should they have? Politically, they could only gain from this “pact” with their citizens if it meant that the support of the nation was ensured. The governments of several countries therefore soon claimed that dignified burials of soldiers and maintaining their graves were the marks of a “civilized” nation.117 This could be used politically, both domestically and internationally. One could lend oneself a sense of superior civilization and discredit as “barbaric” anyone who denied this respect to foreign soldiers for political or religious reasons. The needs of state and society were thus in accord, and governments began to act, often urged on by citizens, who raised funds to build the cemeteries. It was only the form of these last resting places that differed. Often it depended on whether the mortal remains could be identified at all, even if only through the remnants of a uniform that revealed which side the deceased had fought for. In the course of the 1870s, the British government decided to maintain the large British soldiers’ cemetery in Crimea, while Napoleon III had the bones of the dead exhumed in order to distribute them among seventeen ossuaries. It has been said that this included the mortal remains of 90,000 soldiers.118 Given the total casualty figures in that war, they could not all have been French. The situation was similar for two ossuaries created in 1870 to provide a dignified gravesite for soldiers who had died in the battle of Solferino. Eleven years after the battle, so many bones had risen to the surface that citizens took the initiative to end this undignified situation. Italians, Austrians, and Frenchmen found their last resting places together in the ossuaries, which were dedicated with a major trinational ceremony. It was not possible to determine where each individual soldier was from.119 116 See ibid., 97. 117 The idea of a connection between civilization and individual burial is particularly apparent in the different perceptions of the graves of European and indigenous soldiers in the colonies. See Gesine Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewußtsein: Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkriegs in Namibia 1904 bis 1907 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 270–​272. 118 Karine Varley, “Under the Shadow of Defeat: The State and the Commemoration of the Franco-​ Prussian War, 1871–​1914,” French History 16, no. 3 (2002): 323–​344, 326. 119 A detailed discussion is found in Jonathan Marwil, Visiting Modern War in Risorgimento Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  47 Only after the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870–​71 did the situation change, as reflected immediately in the way in which soldiers were buried. The ossuaries did not disappear, but individual graves marked with names would be encountered far more frequently, even decades later.120 The peace treaty signed by the German Reich and France in May 1871 created the legal basis for this. Article 16 provided that “Both governments, the German and French, mutually agree to respect and maintain the graves of soldiers buried on their territories.”121 This was only possible because the identities of soldiers could now be determined much more frequently than in previous wars. A significant role was played by Prussian soldiers’ identity tags. By introducing these, Prussia had taken a step that no other European country had yet tried, but the idea was present throughout Europe. One reason was the large number of Austrian soldiers “missing” after the Austro-​Prussian War in 1866: there were still 12,277 of these in November 1867.122 The International Committee of the Red Cross provided added impetus by promptly taking up the issue. At its first international conference in Paris in 1867, the question of how to solve the problem of the disparus, the missing, was included on the agenda. The problem of identifying dead and wounded soldiers, as well as communication of their whereabouts, was thus on the table.123 Delegates from sixteen national organizations and representatives of the governments of nine state parties were officially called upon to seek a solution. Improving identification processes and the exchange of information was defined by the ICRC as a transnational problem. Above all, however, after the 1867 conference, both issues entered the debate on the international codification of rights that had been initiated a few years earlier in the context of international humanitarian law. The conference did not have the power to decide on the obligatory introduction of an identification tag. But the proposals for improvement put forward in the course of the conference indicated the concrete problems that still had to be solved. They included clarifying property and inheritance matters, as bureaucrats apparently all too frequently still lacked sufficient precise information. Relatives’ uncertainty was also addressed: there was no functioning infrastructure to collect information on sick, captured, or dead soldiers in order to inform their families. It seemed advisable to create an office to facilitate contact with prisoners of war.124 120 Karine Varley, Under the Shadow of Defeat: The War of 1870–​ 71 in French Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 121 “Les deux Gouvernements, allemand et français, s’engagent réciproquement à faire respecter et entretenir les tombeaux des soldats ensevelis sur leurs territoires respectifs.” Traité entre la France et l’Allemagne signé à Francfort le 10 mai 1871 (Frankfurt am Main, 1871), https://​mjp.univ-​perp.fr/​trai​ tes/​1871fr​ancf​ort.htm, accessed 21 January 2022. 122 Anon, “Feldstärke und Schlachtverluste der österreichischen und der preußischen Armee im Jahr 1867, nach officiellen statistischen Mittheilungen,” Außerordentliche Beilage zu Allgemeinen Zeitung, 1867, 4914–​4915, 4915. 123 Sociétés de Secours aux Bléssés Militaires des Armées et de Mer, Conférences Internationales à Paris (Paris, 1867). 124 Ibid.

48  Victims. Perceptions of Harm The conference thus demonstrated with rare clarity how private, social, and bureaucratic needs intersected. When Prussia mandated identification tags for soldiers, it accommodated—​ intentionally or not—​a wide range of interests. More noteworthy, however, were the longer term effects. The identification tag was crucial to the emergence of an entire bureaucracy that produced and distributed knowledge of the death of soldiers. In field hospitals, identification tags made it easier to compile lists with reliable information. In addition, during the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870–​71, private relief organizations, with state support, for the first time set up official information bureaus in different cities that collected information, on the basis of these hospital lists, on the health situation and whereabouts of soldiers and, in case of inquiry, gave it to the family.125 By the end of the war—​that is, within ten months—​ almost 12,000 lists had arrived at the so-​called Central Evidence Bureau (Central-​ Nachweise-​Bureau) in Berlin alone, which gave the bureau the names of almost 510,000 soldiers, including some 60,000 Frenchmen.126 More than 100,000 written inquiries apparently arrived in the same period of time.127 Given this situation, it was clear that new archiving systems would be necessary to ensure rapid access to information. Books were replaced by file cards. Long rows of file boxes now stored large amounts of information about individuals that could no longer be properly administered in traditional fashion. Other countries gradually followed this example; for many, however, the necessity only became clear during World War I. But the course had already been laid: the second Geneva Convention of 1906 officially established in Article 4 that each belligerent was to forward military identification tags and evidence of identity as soon as possible to the authorities of the opposing country. With their signatures, thirty-​six countries confirmed before World War I that they respected this principle, including twelve Latin American states as well as Congo, the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, and Korea.128 The signatories to the Geneva Convention of 1864 who met at the 1867 Conference in Paris had not yet been able to agree upon this. When World War I broke out, the idea that a dead soldier had to be identified by name had become the norm in Europe. The expectation had also been established that relatives would receive information on where soldiers were located, whether wounded or dead. In the course of 150 years, the attitude toward the dead in many European countries had thus changed appreciably—​a complex history overall, as we have seen. It cannot therefore be generalized. We owe to Catherine Drew Gilpin 125 See Marwil, Visiting Modern War. 126 Central-​Komitee der Deutschen Vereine vom Roten Kreuz, Bericht des Central-​Comités der Deutschen Vereine zur Pflege im Felde Verwundeter und Erkrankter Krieger: Über seine Thätigkeit und die Wirksamkeit der mit ihm verbundenen Vereine während des Krieges von 1870–​1871 (Berlin, 1872), 101. 127 Anon, “Das Central-​Nachweise-​Bureau in Berlin,” Militair-​Wochenblatt 56, no. 88 (22 July 1871). 128 Convention pour l’Amélioration du Sort des Blessés et Malades dans les Armées en Campagne (Geneva, 6 July 1906), https://​ihl-​databa​ses.icrc.org/​dih-​trai​tes/​INTRO/​180?OpenD​ocum​ent, accessed 21 January 2022.

Recording, Documenting, Identifying (1800–1914)  49 Faust, author of an impressive book about the American Civil War (1861–​65), the insight that developments taking place in North America evinced clear parallels to those in Europe. In the context of the Civil War, it becomes quite clear that the way dead soldiers were dealt with had changed in that part of the world as well in the course of a century. The newly formed United States Sanitary Commission, a private relief organization, built an infrastructure to collect information on sick and deceased soldiers; together with the Christian Commission, it grew into a contact office for families seeking missing soldiers. Civilians and officers strove to identify the dead. The government of the Union took action toward the end of the war: in 1864 it established official units charged with identifying dead soldiers by name and registering their graves as quickly as possible. It also established the first “national cemeteries” to honor its soldiers who had died “in service to their country.” Still, the number of soldiers who could not be found or identified by name remained large; on the Union side alone, it was said to be around 170,000 soldiers. Some men who went to war had gotten tattoos or taken other measures to ensure that they could be identified if they died. The desire not to disappear in death was thus certainly widespread. Merchants who offered such identifying markers were aware of it. But none of the belligerents had officially introduced identification tags. Like many European countries, the US waited until World War I to do so.129 The distribution of identification tags in this worldwide war unquestionably helped to determine soldiers’ fates in hundreds of thousands of cases. The conditions for informing families, identifying graves, and clarifying property, inheritance, and marriage questions thus improved immensely. Overall, however, gigantic efforts and comprehensive bureaucratic procedures were necessary to satisfy the various needs that, in this war, for the first time involved millions of people. It is far too little understood that these demands also produced new experiences of war. Many of them can be found in letters sent to the International Committee of the Red Cross. If contact between a soldier and his family broke off without his death being officially confirmed, distrust spread. Had the French perhaps forbidden the wounded and prisoners from sending letters? Were the English, French, and Belgians really taking the identity tags off dead German soldiers in order to give them to the German military authorities so that the dead could be identified by name, as one concerned father asked in May 1915?130 French families missing their husbands, fathers, and sons in turn voiced the suspicion that the Germans were running secret prison camps, denying prisoners of war the right to write letters, or keeping back the names of prisoners.131 The entire search and information 129 Gilpin Faust, Republic of Suffering. The reference to tattooing soldiers as a means of identifying them is found in Jane Caplan and John Torpey, “Introduction,” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, edited by Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1–​12, 6. 130 Letter to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 25 May 1915, in: ICRC, C G1 A 14-​03. 131 Aristide Prat, “Vers l’espoir et la justice!,” Le Petit Journal, 8 August 1916, in: ICRC, C G1 A 14-​03.

50  Victims. Perceptions of Harm apparatus brought some people certainty, but fostered distrust in others when no news arrived. Above all, however, it became clear that the desire to identify dead soldiers by name lent the category of the “missing” a different significance and allowed it to emerge more starkly than before. In Europe, the families of nearly five million missing persons were confronted with the fact that the state only honored those who could be proven to have died in the war. Medals of honor were given to the families of the dead, but not to those whose husbands were still “missing.” A final look at France, by way of example, indicates the problems that arose. The Croix de Guerre, the tribute “Mort pour la France” on the death certificate, and compensation of 1,000 francs were reserved for the relatives of soldiers officially pronounced dead. This led to protests; in June 1919, families of the missing took to the streets to demonstrate against the distinction. In their eyes, it was a “horrible” indignity that denied them the right to be proud of the deceased and their sacrifices.132

132 See “Les disparus doivent être considérés comme morts au champ d’honneur,” Journal Français, 24 June1919, and “Les disparus seront considérés comme mort au champ d’honneur,” Le Petit Parisien, 9 August 1919, both in: ICRC, C G1 A 14-​04.

3

Efforts in International Law The “Civilization” of War (1864–​1977)

Introduction In the Forest of Katyn is a short film, barely ten minutes long. It has the format of the documentary short films that were long shown in German theaters as the “weekly newsreel” and in German-​occupied territories as the “foreign weekly newsreel.” In fact, the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had the film made in early 1943 in order to visually present the terrible news reported by the Nazi news agency “Transocean” on 11 April: In a forest near the village of Katyn, German soldiers had discovered a mass grave containing thousands of corpses. The dead were largely Polish officers who had been murdered by the Soviets in 1940.1 The discovery was genuine, but the reports released by the Nazis were embellished in such a way that the narrative and what was shown varied depending on the audience. The short documentary film In the Forest of Katyn was a specific portrayal of the event that, like the entire anti-​Soviet campaign, was made with the purpose of undermining the Allied alliance. Given the mass murders of Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Jews committed by the Nazis since the start of the war, this propaganda demonstrated incredible cynicism. Nevertheless, the film is instructive as a part of the campaign; it demonstrates powerfully that even the Nazis, who were engaged in an unprecedented war of extermination, were extremely clever in using the established rules of “civilized” warfare in their efforts to split their opponents’ alliance. In the Forest of Katyn consisted of more than just horrific images. The visual material edited together in this film, with added commentary, was carefully composed. The beginning, panning over fields and forests, suggested that behind the “peace” that seemed to be dawning in the East, terrible things lurked in secret, as if in ambush. The narrator announced “pits full of corpses” and, more concretely, “12,000 officers”—​much too high a figure, as we now know. The filmmakers did not spare the audience terrible images: the camera hovered over mass graves for

1 See, e.g., Francine Hirsch, Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Thomas Urban, Katyn 1940: Geschichte eines Verbrechens (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2015); George Sanford, Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice and Memory (London: Routledge, 2005).

Victims. Svenja Goltermann, Oxford University Press. © Svenja Goltermann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192897725.003.0003

52  Victims. Perceptions of Harm minutes at a time, following the work of exhumations taking place at various parts of the site; it showed corpses and more corpses, the skulls of numerous dead bodies, while the commentator explained that “murdered officers” were being exhumed. Supposedly one could even tell from the skulls—​shown in close-​up—​“that these people were buried alive.” During a passage lasting two minutes and thirty seconds, in which the camera showed only mass graves and bodies, the filmmakers confronted the viewer with the fact that the Soviets had breached the customs of “civilized” warfare in many respects and had not hesitated to violate international law. The narrator revealed that the Polish population had been lied to about the whereabouts of the missing soldiers. Prisoners of war had been murdered with a shot to the neck and their bodies “piled up” thoughtlessly and then hastily buried in mass graves. The dead soldiers were thus denied even the dignity of a proper burial. A change of scene, in which the camera panned across private documents, identity papers, and photos of young wives and laughing, waving children, underscored that the “GPU executioners” cared nothing for the families of these men who were waiting for them at home, while also demonstrating that they could have identified the dead soldiers if they wanted to. The Germans took on this work of identification, “man by man.” They had mountains of bodies in front of them, as a further camera pan revealed, while also catching, as though in passing, a fluttering Red Cross flag—​the powerful symbol of the codified laws of war to which “civilized” nations had supposedly agreed. In the Forest of Katyn used images to stage the universal horror felt by foreign visitors to Katyn—​representatives of “every European country”—​underlaid with reports on the shocked reaction of everyone present at the site. Catch phrases were enough to assure viewers that even in wartime, certain moral and legal principles still applied. As a result, the dead could be defined as murder victims, and the terrible deeds were crimes—​a “horrible crime against Europeans,” as the narrator clarified. The entire presentation suggested that any “human being” would react with shock. For the bodies at Katyn were not fallen soldiers in a normal war, a “slaughter of the defenseless” had taken place there. What happened could be described in a single word: “barbarism.” As we know, the Nazis were unable to divide the Allies with their campaign involving the discoveries in Katyn. Still, it was not without effect, an effect encouraged by the reactions of the Soviet news agencies, which immediately denied the accusations, declaring in turn that this was all merely Goebbels-​style propaganda and that the murders in Poland were actually committed by the Wehrmacht in summer of 1941.2 The situation was thus ambiguous, and conflicts ensued. The Polish government in exile in London, which distrusted the Soviet story and asked



2 Hirsch, Soviet Judgement, 28–​29; Urban, Katyn, 124–​131.

Efforts in International Law   53 the ICRC to investigate, was accused by Moscow of acting in concert with Hitler; an open break between Moscow and the exile regime followed. The British, too, responded indignantly to Poland’s suggestion: While Winston Churchill certainly did not put it past the Soviets, he criticized the Polish government in exile harshly for acting unilaterally and forced it to withdraw its request to the ICRC. The British government made a political decision: it publicly accused the Germans of “cynical hypocrisy” in face of the murder of so many innocent Poles and Russians and played down the story of mass murder in Katyn, claiming the whole thing was a strategy to divide the Allies.3 In fact, it could not be determined with certainty who had committed the crime: given the protection of sovereignty inherent in international law, the ICRC could only have operated in Katyn with the permission of the Soviet Union.4 But the Kremlin refused to agree to this. Therefore, complete certainty that the crime in Katyn was committed by the Soviets was not possible until the Soviet government officially admitted its responsibility half a century later, in 1990. The problem the Allies faced in the case of Katyn was hardly unique at the time, and not at all new. It had been clear since the late nineteenth century that accusations alone were not enough to determine whether mutual allegations of criminal atrocities by belligerents were justified. Attempts had been made to deal with this dilemma. But the idea of establishing an independent international commission to investigate violations of international law failed to bear fruit, for political reasons. Not until the negotiations between 1974 and 1977 on the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 was a modus found for establishing a permanent international commission to investigate accusations of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. However, the creation of this International Humanitarian Fact-​Finding Commission only theoretically mitigated the problem. Numerous states, mainly in Africa and Asia, but also the United States, refuse to accept this institution to this day.5 It is mainly due to the initiative of many NGOs and their collaboration with international organizations and private actors that the highly complicated work of fact-​finding in these regions has been possible at all.6 The exploitation of actual or invented violations of international law for propaganda purposes is still quite common. What makes it interesting is that propaganda of this sort must refer to existing norms and codified law in order for it to be effective. This was even true under the Nazis, as the propaganda campaign around Katyn shows. The film invoked various violations of norms that had gradually 3 Urban, Katyn, 81–​87. Quote at 87. 4 Ibid., 80ff. 5 See, e.g., Charles Garraway, “The International Humanitarian Fact-​ Finding Commission,” Commonwealth Law Bulletin 34 (2008): 813–​816; Erich Kussbach, “The International Humanitarian Fact-​Finding Commission,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 43 (1994): 174–​185. 6 On the complex work of fact-​finding in the context of war crimes and crimes against humanity, see the critical discussions by numerous authors in the collection by Philipp Alston and Sarah Knuckley (eds.), The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-​Finding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

54  Victims. Perceptions of Harm become part of the codified laws of war since the turn of the century: providing the opposing side with information on the whereabouts of prisoners of war, not despoiling the dead, and especially, treating prisoners “humanely,” as provided for in the Hague Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague Convention) in 1907.7 Based on the experience of World War I, the Geneva Convention of 1929 even emphasized that prisoners of war were to be protected from violence and that reprisals against them were prohibited.8 What had happened in Katyn went beyond violence that was legal or even legitimate in wartime, and could be classified as a “crime.” The German Foreign Office, which published a 300-​page “Official Report on the Mass Murders in Katyn” in 1943, in this case spoke not only of the dead or of bodies; it described them—​seventy-​five times in the first ninety-​eight pages alone—​as “victims.”9 In this way, it made it unmistakably clear that the Poles discovered at Katyn had lost their lives through illegal violence. This story demonstrates that the Nazis knew what language they had to use and what norms they needed implicitly to invoke in order to be heard and understood by the Allies. They doubtless appreciated exactly when the rules of war were violated, and also knew how to determine when illegitimate violence in war could be classified as “crime.” The certainty with which they expected their opponents to know exactly what the norms of “civilized” warfare were and to classify violations accordingly was only possible, however, because the laws of war had been established since the 1860s in the form of binding international treaties. In other words, the fact that the Nazis could invoke the rules of warfare in their propaganda was the result of efforts that began in the nineteenth century to “limit” war through codified law—​to mitigate the harms of war, or “humanize” it, as it was termed at the time.10 This is unquestionably a paradox. These efforts in international law and their complicated history are crucial to a genealogy of the perception of victimhood. They established a knowledge of illegitimate violence that, while it did not immediately bring with it the ascription of victimhood, would nevertheless lay the groundwork for it. Such a genealogy cannot be limited to legal debates and codifications of the laws of war. Medicine and law were in fact closely intertwined in many ways, particularly where it was necessary to establish the line between legitimate and illegitimate violence in war. Colonialism, in turn, lent the laws of war a

7 Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (The Hague, 18 October 1907), https://​www.fed​lex.admin.ch/​eli/​cc/​26/​429_​338_​411/​de, accessed 22 January 2022. 8 Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (Geneva, 27 July 1929), https://​ihl-​databa​ ses.icrc.org/​app​lic/​ihl/​ihl.nsf/​INTRO/​305?OpenD​ocum​ent, accessed 22 January 2022. 9 Auswärtiges Amt, Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn (Berlin, 1943). 10 On the civilization of war in the history of ideas, see, e.g., Kerstin von Lingen, “Crimes against Humanity”: Eine Ideengeschichte der Zivilisierung von Kriegsgewalt 1864–​1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2018).

Efforts in International Law   55 specific “geography”11 until well into the twentieth century—​with consequences for the practice and classification of violence. In general, the history of the laws of war is not simply one of progress; Katyn is only one illustration of this.12 The codified laws of war were repeatedly circumvented, and indeed massively violated; the category of “war crimes” (which began with the international rules established in the twentieth century) made it necessary to create investigative procedures to establish factual “truth.”

The Humanization of War: Regulation and Experimentation Two months before World War II officially ended on the European continent, representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross made contact with various governments and national Red Cross organizations to inform them of their intention to revise and expand the existing conventions that had codified the laws of war by way of international treaties since 1864. Four years later, on 12 August 1949, following intensive discussion at several conferences that brought together representatives of the ICRC, legal experts, Red Cross delegates, and government officials, the results were presented: the Geneva Conventions, to this day the cornerstone of the international laws of war, known since the 1950s as “international humanitarian law.”13 The adoption of these treaties in the aftermath of “total war” was an ambivalent event. On the one hand, the protagonists of the conventions could look back on more than eight decades during which the laws of war (ius in bello) had been developed successfully in the form of internationally codified legal norms. The initial ten articles of the first Geneva Convention of 1864 had only aimed to ensure improved care of wounded soldiers. These were expanded to include war at sea in the two Geneva Conventions of 1906, and also integrated in this form into the

11 Frédéric Mégret, “From ‘Savages’ to ‘Unlawful’ Combatants: A Postcolonial Look at International Law’s ‘Other’,” in International Law and Its Others, edited by Anne Orford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 265–​317. See also Inge Van Hulle, Britain and International Law in West Africa: The Practice of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), especially Chap. 4; Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–​1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chap. 2. 12 There is an extensive body of literature on this. For one example, see Andrew Barros and Martin Thomas (eds.), The Civilianization of War: The Changing Civil-​Military Divide, 1914–​2014 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 13 The term was first used by the ICRC in the 1950s, in order to resituate the laws of the Geneva Conventions and indicate the link between international humanitarian law and human rights. See Dietrich Schindler, “Human Rights and Humanitarian Law,” American University Law Review 31 (1982): 935–​977. On the history of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, see the important new study by Boyd van Dijk, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), which examines the extent to which the debate on the protection of civilians was influenced by the confrontations of the early Cold War years and by colonialism.

56  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Hague Convention of 1907. The Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War followed in 1929; twenty years later, four years after World War II, the fourth treaty on the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” completed the series. Overall, these treaties provided a comprehensive set of rules that set out quite nuanced guidelines for dealing with combatants, non-​combatants, and cultural property.14 On the other hand, a review of the past decades presented a terrible, devastating picture. The extent of violence in war had become limitless. World War I alone had cost nearly 9 million soldiers and millions of civilians their lives. World War II ended after 60 to 70 million people had been killed, many of them systematically murdered. The modern laws of war, the international codification of which had been driven by lawyers and government officials since the mid-​nineteenth century, were apparently unable to limit war. Against this background, it is not surprising that the intention to revise and expand the Geneva Conventions immediately after the war did not meet with unanimous approval. The harshest criticisms came from the ranks of the anti-​war and disarmament movements, which basically repeated the accusations they had leveled against the drafters of the Hague and Geneva Conventions since the turn of the century, leaving aside the wars in the colonies: this set of rules did not prevent wars, but instead created the impression that war could be waged with limited suffering, thus continuing to lay the groundwork for war.15 Others doubted that a new version of the Geneva Conventions would be of any use if the rules they codified were not adhered to, as the atrocities of the last war had shown. The possibility of the use of nuclear weapons intensified the problem: under these circumstances, how was any protection of prisoners of war and civilians possible at all, especially as hospitals would be destroyed in such a case?16 The protagonists of the Geneva Conventions could not ignore these reservations entirely, even though the constellation of the Cold War and continuing colonialism influenced their concrete framing much more strongly.17 But the early debates showed that society’s trust in the capabilities of the laws of war was shaken. Given this situation, even the lawyer Jean Pictet, a member of the directorate of the International Committee of the Red Cross since 1946 who campaigned eagerly for the Geneva Conventions immediately after their adoption, had no wish to create 14 The German version of the four Geneva Conventions adopted on 12 August 1949 is found in Bundesgesetzblatt, 1954, Part II, 1 September 1954: 783–​986. 15 See Anon, “Die Humanisierung des Krieges,” Die Friedens-​Warte 3 (1901): 2–​5; Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–​1914 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991); Gerd Oberleitner, Human Rights in Armed Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 41ff. 16 Jean S. Pictet, “The New Geneva Conventions for the Protection of War Victims,” American Journal of International Law 45, no. 3 (1951): 462–​475, 464. 17 See Van Dijk, Preparing for War; Gilad Ben-​Nun, The Fourth Geneva Convention for Civilians: The History of International Humanitarian Law (London: I. B. Tauris, 2020).

Efforts in International Law   57 illusions. Regarding the destructive force of nuclear weapons, he admitted that the ICRC had no solution and that, “given the discrepancy between our civilization’s material and moral progress,” there was “every reason to be afraid.” His categorization of law in the area of war was at least equally noteworthy. “Law always lags behind charity,” he observed. “It is too slow to keep up with the realities of life and the needs of humanity.”18 This was a sober assessment that contrasted with the usual narrative of progress that was widespread in the discourse on international law in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and which emerged quite soon after the end of World War II.19 Pictet referred to an important, if seldom addressed, characteristic of the laws of war that fundamentally limited their ability to regulate wars and curb their horrors: international law lags in regard to technical innovations and changing methods of warfare, because it cannot predict future developments, but can only react and adapt to them. The fact that this Swiss legal scholar stressed this aspect only a few years after the war ended undoubtedly had a strategic function. Pictet’s arguments were exculpatory for law and therefore also for its makers, especially as he refrained from more clearly questioning the modern laws of war that had applied over the previous decades. He said nothing about the “creators” of this body of law, not a word about the beliefs, fantasies, and fears that had guided them in their work or the concrete effect of the establishment of laws of war since the second half of the nineteenth century. The law that appeared in Pictet’s narrative was largely ahistorical. It was depoliticized, an all but technocratic instrument to regulate war as far as possible in the future and to universalize its principles, as established in the Geneva Conventions. It took a surprisingly long time for international lawyers and historians to become interested in illuminating the early history of the modern laws of war. However, many of its facets have recently been clarified and explained. These include the colonial background of international law, which was conceived by Europeans only for sovereign states.20 The fact that treaties to “humanize” war were intended only for interstate conflicts should also be viewed in this context. The use of military force in the colonies was not subject to the norms of war; it was legitimized by the supposed “uncivilized” nature of stateless societies and legalized under the legal system established in the colonies by the imperial powers themselves.21 18 Pictet, “The New Geneva Convention,” 464. 19 Tillmann Altwicker and Oliver Diggelmann, “How Is Progress Constructed in International Legal Scholarship?,” European Journal of International Law 25, no. 2 (2014): 425–​444. 20 See, e.g., Lauren A. Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law 1800–​1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Anghie, Imperialism; Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. On the use of the concepts of civilization and civilizing in international politics, see Mark Mazower, “End of Civilization and the Rise of Human Rights: The Mid-​Twentieth-​Century Disjuncture,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, edited by Stefan-​Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 29–​44. 21 See, e.g., Benton, Rage; Martti Koskenniemi, “Colonial Laws: Sources, Strategies and Lessons?,” Journal of the History of International Law 18, 2–​3 (2016): 248–​277, 262ff.; Devin O. Pendas, “‘The

58  Victims. Perceptions of Harm The “architects” of the laws of war were, after all, “men of their times,” as international law scholar Frédéric Mégret has rightly observed.22 This did not mean there were no disagreements among them. In general, the ideas of the liberal international law scholars who were concerned with developing concrete proposals for codifying the laws of war in the late nineteenth century were not readily accepted. Each of the conventions was influenced by political considerations and military interests raised by government officials and military leaders.23 The preamble to the Hague Convention on Land Warfare provides a typical example. At the conclusion of the negotiations, the contracting parties were able to formulate their interests only in limited terms: “to diminish the evils of war so far as military necessities permit.”24 Where the laws of war are concerned, as in other areas of international law, what is considered valid law is the result of processes of communication and negotiation involving a variety of actors.25 Law is contested territory. This is true even when legal norms have already been adopted. The bitter conflicts over violations of the laws of war during World War I are just one example;26 the complex legal procedures to punish war crimes are another.27 We will return to all of this. For now, however, we are concerned with medicine. Its connection to war has often been studied (and will be considered further in this book). The same has not been true for its intersection with the laws of war; we are not usually much aware of this relationship. It is familiar mainly because forensic investigations have become increasingly important since the end of the twentieth century when dealing, socially and legally, with war crimes and crimes against humanity.28 Recent debates on the use of non-​lethal weapons in war now make the linkage clear in a very different context. Not only does the development of weapons technology (irritants, shock weapons, and non-​lethal ammunition) depend on medical knowledge; medical experts are also involved in the controversies about whether these “medicalized weapons”29 actually “humanize” war (as it Magical Scent of the Savage’: Colonial Violence, the Crisis of Civilization, and the Origins of the Legalist Paradigm of War,” Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 30, no. 1 (2007): 29–​53, especially 43ff. 22 Mégret, “ ‘Unlawful’ Combatants,” 272. 23 See, e.g., David Kennedy, Of War and Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); for the Geneva Conventions of 1949, see Van Dijk, Preparing for War. 24 Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land. 25 See, e.g., Willibald Steinmetz, Begegnungen vor Gericht (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), 23; Monika Dommann, Autoren und Apparate: Die Geschichte des Copyrights im Medienwandel (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2014). 26 See, e.g., Isabel V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making of International Law during the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 27 See, e.g., Annette Weinke, Law, History, and Justice: Debating German State Crimes in the Long Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn, 2019); Tomaz Jardim, The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 28 See, e.g., Adam Rosenblatt, Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 29 Michael L. Gross, “Medicalized Weapons & Modern War,” Hastings Center Report 40, no. 1 (2010): 34–​43.

Efforts in International Law   59 continues to be phrased) or whether they violate the laws of war, since the Geneva Conventions prohibit weapons “of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.”30 In 1993, non-​lethal chemical weapons were also prohibited under international law, not least for this reason. That was not the first time that medicine had taken part in the process of delineating international legal norms. This is evidenced by medical treatises published by physicians, or more precisely by surgeons, in the second half of the “long” nineteenth century. They provide insight into various practices for generating knowledge, which essentially promised two things: first, reliable information on the wounds to be expected from various weapons, and second, more precise information on the options for treating these wounds. This was not in itself a new concern among physicians. It was, however, typical of medical literature in the late nineteenth century that numerous surgeons dealt with the effects of projectiles, and not only from a medical perspective. Their research also addressed whether and under what conditions weapons and ammunition were “humane.” Some surgeons evaluated the experiences they had amassed as doctors in wartime. Others experimented on corpses, animals, or other objects to test the effects of various weapons. Military doctors’ confrontation with new projectile weapons was one significant reason for these experiments. However, in an 1885 treatise on the effects of modern projectile weapons, the Swiss doctor Heinrich Bircher gave another reason for the experiments so many renowned physicians had been carrying out since the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870–​71: The belligerents in that war had accused each other of using small-​caliber explosive bullets, thus violating the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, which prohibited their use under international law.31 The fact that physicians from various European countries became involved in precise testing of the effects of projectile weapons is quite remarkable. After all, they were not members of a commission tasked with investigating allegations for a potential criminal trial. It would have been impossible to reconstruct such crimes, and in any case, there was no way to sanction violations of international law. What did exist, however, was the guiding principle of the St. Petersburg Declaration, which established “that the only legitimate object which States should endeavor to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy.” It added that “this object would be exceeded by the employment of arms which uselessly

30 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977, Art. 35 https://​www.admin.ch/​opc/​ de/​cla​ssif​i ed-​comp​ilat​ion/​19770​112/​20140​7180​000/​0.518.521.pdf, accessed 21 January 2022. Among the vast literature on the topic: Gross, “Weapons”; Frédéric Mégret, “Non-​Lethal Weapons and the Possibility of Radical New Horizons for the Laws of War: Why Kill, Wound and Hurt (Combatants) at All?,” SSRN Journal (July 2008). 31 Heinrich Bircher, “Die Wirkung der modernen Handfeuerwaffen,” Allgemeine Schweizerische Militär-​Zeitung 31 (1885): 193–​196, 193.

60  Victims. Perceptions of Harm aggravate the sufferings of disabled men, or render their death inevitable.” In short, their use was not compatible with the “laws of humanity.”32 The international military commission that met in St. Petersburg failed to produce a comprehensive weapons ban. There was universal agreement only on a proposal to renounce light (under 400 grams) explosive projectiles. Nevertheless, the St. Petersburg Declaration was hardly meaningless. In fact, including the concept of “unnecessary suffering” in an international agreement was an entirely new phenomenon. The same was true of the requirement that warfare aim to incapacitate the opponent without necessarily killing him.33 While they were not precise stipulations, the mandate was clearly outlined. The Institut de Droit International, founded in 1873 by renowned international law scholars from various European countries, elaborated that mandate further;34 the Hague Convention then established it as a principle, though in weaker form.35 This history must be taken into account in order to understand the physicians’ projectile experiments and their consideration of the “humane” character of various types of bullets. Interestingly, the concrete medical effects of projectiles took some time to determine. It was difficult for surgeons to establish the precise effects of bullets as long as they were dependent on experiments. Artificial specimens made of wood, metal, clay, or stuffed pig bladders were, the physicians soon realized, unsatisfactory substitutes for living bodies. Even old skulls, animal cadavers, and human corpses, which were occasionally utilized, could not really replace them, as physicians pointed out at the turn of the century.36 Nevertheless, not all their observations were unusable. By the mid-​1870s, it could be said with considerable certainty that wounds attributed to prohibited explosive bullets could also be caused by other projectiles. The Swiss surgeon Theodor Kocher, who carried out comprehensive analyses to clarify this phenomenon, therefore recommended in 1878 that these bullets be made smaller “in the interests of humanity.” Only in this way, he believed, would it be possible to achieve the aim of international law: an explosive effect great enough to ensure the “inability of the targeted person to fight” while causing only “non-​life threatening wounds” that could be treated surgically.37

32 Declaration Renouncing the Use, in Time of War, of Explosive Projectiles, https://​www.fed​lex.admin. ch/​eli/​cc/​IX/​597_​543_​597/​de, accessed 22 January 2022. 33 See Henri Meyrowitz, “The Principle of Superfluous Injury or Unnecessary Suffering: From the Declaration of St. Petersburg of 1868 to Additional Protocol I of 1977,” International Review of the Red Cross 34, no. 299 (1994): 98–​122; Mégret, “Non-​Lethal Weapons,” 21. 34 The Laws of War on Land: Oxford, 9 September 1880, https://​ihl-​databa​ses.icrc.org/​ihl/​INTRO/​ 140?OpenD​ocum​ent, accessed 31 January 2022. 35 Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, Arts. 22 and 23. 36 See, e.g., Alwin von Coler and Otto von Schjerning, Ueber die Wirkung und die kriegschirurgische Bedeutung der neuen Handfeuerwaffen (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1894), 3–​30, 4. 37 Theodor Kocher, “Neue Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Wirkungsweise der modernen Kleingewehr-​ Geschosse,” Correspondenz-​Blatt für Schweizer Aerzte 9 (1897): 65–​71, 104–​109, 133–​137, 137.

Efforts in International Law   61 Twenty years later, this assessment had clearly been overtaken. The caliber of the “modern” steel-​jacketed bullets that had by then come into use had in fact become smaller. However, the sophisticated experiments that had meanwhile been developed to determine the effects of projectiles had produced more nuanced results that were not at all reassuring. The German surgeons Alwin von Coler and Otto Schjerning, for example, predicted some very serious wounds, and especially more deaths, on the basis of their experiments on thousands of specimens. At the International Medical Congress in Rome in 1894, they stated that “the idea of the new humane bullet that had been commonly held” was “irrevocably gone.”38 Their colleagues soon confirmed that their results were fundamentally sound. Nevertheless, many doctors around the turn of the century found it difficult to classify the new bullets as basically “inhumane.” After all, the danger of infection was lower with these small projectiles. This led them to consider whether the seriousness of a wound might depend on whether organs or bones were hit, and whether the distance of the shot should be taken into account as well (see Figure 3.1). The Swiss surgeon Heinrich Bircher was one observer who argued in this fashion. On the basis of his experiments and assessments, he determined that “when the great majority of bullet wounds that we can expect to treat present better conditions than in the past—​for example, only 15% of the patients have serious bone splinters and fatal shots increase by only 5% (20% to 25%)—​I do not believe that we can speak of more inhumane weapons.”39 The debate over whether “modern” bullets could be called “humane” or not did not end until World War I. In this case, medical knowledge had difficulty stabilizing, for many reasons. One was the artificiality of the experiments, which, despite considerable effort and care, often only permitted hypotheses. Weapons technology was also constantly developing, so that the results of experiments kept becoming obsolete and the experiments needed to be repeated. Additionally, some believed that there were not enough major wars,40 and therefore reports by doctors who voluntarily traveled to distant theaters of war in order to gain experience in wartime surgery were only helpful to a limited degree. Most importantly, however, medicine was changing. Treatment of wounds and operating techniques had improved considerably by the late nineteenth century, increasing the likelihood that the wounded could be kept alive. The work of the Red Cross, which had greatly improved the state of medical care in wartime, contributed to this. Its activities carried weight when, at the turn of the twentieth century, surgeons from various European states (as well as the US) reflected on whether “modern,” more rapid

38 Coler and Schjerning, Wirkung, 30. 39 Ibid., 53. 40 See Joanna Bourke, Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-​Play Invade Our Lives (London: Virago, 2014), 135.

62  Victims. Perceptions of Harm

Figure 3.1  On the effects of projectiles on the human bodya aHeinrich Bircher, Neue Untersuchungen über die Handfeuerwaffen (Aarau: Sauerländer, 1896).

Efforts in International Law   63 projectiles from more accurate weapons could still be classified as “humane.”41 Determining which weapons caused “unnecessary suffering” and were thus “inhumane” in the international legal sense depended, among other things, on whether one was coming from a military or a medical point of view, and how one viewed deaths in war in the first place. Doctors’ conclusions thus differed greatly, regardless of their national origin. While some believed that the fact that the wounded were twice as likely to survive “more than compensated for the increase in fatal shots,”42 others refused to accept this. Surgeon Theodor Kocher stated at the International Medical Congress in Rome in 1894, “The bullets have really become explosive projectiles, which by their very nature should be prohibited by international agreement.” For this reason, he called urgently for a reduction in their explosive effect, for example by reducing the caliber and tapering the front end of the bullet. Kocher had not given up on the idea of a “humane” bullet. Indeed, he advocated for it, arguing that “the purpose of war between civilized nations is not, as among savages, to annihilate as many people as possible.”43 The disagreements among doctors regarding “modern” bullets did not, in this case, develop into a serious conflict; no one actually went so far as to publicly state that international law required a ban. As a rule, comments remained ambivalent, even from Kocher.44 No one denied that the projectiles had improved the chance of healing many types of wounds, and that this was not due to medicine alone. To this extent, one could certainly speak of “progress” in regard to projectile weapons. Kocher himself formulated this no differently. He even pointed out that the dilation of wounds that occurred when bullets shot from a distance of 200 meters left the body was no longer seven to thirteen centimeters, but only two to three centimeters, because of the metal jacket.45 From this perspective, the hoped-​for “humanization” of war had at least begun. A ban on bullets was therefore never seriously discussed. The experts were more interested in continuing down the path that had been embarked upon, in order to reduce the projectiles’ deadly consequences within the bounds of what was possible and militarily feasible. This was the surgeons’ aim in dealing with war among “civilized” nations, at any rate. None of them had lost sight of the fact that it was necessary to be prepared for possible wars in the context of imperialist ambitions and arms races. Falling behind 41 See, e.g., C. T. Dent, “A Lecture on Small-​Bore Rifle Bullet Wounds and the ‘Humanity’ of the Present War: Delivered at St. George’s Hospital, on May 1st, 1900,” British Medical Journal 1, no. 2055 (May 1900): 1209–​1213. 42 Bircher, Untersuchungen, 71. For a contrasting view, see, e.g., Anton Dilger and Arthur Meyer, “Kriegschirurgische Erfahrungen aus den Balkankriegen 1912/​13,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Chirurgie 127 (1914): 225–​379, 240ff. 43 Theodor Kocher, “Die Verbesserung der Geschosse vom Standpunkt der Humanität,” in Atti Dell’XI Congresso Medico Internazionale (Turin, 1895), 320–​325, 321. 44 See, e.g., August Schachner, “The Surgical Aspects of the Modern Small-​Bore Projectile,” Annals of Surgery 31, no. 1 (1900): 75–​86. 45 Kocher, “Verbesserung,” 324.

64  Victims. Perceptions of Harm militarily was certainly not the goal: the “humanization” of war was not supposed to be a solo national project. Therefore, the surgeons not only attentively followed military developments in other countries; they did not hesitate to appear publicly as medical champions of “civilized” war and international legal norms when they deemed it necessary. Such a situation arose after the British surgeon Henry Davis mentioned in an 1897 article that the British were testing a new projectile, produced in India, in the colonies: the so-​called dum-​dum bullet. Because of the lack of a steel jacket at the tip, it caused “so ghastly a wound,” Davis revealed, “that in all probability it would be forbidden in European warfare.”46 The German surgeon Paul von Bruns, who had tested the bullets experimentally on corpses, confirmed this: “These are inhumane bullets that cause inhumane, terrible wounds.” He feared that they would be used in future wars. At the German Surgeons’ Conference in 1898, von Bruns therefore formulated an urgent appeal to the German military leadership to take steps to ensure their prohibition through a supplement to the St. Petersburg Declaration. His colleagues agreed,47 and their intervention was successful. At the first peace conference in The Hague in 1899, the British did protest that the “more humane” bullets had proven insufficient in combat against “savages.” After protracted debate, however, the majority of attendees reached a different conclusion: they achieved a ban on bullets designed to expand in the human body and inflict terrible wounds. Great Britain’s representatives did not sign; they continued to insist that the use of modified bullets was necessary in the colonies.48 The discussions in The Hague were nevertheless instructive. The government representatives did not wrestle with the British arguments. Lawyers and doctors from various European countries and the United States were quite willing to believe that the “more humane” bullets were not sufficient for military conflicts in the colonies. The British tales of “savages” who kept coming despite numerous bullet wounds were frequently repeated; they can also be found in medical journals. The crucial consideration in arguing for a general prohibition was a pragmatic one: it seemed to be the only way to ensure that dum-​dum bullets did not fall into the hands of “rebels,” where they could be turned against European soldiers or even come to be used in wars between “civilized” states.49 British surgeons at first strongly attacked the experiments by their German colleague von Bruns and the decision in The Hague, but their criticisms quickly

46 H. J. Davis, “Gunshot Injuries in the Late Grecoturkish War, with Remarks upon Modern Projectiles,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 1929 (December 1897): 1789–​1793, 1790. 47 Paul von Bruns, “Inhumane Kriegsgeschosse,” Centralblatt für Chirurgie 25 (1898): 38–​42, 41. 48 Edward M. Spiers, “The Use of the Dum Dum Bullet in Colonial Warfare,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 4, no. 1 (1975): 3–​14; Declaration (IV, 3) Concerning Expanding Bullets (The Hague, 29 July 1899), https://​ihl-​databa​ses.icrc.org/​app​lic/​ihl/​ihl-​sea​rch.nsf/​cont​ent.xsp, accessed 22 February 2022. 49 See, e.g., Christian Meurer, Die Haager Friedenskonferenz: Band 1, Das Friedensrecht der Haager Konferenz (Munich: De Gruyter, 1907), 508; Spiers, “Dum Dum Bullet,” 7f.

Efforts in International Law   65 abated.50 The adoption of the Hague Convention in 1899 established that anyone who used these weapons in the future would be subject to the charge of waging “uncivilized,” “barbaric” war. Under these conditions, no one who considered themselves part of the “civilized” “international community” could openly and publicly oppose the idea of “humanizing” war. It was instead advisable to assure one’s own population that it would be possible to regulate future wars, with the help of law and medical knowledge. The popular, widely circulated newspaper Die Gartenlaube, for example, which had long reported on medical experiments with projectile weapons, asserted that “the doctor distinguishes between humane and barbaric weapons, and he considers it his duty to object to the latter, so that they can be prohibited under international law.”51 The advocacy by German doctors against “inhumane” dum-​dum bullets and the Hague decision essentially confirmed that, despite the ongoing arms buildups, the goal of “humanizing” war had not been abandoned.

Legitimate and Illegitimate Use of Violence In the second half of the nineteenth century, the question whether one could “civilize,” “humanize,” or “limit” war engaged not only the medical community, but also lawyers, government officials, and the military. The Geneva Convention of 1864, and especially the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, were the crucial international legal documents that attempted for the first time—​after protracted discussion, and with effects that continue to this day—​to regulate warfare in this way. Together with the accompanying debates on the international laws of war, they gradually supplied the language that began to define the perception of violence and suffering in war in the last third of the nineteenth century.52 Notions in society regarding who could legitimately use violence against whom in wartime were not unaffected by this, as became apparent at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is not the place for a discussion of the complex origins of the international laws of war. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see the history of the laws of war in the nineteenth century as a linear progression toward the concrete and universal humanization of war. Critical legal historians such as Chris af Jochnick and Roger Normand rightly point out that the politicians and military leaders involved

50 See, e.g., Alex Ogston, “The Peace Conference and the Dum-​Dum Bullet,” British Medical Journal (July 1899): 278–​281. 51 Adolf Kröner, “Von den Schußwunden in künftigen Kriegen,” Die Gartenlaube 5 (1890): 159–​162. 52 See Maartje Abbenhuis, The Hague Conferences and International Politics, 1889–​ 1915 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Lothar Brock and Hendrick Simon (eds.), The Justification of War and International Order: From Past to Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Martti Koskenniemi, “The Politics of International Law,” European Journal of International Law 1, no. 1 (1990): 4–​32.

66  Victims. Perceptions of Harm in developing the Hague rules were careful to ensure that almost all weapons and methods of warfare would still be permitted as long as “military necessity” could be demonstrated. Therefore the Hague Conventions did not prohibit the bombardment of cities and provided no other “concrete limitations on military action.” This was received with disappointment in some quarters, as The Times noted after the first Hague Conference in 1899. According to Jochnick and Normand, the world did not become more secure as a result of the Hague Conventions; rather, their lack of limits “enabled political and military leaders to use rhetorical devices to justify their wartime conduct.”53 This had in fact already become apparent after the adoption of the Geneva Convention of 1864.54 In addition, codified law had not yet become law in practice. Until the mid-​ twentieth century, the applicability of the laws of war depended on whether the belligerent states had ratified the relevant treaties, or at least acknowledged their validity. Also important was whether troops were adequately instructed about these rules. The basic issue was the difficult question of how belligerent nations construed the rules in cases that were open to interpretation, and ultimately whether, in contentious cases, they dismissed accusations of violations of the laws of war as mere enemy propaganda. Whether the laws of war actually “limited” war therefore depended on power relations and disagreements regarding interpretation of the rules.55 This was particularly apparent in the imperialist military force employed in the colonies.56 In fact, the norms were often purposely interpreted loosely and flexibly by lawyers and politicians, since otherwise the parties involved, with their differing interests, might never have agreed on a common convention.57 For the specific question of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the use of force in wartime, which will be the sole focus below, it would not be expedient to describe in detail the debates that led to the drafting of the Hague rules. It is more important to pursue the practical effects of the laws of war in their formative years and early stages. In so doing, the internal restrictions built into these laws become apparent, along with the dynamic that, at least in Europe, ultimately extended the perception of illegitimate force beyond its original scope. The Bulletin of the International Committee of the Red Cross provides examples of the nature of the laws of war in the late nineteenth century and the corresponding 53 Chris af Jochnick and Roger Normand, “The Legitimation of Violence: A Critical History of the Laws of War,” Harvard International Law Journal 35, no. 1 (1994): 49–​95, especially 72–​77. On the debates regarding limitations of methods of warfare and prohibited weapons, see Abbenhuis, The Hague Conferences. 54 See, e.g., Christine Krüger, “German Suffering in the Franco-​German War, 1870/​71,” German History 29, no. 3 (2011): 404–​422. 55 See, e.g., Brock and Simon (eds.), Justification of War. 56 See, e.g., Van Hulle, Britain; Sybille Scheipers, Unlawful Combatants: A Genealogy of the Irregular Fighter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 57 See Daniel Marc Segesser, Recht statt Rache oder Rache durch Recht? Die Ahndung von Kriegsverbrechen in der internationalen wissenschaftlichen Debatte 1872–​1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010), 126–​128.

Efforts in International Law   67 perception of military force. It regularly published reports from national Red Cross societies with information on their missions and the circumstances of their work. In reports on the Russo-​Turkish War of 1877–​78 from various national societies, for example, there were constant references to the fact that the Geneva Convention had largely been respected in battle. But there were also reports of horrific acts supposedly committed by Turkish soldiers against wounded Russian soldiers and prisoners of war. Observers characterized the cold-​bloodedness with which helpless soldiers had reportedly been tortured and killed as “inhumane,” violating the rules of the “civilized world,” “the most inhumane acts,” and “practices of the least civilized peoples”—​in short, as “barbaric.”58 It is obvious from the reports, however, that the semantic distinction between “civilized” and “uncivilized” was linked to the contrast between Christianity and Islam. It is hard to discern today how much of this was propaganda; that should certainly not be underestimated. But a different point is crucial here. The claim to be waging “civilized” war was made by both sides. However, as the Russo-​Turkish War revealed, the party that found itself in the weaker position from a propaganda perspective was the one stereotyped as “uncivilized”: in this case, Turkey.59 The “barbaric,” “uncivilized,” in fact “inhuman” nature of war once again appeared to be exclusively characteristic of those situated outside of Christian civilization. At a conference in Great Britain in 1877 on the experiences of that war, a speaker summarized this view in very typical language: “The protagonists of these atrocities committed by the Turks cannot be included among the members of civilized nations, but must be placed on the same footing as the Ashanti, the redskins, and the worst Semitic races in antiquity. If the Turks are really guilty, it is impossible to continue to accord them the rights of a belligerent nation.”60 This clearly demonstrates the extent to which the codified laws of war were based on a general, long-​standing sense of the superiority of European, Christian, “white” civilization over all others. It was accompanied by a concept of law that asserted that “civilized” nations presided over sovereign, legally ordered states. In contrast, the lack of such an order was seen as a sign of lack of “civilization”; the people involved were considered colonizable and not by any means equal, as international treaties could only be concluded between sovereign states. The laws of war could therefore only apply to armed conflict between “civilized” nations.61 58 Bulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix-​Rouge, “Trente-​huitième circulaire à Messieurs les présidents et les membres des Comités centraux de secours aux militaires blessés,” 32nd bulletin, October 1877, 148–​170, quotes at 157, 160, 163f. and many similar passages in later reports (all translations from the French are the author’s). 59 See Davide Rodogno, “European Legal Doctrines on Intervention and the Status of the Ottoman Empire within the ‘Family of Nations’ throughout the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of International Law 18, no. 1 (2016): 5–​41, 6f. 60 Bulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix-​Rouge, “La convention de Genève pendant la guerre d’orient,” 33rd bulletin, January 1878, 11–​32, quote at 22f. 61 See Bowden, Empire of Civilization.

68  Victims. Perceptions of Harm In the colonial context, it becomes even clearer that the modern laws of war created a systematic “other” outside the law, as international law scholar and legal historian Frédéric Mégret has convincingly explained.62 This ultimately racist hierarchy justified the use of violence in a form that would have been outlawed in Europe for being “uncivilized.” Historian Ulrike Lindner points out that under British and German rule in East, Southwest, and South Africa, colonial wars, the quelling of rebellions, police actions, and so-​called punitive measures were frequently indistinguishable. This was intentional on the part of the colonial powers: “The line between structural violence in the colonies and a permanent state of war was . . . often fluid.”63 During the Maji-​Maji uprising against German rule in East Africa in 1905, for example, German troops responded to the rebels’ early successes with a brutal scorched-​earth policy, with the conscious intention of triggering a famine.64 British observers in the neighboring colonies were irritated by certain forms of the violence,65 but otherwise stressed the need for solidarity among the colonial powers. After all, this represented “European civilization in the midst of millions of uncivilized and semi-​civilized Africans,” as a British editorial put it in August 1905.66 In 1914, the English vice-​consul C. C. F. Dundas retroactively justified “the enormous number of deaths” during the Maji-​Maji uprising “as the only possibility of gaining control of the rebels.” His civilizational pedagogy expressly included starvation.67 Heinrich von Treitschke, of Germany’s National Liberal Party, had earlier argued along the same lines: he believed international law would become “mere rhetoric” if one were to “apply the same principles to barbaric peoples.” He therefore recommended, “one must burn down the villages of a tribe of Negroes as punishment; without such an example, one will achieve nothing.”68 Only in the case of the Herero and Nama uprising in German Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1906 did British officials, as well as British public opinion, condemn the murderous policies of the German commander Lothar von Trotha. However, the argument was mainly tactical in nature: British Secretary of State for the Colonies Alfred Lyttelton, for example, remarked that one could not gain the natives’ loyalty as subjects of the colonial administration through brutal forms of repression and even extermination of whole segments of the population.69 Reference was occasionally made to the requirements of “humanity” and “broad common sense,” which forbade excessive violence. In Germany, too, clear criticism of 62 Mégret, “ ‘Unlawful’ Combatants.” 63 Ulrike Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen: Deutschland und Großbritannien als Imperialmächte in Afrika 1880–​1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2011), 190. Van Hulle, Britain. 64 Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen, 217. 65 Ibid., 219. 66 Cited in ibid., 220f.; see also ibid., 250. 67 Cited in ibid., 221f. 68 Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik: Vorlesungen gehalten an der Universität zu Berlin: Teil 1 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1900), 569. 69 See Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen, 233.

Efforts in International Law   69 von Trotha’s warfare emerged in response to the news from German Southwest Africa, primarily, though not solely, from the ranks of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).70 In 1906, the Reichstag even refused a supplementary budget item for the colonies. The Kaiser then dissolved the parliament, forcing new elections that dealt the SPD heavy losses and ultimately led to the funds being approved.71 It is nevertheless obvious that something had changed in European public opinion since the turn of the century. Not every form of violence in the colonies was accepted. The reaction of the British public to the atrocities in Congo would be another example of this.72 The situation in the second South African war, the so-​called Boer War, which broke out in October 1899, was somewhat more complicated. In this conflict, not only were the British fighting against “a ‘fellow European people,’ ”73 but the treatment of Boer civilians by the British military led to fierce protests among the Western European public. The war was presented by the British, including to their own public, as a fight for a new form of “gentleman’s colonialism,” and at least at the beginning, it had the character of a normal interstate war between Great Britain and the Boer republics.74 But when the capitals of Transvaal and the Orange Free State fell into their opponent’s hands in June 1900, the Boers turned to guerrilla tactics that cost the British relatively high casualties. The British commander, Lord Kitchener, responded with ruthless warfare, destroying the Boers’ agricultural foundation in order to deprive the guerrillas of sources of refuge and supply. At the same time, he drove large numbers of Boer women and children who had been left behind on the farms into rudimentarily equipped concentration camps.75 Thousands died in these camps, especially in the early months. An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 civilians perished, among them many children. This figure not 70 For details on the discussion in Germany and the war in Southwest Africa, see Frank Oliver Sobich, “Schwarze Bestien, rote Gefahr”: Rassismus und Antisozialismus im deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006), and Marouf Hasian Jr., Lawfare and the Ovaherero and Nama Pursuit of Restorative Justice, 1918–​2018 (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2019), 67–​86. 71 Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen, 231. 72 See Christina Twomey, “Framing Atrocity: Photography and Humanitarianism,” History of Photography 36, no. 3 (2012): 255–​264. 73 Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen, 195. 74 Marouf Hasian, Jr., “The ‘Hysterical’ Emily Hobhouse and Boer War Concentration Camp Controversy,” Western Journal of Communication 67, no. 2 (2003): 138–​163, 144; Paula M. Krebs, “ ‘The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars’: Women in the Boer War Concentration Camp Controversy,” History Workshop Journal 33, no. 1 (1992): 38–​56. 75 On the development of the concentration camp as a military strategy, see, e.g., Aidan Forth, Barbed Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1878–​1903 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 129–​158; Jonathan Hyslop, “The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–​1907,” South African Historical Journal 63, no. 2 (2011): 251–​276. This new practice had the goal of interning civilians in order to deprive guerrillas of support. Jonas Kreienbaum, “Ein trauriges Fiasko”: Koloniale Konzentrationslager im südlichen Afrika 1900–​1908 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS, 2015), 33f., calls attention to the fact that the military had resorted to similar means of controlling the population in the colonies even before the Cuba war. According to Kreienbaum, it cannot be determined whether the British actually took these precursors in Cuba as their model when establishing the camps in South Africa (277).

70  Victims. Perceptions of Harm only exceeded the number of military deaths on both sides of the conflict; it was also roughly one sixth of the Boer population.76 The causes of this high mortality rate were numerous: starvation was one of them, and initially also catastrophic hygienic conditions and a measles epidemic. The British military leadership drove the “black” population into other camps (which they officially justified as necessary to evacuate civilians from sites of military operations). Some 14,100 people are thought to have died there.77 Yet the British military considered their actions legitimate. They categorized the Boers, whom they assumed supported the irregular fighters, as belligerents. In the case of the mostly female internees, however, the official justification for their detention was different: the military described the women and children as “unprotected.” This made it possible for them to describe the civilians detained in camps euphemistically as “refugees,” although they had driven them from their farms by the thousands.78 This very targeted choice of language shows that the categorization of the camps was extremely controversial from the beginning. In the varied reactions to the many deaths in the early months, a new sensibility emerged, focused on the fate of civilians in war, but much cooler assessments also appeared. Attention was not paid equally to all who suffered, nor was there agreement about the status of civilians. In the reports received by the ICRC in Geneva, meanwhile, it was clear that the organization had not yet extended its responsibilities to include civilians. There was no dearth of complaints about the brutal treatment of prisoners of war by the English.79 There might be marginal mention of the fact that the families of the dead, their wives and children, should also be treated as “victims” and given aid. But the concentration camps, in which not soldiers but civilians were interned, were never mentioned. However, European public opinion was very aware of the civilian internments. Harsh criticisms were voiced when the first reports appeared in the British press in 1900 on the frequent “farm burnings” and on the camps in which women perceived as “white” were interned under completely unsatisfactory hygienic conditions. Emily Hobhouse, a Quaker and cofounder of the welfare organization South African Women and Children Fund, even traveled to South Africa in December 1900 to view the situation in the camps herself. In letters to newspapers and later a number of public speeches in England, as well as a book-​length publication of 76 Hyslop, “Invention,” 259; Krebs, “The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars,” 41, speaks of 28,000 deaths; Hasian, “The ‘Hysterical’ Emily Hobhouse,” 146, gives a figure of up to 40,000 deaths—​the deaths in camps for “blacks” are most likely included; see Steffen Bender, Der Burenkrieg und die deutschsprachige Presse: Wahrnehmung und Deutung zwischen Bureneuphorie und Anglophobie, 1899–​ 1902 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009). 77 Krebs, “The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars,” 41, 52; Kreienbaum, “Ein trauriges Fiasko,” 111. 78 Krebs, “The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars,” 39; Hasian, “The ‘Hysterical’ Emily Hobhouse,” 145; see also Bender, Der Burenkrieg und die deutschsprachige Presse, 102. 79 See Bulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix-​Rouge, “Traitement des Prisonniers et des Blessés an Transvaal,” 1901, 27–​32.

Efforts in International Law   71 testimonies by women detained in the camps,80 she denounced the conditions there and accused the British government of a “crime”—​with no small success among the British public.81 However, Hobhouse did not fundamentally question the war against the Boer republics, and she was not concerned about all interned civilians. She did not visit a camp for “black” Africans; on the contrary, she considered it particularly cruel that the British sometimes had the Boers brought to the camps and guarded by “Kaffirs.”82 As a status-​conscious member of the middle class, Hobhouse also complained that women in the camps came from affluent families and were rendered penniless by the British military strategy. It was only from this perspective that the violence used by British troops against civilians seemed illegitimate to its critics. Even advocates of war and colonial expansion who generally approved of the burning of farms as a “military necessity” were appalled by the harsh treatment of Boer women and children in the concentration camps. The internment of “blacks,” however, was not criticized at all.83 In face of this criticism, the British military leadership, the colonial administration of the Cape Colony, and the government were forced to consider improvements in the camps. The Secretary of State for War established a committee of middle-​class women, led by the well-​known suffragist and philanthropist Millicent Fawcett, to investigate conditions in the concentration camps on site.84 Fawcett had already defended the creation of camps for civilians as “necessary from a military point of view.” In addition, in a discussion with the Secretary of State for War, St. John Brodrick before she left for South Africa, she noted his overtly indignant remark that it was the first time in history “that one belligerent should make himself responsible for the maintenance of the women and children of the other.”85 Fawcett drew different conclusions than Hobhouse. She only held the camp administration responsible for the deaths in the camps, especially the deaths of many thousands of children, at third hand. Instead, she blamed the “unhealthy conditions in the country” caused generally by the war, and especially the behavior of the camp inmates themselves. In her view, the Boer women were completely ignorant of the most elementary rules of hygiene (for example, they did not “air out” their tents). In addition, they were incapable of caring for their children, and finally, they tended to trust quacks rather than conventional medicine.86 Her arguments were immediately taken up by the pro-​war British press. The suffering and death of the Boer civilians in the concentration camps was now ascribed to their supposed “backwardness” and portrayed as their own fault. The Boers were thus turned into 80 Emily Hobhouse, Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cap and Orange River Colonies (London, 1901). (New edition as The Brunt of the War and Where It Fell.) 81 Hasian, “The ‘Hysterical’ Emily Hobhouse,” 148. 82 Hobhouse, cited in Krebs, “The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars,” 45. 83 Krebs, “The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars,” 42, 49–​53. 84 Hasian, “The ‘Hysterical’ Emily Hobhouse,” 154. 85 All quotes in Krebs, “The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars,” 46. 86 See Krebs, “The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars,” 48; Hasian, “The ‘Hysterical’ Emily Hobhouse,” 152f.

72  Victims. Perceptions of Harm the “other,” in contrast to the civilized British.87 Apparently, such rhetoric was an excellent way to justify one’s own behavior toward a “fellow European people” like the Boers. In other Western European countries, too, people loudly voiced their disapproval of British warfare. However, criticism outside of Great Britain had a very different effect: It could easily be employed by the press as Anglophobe propaganda, to be read especially against the background of imperialism and great power competition. For example, in the German press, horror at the death of Boers in badly equipped tent cities was accompanied by the unproven accusation that the British were purposely trying to kill the Boer camp inmates through neglect and that the concentration camps were in reality “family extermination facilities.”88 In such statements, it was hard to distinguish between propaganda, morality, politics, and real sympathy. The British policy of keeping civilians in camps was not, however, fundamentally “inhumane” under the laws of war, despite what the criticisms suggested. It could certainly be found to conform to the laws of war as they stood at the time. Contrary to what is often assumed, the figure of the passive civilian had not yet been developed under the laws of war (a process in which a variety of actors participated). Neither the American “Lieber Code” of 1863 nor the Hague Convention of 1899 contained explicit passages on “civilians” who were fundamentally entitled to protection. During the drafting of the Hague Convention, there was instead talk of “citizens”; some lawyers and representatives of smaller states hoped to grant them the right to take up arms to defend against invasion. However, the larger European nations, Germany among them, saw a problem with citizens having this option: in their view, it was important to exclude such a right to take up arms.89 The problem of irregular combatants, their use of force, which was considered fundamentally unlawful, and therefore the distinction between irregular combatants and the civilian population, thus did not arise only in the colonial context. It had already proved to be a problem during the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, and finally the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870–​71. The legal discussion regarding the status of these combatants began when German troops were confronted, after their victory at Sedan, with a wave of violent resistance by so-​ called franc-​tireurs, or irregular fighters; according to observers, the German field commanders were confused by the “cowardly” and “unmanly” behavior of these

87 Cited in Krebs, “The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars,” 48. 88 Cited in Bender, Der Burenkrieg und die deutschsprachige Presse, 106. The Nazis repeatedly included these allegations in their anti-​English propaganda; see ibid., 120. 89 See Amanda Alexander, “The Genesis of the Civilian,” Leiden Journal of International Law 20, no. 2 (2007): 359–​376, especially 362–​365. However, the progression from World War I to the adoption of the Geneva Conventions, which for the first time provided comprehensive protection to civilians in armed conflict, was not linear, as Van Dijk argues. On the more complex history of the Geneva Conventions, see Van Dijk, Preparing for War, 53–​97.

Efforts in International Law   73 franc-​tireurs.90 The question was whether such covertly operating forces, who were not identifiable by a uniform, were to be treated as illegitimate combatants, or whether, as the French argued, their actions were legitimate acts of resistance against an aggressor.91 In 1874, European international lawyers met at an international conference in Brussels to discuss the laws of war—​starting with the franc-​ tireur problem—​and to attempt to define irregular combatants. They found no solution. The Oxford Manual, which contained rules for waging war on land and was adopted by the Institut de Droit International at its sixth meeting in 1880, also failed to win universal acceptance.92 However, the first ideas emerged regarding what “irregular” and “regular” might mean. The lawyers proposed that, in addition to the army and its associated militias, a state’s regular armed forces could include “other” troops, including those recruited spontaneously from the population, as long as they were subordinate to a responsible commander, wore uniforms or a recognizable sign, and carried their arms openly.93 This rule was codified under international law with the expansion of the Hague Convention in 1907. It now determined who counted as a regular combatant or soldier of a “civilized” state and was therefore protected by the laws of war for the duration of hostilities. For everyone else, including the civilian population, the so-​called Martens Clause in the preamble to the Hague Convention applied. The clause placed these groups under the weak protection of the rules accepted by “civilized nations,” the “laws of humanity,” and the “public conscience.”94 In addition, in 1906 the ICRC adopted a convention on the treatment of wounded and sick prisoners of war.95 But neither the 1906 Geneva Convention nor the expansion of the Hague Convention in 1907 raised the status of civilians to the point that one could speak of comprehensive protection for unarmed and non-​belligerent populations. Instead, despite the traditional customary law principle that civilian populations should be protected to the extent possible, it was still explicitly permissible to conquer “defended cities” through measures such as bombardment and even starvation of their inhabitants.96 After the Germans invaded neutral Belgium in August 1914, it quickly became clear how problematic the status of the civilian population as a whole remained under the laws of war. Shortly after the war began, German troops killed some 6,500 Belgian and French civilians and destroyed numerous cities, without any

90 For a detailed treatment, see Heidi Mehrkens, Statuswechsel: Kriegserfahrung und nationale Wahrnehmung im Deutsch-​Französischen Krieg 1870/​71 (Essen: Klartext, 2008), 129–​155. 91 See Scheipers, Unlawful Combatants, 89–​97. 92 Oxford Institute of International Law, Laws of War. 93 See Scheipers, Unlawful Combatants, 100. 94 Cited ibid., 101. 95 See Lindsey Cameron, “The ICRC in the First World War: Unwavering Belief in the Power of Law?,” International Review of the Red Cross 97, no. 900 (2015): 1099–​1120. 96 Cited in Alexander, “The Genesis of the Civilian,” 364.

74  Victims. Perceptions of Harm expectation of accountability for these acts of violence.97 In fact, there is at least some evidence that these acts might have been spurred, on the German side, by a fear that the line between regular soldiers and irregular combatants was becoming blurred. In any case, the German military leadership publicly fell back on this formulaic accusation and justification, claiming that their soldiers had been attacked by civilians using perfidious tactics (these were actually often cases of friendly fire).98 During the war, it was in fact difficult to prove the truth of claims of armed popular resistance. The franc-​tireur allegation therefore quickly became a German propaganda trope; believing or rejecting it became a question of which side one was on in the war—​and is still cause for debate today.99 While the historian Isabel Hull rather sweepingly interprets German warfare as an expression of Germany’s fundamental violation of the laws of war and of German militarism,100 Amanda Alexander has noted that even the Belgian government and the British press had warned at the start of such acts of resistance, and even described them. She thus makes a very different argument: These warnings show the widespread awareness of the view of the “citizen” under the laws of war and of the fact that acts of resistance could never be ruled out.101 The German franc-​tireur fantasies were superseded by equally bloodthirsty stories of German “atrocities” (such as murdering children and cutting off hands) spread by Allied propaganda. The commissions of inquiry that were hurriedly set up at the time in Belgium, France, and England cannot be separated from this mix of real events and mere propaganda; this will be discussed later. In all these stories and accusations, the focus was generally, though not always, on the civilian population.102 Particularly in the Allied propaganda campaign against German “atrocities,” the concept of the “civilian” was emphasized and the civilian population seen as worthy of protection in every case.103 This can only be understood, however, if we keep two things in mind. One is the curious interplay

97 See Alan Kramer, “Kriegsrecht und Kriegsverbrechen,” in Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, edited by Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014), 281–​292, especially 282–​284; see also Steffen Bruendel, “Kriegsgreuel 1914–​18: Rezeption und Aufarbeitung deutscher Kriegsverbrechen im Spannungsfeld von Völkerrecht und Kriegspropaganda,” in Kriegsgreuel: Die Entgrenzung der Gewalt in kriegerischen Konflikten vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Sönke Neitzel, Daniel Hohrath, and Bernd Wegner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008), 293–​316, especially 299f. 98 Alexander, “The Genesis of the Civilian,” 366. 99 See the contrary interpretation in John Horne and Alan Kramer, Deutsche Kriegsgreuel 1914: Die umstrittene Wahrheit (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2004) and Gunter Spraul, Der Franktireurkrieg 1914: Untersuchungen zum Verfall einer Wissenschaft und zum Umgang mit nationalen Mythen (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2016). 100 Hull, A Scrap of Paper. 101 Alexander, “The Genesis of the Civilian,” 367. 102 On the treatment of prisoners of war in World War I, see the chapters in Jochen Oltmer (ed.), Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkriegs (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006). 103 Alexander, “The Genesis of the Civilian,” 369.

Efforts in International Law   75 between law and propaganda. Propaganda on both sides incorporated knowledge of the laws of war, even though these laws were still vague and, as mentioned above, the status of civilians remained remarkably undefined.104 But even in this form, law served as a starting point and a metaphor to justify propaganda that focused on violations of law. This propaganda contributed significantly to the efforts made after World War I to determine the status of civilian populations in wartime and increase their legal protection. The status of civilian populations changed during and after World War I for a second reason as well. In industrialized “total” war, civilian populations—​especially women, who worked, among other things, in armaments production—​were seen as an important resource, making them legitimate targets. On the other hand, however, the air war in particular, which targeted population centers in part for this reason, turned “citizens” into “helpless civilian populations.”105 The new technology of the airplane blurred the concept of the battlefield—​which had already been expanded due to long-​range ammunition—​in crucial ways. Particularly in regard to cities attacked by airplanes, the idea that they were a space with clearly defined boundaries could no longer be maintained. This meant that it was no longer possible to distinguish clearly between combatants and civilians.106 It was clear to theoreticians of the laws of war from the beginning of World War I that cities could continue to be legitimate targets. But this did not stop the attacked nations from condemning as “barbaric” these raids on targets their propaganda described as exclusively “civilian,” “passive,” and “innocent.” According to Amanda Alexander, women, quite paradoxically, were considered the “bulwark of the home front, empowered and important,” while at the same time they were turned into a “symbol of weakness.” In other words, they became “victims” of war and violence, and were described as such. There had been little talk of victims of war before World War I. Especially in Europe, the view in the late nineteenth century was still largely focused on wounded, sick, and captured soldiers, who were very rarely described as victims of war. It is true that, since the 1870s, complaints of “atrocities” had increased in the context of armed conflict and colonial rule,107 but this did not mean that everyone who suffered as a result was defined as a victim of violence. This changed as women and children came to be perceived as people suffering from violence in war, especially after 1914. The concept of the exclusively passive and innocent civilian population that arose in this context was, in this sense, “feminized and infantilized.” In May 1915, the British newspaper

104 Marcus Payk, Frieden durch Recht? Der Aufstieg des modernen Völkerrechts und der Friedensschluss nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018), 89f. 105 Alexander, “The Genesis of the Civilian,” 369. 106 Frédéric Mégret, “War and the Vanishing Battlefield,” Loyola University Chicago International Law Review 9, no. 1 (2012): 131–​155, 144. 107 See Twomey, “Framing Atrocity,” especially 255–​257.

76  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Daily News and Leader meaningfully headlined an article about German air raids on English cities “The Baby Victim.”108 This shift toward a conception of certain people as innocent civilian victims had consequences immediately after World War I ended. In Great Britain, for example, the Save the Children Fund was established in 1919, and was already present in twenty-​seven countries within the next three years.109 An international umbrella organization, Save the Children International Union, was established in 1920, with headquarters in Geneva.110 A major reason for this initiative was the effect on children of the British blockade on foodstuffs to Germany and its allies.111 The organization’s founding was justified as a way of doing for children what the Red Cross had done for wounded soldiers two generations earlier due to new humanitarian sensitivities. The Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the League of Nations in 1924 on the basis of a draft by the Save the Children Fund, established for the first time that children were to be “the first to receive relief in times of distress.”112 Similarly, after 1918, international law strove to respond to the new experience of aerial warfare. The 1923 Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare for the first time established a distinction between the military and civilians that would be central to the future development of the laws of war. This did not change the fact that munitions factories, for example, and therefore also the cities in which these factories were located, continued to be legitimate targets. However, the new Hague rules of aerial warfare were a first step in the development of international humanitarian law that aimed to codify the unequivocal protection of civilians into law. Still, it was not until the Geneva Conventions of 1949 that the effort would make significant headway.113 Finally, the Red Cross itself completed the shift to a conception of civilians as innocent victims. During the Tenth International Conference of the Red Cross in early 1921, the delegates considered the effect of new weapons systems on civilian populations. Under the heading of “Limiting War,” they petitioned 108 Alexander, “The Genesis of the Civilian,” 371 (the quote is also found here); Scheipers, Unlawful Combatants, 102. 109 For the first comprehensive study on the history of the Save the Children Fund, see Emily Baughan, Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021). 110 See Lara Bolzman, “The Advent of Child Rights on the International Scene and the Role of the Save the Children International Union 1920–​45,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2008): 26–​36. Dominique Marshall, “Humanitarian Sympathy for Children in Times of War and the History of Children’s Rights, 1919–​1959,” in Children and War: A Historical Anthology, edited by James Alan Marten (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 184–​199, 186ff. 111 Waltraut Kerber-​Ganse, Die Menschenrechte des Kindes: Die UN-​Kinderrechtskonvention und die Pädagogik von Janusz Korczak, Versuch einer Perspektivenverschränkung (Opladen: Budrich, 2009), 38; Marshall, “Humanitarian Sympathy for Children,” 184f. 112 Declaration on the Rights of the Child (Geneva, 26 September 1924), Art. 3, http://​www.un-​ docume​nts.net/​gdrc1​924.htm, accessed 22 January 2022. 113 Van Dijk, Preparing for War; Alexander, “The Genesis of the Civilian,” 375.

Efforts in International Law   77 governments—​unsuccessfully—​to add the following amendments to the Hague Convention of 1907: “an absolute prohibition of the use of gas as a weapon of war” and “limiting the air war to military targets, so that the civilian population is protected as far as possible from the effects of this new method of warfare.”114 The conference also discussed the “complex and delicate question” of civil wars, sparked by the experience of the Red Cross societies in the Russian civil war starting in 1918.”115 For the ICRC, however, it was Bolshevism, not colonialism, that made this issue seem urgent. But the subject also arose because it was in civil wars that the problems of international law were most apparent and affected the ICRC generally in a way that was increasingly seen as problematic. The “battlefield,” which was so essential to the ICRC’s intervention and its efforts to rein in war,116 disappeared in civil wars. “Regular” and “irregular” combatants could hardly be distinguished; the massive presence of “civilians” in places where force was being used was problematic, while the question arose whether the Geneva Convention had to be recognized by all the belligerents in order to be applicable.117 Given these developments and problems, which were new for Europe—​though not for the colonies—​the basis for ICRC action was unclear and, particularly in the Russian civil war, was no longer universally recognized. The solution arrived at during the 1921 conference, which aimed to revise the ICRC’s mandate in face of these changing conditions, was ultimately a dual one. It consisted first of all in a voluntary commitment to intervene in internal conflicts to organize aid for those affected by the conflict. Additionally, the concept of the victim was generalized in this context: Everyone who suffered, “without exception,” as the relevant resolution stated, was now defined as a victim of war and therefore (this was at least the proclaimed intent) could expect aid.118 The delegates spoke of the “enormous number of innocent victims produced by the civil war” and stated that the Red Cross was now to provide aid “wherever there are victims of violence,” and not only, as had been the case, to wounded and imprisoned military personnel in interstate conflicts. It no longer mattered whether soldiers or civilians were the ones who had experienced violence, on regular battlefields or in civil wars; whether the wounded or imprisoned were military personnel or rebels; whether these people’s suffering was solely due to armed force or to hunger or illness suffered in the context of such violent events. The ICRC went even farther, extending the scope of its mandate to “victims of disasters (calamités),” at least in the closing words of its president, Gustave Ador—​to victims of “floods, earthquakes and any other disasters which may affect humanity.”119 114 Compte Rendu: Dixième Conférence Internationale de la Croix Rouge tenue à Genève du 30 Mars au 7 Avril 1921 (Geneva, 1921), 216. 115 Ibid., 123, quote at 156. 116 Mégret, “War and the Vanishing Battlefield.” 117 See Cameron, “The ICRC in the First World War,” 1105. 118 Dixième Conférence Internationale de la Croix Rouge, 217. 119 Ibid., 208.

78  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Overall, the ICRC thus promoted an expansion of the ascription of victimhood, which then accelerated in the course of the twentieth century. This does not mean, however, that this point of view had a resounding effect on its assessment of violence in colonial wars. During the war between the protectorate powers Spain and France and the Rifians of northern Morocco between 1921 and 1926, in which Spain used mustard gas grenades, the ICRC was quite restrained. It would not take action without the consent of the two European belligerents, and they refused to grant it. Great Britain’s Red Crescent did manage to provide some minimal humanitarian aid to the Rifians in the course of the war, and British Quakers and some philanthropists also stepped in. The ICRC, however, continued its deliberately diplomatic attitude toward the colonial powers, with whom it would not risk political conflict. The 1921 conference resolutions seemed to reflect a humanitarian attitude with universal applicability, but in practice, even after the World War, it was clear that humanitarian morality continued to be limited.120

Seeking Evidence: Violations of the Laws of War and the Emergence of Investigative Commissions Despite the exploitation of the laws of war in World War I for propaganda purposes, their international codification had indeed expanded since the mid-​nineteenth century. The international community had great difficulty with one crucial task, however: creating a permanent international institution charged with prosecuting violations of the laws of war, with the help of superordinate international jurisprudence. The International Criminal Court, which officially began operations in The Hague in 2002, is the first institution to have this power in cases where national courts cannot or will not act. Considering that jurists had already proposed creating an international tribunal in the aftermath of the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870–​71, it took a remarkably long time, more than 130 years, for it to become reality.121 In fact, the criminal prosecution of violations of the laws of war was anything but automatic. The trials in Leipzig and Istanbul that took place under Allied pressure in the aftermath of World War I, in national courts, to prosecute crimes against international law were among the few significant exceptions before World War II.122 The criminal trials 120 See, e.g., Dirk Sasse, Franzosen, Briten und Deutsche im Rifkrieg 1921–​1926 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006), 64–​86; Pablo la Porte, “Víctimas del Rif (1921–​1926): Memoria, Acción Humanitaria y Lecciones para nuestro Tiempo,” Revista de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos 10 (2011): 116–​133, especially 117–​126. 121 See Segesser, Recht statt Rache, 90–​95. 122 For an interesting treatment in this context, see Gregory S. Gordon, “International Crimes Law’s ‘Oriental Pre-​Birth’: The 1894–​1900 Trials of the Siamese, Ottoman and Chinese,” in Historical Origins of International Criminal Law, edited by Morten Bergsmo, Wui Ling Cheah, and Ping Yi (Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2015), 119–​180. He refers to a number of international military commissions established in Asia at the turn of the nineteenth century, headed by representatives of

Efforts in International Law   79 before international military tribunals in Nuremberg (1945–​46) and Tokyo (1946–​ 48) are often considered the first notable attempts to hold individuals accountable for war crimes.123 There is no question that lack of political will in the international community long prevented the creation of an international criminal court. The principle of sovereignty carried great weight. Indeed, there were good reasons to adhere to it before the creation of international criminal law that established with sufficient precision the conditions under which violations of international law legitimized outside intervention. A number of fundamental legal problems had to be resolved in the course of the twentieth century. These included, for example, the question of who could be prosecuted in the first place. After all, individuals were not actually subjects of international law who could be held criminally accountable.124 The Hague Convention had taken the first steps toward a different interpretation, although it foresaw national laws as the basis for prosecution. It was also necessary to clarify which violations of the laws of war could be prosecuted. It was not obvious that such violations could be classified as “war crimes.” As already indicated, the concept was not even a common part of the legal vocabulary in the early twentieth century. This only changed in the course of World War I, when Belgian, French, British, and American jurists agreed to prosecute so-​called “German atrocities” and began to speak explicitly of “war crimes.” The law “on the Prosecution of War Crimes and Offenses” [zur Verfolgung von Kriegsverbrechen und Kriegsvergehen] adopted by Germany in December 1919 officially anchored the concept in German legal terminology, and it gained general currency in the interwar years.125 But its meaning was not stable, and it could not easily be stabilized. When the Allies debated criminal prosecution of the crimes of the Axis powers in 1943, there was talk of expanding the term “war crimes” to include crimes against the

European colonial powers, to prosecute violations of international law and crimes against humanity. Gregory presents the thesis that it was no accident that these international military commissions were established around the time of the Hague Convention and in connection with the European debates on international law. There are strong arguments for this, including the participation of renowned European jurists in these trials, such as Gustave Rolin-​Jacquemyns, a member of the Institut de Droit International, founded in 1873. See also Benjamin E. Brockman-​Hawe, “A Supranational Criminal Tribunal for the Colonial Era,” in The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials, edited by Kevin Heller and Gerry Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 50–​76. 123 Devin O. Pendas, “Toward World Law? Human Rights and the Failure of the Legalist Paradigm of War,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, edited by Stefan-​Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 215–​236. 124 On the change in the legal status of individuals under international law in the twentieth century, see the relevant study by Anne Peters, Jenseits der Menschenrechte: Die Rechtsstellung des Individuums im Völkerrecht (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014). 125 Segesser, Recht statt Rache; Harald Wiggenhorn, Verliererjustiz: Die Leipziger Kriegsverbrecherprozesse nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Baden-​Baden: Nomos, 2005).

80  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Jews.126 Nor was it firmly established after 1945 how “genocide” could be meaningfully defined. Even after the mass crimes of World War II, it was clear that morally condemning the crimes was onething,127 but creating international criminal law with sufficiently precise concepts and norms was quite another. The international community was unable to achieve this task during the Cold War, with its political and ideological conflicts. In 1954, the UN International Law Commission was instructed to cease its work on a code of international criminal law.128 However, the international codification of the modern laws of war was set in motion much earlier due to the situative establishment of commissions mandated by governments to investigate violations of the laws of war and, where appropriate, collect evidence of them. These “investigative commissions” were the result of a new discursive order, although they emerged slowly. When the European states decided to establish the laws of war through international treaties, they were not yet thinking of creating an institution that could investigate supposed or actual violations of international law. But the fundamental need for such an institution soon became clear. Not only had belligerents alleged many violations of the rules of “civilized” warfare since the Geneva Convention went into force; as the ICRC had repeatedly emphasized since the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870–​71, it was often impossible to determine whether these involved actual violations or were merely baseless accusations.129 Governments at first saw little reason to take action in such cases. Until well into the nineteenth century, wars ended in amnesties (World War I would change this fundamentally).130 In these circumstances, there was little motivation to investigate rumors of violations of international law. The ICRC and the Institut de Droit International, however, saw a significant need for action, for only if such claims were investigated could there be certainty about whether governments were doing enough to incorporate the agreed-​upon rules of combat into their armies’ practices. Only if the rumors proved true would it be possible to urge governments to take the necessary measures and, if appropriate, morally to condemn belligerents

126 See Daniel Marc Segesser, “Die Haager Landkriegsordnung in der wissenschaftlichen Debatte über Kriegsverbrechen im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Die Friedens-​Warte 82 (2007): 65–​82, 74f.; Segesser, Recht statt Rache, 352–​358. 127 See, e.g., A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 19–​41; Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 128 Pendas, “Toward World Law?” 129 See, e.g., Bulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix-​Rouge, “Suisse—​L’Institut de Droit International et la Guerre d’Orient,” 32nd bulletin, October 1877, 218; Bulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix-​Rouge, “La Part du Comité International de la Croix-​Rouge dans l’Histoire de la Convention de Genève,” 124th bulletin, October 1900, 217f. 130 See, e.g., Shavana Musa, Victim Reparation under the Ius Post Bellum: An Historical and Normative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 8–​15.

Efforts in International Law   81 who were guilty of such offenses. Initially, therefore, the main aim was political pressure, not judicial prosecution. However, the discussion at the time about how to determine violations of international law demonstrates that solutions acceptable to all sides were not easy to find. Based on the numerous reports and rumors of violations of international law that had accompanied the Russo-​Turkish War since early 1877, for example, the Institut de Droit International urgently recommended employing military attaches to follow the belligerent armies and inform governments about serious violations of the laws of war. The ICRC had similar ideas: In 1878, it declared that the “truth of the accusations” could only be determined if an “independent investigation” were conducted after every battle. Since evidence of this sort was lacking, the ICRC called on states to live up to their responsibilities and announce “the number, origin and condition of wounded opponents.”131 For the ICRC, the lists kept by field hospitals were at least a starting point in determining whether the Turks had actually simply killed wounded Russian soldiers, as had been claimed, or whether they had cared for them. The field hospital lists that had heretofore been used by states and aid organizations as central resources to inform the bureaucracy and families of soldiers’ whereabouts thus gained an additional epistemological significance. They provided the first step in determining whether the laws of war, or at least some of the central stipulations in the Geneva Convention, were being adhered to. For the ICRC, this was not, understandably, a satisfactory solution to verifying the countless claims of violations of international law. Reports from Red Cross societies did make it possible to get a better picture of the situation on distant battlefields. So did statements by state representatives, to which the skeptical ICRC ascribed at least a “relative guarantee of correctness” when such documents were signed. But the International Committee had no real way of collecting reliable information to precisely classify the numerous claims of “barbaric” warfare in circulation. During the Second South African War (1899–​1902), the ICRC made it unmistakably clear that all its “investigative procedures” had proven insufficient, and that it was therefore up to governments to establish “a joint commission to oversee and monitor their respective behavior.”132 An international commission of this sort had its advocates,133 but in general, the majority of the international community rejected the 131 Bulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix-​Rouge, “La Convention de Genève Pendant la Guerre d’Orient,” 33rd bulletin, January 1878, 11–​32, quote at 21. 132 Bulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix-​Rouge, “La Part du Comité International de la Croix-​ Rouge dans l’Histoire de la Convention de Genève,” 124th bulletin, October 1900, 208–​225, quote at 218. 133 This is somewhat clear in a letter from the former Dutch Minister of War, Den Beer Poortugael, to the Institut de Droit International, in which he urgently recommends looking closely at the issue of establishing a permanent international commission for this purpose and at what organizational form would be appropriate. The letter is published in Bulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix-​Rouge, 125th bulletin, January 1901, 51f.

82  Victims. Perceptions of Harm proposal.134 Active support came only from a non-​ governmental organization: the American Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), one of the most important supporters of international peace work since its founding in 1910. During the Balkan wars of 1912–​13, it strove successfully to ensure that an eight-​person international commission gained access to the theater of war, as an uninvolved party, to monitor adherence to the laws of war and document their violation—​an historical first. Only comprehensive investigations on site and careful inquiries into the events seemed to be helpful in providing a substantive response to accusations and rumors.135 The commission’s report, submitted in June 1914 and distributed in English and French, had no effect. Public attention immediately before the outbreak of World War I was focused on other matters. The third peace conference in The Hague planned for 1914 could not be held, which frustrated the commission members’ plans to take the opportunity to push for the creation of a permanent international commission that would have the right, in case of war, to examine adherence to international agreements on the territories of all signatory states.136 The first international commission of inquiry remained the only one of its kind, and essentially would not be repeated until 1977. The Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions adopted in that year created the legal basis for the establishment of an International Humanitarian Fact-​Finding Commission as a permanent organ. In principle, it would have the power to investigate serious violations of international humanitarian law if asked to do so by a state party.137 And yet, the history of fact-​finding commissions was not completely interrupted during this long period. Investigations of violations of the laws of war continued on the national level. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report shows that this process had already begun before World War I; in specific cases, governments had arranged for such investigations, and military authorities would also order them. A main reason for this was Article 3 of the Hague Convention of 1907, which established that a belligerent party that violated the rules might “if the case 134 This should not be confused with the institution of a Commission d’enquête, which is included in the Hague Convention of 1899. This was an instrument that could initiate an investigation in case of disagreements between states on the “facts.” The aim was to contribute to peaceful resolution and prevent the outbreak of war. It was therefore an arbitral body. See, e.g., Larissa J. van den Herik, “An Inquiry into the Role of Commissions of Inquiry in International Law: Navigating the Tensions between Fact-​Finding and Application of International Law,” Chinese Journal of International Law 13, no. 3 (2014): 507–​537. 135 Dzovinar Kévonian, “L’Enquête, le Délit, la Preuve: Les ‘Atrocités’ Balkaniques de 1912–​1913: À L’Épreuve du Droit de la Guerre,” Le Mouvement Social 222, no. 1 (2008): 13–​40. 136 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC, 1914). 137 Luigi Condorelli, “The International Humanitarian Fact-​Finding Commission: An Obsolete Tool or a Useful Measure to Implement International Humanitarian Law,” International Review of the Red Cross 83 (2001): 393–​406; Eric David, “The International Humanitarian Fact-​Finding Commission and the Law of Human Rights,” in Research Handbook on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, edited by Robert Kolb and Gloria Gaggioli (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013), 570–​574.

Efforts in International Law   83 demands, be liable to pay compensation.”138 Against this background, it made a great deal of sense for the belligerents to collect evidence of their opponent’s violations of the codified laws of war in order to be able to negotiate favorable terms of peace at the end of the war. It also became clear during the Balkan wars that belligerent states had begun to understand the political and moral benefits of conducting internal investigations when soldiers from their own ranks violated the internationally agreed upon laws of war. In January 1913, for example, after Thrace and Macedonia had been occupied, the high commander of the Bulgarian army explicitly ordered that all such violations against residents of the occupied areas be investigated. Only a month later, the Supreme Military Court requested a report on the number of persons so far convicted of crimes against the local population, including murder and pillage. The order expressly emphasized that the reportinclude offenses against people of all nations, but especially against the Turkish population. It stated that “the military courts must put the government in a position to show the civilized world that crimes committed in the course of the war of liberation will not go unpunished.” The investigations, evidence collection, and prosecution of violations of the laws of war were thus intended as a demonstration that the country was part of the “civilized world.” In this case, this was of particular benefit: Such evidence that the country was not only willing, but also able, to adhere to and apply the laws of war could be used to legitimize the occupation of territories whose occupants were supposedly less civilized and in need of “liberation.”139 The documents produced in this context were important investigative material for the work of the CEIP’s International Commission, although not all of the belligerent parties were as willing to provide their own evidentiary documents for evaluation as the Bulgarians. Various commission members added their own research to the evidence, involving mainly interviews with various witnesses. As a result, despite the obvious difficulties it faced,140 after five weeks the Commission had at its disposal numerous pieces of evidence that it was able to examine and integrate into its report: written testimonies; private letters from soldiers; photographs of dead soldiers and civilians; lists of murdered, wounded, and abducted civilians; official reports on exhumations; and a few certified forensic reports with “scientific” confirmation of illegal executions. As the Commission noted, the accusations were not necessarily credible: in at least one case, official claims of crimes had proven false. Nevertheless, the Commission was ultimately convinced that

138 There was, however, already an investigation in this direction during the Second Boer War. See, e.g., Diana Cammack, The Rand at War, 1899–​1902: The Witwatersrand and the Anglo-​Boer War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 155ff. 139 See the documents in the appendix to Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report, 281f., quote at 282. 140 Frances Trix, “Peace-​Mongering in 1913: The Carnegie International Commission of Inquiry and Its Report on the Balkan Wars,” First World War Studies 5, no. 2 (2014): 147–​162, 152.

84  Victims. Perceptions of Harm “every clause in international law relative to war on land and to the treatment of the wounded, has been violated by all the belligerents.”141 The authors of the CEIP International Commission’s report knew, and emphasized, that they had not produced a “legal study.” Whether the material they collected would have been useful from a legal perspective to actually prove violations of international law was a problem to be decided by other experts.142 However, the Commission raised the possibility of labeling the documented atrocities with a concept not yet included in the formal legal vocabulary: “crimes against humanity.” This is epistemologically interesting. It indicates that in its study, the Commission not only responded to existing norms, but, buoyed by moral indignation, asserted violations of law before a legal apparatus had been created for them. The report vividly illustrates the comprehensive spectrum of forensic techniques that existed, in principle, to pursue such wartime violations. World War I then generalized such investigative commissions almost immediately, but as national projects. In Belgium, for example, following the “German atrocities,” various ministries established commissions of inquiry to compile dossiers on all the cities and towns in which local authorities had reported offenses committed by German soldiers against civilians or objects. Local courts were charged with collecting evidence of German violations of international law from the liberated territories and from refugees.143 Six weeks after the start of the war, Germany also established a “Military Investigative Office for Violations of the Laws of War.” It strove to find witnesses to rebut Allied accusations of violations of international law, and also initiated investigations of supposed illegal acts by its opponents. Also in September 1914, the French justice ministry created a comparable official commission to determine violations of international law by the enemy—​ specifically, the Germans. Additional bodies of this sort followed: in Great Britain before the end of the year, and in Russia in March 1915.144 In the course of the war, the Allied commissions produced enormous amounts of evidence that served as a basis for their official reports (France alone published

141 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report, 13 (emphasis in original). 142 Ibid., 209. 143 Commission instituée en vue de constater des actes commis par l’ennemi en violation du droit des gens (décret du 23 septembre 1914), http://​www.arc​hive​snat​iona​les.cult​ure.gouv.fr/​chan/​chan/​ser​ies/​ pdf/​AJ4_​2​009.pdf, accessed 31 January 2022. 144 See, e.g., Horne and Kramer, Kriegsgreuel; Alexander Watson, “ ‘Unheard-​of Brutality’: Russian Atrocities against Civilians in East Prussia, 1914–​1915,” Journal of Modern History 86, no. 4 (2014): 780–​ 825; Trevor Wilson, “Lord Bryce’s Investigation into Alleged German Atrocities in Belgium, 1914–​15,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 3 (1979): 369–​383; Laura Engelstein, “‘A Belgium of Our Own’: The Sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914,” in Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–​1945, edited by Michael David-​Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 13–​38. On the local level, however, civilian and military bodies in Russia had already been carrying out investigations since the start of the war. See Anon, “Violation du droit des gens par les Allemands envers les Russes,” Journal du Droit International 42 (1915): 380–​382.

Efforts in International Law   85 twelve of these reports, totaling some 1,500 pages).145 Written witness statements (generally under oath) and soldiers’ diaries, letters, and photographs corroborated the accusations that German soldiers in Belgium, France, and Russia had destroyed and pillaged villages, shot and abducted civilians, treated prisoners of war inhumanely, and disregarded the neutrality of medical personnel. For the French commission, photographs of projectiles and wounds, along with autopsy reports, provided the material necessary to confirm suspicions that German soldiers had used prohibited ammunition “which was intended to cause terrible, dangerous wounds.” Concretely, this meant dum-​dum bullets and poison gas.146 Testimonies by Belgian refugees and British and Belgian soldiers included in the official reports of the English commission (known as the Bryce Report) even indicated that German soldiers had cut off the hands of, or otherwise mutilated, Belgian women and children.147 It has long been accepted that not all the statements published in the Bryce Report were reliable. They included exaggerated and imagined allegations that simply repeated accusations spread by rumors and newspapers reports after the German invasion of Belgium.148 The material collected by the other commissions, which altogether comprised thousands of witness testimonies, were also not free of such exaggerations. Fictitious tales of horrifying abuses by the enemy were common on all sides, as the commissions were in fact aware. How many of them they included in their published reports depended largely on their concrete propaganda strategy. But that was not the only deciding factor. Given the overwhelming number of witnesses who confirmed illegitimate acts of violence by the Germans, even scrupulous members of the English commission were willing to argue that there was no doubt of the “general truth of the picture presented.”149 It is therefore still extremely difficult to provide an historical assessment of this material as a source for acts of violence that violated international law during World War I. Even at the time, the commissions were not simply presenting evidence that

145 A number of commissions were formed in Russia, the first in 1915, and later another to investigate Bolshevik crimes, as well as a Soviet commission that considered, among other things, the effects of the civil war. The respective responsible bodies apparently did not publish public reports based on the material collected. See Marina Sorokina, “People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (2005): 797–​ 831, 800. 146 Commission Instituée en Vue de Constater des Actes Commis par l’Ennemi en Violation du Droit de Gens, Rapport et Procès-​Verbaux d’Enquète III–​IV (Paris, 1916), 9. 147 Committee on Alleged German Outrages, Evidence and Documents Laid Before the Committee on Alleged German Outrages (London, 1915), 90, passim. 148 See, e.g., Wilson, “Lord Bryce’s Investigation”; Katie Pickles, Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 77; Nicoletta F. Gullace, “Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War,” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (1997): 714–​747; Florian Altenhöner, Kommunikation und Kontrolle: Gerüchte und städtische Öffentlichkeiten in Berlin und London 1914/​ 1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 201ff. 149 Wilson, “Lord Bryce’s Investigation,” 375.

86  Victims. Perceptions of Harm could have been used without further examination in judicial proceedings. For this reason, it was necessary to establish new investigative commissions at the end of the war that collected their own evidence with an eye to the legal requirements of a trial. On this basis, France, Belgium, and Great Britain demanded the extradition of some 850 Germans in order to try them before national courts. Why this never happened, and the problems faced by the trials that were held instead before the German national court in Leipzig—​the so-​called Leipzig Trials (1921–​27)—​is a story in itself.150 Here it is more important to remain focused on the national commissions active during the war. The fact that their official reports were used for propaganda purposes does not mean that the work of the commissions and the local authorities should be viewed only from the point of view of propaganda. The investigations and collection of evidence were carried out in countless cases with great care, in order to sufficiently justify the accusations of violations of international law and to withstand international scrutiny. An example is the official investigations mandated by the Prussian Minister of the Interior in August 1914 to pursue accusations that the Russian army had abused and murdered civilians in East Prussia. Although the local commissions could show plausibly and in detail that Russian troops had killed or abducted several hundred German civilians, the ministry was not satisfied; they did not consider it sufficient to determine “that a house was burned down or a number of residents shot.” It also had to be shown “that those who were shot had not behaved towards the Russians in hostile fashion,” and that there were “no military grounds for the destruction of the place.” The ministry further directed local investigators to be careful to place the witnesses under oath, in order to ensure the credibility of their testimonies. Since that November, local courts had also been directed to assist the local bodies in their work.151 The Allies proceeded in similar fashion. For example, for the French, sworn testimonies were the rule when collecting evidence, and information about the witnesses had to be included. Legal experts were involved at the national and local levels.152 All parties first had to gain knowledge of how to carry out investigations in the context of international law. The trials could only be used politically against the opposing side if they met certain legal standards. Over time, such a rich pool of documents on violations of the laws of war was collected that the Allies could expect to have sufficient substantive evidence for indictments in case of legal prosecutions. In 1915, Belgium was the first to call for such legal prosecutions, and at the same time to demand reparations. However, 150 Gerd Hankel, The Leipzig Trials: German War Crimes and Their Legal Consequences after World War I (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2014); Wiggenhorn, Verliererjustiz. 151 See Watson, “Unheard-​of Brutality,” 789ff., quote at 792f. 152 Commission Instituée en Vue de Constater des Actes Commis par l’Ennemi en Violation du Droit de Gens, Rapport et Procès-​Verbaux d’Enquète I-​XII; Wilson, “Lord Bryce’s Investigation”; Segesser, “Haager Landkriegsordnung,” 67.

Efforts in International Law   87 the testimonies collected provoked a crucial question: what crimes would the indictments include? Witnesses had described acts of violence and labeled them illegitimate acts of war even when they were not clearly defined as illegal under the Hague Convention. These included, among other things, the forced displacement of civilians.153 The catastrophic effect of new weapons like poison gas, the legal status of which was by no means clear, was also documented and described in the investigations. In this situation it was not surprising that the new Allied commission established at the end of the war to draft the peace treaties agreed that the impending prosecutions should not only be based on the existing laws of war; it seemed more appropriate to draw on the more comprehensive “principles of humanity.” In the end, however, it was argued that this term was too vague.154 The prosecution of German violations of international law—​which, due to concessions by the Allies, eventually took place in Leipzig rather than in their respective military courts—​did not ultimately keep pace with the popular expectations of justice that had built up over the preceding years in France, Great Britain, and Belgium. The investigations had not only helped to secure a variety of testimonies on illegal acts of violence; they had asked the residents of numerous Belgian and French cities and towns, as well as soldiers, to describe atrocities that the enemy had illegally inflicted on them, their families, friends, and strangers. In this way, the investigative process had been an act of social mobilization, with the implicit promise that the witnesses were taking part in defining illegitimate violence. And the subjects had responded with their stories. Not only did they describe in detail a range of offenses against civilians, prisoners of war, and wounded soldiers, as well as their own personal experiences of violence; they had also expressed in no uncertain terms the illegitimate nature of this violence. Those who had been robbed, violated, killed, even those who had survived, frequently appeared in their stories explicitly as helpless, innocent, defenseless “victims.”155 The commissions’ reports then made this interpretation official and thereby confirmed it. They made many of these stories public, framed with passages from the Hague Convention. Above all, the authors explicitly utilized a rhetoric of injustice that purposely brought the concept of the victim into play. The verve with which they did this gives a sense of how much they hoped to be able to formulate a claim to truth regarding illegitimate acts of war by speaking of victims; this would have the emotional and moral effect desired by their respective governments. The official report by the German Foreign Office, which utilized some of the material

153 See also Jens Thiel, “Menschenbassin Belgien”: Anwerbung, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext, 2007). 154 See Segesser, “Haager Landkriegsordnung,” 71f. 155 See, e.g., Committee on Alleged German Outrages, Evidence, 9, 17, 136, 210; The Martyrdom of Belgium: Official Report of Massacres of Peaceable Citizens, Women and Children (Baltimore, 1915), 9, 18; Commission instituée en vue de constater des actes commis par l’ennemi en violation du droit de gens, Rapport et procès-​verbaux d’enquète I, 8, 12, 13, 16 f., 19, passim.

88  Victims. Perceptions of Harm from investigative efforts in East Prussia as propaganda, was no different at all in this respect.156 The official investigative commissions established during World War I had completed their work by the end of the war at the latest. They had fulfilled their political and moral function for their respective governments. Leaving aside the legal evidence-​gathering for planned trials, which was left to other bodies, the official investigations of possible violations of international law and war crimes were thus over. There were no exhumations or forensic examinations, for example, during the interwar period that might have been used to investigate additional war crimes. Systematic investigations of violations of international law on African or Asian battlefields were never even considered. The early investigations were thus primarily political tools of states involved in the war, with the dual function of paving the way for future reparations claims and utilizing the evidence collected for propaganda purposes. The information we have so far suggests that this manipulation of the material continued in European states during World War II. The German and Soviet investigations of Katyn are probably the most prominent examples of this type of propaganda.157 But they are not the only ones. After the start of the war, the Nazis themselves cynically rushed to set up a Wehrmacht investigative office for violations of international law. During the war years, the office recorded thousands of reports; forensic experts followed up on numerous cases. From the start of the war, the Nazis did not hesitate in their publications to decisively condemn their opponents’ violations of international law—​violations by the Poles, for example. On the occasion of the so-​called Bromberg Bloody Sunday, which occurred two days after the German attack on Poland and cost several dozen Germans their lives, the Nazis spread the following allegations in their propaganda: Poland had “set aside even the most basic laws of international war and humanity in their warfare” and “the constant wounding of medical personnel, the abuse and murder of helpless prisoners, the torture and brutal defilement of the wounded are unparalleled in the history of the laws of war.”158 According to this propaganda, the Poles had supposedly murdered tens of thousands of civilians and Wehrmacht members in half a year. It was obvious to the Nazis that the Germans could be described as “victims of the most

156 See Auswärtiges Amt, Greueltaten russischer Truppen gegen deutsche Zivilpersonen und deutsche Kriegsgefangene (Berlin, 1915); Watson, “Unheard-​of Brutality,” 793, emphasizes that the official report shows none of the care in investigation required of the local authorities and which in fact characterized the collection of evidence. 157 There has been little research so far in this area. There are references to the Allied investigative bodies in Alfred M. de Zayas, Die Wehrmacht-​ Untersuchungsstelle für Verletzungen des Völkerrechts: Dokumentation alliierter Kriegsverbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: Universitas, 1979), 57ff. For additional information with regard to Soviet investigative procedures, see Sorokina, “Peoples and Procedures.” 158 Auswärtiges Amt, Dokumente polnischer Grausamkeiten: Im Auftrage des Auswärtigen Amtes aufgrund urkundlichen Beweismaterials herausgegeben (Burg: Faktum, 2007) (first pub. 1940), 15.

Efforts in International Law   89 despicable war crimes.” Overall, they had clearly appropriated the concept of the innocent, passive victim.159 A number of states lacked the ability to carry out substantive investigations during the war. For example, systematic collection of evidence of German war crimes was possible only to a limited extent in the German-​occupied countries of Eastern Europe. This was clear from the work of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, which began to collect proof of Axis war crimes in October 1943—​in this case, already with a view to prosecuting them after the war.160 Other opportunities arose for the Soviet Union, which had the idea of a commission to investigate Nazi war crimes—​with allusions to World War I—​soon after the Wehrmacht invaded the country, but did not establish one until seventeen months later, in November 1942, in the form of an Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate War Crimes. The delay happened for political reasons. However, the halting and gradual process that, in winter 1942, led to the creation of a commission mandated only to calculate economic damage for later reparations demands also sheds light on the government’s priorities. The crucial decision to create the Extraordinary State Commission was ultimately the result of the news that the Western Allies were planning an international investigative commission that would not include the Soviet Union.161 The establishment of the Extraordinary State Commission was thus essentially a political tactic; the mass murders committed by the Germans and their allies during the war of extermination were not enough of an incentive. This should not lead to the mistaken conclusion that the Soviet Union did not understand perfectly well when to speak of crimes in this war. When the possibility of an international tribunal arose, the Commission even intentionally adjusted its investigations to meet the Western powers’ rather different legal requirements, so as to achieve international recognition.162 Above all, it set an impressive machinery in motion: at least a hundred secondary commissions were created, employing more than 30,000 people to collect evidence of Nazi crimes. By the end of World War II, forensics experts, doctors, photographers, journalists, and other investigators had submitted more than 54,000 reports and over 250,000 witness testimonies to the Extraordinary State Commission. The Soviet commission in this way generated 159 Ibid. The term is found many times in the document. 160 Wolfgang Form, “Justizpolitische Aspekte west-​ alliierter Kriegsverbrecherprozess 1942–​ 1950,” in Dachauer Prozesse: NS-​Verbrechen vor amerikanischen Militärgerichten in Dachau 1945–​48; Verfahren, Ergebnisse, Nachwirkungen, edited by Luswig Eiber and Robert Sigel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 41–​66; Lothar Kettenacker, “Die Behandlung der Kriegsverbrecher als anglo-​amerikanisches Rechtsproblem,” in Der Nationalsozialismus vor Gericht: Die alliierten Prozesse gegen Kriegsverbrecher und Soldaten, 1943–​1952, edited by Gerd R. Ueberschär (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000), 17–​31; Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 161 On the history and the decision-​making process, see Sorokina, “Peoples and Procedures,” especially 806ff. 162 Ibid., 816f.

90  Victims. Perceptions of Harm knowledge regarding the gravest war crimes and “crimes against humanity.” It published reports in Russian and English and submitted them to a variety of Allied peace conferences. Most significantly, the documents thus collected were the most important building blocks in the evidence presented by the Soviet prosecutors to the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo.163



163

Ibid., 801ff.

4

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–​1945) Introduction When Werner Kramp decided to donate his letters and diaries to the Hamburg State Archive, he could look back on a long life. Born ninety-​nine years earlier, in 1893, he had experienced many changes of government and survived two world wars. In 1988, he lived in an old-​age home in Hamburg, not far from his birthplace of Barmbek, once a small village north of Hamburg, where he grew up in a peasant family as one of four children.1 Kramp did not write much after the end of World War II. Or he did not keep as much as he wrote; perhaps he did not consider it important enough to include among his papers. We do know that he traveled until well into old age, and in particular that, until the early 1980s, he never stopped looking for the grave of his brother Günther, who died on the Western Front near Autrêches on 16 November 1914. Kramp traveled to France and made many trips to war graves on the former Western Front, of which he kept photos. At the age of eighty-​nine he finally received a letter from the German War Graves Commission informing him that his brother’s grave “could not be verified” among all the reported graves in German, French, and English archives. There was reason to believe only that he “found his final resting place as an ‘unknown’ in the comrades’ grave at the Nampcel Cemetery.”2 Thus Werner Kramp’s efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. Looking through the papers he left behind, one is tempted to add that this was often the case in his life. There were undoubtedly other moments. But the entries Kramp made in his diaries indicate that for more than twenty years after 1916, he was dissatisfied with what he had achieved in life. In the 1930s, he complained that he had not yet been able to find a wife and therefore still lived with his mother. Nor did his salary as an

1 Staatsarchiv Hamburg (Hamburg State Archive, StA Hamburg), 622-​1/​189: Werner Kramp. I thank Janosch Steuwer for referring me to Werner Kramp’s papers. In his monograph, Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse, he extensively analyzed Kramp’s diaries from the 1930s. Janosch Steuwer, Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse: Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern 1933–​1939 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017). 2 Letter from the German War Graves Commission, 16 July 1982, in: StA Hamburg 622-​1/​1, Persönliche und Familienpapiere.

Victims. Svenja Goltermann, Oxford University Press. © Svenja Goltermann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192897725.003.0004

92  Victims. Perceptions of Harm administrative secretary in the city of Hamburg’s registry office live up to his expectations, especially as he was already dissatisfied with his social status. His failure to take up the legal career he had once imagined gnawed at him. Despite all his efforts to finish studying law, in 1926 he was forced to admit defeat. In the early 1920s he had to take the state exam twice, and his legal clerkship marked the end of his legal career.3 And yet everything had started off so well before the war, when Kramp began studying law in Tübingen. Not even the start of the war could shake his confidence. Kramp volunteered to serve; he was eager to go to war, hoping to experience great things. “I would like to tell you everything so you can experience it too, it’s all interesting and great in its details,” he wrote home dramatically in March 1915, shortly after his regiment had reached the trenches on the Western Front, near Carlepont.4 Kramp idealized the war; it electrified him. In early November 1915 he was badly wounded and brought to a field hospital with a head wound (see Figure 4.1). As a result, Kramp had a visible scar on his head that reached to his forehead. After that—​more accurately, once his health permitted it—​he kept a diary. For a while, writing was part of his therapy, to promote his recovery. At first the entries were short, and unlike his earlier letters and later diaries, they were full of orthographic mistakes. Kramp had to retrain his brain; concentration did not come easily. After he attempted to write a lecture in summer 1916, he noted, “The mental machine does not work at all, the mental craftsmanship that creates visible success and not abstract thinking.”5 Kramp strove to promote his own regeneration with the help of other work. Officially still in the military and hoping to become fit for duty again, he took leave to work in a payroll office. His ailments did not get better. He was plagued above all by the feeling that he could not really participate in life. In March 1918, he noted, “Three years ago I went off to war; for two years I’ve ‘served on the home front’ and feel the world moving forward and young people becoming men, while I stand on the sidelines.” A month later, he made a decision; he would take up his studies again. A pension would give him the financial security to do so. A few weeks later, his application for a pension was approved. The office certified that he was 20 percent unable to work, meaning he would receive a pension of 24 Marks.6 Werner Kramp was just one of the more than 300,000 German soldiers in World War I who suffered head injuries from weapons fire,7 and just one of approximately 2.7 million German men whose lives were defined by the fact that they 3 See also Steuwer, Drittes Reich, 210f. 4 StA Hamburg, 622-​1/​189, 2/​1: Letter diary, 4 Mar. 1915–​23 Apr. 1915, No. 11. 5 Ibid., 2/​3: Diary 11 June 1916–​31 Dec. 1916, 16 June 1916. 6 Ibid., 2/​4: Diary 8 Jan. 1918–​31 Oct. 1918, 21 Apr. 1918. 7 Sanitätsbericht über das Deutsche Heer (Deutsches Feld-​und Besatzungsheer) im Weltkriege 1914/​ 1918 (Berlin, 1934).

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  93

Figure 4.1  Werner Kramp, 1915.a aStA Hamburg, 622-​1/​189, Familie Kramp 4/​1–​18.

94  Victims. Perceptions of Harm were permanently disabled in the war.8 Kramp was also just one of the approximately 1.5 million men who received a pension for disabilities caused by the war, according to official figures from the Reich Ministry of Labor in 1923.9 He was, overall, just one—​one of some 20 million soldiers seriously wounded in that war.10 Nevertheless, Werner Kramp’s story is not typical of injured veterans after World War I. In fact, we know very little about many of them. This is especially true of the colonial soldiers, and even more so of the “carriers” recruited by the colonial powers, often by force, to transport artillery, ammunition, food, and other supplies. In both cases, there are not even estimates of the number of disabled. The only thing we know for sure is that the colonial powers did not grant them the same right to a disability pension after the end of the war as “European” soldiers. The carriers returned from the war empty-​handed.11 But our knowledge in regard to the physically and mentally wounded from the belligerent European countries is also incomplete. We focus on soldiers, and our idea of those disabled in war focuses on men. What do we know about civilians, women as well as men, whose health was damaged by the war? For Poland, figures from 1921 tell us that a fifth of all war invalids who lost one or more limbs were women. They also made up half of those who lost their sight or hearing as a result of the war.12 But even for male veterans, we are most aware of the amputees, the soldiers with facial wounds, and those with shell shock. It is their images that we generally see in documentary films and photographs used as book illustrations to help us visualize victims of war. As we will see, historians have shown that these are limited and simplified interpretations. However, they contribute to the persistent belief that trembling soldiers with missing limbs and disfigured faces are typical of those disabled in war. No other group has been written about as much as these, even though they are far from the largest group of war invalids. In Austria, for example, tuberculosis cases and the lasting, often invisible consequences of gunshot wounds made 8 Deborah Cohen, “Kriegsopfer,” in Der Tod als Maschinist. Der industrialisierte Krieg 1914–​1918, edited by Rolf Spilker and Bernd Ulrich (Bramsche: Rasch, 1998), 217–​227, 217, assumes at least 1.5 million disabled. The number cannot be precisely determined. Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914–​1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 94, believes an estimate of 2.7 million is realistic. 9 Pierluigi Pironti, Kriegsopfer und Staat: Sozialpolitik für Invaliden, Witwen und Waisen des Ersten Weltkriegs in Deutschland und Italien (1914–​1924) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015), 352. 10 Cohen, “Kriegsopfer,” 217. 11 Ana Carden-​Coyne, The Politics of Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 345; Timothy J. Stapleton, No Insignificant Part: The Rhodesia Native Regiment and the East Africa Campaign of the First World War (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006); Risto Marjomaa, “The Veterans’ Dilemma: Employment of Ex-​Soldiers of the King’s African Rifles’ Nyasaland (Malawi) Battalions, 1902–​1939,” Hemispheres 20 (2005): 39–​57; David Killingray and James Matthews, “Beast of Burden: British West African Carriers in the First World War,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 13, nos. 1/​2 (1979): 5–​23; Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 12 Anita Magowska, “The Unwanted Heroes: War Invalids in Poland after World War I,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 69, no. 2 (2014): 185–​220, 196ff.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  95 up a significantly larger portion of the harms recognized in the immediate postwar period to have been caused by war.13 This does not, however, change the fact that the total number of soldiers who suffered lasting harm as a result of the war was so high that all the European states felt called upon to reform their welfare systems. After this industrialized mass conflict, easing the consequences of war—​which had heretofore largely been the task of local relief programs for the poor and private charities—​required other forms of social security, particularly greater state responsibility, at least toward their own populations. The disabled were not the only issue. In addition, leaving the colonies aside, there were also the families of the millions of dead—​some 3 million widows (France and Germany alone are thought to have had 600,000 each).14 There were also approximately 9 million orphans, if we include those whose fathers died of their wounds soon after the war’s end.15 The governments of the belligerent nations responded throughout Europe. Their models might vary, and the extent of relief payments ultimately differed. But it may be said generally that from France, to England, to Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, states took responsibility in completely new ways for guaranteeing the social security of their citizens in the context of war.16 As a result, ways of speaking about victims broadened considerably. But as with the commemoration of the enormous numbers of dead, we should not delude ourselves. Even the sight of mutilated bodies did not automatically lead to a description of disabled veterans as passive victims of war; indeed, the disabled themselves were not committed to describing themselves in this way, or even eager to do so. Nevertheless, World War I played a particular role from the perspective of a history of the victim. It was not least the expansion of government social spending that provoked diversification in the ascription of victim status.

13 Verena Pawlowsky and Harald Wendelin, Die Wunden des Staates: Kriegsopfer und Sozialstaat in Österreich 1914–​1938 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2015), 492f. 14 Erika A. Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of Nation after the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 3. 15 Tammy M. Proctor, “Total War: Family, Community, and Identity during the First World War,” in The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–​1945, edited by Nicholas Doumanis and Tammy M. Proctor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 61–​76, 72. 16 See u. a. David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Soviet Social Intervention in Its International Context, 1914–​1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Julia Eichenberg, Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge: Polnische Veteranen des Ersten Weltkriegs und ihre internationalen Kontakte 1918–​ 1939 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011); Natali Stegmann, Kriegsdeutungen—​Staatsgründungen—​ Sozialpolitik: Der Helden-​und Opferdiskurs in der Tschechoslowakei 1918–​1948 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010); Pironti, Kriegsopfer; Magowska, “Unwanted Heroes”; Pawlowsky and Wendelin, Wunden des Staates; Michael Geyer, “Ein Vorbote des Wohlfahrtsstaates: Die Kriegsopferversorgung in Frankreich, Deutschland und Großbritannien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 230–​277; Sarah D. Phillips, “‘There Are No Invalids in the USSR!’: A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2009); Beate Fieseler, “The Disabled Soldiers of the ‘Great Patriotic War’,” in Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: History, Policy and Everyday Life, edited by Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-​Smirnova (New York: Routledge, 2014), 18–​41.

96  Victims. Perceptions of Harm In this sense, World War I was not a break with the past; rather, it was a catalyst that expanded government social and health policies, which had already been introduced at the end of the nineteenth century, and contributed to their advancement.17 Only in this context does it become clear why, in the course of World War I, states relatively quickly declared themselves willing to reform and expand aid to those disabled in war. The welfare-​state logic that began to take hold was based on social entitlements and claims that had already been established in civilian life. Society’s expectations that the state would take action in emergencies such as sickness, invalidity, or unemployment had increased perceptibly in many European countries since the late nineteenth century. It is therefore not surprising that, starting in the early twentieth century, the figure of the victim could be found in other contexts outside of war; for example, in the labor movement. In Germany, during the 1920s, one no longer spoke of “work invalids (Arbeitsinvalide)” but of “work victims (Arbeitsopfer)”—​a term that has not so far been found to have existed before 1914.18 It was a symptomatic shift that referenced the struggle for social rights fought since World War I by a growing number of people and groups. The campaign for the rights of the physically disabled, which began in the late nineteenth century with the “discovery” of the physically disabled child as a product of poverty, is another example of this.19 Those disabled in war were also involved in this struggle for rights. This can be seen in politics and the media, but it also took place in confrontations with the medical community and the bureaucracy. It was their responsibility to determine the sources of physical and psychological complaints and, where necessary, establish the level of benefits. Administrative regulations, legal procedures, and medical interpretations not only played a significant role in deciding which of the “army of survivors” were certified invalids; they also influenced what disabled veterans and surviving dependents could expect from society.20

17 See, e.g., Greg Eghigian, Making Security Social: Disability, Insurance, and the Birth of the Social Entitlement State in Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); for a concise overview of European developments: Hoffmann, Masses, 19–​29. 18 Greg A. Eghigian, “The Politics of Victimization: Social Pensioners and the German Social State in the Inflation of 1914–​1924,” Central European History 26, no. 4 (1993): 375–​403, 383. 19 See Seth Koven, “Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers, and the Great War in Great Britain,” The American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994): 1167–​1202. 20 The numbers themselves provide evidence of this: if we take the number of wounded in 1919 as the basis, in Italy a far smaller percentage of wounded received a war victim’s pension than in France or Great Britain. Henry H. Kessler, The Crippled and the Disabled: Rehabilitation of the Physically Handicapped in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 146. The International Labour Organization’s estimates are the basis for the year 1918.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  97

Medicine and the Hosts of the Disabled Werner Kramp, who received a severe head wound on the Western Front in autumn of 1915, was lucky to have survived the injury, from a medical point of view. While there are no precise figures, it is certain that a large number of those with cranial injuries who were alive when brought to field hospitals died if their brains were damaged. Medical records give at least some evidence of the dimensions of this phenomenon. If we follow the relatively differentiated notes left by a German medical officer who served in a field hospital on the Western Front in 1917, 50 percent of “brain shots” that reached the nearest field hospital did not survive this first stop. Of those with brain injuries who could be transferred to a hospital in their home country, an additional 20 percent died. But in this case, what did survival mean? In the medical officer’s experience, only a very small number of those with brain injuries—​less than 10 percent—​recovered completely. Kramp was not one of them. But he was also not one of those veterans—​more than a third—​who were left with severe paralysis, impaired speech or vision, severe psychological disturbance, or epilepsy.21 The medical profession long tended to describe war as a great “mass experiment” and a period of significant practical success, and in many ways historians continue to subscribe to this view today, particularly in regard to World War I. This perspective is supported by the fact that medicine, including military medicine, had become increasingly professionalized in the second half of the nineteenth century, and doctors’ and nurses’ training had become more intensive.22 Furthermore, the antiseptic treatment of wounds had improved considerably. Medical procedures such as the transfusion of strangers’ blood, which had been rejected by European doctors before 1914, came into widespread use during the war. Doctors also took the opportunity to test and improve skin transplants as a therapeutic tool.23 Furthermore, military medicine in much of Europe was better equipped than ever before. In terms of personnel, it benefited from the organization of voluntary patient care, especially by the Red Cross and Red Crescent, which mobilized large numbers of civilians (especially women) for wartime duty.24 For example, on 21 See Wolfgang U. Eckart, Medizin und Krieg: Deutschland 1914–​1924 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014), 165. 22 See, e.g., Ian R. Whitehead, Doctors in the Great War (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2013), 6–​31; Deborah Brunton (ed.), Medicine Transformed: Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1800–​1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Katrin Schultheiss, Bodies and Souls: Politics and the Professionalization of Nursing in France, 1880–​1922 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 23 See, e.g., Myriam Spörri, Reines und gemischtes Blut: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Blutgruppenforschung, 1900–​1933 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), 233; Thomas Schlich, The Origin of Organ Transplantation: Surgery and Laboratory Science, 1880–​ 1930 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010); Thomas Schlich, “ ‘Welche Macht über Tod und Leben!’: Die Etablierung der Bluttransfusion im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Die Medizin und der Erste Weltkrieg, edited by Wolfgang U. Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (Herbolzheim: Centaurus Verlag & Media, 2003), 109–​130. 24 See, e.g., Christine E. Hallett, Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). A mobilization also took place in the Ottoman Empire (including women),

98  Victims. Perceptions of Harm the eve of World War I, the Red Cross alone had 105,000 members in Russia and 164,000 in France. Germany outdid them with its 1,083,000 Red Cross members; by the end of the war, more than 500,000 of them were directly involved in medical care.25 Where the belligerent countries lacked sufficient capacity, as in the Balkans, the Red Cross and Red Crescent could mobilize members in other countries.26 This manpower was supplemented by modern medical equipment, such as portable X-​ ray machines,27 as well as other technical innovations such as motorized transport for the wounded (though this was not available everywhere).28 Still, it is impossible to make generalizations about the effects of medicine and the medical system on this war, with its millions of dead, wounded, and sick. The war was too non-​uniform on its various fronts, even in Europe (conditions at the front and behind the lines were in any case entirely different), and it lasted too long. Nutritional conditions and the level of soldiers’ physical resistance worsened considerably as the war dragged on; the ways in which soldiers were supplied and fed by their respective governments also played a role.29 Further, civilian infrastructures in different countries differed greatly, as did the risk of falling victim to epidemics in the various theaters of war. Cholera was prevalent only in eastern and southeastern Europe; the same was true of typhus, though at first it also infected thousands on the Western Front. Vaccination kept the rates of sickness, and but to a much smaller extent, particularly since the Red Crescent was only rebuilt in 1911. In addition, its members were used to a much smaller degree for medical care of soldiers. See, e.g., Nadir Özbek, “Defining the Public Sphere during the Late Ottoman Empire: War, Mass Mobilization and the Young Turk Regime (1908–​18),” Middle Eastern Studies 43, no. 5 (2007): 795–​809. In Italy, the Red Cross was not involved in military medicine. See John Gooch, The Italian Army and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 273. 25 On the numbers in Germany: Eckart, Medizin und Krieg, 105f.; in France: Rachel Chrastil, Organizing for War: France, 1870–​1914 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); in Russia: Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (Harlow: Longman, 2005), 47. 26 See, e.g., Zuhal Ozaydin, “The Indian Muslim Red Crescent Society’s Aid to the Ottoman State during the Balkan War in 1912,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 2, no. 4 (2003): 12–​18, 13f.; Svenja Goltermann, “Medizin, Recht und das Wissen vom ‘zivilisierten’ Krieg im langen 19. Jahrhundert,” Gesnerus 72, no. 2 (2015): 215–​230. 27 See, e.g., Monika Dommann, Durchsicht, Einsicht, Vorsicht: Eine Geschichte der Röntgenstrahlen, 1896–​1963 (Zurich: Chronos, 2003), 212ff. 28 On the improvements and remaining problems in the transport system, see, e.g., Mark Harrison, The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 20ff., passim. In general, transport possibilities differed considerably among the various theaters of war depending on available infrastructure. See, e.g., Fiona Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe: Soldiers, Medics, Pacifists (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 170f.; Ke-​Chin Hsia, “Who Provided Care for Wounded and Disabled Soldiers? Conceptualizing State-​Civil Society Relationship in First World War Austria,” in Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, edited by Joachim Bürgschwentner, Matthias Egger, and Gunda Barth-​ Scalmani (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 303–​329, 308ff.; Leila Tarazi Fawaz, A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) 202f.; Hikmet Özdemir, The Ottoman Army 1914–​ 1918: Disease & Death on the Battlefield (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 41, 130. 29 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 164f.; Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–​1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 57ff.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  99 especially death, in check—​but it was a measure that was undertaken in the belligerent countries with varying degrees of intensity.30 Finally, it should be noted that ultimately, despite the existence of various medical reports, there are no reliable figures that would permit an overview of the entire situation.31 Nevertheless, it has become clear that medicine was much less successful during the war than originally planned, or than it tended to be portrayed afterwards—​and also that it did not necessarily humanize the war. All the major states involved in the war on the Western Front realized by autumn 1914 that the capacities they had calculated to be necessary for soldiers’ medical care were in no way sufficient, and even though these capacities were continually expanded, they often failed to meet the need.32 This was due not only to the enormous number of wounded, but also to the number of sick people. In both cases, the planners had completely miscalculated. The 1911 Royal Army Medical Corps Training Manual, for example, assumed that, in future wars, there would be far more sick than wounded soldiers; it suggested a ratio of 25:1. This estimate massively misjudged the actual share of the wounded, although military doctors and nurses did in fact have more sick than wounded soldiers to care for, if we look at the entire World War I period (even in France, the number of sick soldiers was approximately twice as high as that of the treated wounded). Above all, however, all the belligerent parties had expected a short war. As we know, that is not what happened. Doctors and nurses had to work for four years under conditions of mass mobilization. For this reason alone, the total number of sick and wounded soldiers was many times higher than the estimates. The approximate magnitude can be calculated for some West European countries, at least: The British Army recorded 3.5 million cases of illness, the French some 5 million; Germany, affected most severely by the Spanish Flu that spread worldwide beginning in 1918, registered over 7 million.33 In addition to all this, soldiers on the front lines—​especially in the west—​were being wounded in as-​yet unimaginable ways as a result of new weapons, many of them more than once: more than 2 million wounded soldiers in the British Army, 2.8 million apiece in the French and Russian armies, and 4.8 million in the German Army.34 These 30 In the British and American armies, which vaccinated early, there were essentially no deaths from typhus. Germany introduced obligatory vaccination when typhus cases on the Western Front clearly increased and the death rate reached 10 percent. See Leo van Bergen, Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914–​1918 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 143f. On the increase in epidemics in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, see, e.g., Mehmet Beşikçi, The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War: Between Voluntarism and Resistance (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 262; Jeremy Salt, The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (Oakland: University of California Press, 2009), 56f. 31 See, e.g., Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe, 30f.; van Bergen, Sight, 106f., passim. 32 See, e.g., Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe, 33. 33 The figures for Great Britain: van Bergen, Sight, 140; for France and Germany: Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe, 45. 34 Figures for Great Britain: Carden-​Coyne, The Politics of Wounds, 4; for France: Jean-​Jacques Becker and Gerd Krumeich, Der Große Krieg: Deutschland und Frankreich 1914–​1918 (Essen: Klartext, 2010), 167; for Russia: Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 65; for Germany: Benjamin Ziemann, Gewalt im Ersten Weltkrieg: Töten—​Überleben—​Verweigern (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2013), 7.

100  Victims. Perceptions of Harm numbers would be much higher if they included soldiers who never even made it to a first aid station. Overall, the demands on medical professionals were enormous, while their efforts to help soldiers return to the fight as quickly as possible was considered a patriotic duty. Western European doctors were better able to fulfill this duty for those who fell ill than for the wounded. In the British Army, for example, of the above-​ mentioned 3.5 million sick soldiers, only around 30,000 died—​less than 1 percent. This was a noteworthy improvement over the nineteenth century, and there is no doubt that better hygiene played an important role. In addition, a higher number of vaccinations had become possible, and German medical officers administered no less than 200 million vaccines over the course of the war, an average of 15 per soldier.35 The situation was different for the wounded. It is impossible to determine exactly how many soldiers died immediately, or shortly after they were wounded. Estimates suggest, however, that the number on the Western Front was one in five (conditions were much worse for the wounded on the Eastern Front36). For the remainder who received medical attention, the prospects of survival were relatively good: the death rate was around 8 percent—​significantly lower than in nineteenth century Europe, where it was at least twice as high. These are rough estimates. They do not reveal, for example, that the survival rate for stomach wounds was nearly nonexistent. They also do not indicate that artillery fire literally cut soldiers to pieces, or that many soldiers who could be kept alive by the doctors had to have one or more limbs amputated; in Germany alone, there were some 500,000 such cases.37 Those with facial wounds were often completely disfigured (in France, 14 percent of all wounded were gueules cassées—​“broken faces”).38 More commonly, however, health problems became chronic without the cause—​the wartime injury—​being obvious to others. Overall, medicine was able to save far more lives in World War I than it could in the nineteenth century. But at the same time, it produced wartime invalids in greater numbers than ever before. The seemingly low mortality rate of 8 percent is deceptive, since medical knowledge and skill alone did not decide who lived and who died. They were more effective behind the lines and on the home front, where conditions for medical care were comparatively acceptable. At first aid stations and field hospitals, in contrast, terrible conditions prevailed, which in no way resembled the common photos and postcards of hospitals that played to mass media by showing successful deployment

35 Van Bergen, Sight, 286. 36 Ibid., 287, presents the following figures: between 15 and 25 percent of all wounded on the Western Front died (including those who did not receive medical assistance), while on the Eastern Front, more than half of all wounded Russians and Serbs lost their lives. See also Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 65. 37 Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-​ Hungary 1914–​ 1918 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 296. 38 Becker and Krumeich, Der Große Krieg, 167.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  101 of medical care. On the front lines, with such massive numbers of wounded, military medicine looked very different. In the narrow trenches, the basic rule was that munitions transports had first priority; troop circulation took second place; and stretcher bearers evacuating the wounded came last. They were also expected to leave the most gravely wounded behind, as there was no time to waste in treating them. Meanwhile, the small first aid stations had no room for the wounded who were brought to them; they had to be left outside in the dirt. Doctors were required to decide who had a chance of survival and would get further care. Under massive time pressure, they had to quickly determine which people with which wounds should be transferred to what hospital behind the lines, or who might be saved by an immediate amputation. But under such pressure, decisions were based on guesswork, not on thoughtful diagnoses. Doctors forced to carry out emergency operations in these situations did them in narrow, badly lit rooms full of flies and in unhygienic conditions, sometimes even without anesthetic. Antisepsis in these places was an illusion, and the risk of infection, which was believed to be under control before the war, was immense.39 It is not surprising that, under conditions of mass mobilization and given the gigantic number of wounded, military medicine adopted the principle of triage—​ that is, it prioritized. This certainly had a medical rationale. It meant utilizing the far too scarce resources of doctors, materiel, and personnel so that the greatest possible number of lives could be saved. Therefore, in cases that seemed hopeless, the wounded were generally not transferred to hospitals behind the lines. However, it is also true that these decisions primarily followed the military rationale of treating those who could be made fit for active service again. Treatment at military hospitals in the home countries also employed this selection principle. The differing valuation of life connected with this approach affected not only a country’s own soldiers, but also prisoners of war, and above all civilians. The terrible state of prisoner of war camps—​in Russia they were truly dreadful—​shows that the belligerent states were not prepared for the enormous number of prisoners of war. But it also indicates that resources were quite selectively employed. French prisoners of war experienced this in German camps. In Russia, malnourishment and sickness cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war.40

39 Van Bergen, Sight, 289ff., 306. 40 On prisoners of war in Russian custody, see Georg Wurzer, “Die Erfahrung der Extreme: Kriegsgefangene in Russland 1914–​ 1918,” in Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkriegs, edited by Jochen Oltmer (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 97–​125; Reinhard Nachtigal, “Hygienemaßnahmen und Seuchenbekämpfung als Probleme der russischen Staatsverwaltung 1914–​ 1917: Prinz Alexander von Oldenburg und die Kriegsgefangenen der Mittelmächte,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 39, 2/​3 (2004): 135–​163. The neglect of prisoners of war in Russian camps was not, however, the result of an intention to exterminate. On the treatment of prisoners of war in World War I in general, see, e.g., Heather Jones, Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–​1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jochen Oltmer (ed.), Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkriegs (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006).

102  Victims. Perceptions of Harm States’ own civilian populations were also severely affected. For example, in Germany, the concentration of medical resources on the fighting forces led to the conscription of some 79 percent of the approximately 33,000 doctors available on the eve of World War I into military service. For civilians, the number of patients per doctor therefore rose from 1,500 to 5,800. In France, too, the military conscripted 80 percent of all doctors; as a result, each civilian doctor was responsible for an average of as many as 14,000 people (in 2017, the ratio in Germany was 1:285).41 Bed capacities in civilian hospitals were at times almost entirely reserved for the military wounded and sick. In France, from the beginning of the war, all spots in tuberculosis clinics were reserved for soldiers; no beds were available even for women and children.42 Medication was lacking everywhere. In Germany, the massive reduction in medical care for civilians had disastrous consequences in the last third of the war. As the British naval blockade gradually reduced food supplies, and governments stood by their decision to reserve the available food supply primarily for soldiers and workers in munitions factories, the average daily calorie intake for civilians sank dramatically, from around 3,400 to a dangerous level of 1,000 calories. The results of this policy were particularly apparent in prisons and psychiatric facilities, where inmates could not obtain additional food on the black market. Their average weight fell by almost a quarter in the course of the war, to as little as 50 kilograms. In rehabilitation facilities and nursing homes, more than 70,000 people starved to death, especially those particularly dependent on nourishing food.43 But hunger and malnourishment, sickness and increased mortality were also rampant outside of such facilities. For example, tuberculosis deaths increased by 68 percent between 1914 and 1917 (this meant more than 41,000 deaths). In total, mortality among the German civilian population, which now had very little medical care, increased by 37 percent compared with 1913—​and by as much as 51 percent among women.44 It is therefore apparent that, in 1918, in the belligerent states, it was not just returning soldiers, but also millions of civilians, who formed the host of survivors who had escaped with their lives but suffered from a wide range of disabilities,

41 See Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman, “The Nation Sacrificed for the Army? The Failing French Public Health, 1914–​1918,” in Die Medizin und der Erste Weltkrieg, edited by Wolfgang U. Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (Herbolzheim: Centaurus Verlag & Media, 2003), 343–​364; Medizinische Versorgung, http://​www.laend​erda​ten.de/​ges​undh​eit/​medi​zini​sche​_​ver​sorg​ung.aspx, accessed 31 January 2022. 42 See van Bergen, Sight, 25. The situation was similar in Germany in the “cripples’ homes,” which normally cared for children; during the war, orthopedists used them to treat disabled soldiers. See Julie Anderson and Heather R. Perry, “Rehabilitation and Restoration: Orthopaedics and Disabled Soldiers in Germany and Britain in the First World War,” Medicine, Conflict, and Survival 30, no. 4 (2014): 227–​ 251, 231. 43 Heinz Faulstich, Hungersterben in der Psychiatrie 1914–​1949: Mit einer Topographie der NS-​ Psychiatrie (Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus, 1998), 41–​68. 44 See Alexander B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 86f., Herwig, War, 295.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  103 many of them permanent. This picture of human devastation becomes even more dramatic if we look beyond the year in which the war officially ended. It is difficult to overstate how massive were the health consequences for those who survived the civil war and accompanying famine in Russia and the Eastern European regions of the emerging Soviet Union—​or the civil wars and border conflicts, revolutions and counterrevolutions in the regions of the former Habsburg monarchy and southern Europe. We have only approximate figures on refugees resulting from the war and forced resettlement. Estimates point to some 9.5 million by the mid-​1920s, at least 2 million of them from Russia. We also know the numbers of deaths: The Russian civil war of 1917–​1922, together with epidemics and famine, took the lives of some 10 million people. Well over 4 million died in other armed conflicts in postwar Europe. In short, between 1918 and 1923, in the apt words of historian Robert Gerwarth, the continent was “the world’s most violent region by far.”45 At the same time, however, it is also true that considerable efforts were made on a number of fronts to reduce suffering. These included initiatives at the national level to provide material support for war invalids, widows and orphans, and also broad-​based international humanitarian aid to the hungry, especially children, in Europe and the Middle East. They were financed and promoted primarily by the United States.46 The League of Nations prepared to grant minimal legal status to the huge number of refugees and people who had been expelled and denaturalized, whom few states were willing to take in; this would make it possible for them to seek work across borders and ensure their livelihoods.47 These included hundreds of thousands of Russians who had fled for political reasons and whose citizenship had been revoked by Lenin.48 An impressive example of the extent of humanitarian aid was the American Red Cross (ARC) operation in Greece in the winter of 1922–​1923, during the Greco-​ Turkish War (1919–​1923). After the Greek defeat and the subsequent forced resettlements, hundreds of thousands of Greeks were provided with humanitarian aid by the ARC. During the winter months, the organization distributed food every day to some 860,000 people. Together with the Greek government, it organized medical care for the refugees: over 230,000 cases were treated at seventy-​one ambulatory stations, large-​scale vaccination programs were implemented against

45 See Robert Gerwarth, Die Besiegten: Das blutige Erbe des Ersten Weltkriegs (Munich: Siedler, 2017), 19. The citation is also found there. 46 Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 28ff. 47 See, e.g., Dieter Gosewinkel, Schutz und Freiheit? Staatsbürgerschaft in Europa im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 161–​163; Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–​1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 133–​140. 48 See, e.g., Gerwarth, Besiegten, 127.

104  Victims. Perceptions of Harm typhus and cholera, and over 400,000 people were treated in delousing and bathing facilities.49 As in many similar cases, this was an impressive act of solidarity, especially in a period of national division and ethnically and religiously charged conflicts. Nevertheless, it was not simply about empathy, and certainly not toward everyone who was suffering. In Greece, for example, the religious distinction between Christians and Muslims determined the behavior of Western humanitarian organizations—​with the exception, in this case, of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).50 Above all, humanitarian aid was not free of political motivations, as can be observed in the interwar period, for example in famine aid for Eastern Europe. Large-​scale aid organized by the American Relief Administration for Russia was guided not only by humanitarian motives, but by the interest in combatting Bolshevism. Its initiator, future President Herbert Hoover, explained in retrospect that “fighting Bolshevism was humanitarian.”51 Conversely, after the Russian Revolution, the British public was not at first eager to provide food for “enemy children” through the Save the Children Fund. The organization was nevertheless able to provide aid to 300,000 children a day in the Russian province of Saratov, after it launched a successful media campaign to explain that innocent children should not be held responsible for their country’s political behavior.52 Medicine was central to all these international aid operations and the public campaigns that supported them. Doctors measured and weighed bodies, determined the degree of undernourishment of the starving, and judged the extent to which their emaciated bodies deviated from the norm. Doctors were also brought in to showcase the competence and willingness to help of humanitarian organizations. The position and expertise of doctors seemed to insulate them from political disputes. But disabled soldiers got to know a different side of the medical profession. If they applied for a pension based on physical or psychological disability, doctors determined whether the damage to their health was in fact a result of war and assessed, where necessary, the reduction in their earning capacity. Doctors and the disabled were thus acting within a very different context and following very different rationales than the humanitarian organizations, which adhered to charitable principles. But those applying for pensions were not looking for charity. They were 49 Davide Rodogno, “The American Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Humanitarian Politics and Policies in Asia Minor and Greece (1922–​1923),” First World War Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 83–​99, 87. 50 Ibid., 89. 51 Cited in Branden Little, “An Explosion of New Endeavours: Global Humanitarian Responses to Industrialized Warfare in the First World War Era,” First World War Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 1–​16, 10 (emphasis in original). 52 See Linda Mahood and Vic Satzewich, “The Save the Children Fund and the Russian Famine of 1921–​23: Claims and Counter-​Claims about Feeding ‘Bolshevik’ Children,” Journal of Historical Sociology 22, no. 1 (2009): 55–​83.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  105 making a claim on the state and society, demanding financial and symbolic recognition of the sacrifices they had made for the nation during the war.

Material Compensation and the Symbolic Recognition of the Victim When World War I ended in November 1918, it was not at all certain how the millions of wounded and sick who returned from the war would be described in the future. New ways of dealing with the war dead socially and politically had become established in the nineteenth century; but no language seemed adequate for the millions of war invalids, as could be seen in 1914 in Austro-​Hungary and Germany, for example.53 In Germany, this became clear in a May 1915 decree by the Prussian authorities that introduced the term “war invalids.”54 This was an attempt to avoid the word “cripple,” which had commonly been used for disabled soldiers since the beginning of the war. Until then, the term had often been used for children and young people whose bodies were deformed from birth or as a result of illness, but it was highly controversial as a term for soldiers.55 Some believed it was pejorative, as a cripple was not a full member of human society. Others defended the use of the word. A 1915 article in the popular science and culture magazine Der Kunstwart argued, “Let us not be content with finding a different name for the misfortunes of our war participants, but let us call those who are crippled ‘war cripples,’ while at the same time making sure that this expression is understood for what it is: an honorific.”56 The description “war victims” also appeared—​an older term, but one that had so far been used for the dead, not for the living. However, the term did not become established as a collective designation for those harmed in the war and their dependents until the late 1920s.57 Organizations that had formed during the war to represent the interests of wounded soldiers used different terms in labelling themselves. In Germany, the organizations called themselves Association of Blind

53 See, e.g., Pawlowsky and Wendelin, Wunden des Staates, 38; Sabine Kienitz, Beschädigte Helden: Kriegsinvalidität und Körperbilder 1914–​1923 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008), 113ff. 54 See Eckart, Medizin und Krieg, 303. 55 See Kienitz, Helden, 113. On Great Britain: Koven, “Remembering.” Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37f. does not address the term “crippled,” but notes that the institutions dealing with the care of these children, who were physically disabled from birth or through illness, emphasized their “innocence” regarding their situation. They were not responsible for it and were passive, which did not apply to soldiers in combat. 56 Paul Frank, “Kriegskrüppel,” Der Kunstwart 28 (1915), 17f., cited in Kienitz, Helden, 111. 57 See Pironti, Kriegsopfer, 11; Karin Hausen, “Die Sorge der Nation für ihre ‘Kriegsopfer’: Ein Bereich der Geschlechterpolitik während der Weimarer Republik,” in Von der Arbeiterbewegung zum modernen Sozialstaat. Festschrift für Gerhard A. Ritter zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Jürgen Kocka, Hans-​Jürgen Puhle, and Klaus Tenfelde (Munich: Saur, 1994), 719–​739, 725.

106  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Fighters (Bund erblindeter Krieger) (1916) and Association of War Disabled and Veterans (Bund der Kriegsgeschädigten und ehemaligen Kriegsteilnehmer) (1917). In France, the Association of War Disabled (Association des mutilés de guerre) was formed in 1916, and a similar Italian association in 1917 used the terms “war disabled and war invalids.” The National Relief Agency for Women and Children, Victims of War (Œuvre national de protection en faveur des femmes et enfants, victimes de la guerre), founded in France in 1916, even used the term “victims of war,” but dealt only with civilians, specifically women and children.58 This self-​description changed little in the early postwar years. Most of the newly formed organizations chose the same or similar names, whether in Germany, Poland, Austria, or Czechoslovakia. The two international associations established in 1920 and 1924 were no exception.59 When the national organizations changed anything, it was to include surviving dependents in their names. In Germany, for example, the “Association” formed in 1917 changed its name to “Reich Association of War Disabled, Veterans, and Surviving Dependents” (Reichsbund der Kriegsbeschädigten, Kriegsteilnehmer und Kriegshinterbliebenen). Other, smaller associations did the same; political affiliation played no role in this. In fact, as far as we know, there were only three exceptions to this naming pattern in all of Europe: first of all, the communist International Association of Victims of War and Labor, founded in 1919; second, the firmly Christian Reich Association of War Victims of Austria; and third, the Reich Association of German War Victims, established by the National Socialists in 1932. This terminological variety came to an end in Germany when all existing associations of the war disabled were absorbed into the National Socialist Relief Organization for War Victims (Nationalsozialistische Kriegsopferversorgung) in July 1933 (the same happened in Austria a short time later). It was thus in fact the Nazis who established the concept of the “war victim” (“Kriegsopfer”) institutionally, though not the idea of the passive victim. At first glance, this sounds paradoxical. However, the German term “Kriegsopfer” was not necessarily understood at the time in the sense of “war victim”; in German it could also refer to the sacrifices made in war—​a connection that is no longer made today. This becomes clear when we consider its use by the Social Democrats, going back to the World War I period. In their party organ Vorwärts, “Kriegsopfer” first of all referred to the dead, both military and civilian, as well as to disabled soldiers and surviving dependents. The word was also used in another sense, in which it took on an active element: economic losses constituted “war sacrifice,” which the “little people” and the “poor and impecunious” were willing to accept.60 Above all, 58 For the organizations of war-​disabled in the different countries see, e.g., Pironti, Kriegsopfer; Pawlowsky and Wendelin, Wunden des Staates, 199ff., 260ff. 59 Fédération interalliée des Anciens Combattants (FIDAC) und Conférence Internationale des Associations de Mutilés et Anciens Combattants (CIAMAC). 60 See, e.g., Vorwärts, 4 July 1916, 5; Vorwärts, 24 May 1918, 7.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  107 however, the Social Democrats emphasized that soldiers had made the “heaviest sacrifices”—​“blood sacrifice” and the “enormous privations and hardships of four years of wartime life.”61 They did not fundamentally oppose such sacrifice, but they expected it to be acknowledged in the form of political rights and material aid. In October 1914, they were appalled at the continued failure to introduce “universal, equal, secret, and direct state parliamentary suffrage,” making the emotional plea, “In these days in which the entire German people, without distinction of sex and class, are making the heaviest sacrifice of property and blood, and the poor, politically disenfranchised classes, especially the working class, are bearing an enormous part of this sacrifice . . . ”62 In June 1918, they offered the following critique: “Those disabled in the war . . . have already given everything that could ever be asked of them. They have sacrificed arms and legs, without asking for compensation, trusting in the Fatherland’s promised thanks.”63 Even for the Social Democrats, the idea of wartime sacrifice was based on active behavior—​without endorsing the war and the devastation it created. Making sacrifices in wartime was a question of attitude. It stood for the willingness and intention to be a full-​fledged part of the nation—​which was therefore also a claim not just for material support, but for full rights of citizenship. However, the idea that the state owed something to those harmed in the war was not limited to Social Democrats or to Germany.64 This view was also expressed in France, for example at a November 1917 conference of veterans at the Grand Palais in Paris. French doctor and lawyer Charles-​Louis Valentino was applauded when he proclaimed that the war wounded were “true believers.” He explained, “When a man returns home disabled and has shed his blood . . . this is a basis for his right not to charity, but to compensation for the harm he has suffered.”65 Almost all governments that celebrated their relief laws for war invalids and surviving dependents after 1918 made the impression in their public remarks that they had never imagined anything else. In Germany, Reich Labor Minister Alexander Schlicke emphasized that the Reich Relief Law of 12 May 1920 fulfilled the duty to “give the victims of war (Kriegsopfer) the thanks they are due.”66 When he took office in 1921, French Prime Minister Aristide Briand also underscored that those wounded in the war and their families were the “the nation’s foremost

61 Vorwärts, 18 September 1918, 9. 62 Vorwärts, 23 October 1914 (Supplement). 63 Vorwärts, 23 June 1918, 1. 64 For example, the Association of War Injured Civil Servants, Teachers, and Employees in the Civil Service stated in 1920, “We sacrificed our healthy limbs, bore suffering and sacrifice in years of battle, and suffered unspeakable torments in field hospitals. Thus we became the state’s first creditors.” See Kienitz, Helden, 108. 65 Cited in Antoine Prost, “René Cassin and the Victory of French Citizen-​Soldiers,” in The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism, edited by Julia Eichenberg and John Paul Newman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 19–​31, 22. 66 Cited in Hausen, “Sorge,” 730.

108  Victims. Perceptions of Harm creditors.”67 And in Italy, it was none other than Benito Mussolini who introduced the newly adopted War Pension Law to the King in 1923 with the words, “The state that demands death and wounds from soldiers for the fate and future of the nation, has the duty to its citizens to compensate them as far as possible for the economic consequences of their sacrifice.”68 But things were not as simple in any of the states that had participated in World War I as these pleasant words suggest. It is true that governments, military leaders, and political parties realized soon after the war began that existing relief structures were no longer suited to the realities of war. The mere fact that support payments were staggered according to military rank—​if soldiers even received such payments—​meant that tens of thousands of disabled soldiers and their families were threatened with poverty. Nevertheless, the road to these relief laws in the immediate postwar period was hardly easy or uncontroversial. First of all, difficult debates were necessary to clarify the form and extent to which relief would be granted; and second, in the course of the war, the idea of who should receive relief payments changed repeatedly.69 Thus during the first two years of the war, the government of Great Britain, for example, was not prepared to accept state responsibility for wounded soldiers.70 When more serious debates began in Germany in December 1914 about how to change the system of relief payments for the hundreds of thousands of disabled, the government and military leadership even insisted that there was no “war invalid question”; in particular, they rejected the idea that war invalids should become passive recipients of a state pension.71 In the early years of war, Austro-​Hungary maintained its existing regulations, in which only those soldiers who could prove they were wounded by the enemy were considered to have a war-​related disability. Illnesses during wartime service were not at first included, even if they were very serious (this was similar in Great Britain).72 Despite their relatively small number, it was therefore at first the amputees and those blinded in the war who counted as actual war invalids, although this definition was criticized: “A very large number of returning soldiers cannot be helped by prostheses or any sorts of apparatuses . . . There are thousands whose hearts, lungs, and nerves have suffered, but who . . . do not fall under the generally accepted idea of ‘invalids.’ ”73 Throughout Europe, however, all the experts and politicians who 67 See Cabanes, Great War, 35. 68 Cited in Martin Salvante, “Italian Disabled Veterans between Experience and Representation,” in Men after War, edited by Nicola Cooper and Stephen McVeigh (New York: Routledge, 2013), 111–​ 129, 119. 69 See, e.g., Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–​1939 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 20ff.; Gregory Mathew Thomas, Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatry in France, 1914–​1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 95ff., 108ff. 70 Cohen, The War Come Home, 23. 71 Pironti, Kriegsopfer, 108. 72 See Pawlowsky and Wendelin, Wunden des Staates, 47; Cohen, The War Come Home, 25. 73 Gustav Marchet, Die Versorgung der Kriegsinvaliden, Warnsdorf i. B. 1915, 29, cited in Pawlowsky and Wendelin, Wunden des Staates, 48f.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  109 took part in these debates during the war had one thing in common: none of them so much as suggested that civilians who had suffered health damage from malnutrition or weapons fire might expect compensation—​although they were regularly expected to take on duties on the “home front.”74 The relief laws that came into effect after the war were quite different from the initial regulations and ideas, though the details varied from state to state. Those who had fallen ill during the war could now everywhere apply for a pension; widows of dead soldiers were also entitled to relief (although the payments were far lower than for male breadwinners). Most important, however, governments now accepted the principle that a general legal claim for relief should be established, creating a right for everyone harmed by the war. This was not only the case in France, Germany, and Great Britain (with the British continuing to rely to a much greater extent on private charity); the principle was also adopted in the newly created Eastern European states of Poland and Czechoslovakia.75 This was not surprising: both states consciously oriented their veterans’ relief systems toward the new developments in Western Europe, which were considered modern.76 From then on, in all the European countries, these relief laws determined who was officially recognized as having been invalided or harmed in the war. The laws did not, however, create equality among former soldiers whose wounds and illnesses resulted from the war. In almost all European countries, war pensions did not provide compensation for simply being sent to war (even if official statements seemed to say so); they assessed either the psychological damage or the economic losses that wounded veterans would suffer in civilian life.77 The second principle, applied especially in Austria, Germany, and Poland, was formulated as follows by the chief medical officer of the Vienna Office for Invalids: “Only the economic consequences of war disability are compensated, not wounds in themselves or pain and suffering, nor complaints themselves or the like. It is not anatomical harm, but functional loss, that is compensated.”78 Thus no lump-​sum pensions were paid out; instead, physical and, where applicable, psychological harm was diagnosed, the resulting reduction in earning capacity was estimated, and correspondingly tiered relief payments were granted. People harmed in the war could be dropped from the list of war disabled if the reduction in their earning capacity was too small. In 74 In this case, Poland was an exception, even if the Polish government could not achieve its aim of providing compensation due to the economic situation. See Eichenberg, Kämpfen. 75 As successor states to the Habsburg monarchy, Poland and Czechoslovakia faced particular challenges, as soldiers who had fought on the side of the Central Powers were making claims for support. See Eichenberg, Kämpfen; Magowska, “Unwanted Heroes”; Stegmann, Kriegsdeutungen. 76 See Eichenberg, Kämpfen, 140f.; Pawlowsky and Wendelin, Wunden des Staates, 96. 77 Internationales Arbeitsamt, Die Arbeitsfürsorge für Beschädigte. Sachverständigenzusammenkunft auf dem Gebiete der Arbeitsfürsorge für Beschädigte (Geneva, 1923), 12. 78 See, e.g., Pawlowsky and Wendelin, Wunden des Staates, 40, 231f. (the citation is found on p. 231); Cohen, The War Come Home, 154; Pironti, Kriegsopfer; Geyer, “Kriegsopferversorgung.” France was an exception. Unlike other countries, its law specifically stated that it was compensating war injured for their service to the nation; this had an effect on how relief payments were determined individually.

110  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Germany, for example, the threshold was originally 10 percent, but rose later to 30 percent. The limit for those who were “lightly harmed” was thus flexible: when the economic situation changed, laws could be amended or regulations revised to change the thresholds, causing thousands to be excluded from or readmitted to the category of recognized disabled veterans.79 Overall, the basic principle was that the physical or psychological impairment claimed by the applicant had to have a causal connection to the war. In most European countries, applicants had to prove this causality. But for illness, especially, this was hardly a trivial requirement. The most prominent example was psychological disorders. The relief laws did not rule out recognition of psychological harm as a result of military service. But it could not be assumed that the psychiatrist who was required to provide the certification for the application process would see the causal connection between the psychological disorder and the war.80 To be sure, psychiatrists were well aware that there had been psychological breaking points during the war. In 1922, for example, the German psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer listed possible reasons for psychiatric disturbances that could develop during war as “blood loss,” “direct injury, the effect of explosives, being buried,” and “unnatural conditions of life in the trenches.”81 Particularly for soldiers whose symptoms included tremors, shaking, and palsy, psychiatrists at first often spoke of “traumatic neurosis,” or in Great Britain of “shell shock.” Both diagnoses essentially arose from organic impairment from shell impacts.82 However, many psychiatrists became convinced that the psychological disturbances and impairments triggered in this way were only short-​term.83 For longer-​term disturbances or those that presented later and could not be explained organically, doctors spoke with increasing frequency of “neuroses,” “neurasthenia,” or “hysteria.” In these cases, psychiatrists—​whether French, British, or Russian—​assumed that the war was not the cause. The doctors suggested hereditary causes, and also blamed what they described as a psychologically based “retreat into illness” or “weakness of will” that developed into a desire for a pension. In the German-​speaking world, psychiatrists

79 See, e.g., Pawlowsky and Wendelin, Wunden des Staates, 50; Cohen, The War Come Home, 154. 80 See, e.g., Thomas, Treating the Trauma, 112ff.; Stephanie Neuner, Politik und Psychiatrie: Die staatliche Versorgung psychisch Kriegsbeschädigter in Deutschland 1920–​1939 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 166ff. 81 Karl Bonhoeffer, “Über die Bedeutung der Kriegserfahrungen für die allgemeine Psychoapathologie und Ätiologie der Geisteskrankheiten,” in Handbuch der ärztlichen Erfahrungen im Weltkriege 1914/​1918, edited by Otto von Schjerning (Leipzig: Barth, 1922), 3–​44, 4. 82 See, e.g.,Tracey Loughran, Shell-​ Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). During the war, military doctors in Great Britain distinguished between shell shock “wounded” and shell shock “sick,” and on that basis decided whether the symptoms were the result of direct enemy activity or not (ibid., 11); Paul Frederick Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–​1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Hans Georg Hofer, Nervenschwäche und Krieg. Modernitätskritik und Krisenbewältigung in der österreichischen Psychiatrie 1880–​1920 (Köln: Böhlau, 2004). 83 See, e.g., Lerner, Hysterical Men; Loughran, Shell-​Shock; Thomas, Treating the Trauma.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  111 used the term “pension neurosis”—​a technical term that had until then been used mainly in the context of accident insurance.84 In practice, this did not mean that every application for a pension for psychological disability was rejected out of hand. Files from the relief bureaucracy indicate cases of applicants found to be entitled to a pension, even when the diagnosis was “hysteria.”85 However, no pension was permanent. Reductions in earning capacity were regularly reviewed, for physical disabilities as well as psychological impairment. In the course of this review, doctors often changed diagnoses and reassessed the level of physical or psychological limitation. In these cases, pension amounts would be modified by the relief authorities. Conflicts therefore arose over whether an applicant even counted as a “disabled veteran.”86 A person’s status as a “disabled veteran” was never permanent. In contrast, what the state and much of society expected from injured war veterans in civilian life was relatively consistent and agreed upon: willingness to work. This had already been demonstrated during the war through numerous measures aimed in that direction. The maimed and disabled were to be made fit for work again. By 1915, there were already workshops in German reserve hospitals to train war invalids for useful occupations.87 The invalid school in Vienna and the military hospital in Shepherd’s Bush, London, had the same goal.88 Economic regulations after the war in the various European countries required businesses to make jobs available for the severely disabled.89 Doctors supported in their own ways the idea that anyone injured in the war could be rehabilitated: orthopedists—​of which there were in fact very few—​developed technically sophisticated prosthesis,90 and psychiatrists practiced work therapy as “active treatment” to make “the sick once again equipped and ready for life outside the institution.”91 In both cases, this was based 84 See, e.g., Greg A. Eghigian, “Die Bürokratie und das Entstehen von Krankheit: Die Politik der ‘Rentenneurosen’ 1890–​1926,” in Stadt und Gesundheit: Zum Wandel von “Volksgesundheit” und kommunaler Gesundheitspolitik im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Jürgen Reulecke and Adelheid Gräfin zu Castell Rüdenhausen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991), 203–​223, 214. 85 See, e.g., Neuner, Politik und Psychatrie; Patricia E. Prestwich, “‘Victims of War’? Mentally-​ Traumatized Soldiers and the State, 1918–​1939,” Journal of the Western Society of French History 31 (2003): 243–​254. 86 See, e.g., Neuner, Politik und Psychatrie; Marie Derrien, “ ‘Entrenched from Life’: The Impossible Reintegration of Traumatized French Veterans of the Great War,” in Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World War, edited by Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese (New York: Springer, 2017), 193–​214. 87 See Cohen, The War Come Home, 156. 88 See Pawlowsky and Wendelin, Wunden des Staates, 112ff.; Jeffrey S. Reznick, “Work-​Therapy and the Disabled British Soldier in Great Britain in the First World War: The Case of Shepherd’s Bush Military Hospital, London,” in Disabled Veterans in History, edited by David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 185–​203. 89 See, e.g., Cohen, The War Come Home, 151f. 90 See, e.g., Kienitz, Helden, 170ff.; Pironti, Kriegsopfer, 140ff., 198ff., passim; Magowska, “Unwanted Heroes,” 216f.; Anderson and Perry, “Rehabilitation.” 91 Hermann Simon, Direktor der Anstalt Gütersloh (1924), cited in Thorsten Halling, Moritz Liebe, Julia Schäfer et al., “Arbeits-​und Erwerbsfähigkeit und das Recht auf Leben: Der ‘Wert des Menschen’ in der Psychiatrie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Herausforderung Bevölkerung. Zur Entwicklung des modernen Denkens über die Bevölkerung vor, im und nach dem “Dritten Reich,” edited by Josef Ehmer,

112  Victims. Perceptions of Harm on the conviction that inactivity on the part of war invalids was a sign of indolence and was morally reprehensible. In interwar Europe, the view was widespread that work was the basis for “full membership in society” and therefore “both a duty and a right.”92 However, doctors were not always as successful with their therapeutic concepts as medical experts liked to claim to politicians and the public.93 The attempt, for example, to return mutilated bodies to their normal functioning using substitute limbs failed to meet the invalids’ needs,94 though they were heavily dependent on these orthopedic aids. Amputees needed them, after all, to regain their ability to work. And being able to work was very important to all war invalids. It was therefore no surprise that medical care and prosthetic technology were among the most important subjects discussed by disabled veterans, along with doctors and government representatives, at the first international conference of associations of disabled veterans in Geneva in 1921.95 Based on these discussions, the conference participants urged the International Labour Organization (ILO) to take up “questions of treatment and orthopedic care, international protection and workers’ welfare for the disabled.”96 With the active assistance of disabled veterans, the ILO subsequently developed rapidly into an institution that systematically collected relevant labor market data, laws, and occupational medicine measures and provided international comparisons.97 Associations of war victims were not the only ones to take advantage of this information in order to exert pressure on their national governments; the ILO also became a point of reference for states. In January 1922, the Czechoslovak Ministry of Social Welfare became the first government office to ask the ILO to help negotiate mutual treaties with the German and Austrian governments for the protection of war invalids outside their home countries.98 Ursula Ferdinand, and Jürgen Reulecke (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 133–​ 146, 141. 92 Cohen, “Kriegsopfer,” 211; Self-​descriptions of war invalids in Cohen, The War Come Home, 155ff. This was especially clear in the Soviet Union. See Phillips, “No Invalids in the USSR..” 93 This was also true of psychiatrists, who during and after World War I drew attention to their psychiatric capabilities and successes in the therapeutic treatment of shell shock with the help of photography and film. See, e.g., Julia Barbara Köhne, Kriegshysteriker: Strategische Bilder und mediale Techniken militärpsychiatrischen Wissens (1914–​1920) (Husum: Matthiesen, 2009). 94 On critiques of prostheses by amputees, see Kienitz, Helden, 190. In Poland, the only firm that produced prostheses in 1920 produced only the simplest and cheapest. See Magowska, “Unwanted Heroes,” 216. 95 See Cabanes, Great War, 47. 96 Internationales Arbeitsamt, Arbeitsfürsorge, 9. 97 See Julia Eichenberg and John Paul Newman, “Introduction: The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism,” in The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism, edited by Julia Eichenberg and John Paul Newman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–​15, 6; Cabanes, Great War; Jay Winter, “Veterans, Human Rights, and the Transformation of European Democracy,” in In War’s wake: International Conflict and the Fate of Liberal Democracy, edited by Elizabeth Kier and Ronald R. Krebs (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 121–​138, 125ff. 98 Internationales Arbeitsamt, Arbeitsfürsorge, 9.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  113 The ambitious goal of associations of disabled veterans, the ILO, and the League of Nations to establish equal rights for disabled veterans internationally was never attained, not least due to the changing and often difficult economic situation of the 1920s. Nevertheless, efforts to integrate the severely disabled into the labor market were significant in some European countries, and in Germany, for example, they were not without success. In letters they wrote, disabled veterans expressed relief at having found work. A telephone operator wrote in 1920 to his teacher at a school for the blind: “With this job I’ve finally regained my sense of happiness. I feel best and most content when I’m at work.”99 Due to protective laws, unemployment among the severely disabled remained surprisingly low until 1928, at slightly over 6 percent. In 1933 the proportion rose to 12 percent, it is true, but at a time when average unemployment was 30 percent.100 Nevertheless, the tense economic situation in Germany also became fertile ground for a range of conflicts among disabled veterans, especially as their associations inclined toward a variety of ideological factions. Even aside from political disagreements, however, competition emerged over how the state assessed and compensated different health conditions. Disabled veterans with internal diseases, for example, claimed their situation was worse than that of men who lacked only an amputated limb, and that they should therefore receive a higher pension. It is noteworthy that the disabled did not complain of being victims of the war. On the contrary, they were explicitly concerned with official recognition of the wartime sacrifices they had made. A group of men with stomach ailments who felt devalued by the pension process made a typical argument: stomach ailments were “generally the result of long-​lasting and especially severe hardship at the front.”101 This reference to sacrifice in the war was widespread in all European countries during the interwar period. This was even true in Germany, where both economic and political tensions worsened dramatically in the 1920s. When the Brüning government reduced the war victims’ pension in 1930, the founder of the Social-​Democratic oriented Reich Association of War Disabled and Surviving Dependents, Erich Kuttner, condemned the policy of “robbing the front-​line fighters of their rights won through blood and wounds.”102 The thrust was similar in an “Accusation by a War Widow” published by the Vorwärts in May 1931 in the context of countrywide mass protests by people harmed by the war. It argued, “We made sacrifices for the German people. The mother of a fighter says, ‘Our husbands and sons had only one thought when they were called up: I must!’ We expect the



99

Cited in Cohen, The War Come Home, 158. See ibid., 160f. 101 See Kienitz, Helden, 101–​107, quotation at 105. 102 Vorwärts, 2 September 1930. 100

114  Victims. Perceptions of Harm same willingness from the Reich government when it comes to the welfare of surviving dependents. Sacrifice for sacrifice (Opfer gegen Opfer)!”103 This was not a glorification of sacrifice, and certainly not of war, in contrast to the National Socialists, who began in the 1930s to mobilize war invalids offensively on their behalf. The Social Democrats commemorated the sacrifices made, but derived from them a claim of rights—​and the moral authority to oppose war. The National Socialists therefore accused them of demeaning the soldiers’ sacrifices. They accused the Social Democrats of treating the care of the war disabled as a purely bureaucratic act that would merely alleviate material need, while failing to honor their sacrifices. They had supposedly degraded those harmed in the war to “mere victims.” In an article in the newspaper Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Kriegsopferversorgung (National Socialist War Victims Relief), an author put the argument in a nutshell: “It was originally the case that we made our great soldier sacrifices in war for the Volk. A leg, a hand, an eye, or our health. We sacrificed for the Fatherland. We ourselves did this. Later, people said something different. We became poor, pitiful victims of the war. We were no longer the sacrificers, but the victims.”104 After 1933, the Nazis, like the fascists in Italy, could not back out of anchoring the claim to relief in law. However, they modified the Weimar Republic’s laws so as to withdraw support from entire groups of the disabled, particularly those with psychological disorders and Jews disabled in the war, who were gradually subjected to exclusion and persecution. Otherwise, the Nazis celebrated those harmed in World War I as “honored citizens of the nation.” Soldiers with physical injuries received special support; they were described by Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti as “highly valued war injured (hochwertige Kriegsversehrte).”105 It was fitting that Hitler personally honored these war injured at the Nazi Party Conference in 1935, and that fascist Italy assembled a battalion of disabled veterans to take part in the war against Ethiopia.106 This only changed after the end of World War II. It happened earliest and most clearly in Germany. Soldiers’ sacrifices could no longer be glorified in postwar Germany, after the millionfold crimes and complete moral discrediting of the Nazi regime. This was not true to the same extent in other European countries. There the concept of heroic sacrifice not only lived on, but became a central element of official commemorative culture. Examples include the memory of the martyrs of the Italian Resistenza and the French Résistance. Czechoslovakia valued the sacrifices

103 Vorwärts, 1 May 1931; for additional evidence of these increasing protests, see Nils Löffelbein, Ehrenbürger der Nation: Die Kriegsbeschädigten des Ersten Weltkriegs in Politik und Propaganda des Nationalsozialismus (Essen: Klartext, 2013), 62f. 104 Hans Zöberlein, “Das Kriegsopfer,” Deutsche Kriegsopferversorgung 1 (1933), 23, cited in Löffelbein, Ehrenbürger, 82. 105 See Löffelbein, Ehrenbürger, 328ff.; Neuner, Politik und Psychiatrie, 315ff. 106 See Salvante, “Veterans,” 121.

Wounded Bodies and the Battle for Recognition (1914–1945)  115 of World War II over those of World War I, and the Soviet Union, after the Great Fatherland War, officially spoke only of heroes. Even the early regulations adopted to adjust the relief systems existing since World War I to the new forms of violence brought forth by World War II demonstrated the extent to which active sacrifice was valued. In France, for example, active resistance fighters received a higher pension than the extremely heterogeneous group of so-​called “political deportees,” a term that covered both forced laborers taken to Germany and deported Jews. In the early years, because this group was seen as passive, the authorities determined that they had a lesser claim to a pension than active resistance fighters.107 However, a few years later, France, too, abandoned this distinction. This was in part a result of the rapidly developing understanding that the Jews, in particular, were not simply civilian victims of war like bombing victims or refugees. Awareness of the extent and horror of Nazi persecution made it morally unacceptable to continue to discredit the victims of mass state crimes in this way.

107 See, e.g., Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–​1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Claudia Moisel, “Pragmatischer Formelkompromiss: Das deutsch-​ französische Globalabkommen von 1960,” in Grenzen der Wiedergutmachung. Die Entschädigung für NS-​Verfolgte in West-​und Osteuropa 1945–​ 2000, edited by Hans Günter Hockerts, Claudia Moisel, and Tobias Winstel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 242–​284, 245ff.

5

Trauma and Morality (1945–​2015) Introduction Home was published in the United States in 2012, and translations into other languages quickly followed.1 The book, by the highly respected American author Toni Morrison, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, was immediately reviewed in the mass media. The summary of the brief novel, which at 150 pages reads more like a novella, was similar in all the reviews: Home takes the reader to the United States of the 1950s, the time of the Korean War, but also of segregation, which was still legally anchored in the South but had not lost its potency in the liberal north. The novel tells its story from the African-​American perspective, through the protagonist Frank Money and his sister Cee, who almost loses her life as a result of medical experiments carried out by a white doctor in Georgia. The main character in the story, however, is her 24-​year-​old brother Frank, who lives in Seattle. He fought in Korea, but his return to the United States a year previously was not a homecoming to a place in which he feels at all protected or safe. He never sets down roots in Seattle. He calls himself “not totally homeless, but close” and earns his living as a day laborer, but cannot imagine returning to his hometown of Lotus, Georgia; he is too ashamed to face the families of his two friends who died in Korea. In fact, he hates the town, with its suffocating smallness and lack of prospects, where the only work is on a cotton plantation. That is why Frank volunteered to join the army. He does not regret doing so, even after the terrible events of the war. For Frank, Lotus, Georgia is “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield.” Only at the end of the book does Frank’s relationship to his hometown of Lotus change, when he returns because his sister needs him. But the burdens of racism and racist violence continue to be a theme until the end of the novel, running through the lives of the siblings in many ways, as shown by flashbacks to their childhood and stages in Frank’s journey from Seattle to Chicago to Lotus. Yet Frank’s story is also that of a veteran who cannot find closure after the war. For a long time he has nightmares in which he dreams of body parts. During the day, too, his thoughts drift back to the war and to friends who were badly wounded or killed before his



1

Toni Morrison, Home (New York: Knopf, 2012).

Victims. Svenja Goltermann, Oxford University Press. © Svenja Goltermann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192897725.003.0005

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  117 eyes. The images overwhelm him: for months, he drowns the constantly returning ghosts of the dead in alcohol. The image of a Korean girl shot in the face by a soldier keeps reappearing. He later admits that he was the one who shot her. He tried to deny the incident by talking about his dead friends, whose faces and deaths he saw before him. Reviewers of the book agreed that Frank Money was traumatized by the war. Some noted more specifically that he suffered from post-​traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In general, the reviewers spoke of various “traumatic experiences”: Cee has one in the doctor’s house; the siblings have one in Lotus when they happen to see someone secretly burying the body of a black man. Some reviewers therefore found the end of the novel too simplistic, “too sweetish.” At the book’s end there is no internal struggle, no tormenting memory: the last scene is quiet, even peaceful, and Lotus is the place to which Frank returns with his sister.2 Toni Morrison provided many clues in the novel that make it plausible for today’s readers to talk about trauma and PTSD. This is essentially found in the way in which she tells Frank’s story. Morrison mentions nightmares, as well as a hallucination with “dogs or birds eating the remains of his comrades.”3 She suggests images of shattered bodies, images of war that caught up with Frank as soon as he was sober, including a young soldier “pushing his entrails back in” and another “with only the bottom half of his face intact, the lips calling mama.”4 Morrison’s descriptions of wartime violence are horrific—​brief and haunting. Frank hears voices, furtive and accusatory, asking him the same probing question over and over: Why hadn’t he moved faster? Maybe then he could have saved his friend Mike. He killed Korean women, children, and frail old people—​“because you believed it would make up for the frosted urine on Mike’s pants and avenge the lips calling mama.” Did it work? Morrison leaves Frank with this unanswered question.5 But she does not herself mention PTSD, or even trauma. The author is historically precise in taking her readers back to the 1950s. On the one hand, her story is built on insights that medicine and history have since achieved about people returning from war. They tell us that nightmares about war were not rare, and that many people were haunted by horrific images. Returning soldiers were often startled by noises that reminded them of the war. While not all veterans experienced these symptoms, many suffered a great deal. We have known for a long time that civilians as well as soldiers were affected. In the twentieth century, doctors most likely recognized this for the first time among survivors of Nazi persecution. The

2 See, e.g., Sarah Churchwell, “Does Toni Morrison’s Latest Novel Stand Up to Her Best?,” Guardian, 27 April 2012; Simone Hamm, “Soldatenheimkehr und Rassismus in den 50ern,” Deutschlandfunk, 9 July 2014; Angela Schader, “Wege durchs Fegefeuer,” NZZ, 1 April 2014; Arifa Akbar, “Home, by Toni Morrison,” Independent, 19 April 2012. 3 Morrison, Home, 34. 4 Ibid., 20. 5 Ibid., 22.

118  Victims. Perceptions of Harm discovery of so-​called “survivor’s guilt” can be understood in this context. Not until the Vietnam War did psychiatrists find this among soldiers as well.6 On the other hand, however, in her novel Morrison also takes account of the fact that PTSD was not yet known in the 1950s. Doctors in the United States and Europe were certainly aware that psychiatric disorders could emerge during and immediately after war. However, the medical profession at first believed this was a temporary phenomenon that would wear off after a few weeks or months.7 Morrison sticks to this. She has her protagonist Frank describe how “the discharge doctors had been thoughtful and kind, telling him the craziness would leave in time. They knew all about it, but assured him it would pass. Just stay away from alcohol, they said.” Frank is not surprised by this. He has little need to tell Lily, his girlfriend, about the war in Korea and the images that continue to haunt and frighten him. Once Lily asks, but then adds promptly, “Better to move on.”8 The same is essentially the case for Frank’s sister Cee after the painful treatment she endures because of the medical experiments. The women of Lotus make great efforts to nurse her back to health. But Morrison couples their willingness to help with notable severity. Cee’s psychological state is not an issue for these women. They instead make it clear to her that it was her own mistake to have worked for the doctor and permitted his experiments. It was her job to keep her eyes open, the women insist. They do not tolerate Cee’s interjected protests.9 Morrison’s story creates a reality that represents not only the racism of the 1950s and the Korean War, the “forgotten war” that was hardly discussed in the United States until around 1985.10 She also describes a specific way of dealing with the 6 See, e.g., Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 7 See, e.g., Jolande Withuis and Annet Mooij (eds.), The Politics of War Trauma: The Aftermath of World War II in Eleven European Countries (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2010); Ben Shephard, “Die frühen Befunde der Psychiatrie zum Holocaust (1945–​1950),” in Holocaust und Trauma: Kritische Perspektiven zur Entstehung und Wirkung eines Paradigmas, edited by José Brunner (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), 72–​85. 8 Morrison, Home, 77. 9 Ibid., 122. 10 See, e.g., Christine Knauer, Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Judith Keene, “Lost to Public Commemoration: American Veterans of the ‘Forgotten’ Korean War,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 4 (2011): 1095–​1113; Dong Choon Kim, “Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacres—​the Korean War (1950–​1953) as Licensed Mass Killings,” Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 4 (2004): 523–​544; Jae-​ Jung Suh (ed.), Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea: Between the Present and Future of the Korean Wars (New York: Routledge, 2013). The Korean War, called a “police action” at the time, claimed the lives of over 30,000 American soldiers. There was no monument to them until 1992, at which point the war was officially included in the United States’s patriotic memorial culture. Since then, the war has been presented as a victory—​including where racism in the United States is concerned. However, the country has struggled with reconstructing the many massacres of both North and South Koreans committed during the war. They are generally not included in narratives of the war. There is no question that American soldiers participated in the murder of Korean civilians or witnessed such massacres in many cases. Anti-​communism joined with racism, and several million Koreans died in that war, a majority of them civilians.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  119 experience of violence that is distinct from the way in which various types of violence have been spoken and written about since the end of the twentieth century in much of Europe and the United States. Since then, it has been commonly understood that speaking of violence, the suffering attached to it, and memories of this violence requires speaking of “trauma” (or PTSD). We are now also accustomed to the use of the word “victim” in reports and stories of people affected by violence. This was not the case in the 1950s, as Morrison’s novel makes clear. The United States at that time is just one example; where ways of dealing with the experience of violence are concerned, a quite similar story could be told about places in Europe, in some cases until well into the 1970s. Along with the increasingly frequent mention of “trauma,” which began in the United States in the 1980s and then spread to Europe, ascriptions of victimhood have noticeably increased. The two developments are closely related. The breakthrough in ascriptions of victimhood in the late twentieth century cannot be explained without the establishment of a specific concept of “trauma.”11 This concept presumes that instances of violence can cause not only short-​term, but also significant long-​term psychological distress and disorders, with no basis in physical harm. In medicine, as well as in the social sciences and humanities, this point of view first took hold when psychiatrists in the United States developed the diagnosis of PTSD and in 1980 added it to the US classification system for psychological disorders, the DSM-​III. Eleven years later, it was integrated into the World Health Organization’s (WHO) international classification system.12 In both Europe and the United States, this was accompanied by a fundamental change in the understanding of what violence is and how it can affect peoples’ lives. This may be seen even in regard to torture, which can serve as an example. As is evident in Amnesty International’s Torture Reports, the organization’s attention to the psychological effects of torture has notably increased since its first report in 1973. At first, little medical knowledge existed regarding the psychological consequences of torture; systematic studies followed. The change in the psychiatric knowledge of individuals’ ability to cope with physical and psychological stress had the additional effect of successively expanding the definition of torture. Psychological torture was added to physical torture; practices that were still considered “mistreatment” in 1973 were later added to the definition. This includes beatings, for example, which are no longer considered a legitimate method of interrogation.13 11 For a foundational work in the field, see Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 12 Gordon J. Turnbull, “A Review of Post-​Traumatic Stress Disorder: Part I: Historical Development and Classification,” Injury 29, no. 2 (1998): 87–​91. 13 See, e.g., Amnesty International, Report on Torture (London, 1973); Amnesty International, Torture in the Eighties: An Amnesty International Report (London, 1984); Amnesty International, Torture in 2014: 30 Years of Broken Promises (London, 2014); Tobias Kelly, This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). A comprehensive scholarly study of torture is needed. To the extent medicine has been considered, it is generally from the perspective of the significance of medical and psychiatric knowledge for the

120  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Since the establishment of the definition of PTSD, our view of the past has also changed. The category of “trauma” has become an important guide in our ability to imagine history, changing our assumptions about violence and its long-​term consequences for people’s lives, their experience of suffering, and their biographies.14 Within as well as outside of scholarship, this has raised or revived questions of how individuals and society deal with war and genocide, flight and migration, and the behavior of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes. The concept of “trauma” has also become part of numerous narratives. Sometimes it serves as a metaphor for the cruelty inflicted on human beings; at other times, it is a type of shorthand to condense assumptions about mental pain, impairment, and hardship. It is noteworthy that we seldom ask whether the concept of “trauma” is appropriate, although we are dealing with retroactive ascriptions. In contrast, the concept of the victim, which is generally connected with ascriptions of trauma, does occasionally meet with criticism—​for example when applied to the Germans in World War II. It is interesting the extent to which it has been forgotten that, in the decades after 1945, it did not particularly accrue to one’s moral advantage in either Europe or the United States to call oneself a victim after an act of violence. The focus on the public culture of memory in West Germany distorts the picture.15 In many cases, the status of victim was fraught with skepticism. These misgivings also applied to victims of violent civilian crimes, as a look at the history of victimology shows. Only in the late twentieth century did the belief that victims do not share some sort of responsibility for their victimhood become more widespread. It was the establishment of the concept of PTSD that gave the idea of the innocent victim momentum. Thus in the context of modern Europe, the figure of the passive, innocent victim has only existed for a relatively short time. We can see to this day that it is a powerful status. But it is also connected with

commission of torture and the development of new methods of torture. See, e.g., Steven H. Miles, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2006), 24–​ 40. An early study providing an overview of the first psychiatric studies of torture is Metin Başoğlu (ed.), Torture and Its Consequences: Current Treatment Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 14 Svenja Goltermann, The War in Their Minds: German Soldiers and Their Violent Pasts in West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 8. 15 Helmut Schmitz (ed.), A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi, 2007); Lothar Kettenacker (ed.), Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–​1945 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003); Jörg Arnold, “ ‘Nagasaki’ in der DDR: Magdeburg und das Gedenken an den 16. Januar 1945,” in Luftkrieg: Erinnerungen in Deutschland und Europa, edited by Jörg Arnold, Dietmar Süß, and Malte Thießen (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009), 239–​ 255; Malte Thießen, Eingebrannt ins Gedächtnis: Hamburgs Gedenken an Luftkrieg und Kriegsende 1943 bis 2005 (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2007); Stephan Scholz, Vertriebenendenkmäler: Topographie einer deutschen Erinnerungslandschaft (Paderborn: Schöningh and Fink, 2015); William John Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  121 particular narrative conventions and is predicated on specific medical knowledge regarding the human ability to cope with stress.

Despised Victims: Victimology and the Emergence of Victims’ Rights The American political scientist Robert Elias was not a newcomer to the field of scholarly research on “victims” when he published his 1986 book, The Politics of Victimization: Victims, Victimology and Human Rights.16 Like many other scholars who studied crime victims, as criminologists or out of interest in criminological questions, Elias located himself in the field of “victimology”—​a new discipline that the famed criminologist Marvin E. Wolfgang described in 1976 as “the scientific study of victims, the process, the etiology, and the implications of becoming a victim.”17 While critics in the 1960s still dismissed the “fad years of victimology”18 a decade later the first steps had been taken to establish and promote the new discipline internationally. An international conference in Jerusalem in 1973 marked the beginning of these efforts; the first professional publication followed three years later, and before the end of the decade, the World Society of Victimology had come into being. Its proclaimed aims included encouraging cooperation among relevant international, national, and regional organs; its scholars hoped to exercise political influence on the fields of crime prevention and victims’ rights. Victimology had barely consolidated as a discipline when Elias, in his book The Politics of Victimization, was already arguing that it was time to develop a “new” victimology. He critiqued what he saw as the narrowness of existing victimology, with its focus on “common crimes.” In his view, other forms of criminality had to be taken into account, such as state crimes. Not only individual but also institutional crimes should be considered, he argued; not only traditional crimes, but all crimes against humanity, should be studied. He therefore declared pragmatically, “We will wed victimology with human rights.” He suggested that this would have concrete effects for victims: an expanded concept of “victimization” would make it possible to provide victims with new rights and greater protection.19 Elias was certainly not the first person to advocate freeing victimology from its close connection to criminology and embracing victims of violence in a broader 16 Robert Elias, The Politics of Victimization: Victims, Victimology and Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 17 Cited in Hans Joachim Schneider, “Verbrechensopfer im Strafprozeß: Fortschritte der Viktimologie-​Forschung,” JuristenZeitung 32, no. 19 (1977): 620–​632, 620. 18 Gerhard O. Mueller, “Toward a Whole Victimology within a Whole Criminology,” in The Victim in International Perspective: Papers and Essays Given at the “Third International Symposium on Victimology” 1979 in Münster/​Westfalia, edited by Hans Joachim Schneider (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982), 1–​3, 2. 19 Elias, Politics of Victimization, 7, 193f.

122  Victims. Perceptions of Harm sense. This idea had already found support around 1970 from scholars such as Benjamin Mendelsohn, a Romanian-​Israeli legal scholar and one of the so-​called founding fathers of victimology. Almost thirty years after offering his initial ideas of a science of victimology, developed in 1947, he had changed his views to such an extent that he used the first issue of the magazine Victimology in 1976 to call for a “general victimology” that would include all sorts of victims: victims of environmental catastrophes and famine, technological progress, and discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or age.20 The sociologist Richard Quinney was even more radical. In the early 1970s, he argued that “victim” referred not only to the target of an incident, but also to a specific conception of reality. Who was a victim, in his view, was not a firm category, but depended instead on our conception of victimhood, the social values or morality we adhered to, and the way we defined responsibility. As a sociologist, he imagined nothing less than a rethinking of “reality” as a social construct. Quinney was interested in critiquing widely accepted and politically effective classifications and interpretations. He argued that this made it possible to make victims other than those in criminology visible: “Victims of police violence, victims of war, victims of corrections, victims of state violence, victims of all sorts of oppression.”21 At first, only a few victimologists argued in this way. They came mostly from the Anglo-​American world, forerunners of a “radical victimology” that would be spelled out in a broader sense by social scientists in the course of the 1980s. They distanced themselves sharply from “traditional” victimology, with its focus on normal crime victims, criticizing it as positivist and lacking in social critique.22 It took time, however, for other forms of violence, and therefore other victims, to be included in the scholarly studies that emerged in the context of victimology. Women and children were the first to be added. After all, child abuse, understood as physical and sexual violence against children, had become an issue in the late 1960s and had since been newly mapped in a variety of fields.23 This was also true of violence in marriage, domestic violence, and sexual assault, at least in some countries. New studies, at first in the United States, spoke of rape as a “social problem” and of rapes primarily by acquaintances and in the family, even in marriage, and 20 See Benjamin Mendelsohn, “Victimology and Contemporary Society’s Trends,” Victimology 1, no. 1 (1976): 8–​28, especially 20. The approach in the 1950s was noticeably narrower, when Mendelsohn, too, included the new scholarship in the field of criminology. See, e.g., Benjamin Mendelsohn, “Une nouvelle branche de la science bio-​psycho-​sociale: Victimologie,” Etudes Internationales de Psycho-​ Sociologie Criminelle (1956). 21 Richard Quinney, “Who Is the Victim?,” Criminology 10, no. 3 (1972): 314–​323, 321. 22 On classification, see, e.g., Anne Kersten, “Wie Opfer ins wissenschaftliche Blickfeld rücken und beforscht werden können,” Newsletter Studienbereich Soziologie, Sozialpolitik und Sozialarbeit 15 (2014): 6–​13. For a typical critique, see David Miers, “Positivist Victimology: A Critique,” International Review of Victimology 1, no. 1 (1989): 3–​22; from a feminist perspective, see, e.g., Sandra Walklate, “Researching Victims of Crime: Critical Victimology,” Social Justice 17, no. 3 (1990): 25–​42. 23 On the broadening of the concept in the 1960s, Ian Hacking, “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2 (1991): 253–​288.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  123 urged punishment for marital rape (an aim that could not be achieved politically in some European countries until the 1990s). However, victims of state-​sponsored human rights violations and war crimes would not appear on victimology’s scholarly radar until the turn of the century. Victimology in the broadest sense would then begin to become involved in scholarly and political debates about victims of crimes against humanity and their rights and interests. Until then, however, the diffuse field of victimology dealt almost exclusively with so-​called interpersonal violence. That was (and remains) the main focus of victimology, which explores how people become victims and what consequences can be drawn from this. Thus victimology, which rarely focused on victims of war, cannot easily be integrated into the history of the perception of victims as it has so far been described in this book. But the change in perspective in victimology is a fruitful study for two main reasons. First of all, victimology is one of the forces that has advocated since the 1970s for the provision of assistance and rights to victims of common crimes—​ for example, the right to claim compensation and to be heard in criminal trials. The first moves in this direction began on the national level, before being taken up by supranational organizations like the United Nations in the 1980s and formulated as internationally recognized norms—​in this case, for victims of state abuses. Victims of war crimes were added at the turn of the century. Victimology promoted this process, as we will see. Above all, the history of victimology reveals assumptions about victims of violence that, until well into the second half of the twentieth century, linked ascriptions of victimhood with reservations about the people involved. If we consider the period before 1945, we can already observe disparaging views of the victim, at a time when systematic victimology had not yet developed but the discipline’s founding fathers were beginning to explain why people became victims and what characterized them. These views shifted in the course of the century, but victimhood long retained negative connotations. In other words, until the last third of the twentieth century, it was hardly an attractive status. The legal historian David von Mayenburg has researched the concept of the victim in the early writings of the German criminologist Hans von Hentig, revealing it to be a “building block of the history of victimology.” His findings about the interwar years are noteworthy in providing an understanding of the “victim” that is not, as a rule, our present one.24 The assumption was that people became victims because they were “born victims.” This referred especially to Jews and women. Von Hentig spoke of the Jews in the 1920s in the context of his examination of anti-​Semitism, which he himself considered an extraordinary danger. The

24 David von Mayenburg, “ ‘Geborene Opfer’: Bausteine für eine Geschichte der Viktimologie—​Das Beispiel Hans von Hentig,” Rechtsgeschichte 14 (2009): 122–​147; David von Mayenburg, Kriminologie und Strafrecht zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus: Hans von Hentig (1887–​1974) (Baden-​ Baden: Nomos, 2006).

124  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Jews, he argued quite critically, were a scapegoat for popular anger; in this context, he questioned why the German people had chosen the “Jews” in particular. In his “Psychology of Pogroms,” a brief essay published in 1919, he gave the following answer: “The mass always takes as its enemy the weakest, but at the same time most profitable, victim possible.” In his view, the “Jews” were the obvious target, due on the one hand to their “financial strength,” and on the other to their “numerical inferiority, their physical weakness, and their insufficient endowments in the sphere of will and character.”25 Although he was not one of the aggressive, anti-​Semitic race theoreticians, Von Hentig argued using race theory.26 Therefore, his arguments, which implied that Jews as victims shared responsibility for the behavior of anti-​Semitic agitators and thus exonerated the latter, were compatible with the views of race theorists of various stripes. Von Hentig conceived of the figure of the “victim” not as someone sacrificing for something, which had a positive connotation in the view of his contemporaries. Becoming a victim was something to disparage. It stood for weakness, and in this case also for inferiority. Both characteristics turned victims into accomplices to the aggressive acts aimed at them. Von Hentig was not the only criminologist to hold this view at the time.27 The same was true of his view of sex crimes against women and young girls, which in the course of the 1920s tended increasingly toward the view that women (and girls) often shared the blame for the violence against them. This was expressed, for example, in “Studies of Incest,” published in 1925 by Von Hentig and the doctor and forensic biologist Theodor Viernstein. In it, they claimed that brutal fathers were not, in reality, forcing their poor, defenseless daughters to engage in sex acts. The “good child,” they explained, could be a “negative seductress” if, for example, she did not “show the normal amount of refusal, such as the daughter who takes care of her father after his wife’s death (pleurisy) and then slips into the bed of the feverish man.”28 We know that this perspective was widespread among legal scholars, criminologists, and psychiatrists in early twentieth-​century Europe and the United States and was also found in criminal law practice. Women and young girls who reported sexual violence were often considered hysterical and not credible, or were believed to have seduced the man. They had no official recourse to the status of victim.

25 See Von Mayenburg, “ ‘Geborene Opfer,’ ” 133 (including a citation from “Die Psychologie des Pogroms,” published in: Der Tag, 3 October 1919). 26 A nuanced classification of racism is found in Von Hentig’s work in Von Mayenburg, Kriminologie, especially 324–​344. Racist arguments are found in various forms in Hans von Hentig, Strafrecht und Auslese: Eine Anwendung des Kausalgesetzes auf den rechtbrechenden Menschen (Berlin: Springer, 1914). 27 Various examples can be found in Christoph Jahr, Antisemitismus vor Gericht: Debatten über die juristische Ahndung judenfeindlicher Agitation in Deutschland (1879–​ 1960) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2011). 28 Cited in Von Mayenburg, “ ‘Geborene Opfer,’ ” 137.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  125 Aside from the women’s movement, which criticized this situation early on, almost no one was concerned about it until the second half of the twentieth century.29 Von Hentig’s argument was actually a more general one. He began with the assumption that a person against whom violence was exercised, even someone who was murdered, could be considered part of the perpetrator’s “environment” or “milieu” and could therefore contribute to the criminal behavior. For this reason, he spoke of “activation of the predisposition through a stimulating milieu.”30 Unlike most criminologists, lawyers, and psychiatrists of his time, who continued to be concerned exclusively with the question of what made a criminal, Von Hentig included the victim as an active participant in his explanation of the criminal process. He argued that the perpetrator–​victim relationship was key, and therefore the victim also had to be studied systematically. In his short 1929 study, “Psychology of the Victim,” he stated that “the scientific criminologist who studies the figure of the ‘victim’ comes to the conclusion that there is not only the habitual criminal, but also the type of the born victim.” He added, “life situations . . . can lead one to become a victim.” While he admitted that many were still busy studying criminals, Von Hentig predicted, “Monitoring these life situations and recidivist victims, depriving them of their harmful inciting function, will one day be the task of crime policies.”31 Today one can only surmise whether criminal justice policy in the 1930s and 1940s was actually moving in this direction. There are of course numerous studies of Nazi Germany and occupied Europe, and they do not exclude the justice system, the police, and the extensive criminalization of minorities and political opponents.32 But the main goal of these studies is to reveal the policies and practices of discrimination and of psychological and especially physical violence. They do refer to victims. But it is historians themselves who use the term, ex-​poste, to refer to people who were degraded, tormented, persecuted, and murdered by the Nazis because the police and justice system failed to act, or were even key participants. 29 See, e.g., Anne Logan, Feminism and Criminal Justice: A Historical Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 139ff.; Joseph E. Davis, Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (London: Routledge, 2000); Tanja Hommen, Sittlichkeitsverbrechen: Sexuelle Gewalt im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999). 30 Cited in Von Mayenburg, “ ‘Geborene Opfer,’ ” 136. 31 Hans von Hentig, “Psychologie des Opfers,” in Fazit: Ein Querschnitt durch die deutsche Publizistik, edited by Ernst Glaeser (Hamburg: Gebrüder Enoch, 1929), 243–​246, 255. 32 See, e.g., Jahr, Antisemitismus vor Gericht; Alexandra Przyrembel, “Rassenschande”: Reinheitsmythos und Vernichtungslegitimation im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003); Lothar Gruchmann, Justiz im Dritten Reich 1933–​1940: Anpassungen und Unterwerfung in der Ära Gürtner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001); Patrick Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher: Konzeptionen und Praxis der Kriminalpolizei in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik und des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Christians, 1996); Michael Stolleis, Recht im Unrecht: Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994); Diemut Majer, “Fremdvölkische” im Dritten Reich: Ein Beitrag zur nationalsozialistischen Rechtssetzung und Rechtspraxis in Verwaltung und Justiz unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der eingegliederten Ostgebiete und des Generalgouvernements (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1993).

126  Victims. Perceptions of Harm For historians, ascription of victimhood in this context is an instrument by which illegal acts can be clearly designated and the perpetrators identified. From this perspective, the question whether criminal justice policy and the justice system had their own basic conception of the victim, and whether this helped guide their ideas on crime-​fighting or played a role in sentencing, does not immediately arise. If we examine the problem, however, there is little evidence that criminal justice policy and the justice system began to shift their interest in any way to victims and their possible influence on crime, as Von Hentig imagined. We can suggest four reasons for this: First of all, under the Nazis, crime policy clearly distanced itself from criminological and legal approaches that included social conditions in explanations of crime, such as the perpetrator’s “milieu” or “environment.” Instead, the Nazis viewed “hereditary predisposition” as the absolutely dominant factor in determining whether a person became a criminal. If they referred to the “environment” at all, it was to assume that the criminal responded to its “attraction” on the basis of his “predisposition” and his resulting criminal character.33 This largely ruled out the possibility that external constellations and social relationships—​such as a specific victim–​perpetrator relationship—​could be crucial to crime, and thus considered in sentencing. Second, Nazi legal policies in the mid-​1930s were explicitly focused on ensuring that the task of the “National Socialist legal system” should no longer consist in “protecting the individual to the greatest possible extent against any sort of action by the authorities,” as Hermann Göring put it in 1935.34 With the help of various decrees, regulations, and laws, the Nazi leadership ensured that this maxim would gradually determine practice.35 As we know, this meant that not everyone was equally protected by the law. In general, the “National Socialist legal system” followed the precept that the individual was only valuable “as a member of the national community [Volksgemeinschaft].” The gradual elimination of the rights of Jews, whose existence as legal persons was denied in 1936, is only one example.36 Another was the creation of the concentration camps, which were a complete legal vacuum under the Nazis. Third, Nazi criminal law was highly and specifically perpetrator-​oriented, and this only intensified once the war began. This meant that the degree of punishment 33 Imanuel Baumann, Dem Verbrechen auf der Spur: Eine Geschichte der Kriminologie und Kriminalpolitik in Deutschland 1880 bis 1980 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 69ff. 34 Gruchmann, Justiz, quote at 122 (1935 speech by Hermann Göring). 35 Bernd Rüthers, Die unbegrenzte Auslegung: Zum Wandel der Privatrechtsordnung im Nationalsozialismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), especially 117ff. 36 See, e.g., Joachim Vogel, “Einflüsse des Nationalsozialismus auf das Strafrecht,” in Moralisierung des Rechts: Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten nationalsozialistischer Normativität, edited by Werner Konitzer (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2014), 87–​126, quote at 103; Bernd Rüthers, Das Ungerechte an der Gerechtigkeit: Fehldeutungen eines Begriffs (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), especially 111f. In this context, the studies on the justice system in occupied Eastern Europe in Maximilian Becker, Mitstreiter im Volkstumskampf: Deutsche Justiz in den eingegliederten Ostgebieten 1939–​1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012) are also crucial; as is Majer, “Fremdvölkische” im Dritten Reich.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  127 was based not only on the crime, but also to a great extent, indeed often primarily, on categorization as a “type of perpetrator.” The subjective ranking of character and personality (dependent for example on lifestyle), as well as an attested decay in worldview, or even “criminal worldview,” contributed to whether a defendant would be judged a “habitual offender,” a “perpetrator from conviction,” or later a “violent criminal” or a “parasite on the Volk.”37 Fourth, leading criminal lawyers understood Nazi criminal law to be “criminal law of the will,” accurately described as a “synthesis of the criminal law of endangerment, of worldview, and of the perpetrator.”38 This included, among other things, an expansion of the definitions of offenses, and therefore of perpetrators. According to this “criminal law of the will,” perpetrators were not only those who could be shown to have actually committed violations of law; a “willingness” to commit a crime could be enough for criminal prosecution (even if the person had not actually committed the relevant act).39 It was thus easy to be classified as a perpetrator, especially as it became possible in the 1930s for judges to call an act a crime if, in their opinion, it violated “healthy popular sentiments.” At the same time, essentially only one entity could really be the victim of a violation of the law: the German “Volksgemeinschaft” (national community). Nazi criminal law ultimately saw the individual not as an independent personality, but only as a member of this German idea of the “Volksgemeinschaft.” Protecting this community from harm was the main task of criminal law, while protecting the interests of the individual took second place.40 Much of this was merely legal theory at first, which only gradually began to influence policing and judicial practice.41 Even violence against Jews remained punishable de jure.42 The Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith therefore at first did what it could to seek legal protection. However, there has been no research on how many people actually turned to the police and how high the number of complaints was. As far as we know, such complaints would normally have had no chance of success, if they even ended up before a court. It is thus difficult to know to what extent and for how long after 1933 German Jews were actually

37 See, e.g., Jana Nüchterlein, Volksschädlinge vor Gericht: Die Volksschädlingsverordnung vor den Sondergerichten Berlins (Marburg: Tectum, 2015); Vogel, “Einflüsse,” 110f.; Barbara Manthe, Richter in der nationalsozialistischen Kriegsgesellschaft: Beruflicher und privater Alltag von Richtern des Oberlandesgerichtsbezirks Köln, 1939–​1945 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 47ff.; Gerhard Werle, Justiz-​Strafrecht und polizeiliche Verbrechensbekämpfung im Dritten Reich (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989). 38 See, e.g., Herlinde Pauer-​Studer, “Einleitung: Rechtfertigungen des Unrechts: Das Rechtdenken im Nationalsozialismus,” in Rechtfertigungen des Unrechts: Das Rechtsdenken im Nationalsozialismus in Originaltexten, edited by Herlinde Pauer-​Studer and Julian Fink (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), 1–​135, 84ff. 39 See, e.g., ibid.; Benedikt Hartl, Das nationalsozialistische Willensstrafrecht (Berlin: Weißensee, 2000). 40 See Hartl, Willensstrafrecht, 49, passim. 41 On changes in the scope of police freedom to act, see Patrick Wagner, Hitlers Kriminalisten: Die deutsche Kriminalpolizei und der Nationalsozialismus zwischen 1920 und 1960 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002), 56ff. 42 Jahr, Antisemitismus vor Gericht, 285.

128  Victims. Perceptions of Harm seen as injured parties by the justice system. The historian Christoph Jahr suggests that initially there was a legal debate about “whether, why, and to what extent German Jews could be granted protection from anti-​Semitic statements.”43 The less Jews were viewed as injured parties, the less relevant it would have been to speak of them as victims. This was also true of anyone else who was declared an “enemy of the people” and criminalized. Speaking of individuals as victims, if only to examine their significance in the context of criminal behavior, as Von Hentig urged, would only make sense if civil legal principles still applied to them. Only someone thus situated within the law can be called a victim. When Nazi rule in Europe ended and most European countries returned to democracy, the legal and societal methods of dealing with all types of crime initially remained almost entirely focused on perpetrators. Criminal trials remained “perpetrator-​centered,” as we would say today; this means that those harmed by violent acts were not explicitly heard as victims bringing their perception of events before the court. Before the 1960s, there was no such thing as so-​called victim witnesses with a right to attend legal proceedings, present their view of what happened, and describe the effects of the crime on their lives. In essence, the history of the victim witness did not begin until the 1980s.44 In general, it may be said that until the 1960s, those harmed by crime were largely marginalized. There was certainly little explicit interest in them as victims.45 This general disinterest in the figure of the victim most likely cannot be blamed only on criminal law or the assumptions of criminology. However, there is some 43 Ibid., 285ff., 295ff. (quote at 295); Hannah Ahlheim, “Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden!”: Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott in Deutschland 1924 bis 1935 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011). 44 See, e.g., Thorsten Bonacker, “Global Victimhood: On the Charisma of the Victim in Transitional Justice Processes,” World Political Science 9, no. 1 (2013): 97–​129; Sybille Schmidt, “Vom Recht, sein Wissen kundzutun: Zeugenschaft im Spannungsfeld von Evidenz und Gerechtigkeit,” in Wissen, was Recht ist, edited by Monika Dommann, Kijan Espahangizi, and Svenja Goltermann (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015), 83–​106. The 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem was no exception. A particularly large number of witnesses testified to the violence he had done to them in concentration and extermination camps; but their testimony was used specifically to make “historical events that had heretofore been described at a distance concretely imaginable to the audience (in the courtroom as well as on radio and television) through the description of their personal experiences.” The form of the testimony was “different from the legal function of the witness,” because it was not used to clarify facts, but for the purpose of memorialization. The witnesses were chosen according to what they could tell the public, which was extremely interested in the trial. There was no recognition of an individual right to testify on the part of the witnesses. See Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, Jewish Encounters (New York: Knopf, 2011); Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 97–​183; Judith Keilbach, Geschichtsbilder und Zeitzeugen zur Darstellung des Nationalsozialismus im bundesdeutschen Fernsehen (Munster: Lit, 2008) both citations at 145. 45 See, e.g., David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11ff. Anne Peters, Jenseits der Menschenrechte: Die Rechtsstellung des Individuums im Völkerrecht (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), has shown how individual rights—​that is, subjective rights of individuals—​entered international law; only after 1949 is there weak evidence of this in international humanitarian law, in regard to civilians (p. 181f.). Ascriptions of victimhood cannot necessarily be derived from this, although the introduction of individual rights certainly affected the history of perceptions of victimhood in the context of war.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  129 evidence that both played a significant role in ensuring that victims—​to the extent they were alive and not dead—​continued to be suspect figures in the initial decades after 1945. Studies in the field of victimology, which began to develop in the 1950s, are symptomatic as well as instructive in this regard. Those that began to appear in various European countries, as well as the United States and Canada in particular,46 did not at first deal at all with victims per se and their needs and interests. Lawyers and criminologists concentrated instead on identifying perpetrator–​victim relationships, as Von Hentig had already envisaged before the war. The primary aim was ultimately to explain the origins of crime. The crucial assumption that led victimology to its interest in victims was that they played a role in the occurrence of crimes. Thus the key question was only whether people were particularly prone to becoming victims due to their own specific characteristics or habits, and whether victims should be ascribed a share of responsibility for the crimes against them as a result of their behavior. There was no simple answer to this from the perspective of legal scholars and criminologists. The victim typologies they created made it clear to everyone that it was necessary to refrain from blanket generalizations. In his study “The Criminal and His Victim,” published in 1948 during the period of his emigration to the United States, Hans von Hentig distinguished eleven different categories of victims, including young people (because of their inexperience), women (because of their weakness), immigrants (“alone and uprooted”), “minorities,” “dull normals,” the “depressed,” the “lonesome,” and the “wanton.” He described the latter as “thoughtless victims” that one encountered in the context of rape—​a “certain class of women” who behaved thoughtlessly or even played an “active role.”47 Benjamin Mendelsohn took a different approach. In 1956 he published a typology of victims that distinguished them according to the degree of their guilt. He included six categories, only one of which described completely innocent victims. Mendelsohn called the latter the “ideal victims”; they included children, but otherwise only people who were unconscious during the crime. Only victims with lesser responsibility, his second category, were less guilty than the perpetrator. As the American sociologist Mary Sengstock was one of the first to note critically in the 1970s, Mendelsohn’s typology would lead one to believe that any adult who was conscious during a crime shared the blame in one form or another.48 Von Hentig’s and Mendelsohn’s typologies, still presented today as “classics,” were shielded from fundamental criticism for many years. No one discussed the many sex and minority stereotypes in Von Hentig’s typology, for example; in the 46 Schneider, “Verbrechensopfer.” For victimology in France: Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 119ff. 47 Hans von Hentig, The Criminal and His Victim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 426f. 48 Mendelsohn, “Nouvelle Branche”; Mary C. Sengstock, The Culpable Victim in Mendelsohn’s Typology (St. Louis, 1976).

130  Victims. Perceptions of Harm late 1970s they were considered “purely phenomenological,” a mere description of phenomena that refrained from value judgments.49 During the first couple of decades after the war, in particular, it went largely unremarked that criminologists, psychiatrists, and ultimately social scientists who were involving themselves in the field of victimology had begun to focus on the shared guilt or responsibility of victims rather than on the innocent victim. As Mary Sengstock accurately noted, the latter, while not completely vanishing from scholarly analysis, had become nothing more than a control group.50 By the mid-​1970s, Sengstock was no longer alone in her objections. At the first international conference on victimology in Jerusalem in 1973, critics observed that victimology tended to place too strong an emphasis on victims’ responsibility for perpetrators’ actions. They even took it a step farther: “Studies on rape are a particularly graphic example of the way victimology can become the art of assigning blame to victims.”51 These critiques were a clear sign that the discourse on victims in various contexts was beginning to shift. This process, which was hardly free of conflict both outside and within victimology, began with reform movements, which were quite heterogeneous in their substantive focus and political leanings. A variety of groups formed in the United States in the 1960s, and generally somewhat later in many European countries, challenged the denigration of victims from varying perspectives, with some degree of effectiveness.52 These included the new women’s movement in the United States in the early 1970s, which publicly denounced abuse of women, addressing the problem of rape in particular and protesting its banalization. This was soon followed by similar campaigns in Europe. Activists not only firmly rejected the common assumption that no woman could be raped against her will; they insisted on recognition of the responsibility of perpetrators as well as of society, which they argued had to act decisively to prevent this form of male dominance. Feminists declared war on any sort of victim blaming of women who were raped or otherwise abused.53 They could be certain to gain media attention. Beginning in the late 1970s, scientific studies that investigated the frequency of rape, examined its psychological effects, and included the narratives of the women involved provided the empirical material to make sexual violence

49 Schneider, “Viktimologie,” 543. 50 Sengstock, Culpable Victim, 8ff. 51 Kurt Weis and Sandra S. Borges, “Victimology and Rape: The Case of the Legitimate Victim,” Issues in Criminology 8, no. 2 (1973): 71–​115, quote at 76. 52 See, e.g., Carrie A. Rentschler, Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media in the U.S. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 53 See, e.g., Davis, Accounts of Innocence, 80ff.; Elisabeth Zellmer, Töchter der Revolte? Frauenbewegung und Feminismus der 1970er Jahre in München (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011). See also Diana E. H. Russel and Nicole Van de Ven (eds.), Crimes Against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal (Millbrae, CA: Les Femmes, 1976).

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  131 visible as a social problem and a topic for discussion in a new way.54 At least in the United States, this applied in similar fashion to the problem of domestic violence.55 However, the aim of raising the status of rape victims pursued by the new women’s movement required talking about perpetrators—​especially about their punishment. Many feminist activists demanded harsher penalties, and they did not hesitate to enter into strategic alliances with the movement for higher sentences in order to achieve this goal. This was true at least in the United States, where conservative interest groups had not only been urging tougher action on crime since the 1970s, but had also fought to ensure that victims of crime were no longer treated with the usual negligence, but instead granted rights that they had not previously enjoyed under criminal law.56 The discussion on criminal procedure in Europe was different, but in neither the United States nor Europe did the call for tougher sentencing come only from political conservatives. Nor was the battle for victims’ rights, the discussion of which began in the 1970s to be heavily promoted by victims on the national and international levels, fought only by the political left. This is underscored by the less-​ well-​known debates on crime victims’ right to compensation. In some European countries, this discussion had already begun in the early 1960s, prompted by controversies surrounding international efforts to reform criminal law. An example is Great Britain, where both liberal and conservative politicians urged Parliament to adopt compensation laws for victims in order to mitigate the massive voter criticism of criminal law reform and liberalization of the corrections system. Compensation was used as a political strategy to mollify those who believed that the abolition of the death penalty and physical punishment made a mockery of victims. How to actually establish such compensation rules was not an easy question. Nevertheless, all the political parties soon agreed on one thing: being a victim was not “a synonym for complete innocence.” It seemed obvious at the time that a distinction had to be made between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. No one intended to establish a program that guaranteed all victims an equal claim to compensation. United on these premises, the British Parliament was able to agree on the adoption of a Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme in 1964. 54 Examples of this new type of discussion in the mass media: Anon, “Mord an der Seele,” Der Spiegel, 1981, 50–​62. Illustrative of research in the 1970s: Carol Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology (New York: Routledge, 1977); on the social science and psychological debates on rape in the United States since the 1970s, see, e.g., Colleen A. Ward, Attitudes toward Rape: Feminist and Social Psychological Perspectives (London: Sage, 1995). 55 See, e.g., James Ptacek, Battered Women in the Courtroom: The Power of Judicial Responses (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999). 56 Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Frank J. Weed, Certainty of Justice: Reform in the Crime Victim Movement (New York: De Gruyter, 1995). However, this argument, referring to the victim’s dishonor, had already appeared as a justification for the demand for harsher punishment of perpetrators since the beginning of the twentieth century. See, e.g., Andrew Lees, Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 175.

132  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Great Britain was the first country on the European continent in which the government declared itself willing to grant crime victims compensation for personal harm under certain specified conditions.57 In the 1960s, only New Zealand, California, and Northern Ireland emulated Britain. Other places followed in subsequent decades, primarily a number of states in the United States and a majority of Western European countries, including Austria, all the Scandinavian countries, Ireland, the Netherlands, West Germany, and France.58 Finally, in 1983, the Council of Europe took a stand in its European Convention on the Compensation of Victims of Violent Crimes, which required member states to adopt laws compensating victims of intentional crimes of violence.59 In general, the institutionalization of government compensation of victims was a drawn-​out process that never included all crime victims. Neither in Europe nor outside it did governments seem anxious to establish such a system, which brought with it financial risks if too generous and political risks if too restrictive. The question of political utility played a significant role: In Northern Ireland, Spain, Italy, and France, for example, establishing compensation for victims was clearly associated with terrorist attacks and internal political tensions.60 Different countries therefore came to quite different solutions; breaking them down here would take us too far afield. However, it can be stated that none of the laws made compensation an enforceable right, and they included the possibility of denying or reducing compensation. This was apparent in the actual practice of compensation: not every person who suffered harm was considered a victim worthy of being compensated.61 Nothing fundamental has changed in this regard to this day. For this reason, victim compensation has remained an object of criticism and both political and legal debate. In the 1980s, these debates began to be engaged in at the international level as well. This led to the involvement of various political actors, including representatives of victims’ assistance groups and NGOs. Scholarly experts are part of the conversation as well, including lawyers, criminologists, and explicit advocates of victimology. The latter even managed to become 57 See, e.g., Logan, Feminism, 139ff.; Tim Newburn, Crime and Criminal Justice Policy (Harlow: Longman, 2003), 226ff. On the debate in England, see Terrence Morris, “Compensation for Victims of Crimes of Violence,” Modern Law Review 24 (1961): 744–​745; also typical of the debate in England at the time: Anon, “Victims’ Relief,” The Times, 30 June 1961. On the desired compromise, see Bernard W. M. Downey, “Compensating Victims of Violent Crime,” British Journal of Criminology 5 (1965): 92–​95. 58 See, e.g., Rentschler, Second Wounds, 61ff.; Jo Goodey, Compensating Victims of Violent Crime in the European Union with a Special Focus on Victims of Terrorism: The National Center for Victims of Crime, Discussion Paper (2003), 5. 59 European Convention on the Compensation of Victims of Violent Crimes (Strasbourg, 24 November 1983). 60 See Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 108ff.; Goodey, Compensating Victims, 13ff. Spain initially concentrated its 1984 victim compensation law solely on victims of terrorist attacks; not until eleven years later were other victims of crime and sexual violence added (Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 14). 61 See, e.g., Goodey, Compensating Victims, 5ff.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  133 part of the United Nations pool of experts62 when the UN prepared to draft a resolution aimed at bolstering aid to crime victims, granting them additional rights in the legal process, and meeting the needs of people harmed by crime through restitution and compensation. The result of the debate emerged in condensed form in November 1985 as General Assembly Resolution 40/​34, entitled Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power.63 It was not easy for those present, who certainly did not all share the same interests, to come to an agreement. The UN was apparently originally interested mainly in victims of state terror and abuse of power; addressing their needs and improving their position in the criminal justice process was the actual aim. UN representatives and human rights organizations were particularly focused on state-​sponsored violence in Latin American dictatorships and South Africa’s apartheid regime. This is difficult to recognize in the final resolution, which was a compromise. Victims of “normal” criminality are clearly its primary focus; only the final, brief passages still point to the idea that these efforts can also apply to victims of state abuse of power. And yet the resolution was an important document, crucial to the history of ascriptions and perceptions of victimhood everywhere in the world. It was the first document to establish, on an international level, who could lay claim to victim status. The resolution stated, “ ‘Victims’ means persons who, individually or collectively, have suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that are in violation of criminal laws operative within Member States, including those laws proscribing criminal abuse of power.”64 This was a comprehensive definition in itself. Yet the possible spectrum of people who might fall within its sphere was even larger. As the resolution made clear, it did not matter whether a perpetrator was even identified, or whether they were apprehended, prosecuted, or convicted. It also provided explicitly that the term “victim” could also include a victim’s dependents, and even persons who were harmed because they helped the victim in distress or tried to hinder their victimization. Finally, the resolution established that no one might be excluded from its terms; it was to apply regardless of sex, ethnic or social origin, age, religion, nationality, and not least, political opinion.65

62 This is shown not only by the participation of representatives of the World Society of Victimology in the UN Conference in Milan in 1985; it is also demonstrated by explicit references to victimology and its scholarly activities since the 1970s, as reflected in working papers. See, e.g., UN Secretariat, Victims of Crime: Working paper prepared by the Secretariat, A/​CONF.121/​6 (1 August 1985), https://​ www.unodc.org/​congr​ess/​en/​previ​ous/​previ​ous-​07.html, accessed 22 January 2022. 63 UN General Assembly, Resolution 40/​34: Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, A/​RES/​40/​34 (29 November 1985), https://​docume​nts.un.org/​, accessed 22 January 2022. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid.

134  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Resolution 40/​34 was two things above all: first, it was the product of diverse social, political, and victimological initiatives that had developed in the preceding decades to draw greater attention to “victims” and achieve “justice” for them in new and different ways. And second, it represented a starting point for the creation of new legal structures (victims’ assistance and compensation laws), as well as other measures making it possible to inform victims of the claims available to them. Thus the resolution was in a certain sense a further prelude to the emergence of a massive field of activity and knowledge that has since involved representatives of the most varied disciplines. One of these is psychiatry, which, with PTSD, provided an interpretative framework that was able once again to change the way the victim was perceived.

Post-​Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Spread of Innocence The Bosnian War had barely ended when the European Community Task Force (ECTF) Psycho-​Social Unit in 1996 submitted an official report on its activities in the war zone over the preceding three years. The European Commission Humanitarian Office, which had established the task force, had provided twenty-​ five NGOs from various European countries with over 10 million Euros in financial support for the creation of psychosocial programs. Of this, 8.24 million was made available just in the months between May 1995 and April 1996.66 In addition, knowledge had to be “imported”; foreign experts with experience in the care of refugees, asylum seekers, and victims of human rights violations were flown in to pass on their knowledge to psychosocial workers on the ground. Members of the psychosocial task force themselves had also provided training in areas such as post-​ traumatic therapy, secondary traumatization, mental health, and human rights.67 In the eyes of the task force, this intervention was extremely urgent. A year earlier, it had emphasized that an estimated 700,000 people in Bosnia and Herzegovina were suffering from serious trauma and would need professional help—​a situation that the 185 psychosocial projects in the region were insufficient to deal with. They also warned of the consequences to be expected if the necessary aid was not provided; there was a danger of massive effects on the next generation that could even lead to renewed wars.68 The final report underscored once again that the peace process required providing traumatized people with psychosocial assistance to help them understand and process their traumatic experiences.69 66 Inger Agger and Jadranka Mimica, Psycho-​ Social Assistance to Victims of War in Bosnia-​ Herzegovina and Croatia: An Evaluation (EU Commission Working Document, 1996), 20. 67 Ibid., 29f. 68 Inger Agger, Sanja Vuk, and Jadranka Mimica, Theory and Practice of Psycho-​Social Projects under War Conditions in Bosnia-​Herzegovina and Croatia (Zagreb, 1995), 9. 69 Agger and Mimica, Psycho-​Social Assistance, 30.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  135 The task force emphasized that this war was unusual for them as Europeans, as it was for international humanitarian organizations. It was the first war on European soil since World War II. But the task force also pointed out that this was the first war in which there had been organized efforts to provide a traumatized population with psychosocial assistance, even while the conflict was still going on.70 In fact, there had never been anything comparable. Humanitarian psychiatry had only been developed in the late 1980s, as a component of the international humanitarian assistance employed in war zones and disasters, in order to treat psychologically traumatized people as efficiently as possible.71 No such teams had been created at the end of World War II, not even for survivors of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or of Nazi concentration camps.72 When the Western Allies organized aid for liberated concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war, and forced laborers, their planning was largely guided by the experiences of the previous world war, when the influenza epidemic and famine in Eastern Europe had claimed at least 30 million lives. Thus the international aid programs that began in autumn of 1944 were equipped mainly to provide medical care to the physically ill, distribute vaccines, use DDT prophylactically against the spread of epidemics, and address undernourishment.73 The military doctors who were first on the scene were unprepared for the catastrophic situation they found in the concentration camps.74 Only the Soviet doctors who arrived in Auschwitz felt that they had been confronted with comparable scenes of starving people—​during the almost two-​and-​a-​half-​year German siege of Leningrad, when a million civilians starved to death.75 It often seems surprising today that psychiatrists and psychologists in the immediate postwar period at most merely glossed over the question of whether survivors 70 Ibid., 13. 71 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 163ff. On the institutionalization of therapeutic crisis intervention in (natural) disasters in the United States in 1974, see Andrew J. F. Morris, “Psychic Aftershock: Crisis Counseling and Disaster Relief Policy,” History of Psychology 14, no. 3 (2011): 264–​286. On sociological disaster research and its critiques of broad-​based therapeutic interventions, see also Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger, “Psychische Störungen und sozialwissenschaftliche Katastrophenforschung, 1949–​1985” [Mental Illness and Social Science Disaster Research, 1949–​1985], NTM. Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 24, no. 1 (2016): 61–​79. 72 See, e.g., Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 144ff.; Paul Weindling, “ ‘Belsenitis’: Liberating Belsen, Its Hospitals, UNRRA, and Selection for Re-​Emigration, 1945–​1948,” Science in Context 19, no. 3 (2006): 401–​418. 73 See, e.g., Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 58ff.; Ben Shephard, “ ‘Becoming Planning Minded’: The Theory and Practice of Relief 1940–​1945,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008): 405–​419. 74 Weindling, “ ‘Belsenitis.’ ” 75 See Rebecca Manley, “Nutritional Dystrophy: The Science and Semantics of Starvation in World War II,” in Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, edited by Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald A. Filtzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 206–​264; Alexis Peri, “Queues, Canteens, and the Politics of Location in Diaries of the Leningrad Blockade, 1941–​1942,” in Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, edited by Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald A. Filtzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 158–​205.

136  Victims. Perceptions of Harm might develop long-​term psychological problems as a result of their experiences. This surprise is mixed with indignation when it involves West German psychiatry. At first, applications for compensation submitted after the adoption of West Germany’s Federal Restitution Law (1953–​56)76 were often rejected if they claimed psychological harm due to Nazi persecution. Until the early 1960s, the majority of German psychiatric evaluators argued that purely psychological conditions that lasted many years, or did not appear until years later, did not originate in persecution or in the concentration camps.77 In the psychiatric community, they were not entirely alone in these views. In the 1950s, European psychiatrists rarely believed that ongoing psychological conditions or those that had first appeared at the time had a causal connection to deportation or internment.78 Psychiatrists also at first believed that the persistent symptoms associated with so-​called “concentration camp syndrome” were primarily a result of hunger and the resulting organic harm.79 Until the end of the 1950s, even Israeli psychiatrists failed to see victims of persecution who had immigrated to Israel as a group with particular psychological problems.80 Historians took even longer to address the subject. Until well into the 1970s, contemporary history was essentially political history; historians writing social history approached it mainly as structural history and were interested in processes above the individual level. Moreover, until the late 1960s, historians in both the United States and Western Europe were strikingly reluctant to address the history of the Holocaust.81 The few studies that did appear were primarily efforts to 76 The Federal Supplementary Law (BEG), which went into effect on 1 October 1953, limited those entitled to apply for compensation to victims of Nazi persecution who were West German citizens. The Federal Restitution Law that followed in 1956 extended this right to persons who “emigrated or were deported or expelled before 31 December 1952” and whose “last domicile or permanent residence was in areas” that belonged to the “German Reich” on 31 December 1937. However, it left out citizens of countries with which West Germany had no diplomatic relations at the time of the decision. See Georg Blessin and Hans Giessler, Bundesentschädigungsgesetz, Kommentar zu der Neufassung des Bundesentsc hädigungsgesetzes (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1967), 6f. 77 See, e.g., Goltermann, The War in Their Minds; Christian Pross, Paying for the Past: The Struggle over Reparations for Surviving Victims of the Nazi Terror, translated by Belinda Cooper (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 78 See especially the articles in Withuis and Mooij (eds.), The Politics of War Trauma. A clear deviation from this was the assessment of psychological conditions in children during the immediate postwar period. See Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). On the US, see, e.g., Arlene Stein, “The Shame of Survival: Rethinking Trauma’s Aftermath,” in The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Psychosocial, edited by Lynn Chancer and John Andrews (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 338–​356. 79 See Goltermann, The War in Their Minds, 183f. 80 Rakefet Zalashik, Das unselige Erbe: Die Geschichte der Psychiatrie in Palästina 1920–​1960 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012), 134. 81 See, e.g., Ulrich Herbert, “Holocaust Research in Germany: The History and Prospects of a Difficult Discipline,” in Holocaust and Memory in Europe, edited by Thomas Schlemmer and Alan E. Steinweis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 17–​48; Jan Eckel, Geist der Zeit: Deutsche Geisteswissenschaften seit 1870 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008); Jan Eckel, Hans Rothfels: Eine intellektuelle Biographie im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 223ff.; Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004); Irmtrud Wojak,

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  137 reconstruct Nazi extermination policies and practices. Here the focus was on the perpetrators—​not unlike the criminal justice perspective brought to bear on the legal treatment of these crimes.82 Studies on the postwar period were colored in turn by the Cold War and the paradigm of the “Stunde Null”: for decades, “reconstruction” (also a term used in Eastern Europe),83 the Marshall Plan, and modernization defined historical interest in post-​1945 Western European history. Finally, in this context we should also mention the modernization theory popular until the 1970s in US and German social history. It was confident, optimistic, and full of promise, both analytically and normatively. No provision was made for violence and psychological irruptions as relevant problems in the economically determined progress of capitalist industrial societies that modernization theoreticians proclaimed. There may be other factors that explain this blind spot. Yet however one assesses it, the fact remains that no one in the discipline that deals professionally with reconstructing the past apparently thought to inquire into the psychological effects of persecution and mass murder. This did not change until the turn of the twenty-​first century. The change in cultural history that began around 1980, which emphasized experience, perception, and interpretation, was certainly pathbreaking. It was assisted by greater appreciation of “witness” and the related memory boom.84 However, it is not unreasonable to believe that this shift was most connected with the emergence and establishment of new concepts of trauma. The writings of psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, a significant contributor to the development of a new trauma diagnosis (ultimately called post-​traumatic stress disorder), clearly influenced studies by Anglo-​American historians in the mid-​1970s that began to look at psychological breakdowns among World War I soldiers.85 Physician Christian Pross, in turn, shifted the discussion

“Nicolas Berg and the West German Historians: A Response to His ‘Handbook’ on the Historiography of the Holocaust, German History 22, no. 1 (2004): 101–​118; Mark Mazower, “Changing Trends in the Historiography of Postwar Europe, East and West,” International Labor and Working-​Class History 58 (2000): 275–​282. Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) shows that it would have been quite possible to address the history of the Holocaust in a different form, using the collection and documentation practices of the Jewish survivors. 82 It may also have been pivotal that some historians were brought in as experts on criminal penalties. At the Auschwitz trial, these were for example Martin Broszat, Hans Buchheim, Helmut Krausnick, Hans-​Adolf Jacobsen, and Jürgen Kuszynski. See, e.g., Devin O. Pendas, Der Auschwitz-​ Prozess: Völkermord vor Gericht (Munich: Siedler, 2013), especially 149ff. In this context, it is also interesting that early efforts by Jewish survivors to collect testimonies to document the crimes apparently did not include sources on the effects of those crimes on health. See Jockusch, Collect and Record! 83 Holly Case, “Reconstruction in East-​Central Europe: Clearing the Rubble of Cold War Politics,” Past & Present 210, no. 6 (2011): 71–​102, 72. 84 For a brief analysis, see Jay Winter, “Die Generation der Erinnerung: Reflexionen über den ‘Memory Boom’ in der zeithistorischen Forschung,” Werkstatt Geschichte 30 (2001): 5–​16. 85 See Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

138  Victims. Perceptions of Harm to psychological harm among victims of Nazi persecution. In his 1988 study on the history of reparations, he revealed that numerous applications for reparations made by these victims had been rejected, because for years many German psychiatrists failed to classify psychological harm as a consequence of persecution.86 Fifteen years later, psychiatrist Alice Förster and historian Birgit Beck asserted that countless Germans had experienced traumatic events in the context of World War II, including air raids, expulsion, rape, and the sight of wounded and dying people. They thought it possible that even soldiers who had committed crimes on the Eastern Front might have been traumatized as a result. Förster and Beck referred to psychiatric studies of Vietnam veterans, especially the diagnosis of PTSD, and suggested that this new diagnosis made necessary renewed analysis of the effects of all these events on the lives of those involved, including their behavior after the war.87 There are now many scholarly and popular accounts of war, “ethnic cleansing,” and genocide in the twentieth century that speak as a matter of course of “traumatic experiences,” and even collectively of “traumatized” societies. From a medical perspective, these attributions have nothing to do with the psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD; often they do not even refer to its criteria. The use of the word “trauma” in this form is a code that expects and acknowledges psychological pain resulting from the experience of violence. Yet even these attributions of “trauma” employ a very specific concept of trauma that has only become widespread since the institutional establishment of PTSD. As Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman have noted, this medical classification fundamentally altered the status of an event. In contrast to earlier concepts of trauma, an event for the first time became a necessary and sufficient etiological factor in psychological disorders.88 This is also important to the idea that societies are “traumatized.” Today, no one would associate this with statements such as those connected in the past with “traumatic neurosis”—​that there was damage to the nerves, that the symptoms were evidence of unconscious wishful thinking, or that they were psychological reactions to external events that only appeared in those particularly disposed to such symptoms. This use of the trauma concept in self-​evident fashion, which we see today in and outside of the scholarly world, can lead us to forget that in the early 1970s, a diagnosis like PTSD were not exactly obvious to psychiatrists in the United States. The constellation, in brief, was as follows: In its 1968 revised official classification system for psychological disorders (DSM-​II), the American Psychiatric Association had just removed the diagnosis of “gross stress reaction.” It had been included in the first version, in 1952, in order to do justice to psychological disorders 86 Pross, Paying for the Past. 87 Alice Förster and Birgit Beck, “Post-​Traumatic Stress Disorder and World War II,” in Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, edited by Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 15–​36. 88 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 86; Richard Rechtman, “Être Victime: Généalogie d’une Condition Clinique,” L’Évolution Psychiatrique 67, no. 4 (2002): 775–​795, 791.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  139 that appeared temporarily after extraordinary stress—​in particular, participation in combat.89 The abandonment of that diagnosis actually had a direct connection to the early stages of the Vietnam War: according to military psychiatrists, there had been a reduction in psychological breakdowns among soldiers in comparison with the Korean War and World War II. Immediate psychiatric treatment close to the front lines and shorter deployments seemed to have solved the problem.90 Psychiatrists who saw veterans with psychological disorders therefore diagnosed depression, personality disorders, schizophrenia, or neuroses; none of these diagnoses addressed the context of conflict. Doctors at the Veterans Administration responsible for the medical treatment of veterans also argued largely within the framework of the official doctrine. It was therefore at first mainly the anti-​Vietnam War organization Veterans Against the War that created alternatives to this treatment, which they considered dismissive. In 1970, they established the first so-​ called rap group, or self-​help group, in New York; many others followed. These were places where Vietnam veterans were able to discuss their psychological and emotional problems. At the time, only a small group of psychiatrists was open to their concerns.91 They included Chaim Shatan and Robert J. Lifton, the first psychiatrists asked to attend the rap groups (though not in a therapeutic capacity). Both were publicly active against the Vietnam War and advocated recognition of the long-​term psychological effects of the war. They used calculated appearances in the media and at conferences to achieve these goals. Still, when the psychiatrist Robert Spitzer was asked in 1974 to lead the revision of the DSM-​II and harmonize it with the international classification system, it was by no means clear that this would achieve Shatan and Lifton’s desired integration and official recognition of the diagnosis of long-​term trauma resulting from the Vietnam War.92 Despite growing support within the profession, their position was still controversial. There were not yet any comprehensive empirical studies containing sufficient data to justify a new 89 See American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Mental Disorders (Washington, DC, 1952), 40. It was stated expressly that psychological reactions were considered temporary, especially in case of immediate treatment. The diagnosis also appeared under the rubric “Transient Situational Personality Disorders.” 90 During the Korean War, the rate of neuropsychiatric breakdowns is said to have been 250 per 1,000 soldiers (annual average). For the first two years in Vietnam, the figure is 5 per 1,000. See Hans Pols and Stephanie Oak, “War & Military Mental Health: The United States Psychiatric Response in the 20th century,” American Journal of Public Health 97, no. 12 (2007): 2132–​2142; Wilbur J. Scott, Vietnam Veterans Since the War: The Politics of PTSD, Agent Orange, and the National Memorial (New York: Routledge, 1993), 32f. 91 See, e.g., Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 54ff.; Andrew E. Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 87f., 167; Chaim F. Shatan, “The Grief of Soldiers: Vietnam Combat Veterans’ Self-​Help Movement,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 43, no. 4 (1973): 640–​653; Arthur Egendorf, “Vietnam Veteran Rap Groups and Themes of Postwar Life,” Journal of Social Issues 31, no. 4 (1975): 111–​124. 92 Wilbur J. Scott, “PTSD in DSM-​III: A Case in the Politics of Diagnosis and Disease,” Social Problems 37, no. 3 (1990): 294–​310, 304.

140  Victims. Perceptions of Harm diagnosis.93 The effort to define a post-​combat syndrome tailored to soldiers’ disorders, as originally intended, was unsuccessful. It was therefore strategically important to recruit into the official working group psychiatrists who had experience with survivors of other extreme stress situations, and thus had an interest in a new trauma diagnosis. Victims of the Nazi regime obviously had symptoms similar to those of Vietnam veterans. Consideration was also given to rape trauma syndrome, which had been described in 1974 as an aftereffect of rape. Further overlaps could be observed with victims of natural disasters and serious work-​related accidents. The architects of the new diagnosis had to find a way to bridge the gap between military and civilian violence and stress situations.94 In other words, post-​ traumatic stress disorder, as the diagnosis was labeled after three years of work and numerous naming suggestions, was the end result of a process of negotiation and compromise. It left the diagnosis open to a variety of extraordinary stress situations, thus de-​emphasizing the specifics of each experience.95 The historical development of PTSD was thus closely, but by no means exclusively, tied to the Vietnam War context. Medical interpretations of the long-​term psychological effects of violence had been changing in a variety of fields—​a complex history about which we now know more, though not everything. This is even clearer when we include the fact that, since the late 1950s, psychiatrists in Europe and Israel had been producing an increasing number of studies that no longer ruled out long-​term psychological effects of extreme stress and violence, at least in the case of deported resistance fighters and former victims of Nazism, as well as prisoners of war. US, German, Norwegian, French, Dutch, and Israeli psychiatrists who worked in this area and had been seeking new diagnostic options had long been aware of each other, but there are as yet no systematic studies of these relationships. However, it is easy to find reciprocal references in scholarly publications and reports.96 This is not to suggest that the concept of PTSDactually originated elsewhere. It is true that increasing numbers of studies had appeared in Europe and Israel since the late 1950s that parted ways with the prevailing doctrine that long-​term

93 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 88; Scott, Vietnam Veterans, 60f. 94 Among others, a crucial role is ascribed to William Niederland, who in the 1960s developed the diagnosis of “survivor syndrome” among victims of the Nazis, and Mardi Horowitzder, who sought common patterns of emotional reaction to civilian disasters in his 1976 book Stress Response Syndromes. 95 See Scott, “PTSD,” 307. 96 See, e.g., Walter von Baeyer, Heinz Häfner, and Karl Peter Kisker, Psychiatrie der Verfolgten: Psychopathologische und gutachtliche Erfahrungen an Opfern der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung und vergleichbarer Extrembelastungen (Berlin: Springer, 1964); Robert Jay Lifton, “ ‘Death Imprints’: On Youth in Vietnam,” Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 3, no. 2 (1974): 47–​49; H. C. Archibald and R. D. Tuddenham, “Persistent Stress Reaction after Combat: A 20-​Year Follow-​Up,” Archives of General Psychiatry 12 (1965): 475–​481; William G. Niederland, “Psychiatric Disorders among Persecution Victims,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 139 (1964): 458–​474; William G. Niederland, Folgen der Verfolgung: Das Überleben-​ Syndrom, Seelenmord (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980); Goltermann, The War in Their Minds, 181ff.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  141 psychological disorders were only possible in tandem with organic (or “hereditary”) impairment. However, these did not lead directly to the 1980 diagnosis of PTSD. Such studies of the health consequences of deportation, concentration camp detention, and Nazi persecution followed only one strand of what would later be included in the new diagnosis. Current accounts sometimes obscure this by equating “concentration camp syndrome,” formulated in the mid-​1950s by Danish psychiatrists, or “survivor syndrome,” developed by William Niederland in the early 1960s, with PTSD.97 Yet differences appeared not only in the symptoms; the etiology, too, was fundamentally different. For “concentration camp syndrome,” psychiatrists largely assumed that psychological impairment could be explained by organic damage, such as harm to the brain. Twenty-​five years later, PTSD was a categorically different concept, in which a traumatic event was a necessary, but also sufficient, cause of a specific psychological disorder.98 Nevertheless, it is useful, in this context, to take account of psychiatric scholarship on the European continent. We can take West German psychiatrists as a case study. They were by no means alone in postwar Europe in their belief that long-​term psychiatric disorders were not an expected result of wartime violence.99 A decade later, however, a smaller number of German psychiatrists advocated a different perspective. In a 1958 post-​doctoral thesis, Ulrich Venzlaff wrote of the cases of former Nazi victims for whom “affective memories of humiliation and degradation” persisted for many years, and he described a “fear syndrome”: “A fear that transformed from fear of torment, humiliation, and death into a Lebensangst [fear of life].” Organic damage could be ruled out as a factor. Venzlaff urged a new diagnosis: an “experience-​based change in personality.” Other psychiatrists agreed, and the reparations authorities officially recognized this new diagnosis. Claiming a causal connection between long-​term psychological disorders and extraordinary violence was therefore no longer precluded per se.100

97 By way of example, see, e.g., Frank Wiedemann, Alltag im Konzentrationslager Mittelbau-​ Dora: Methoden und Strategien des Überlebens der Häftlinge (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010); 57. A brief, accurate explanation of the differences among the classifications is found in Leys, Guilt, 27; as well as Goltermann, The War in Their Minds, 181ff.; Ralf Futselaar, “From Camp to Claim: The KZ Syndrome and PTSD in Scandinavia, 1945–​2010,” in The Politics of War Trauma: The Aftermath of World War II in Eleven European Countries, edited by Jolande Withuis and Annet Mooij (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2010), 241–​268. 98 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 86f. 99 For greater detail, see Goltermann, The War in Their Minds. Early statements by German psychiatrists suggest that by the end of the war there was a degree of uncertainty about whether wartime violence would cause particular mental breakdowns over a longer period of time. A few suspected that psychological resilience was not absolute (125ff., 211f.). On the Allied side, the few psychiatrists and psychologists who actually encountered survivors of the concentration camps provided differing prognoses. Two observations from Bergen-​Belsen are illustrative: M. Niremberski, “Psychological Investigation of a Group of Internees at Belsen Camp,” Journal of Mental Science 92 (1946): 60–​74; Jacques Tas, “Psychological Disorders among Inmates of Concentration Camps and Repatriates,” Psychiatric Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1951): 679–​690. 100 Goltermann, The War in Their Minds, quote at 196.

142  Victims. Perceptions of Harm This shift did not occur without resistance. In postwar Germany, many psychiatrists, as well as investigators in reparations offices, for many years adamantly refused to recognize that long-​term psychological disorders might result from persecution. There may have been political and ideological motivations behind this view.101 However, when considering twentieth-​century psychiatry, which adhered to the scientific method, we should keep in mind that changes in prevailing medical doctrines and diagnostic methods tended to be sluggish.102 Yet a look at postwar psychiatric “reformers” reveals something else: Their search for a diagnosis that could interpret long-​term psychological disorders as the causal result of extraordinary stress required a fundamental rethinking—​a radically different view of the human ability to cope with mental stress. After all, the unshakable prevailing doctrine after World War II continued to assume that, in physically healthy people, the human organism showed “an astonishing ability to adjust” even in case of serious mental stress.103 Abandoning this position required nothing less than reimagining human beings in significant ways. This becomes apparent, for example, in the shifting perspective on “personality.” “Neurosis,” which was pretty much the only diagnosis available when psychiatrists could find neither organic causes nor “mental illness” as a reason for a psychiatric disorder, was still based on the idea that the “personality” or “personality structure” was responsible when purely psychological problems persisted over the long term.104 The person involved, it was believed, had processed the event “abnormally” as a result of his “personality,” and perhaps also developed “Wunschreaktionen”—​ reactions based on a desire to obtain compensation, even if there was no basis for it. It was the personality itself that drove psychological disorders. The idea of persecution-​based psychological impairment thus required making the leap to reimagining “personality” as something that could be destroyed or greatly altered as a result of external influences. This shift in perspective did not occur abruptly. New York medical examiner Hans Strauss argued in 1957 that a “depression resulting from being uprooted” could be found in former victims of persecution that had nothing to do with a desire for compensation, yet he was still influenced by the conventional idea of personality. He wrote, “One cannot accuse these people, and refuse them compensation, because they were incapable, due to their personality structure and unfavorable external conditions, of overcoming their uprootedness through the development of new, firm roots.” His argument for approving their compensation

101 See, e.g., Dagmar Herzog, “The Obscenity of Objectivity: Post-​Holocaust Anti-​Semitism and the Invention-​Discovery of Post-​Traumatic Stress Disorder,” in Catastrophes: A History and Theory of an Operative Concept, edited by Nitzan Lebovic and Andreas Killen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 128–​155. 102 See, e.g., Brigitta Bernet, Schizophrenie: Entstehung und Entwicklung eines psychiatrischen Krankheitsbilds um 1900 (Zurich: Chronos, 2013). 103 See Goltermann, The War in Their Minds, 193ff. 104 See ibid., Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 34ff.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  143 claims thus remained a moral one. However, other doctors went further. An investigator at one reparations office, more open to reforms than others, wrote in 1958 that they were dealing primarily with “damage to the personality.” He therefore considered the diagnosis of “neurosis” to be incorrect.105 Venzlaff ’s explication of an “experience-​based change in personality” also functioned in this way. It is true that, in the late 1950s, he believed that “personality could be formed.” However, he argued that this was only true of a particular period in life. The “personality’s ordering structure” could be “too profoundly ruptured.”106 The concept of the “personality,” and therefore also of human beings and their psychological vulnerability, had begun to shift. Yet there was another intellectual step separating the “reformers’ ” thinking from the view of human beings upon which the 1980 concept of PTSD was based—​a view that required no reference to “personality.” Fassin and Rechtman described this with precision: an event lying “outside the scope of human experience” was now considered the cause of psychological trauma, and not some disposition of the personality, whether in its psychological constitution or in age-​related fragility. The crucial assumption was that nearly every individual who experienced such an event would develop the characteristic symptoms of the disorder.107 The “reformers” of the late 1950s were still far from this sort of generalization. Even for them, it was at first hardly imaginable that a diagnosis such as “experience-​ based change in personality” could be applied to a wide variety of stress situations and groups. No one spoke at all yet of interpersonal or “private” violence. Even when considering World War II, Heidelberg psychiatrist Walter von Baeyer emphasized in 1961 that “trauma [did not] equal trauma, stress [did not] equal stress.” The development of ongoing psychological disorders that could not be equated with “neurosis” depended on the “way” in which individuals were “existentially affected,” he explained. Concretely, this meant that, compared with the German experience of war, the “way of traumatization through totalitarian persecution” was different, since it was aimed at “disrupting existential security as a whole” and 105 Goltermann, The War in Their Minds, 194. 106 Ibid., 194f. 107 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 87; Rechtman, “Être Victime,” 791. To diagnose PTSD, according to the DSM, three conditions must be fulfilled: First, the traumatic event must be revisited by the patient through “recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event” or “recurrent dreams of the event” or “sudden acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were reoccurring, because of an association with an environmental or ideational stimulus.” Second, after the traumatic event, a “numbing of responsiveness“ or “reduced involvement with the external world” must have appeared, which is present when the patient shows “markedly diminished interest in one or more significant activities,” “a feeling of detachment or estrangement from others,” or “a constricted affect.” Third, at least two of the following additional symptoms must be present: “1) hyperalertness or exaggerated startle response; (2) sleep disturbance; (3) guilt about surviving when others have not, or about behavior required for survival; (4) memory impairment or trouble concentrating; (5) avoidance of activities that arouse recollection of the traumatic event; (6) intensification of symptoms by exposure to events that symbolize or resemble the traumatic event.” See Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-​III (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980), 238.

144  Victims. Perceptions of Harm “taking away from the human being everything he clung to and in which he found meaning and value.”108 Von Baeyer’s distinction basically showed how deeply assumptions about human beings’ immense psychological ability to deal with stress was rooted in psychiatric thinking. In the early 1960s, the “reformers” therefore defended strict review, at least in cases of compensation and insurance, sometimes with harsh warnings about “pension neurotics.”109 In their view, the causes of this were mainly medical, though also political and financial. In our context, however, the following effect is of particular interest: The etiology of neurosis, which ruled out a monocausal connection between the event and the psychological aftereffects, not only prevented official approval of pensions; it also rendered positioning as a victim of violence contestable, and self-​definition as a victim questionable. In the psychiatry of the 1950s and 1960s, no one found it in the least necessary to fundamentally challenge this constellation. However, the “reformers’ ” critiques of the undifferentiated application of the “neurosis” diagnosis indicates that they were well aware of the context. They reinforced their call for a different diagnosis of ongoing psychological disorders in Nazi victims by pointing to their actual, unlimited state of victimhood, characterized by complete helplessness. Hans Strauss, for example, based his advocacy regarding “depression resulting from being uprooted” on the specifics of Nazi persecution, especially the victims’ “complete absence of rights.” He emphasized that “they were the completely defenseless victims of any conceivable whim on the part of their often sadistic masters.”110 At the so-​called Main Medical Conference in 1958, which addressed the necessity of an alternative diagnosis in the context of compensation procedures, internist Wolfgang Meywald made a similar argument. He suggested that, compared with a wartime situation in which troops or individual soldiers were completely outgunned by their opponents, “Even the complete inequality of the means and recognition of the inadequacy or even impossibility of defense during military service does not annul moral equality. The persecuted person, however, is exclusively a victim.”111 To be “exclusively a victim”—​that is, completely defenseless and characterized by weakness for which one is not responsible—​was thus an exceptional state. This assumption was in full accord with the views of those who had created victimology in the postwar decades. As noted above, it was a common assumption at the time with regard to interpersonal violence. This does not mean that people did not call themselves victims. The question, however, is for whom and for how long

108 Walter von Baeyer, “Erlebnisbedingte Verfolgungsschäden,” Der Nervenarzt 32, no. 12 (1961): 534–​538, 536. 109 The concept of the “pension neurotic” was not a solely German one; the same idea was found in other European countries and Israel. Goltermann, The War in Their Minds, 158ff., passim; Zalashik, Erbe, 172ff. 110 Goltermann, The War in Their Minds, 190. 111 Ibid., 193.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  145 this self-​ascription could be a strong and convincing subject position. In any case, long-​term psychological conditions did not support this ascription until the establishment of a medical perspective that interpreted such longer-​term psychological symptoms as a causal result of extraordinary stress. An “experience-​based change in personality” was one such diagnosis. However, most German doctors only accepted it because it did not apply to everyone, but remained a “special status” in the sphere of reparations proceedings. In the mid-​1960s, psychiatrist Hermann Witter, at first an opponent of the diagnosis, explained this position to lawyers as follows: “From a medical-​psychological perspective,” the crucial factor was “the presence of not only short-​term threats to health and life, but also long years of mental stress of the most extreme sort as a damaging factor.” This “persistent mental stress” was quite different from “the experiences of fright and fear that are generally discussed in accident insurance, and also in veterans’ disability cases.” He added, “In the case of victims of political and racial persecution, another consideration comes into play, namely, that the culpability of those inflicting the damage was exceptionally great.”112 Even in this technocratic-​sounding explanation, the interplay between the medical classification of psychological conditions and the ascription of victimhood was clear, as well as the fact that, within this framework, central questions such as guilt (and shared responsibility) were also being negotiated. The official adoption in 1980 of post-​traumatic stress disorder, which could in principle be found in any individual attested to have survived an event “outside the range of human experience,” created the conditions to make attribution of victimhood plausible to a far greater extent. This shift could only be effective, however, because the constructors of the DSM-​III took a further step: they removed the diagnosis of “neurosis” from the official classification system.113 These two steps unquestionably caused a paradigm shift. They created a situation in which the traumatic event that was etiologically sufficient for the acknowledgment of psychological suffering no longer necessarily led the psychiatric mind to suspect the victim of subconscious deception.114 In this sense, PTSD produced a veritable boom in innocence. In the United States, it lasted approximately a decade and a half; in Western Europe, where it began later, it would last somewhat longer. On both continents—​and beyond—​it would have far-​reaching political and social consequences.

112 Ibid., 226. 113 Roland Bayer and Robert L. Spitzer, “Neurosis, Psychodynamics, and DSM-​III: A History of the Controversy,” Archives of General Psychiatry 42, no. 2 (1985): 187–​196; Rick Mayes and Allan V. Horwitz, “DSM-​III and the Revolution in the Classification of Mental Illness,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Science 41, no. 3 (2005): 249–​267. Following a fierce debate with psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists, the old terminology was still temporarily retained in brackets, but the classification system no longer granted neurosis any official etiological value. The DSM-​IV of 1994 then completely eliminated the diagnosis. 114 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 86f.

146  Victims. Perceptions of Harm

Blocked Histories The naturalness with which we speak of “trauma” today conceals the fact that the diagnosis of PTSD is no longer the same as it was in 1980. Epidemiological studies beginning immediately after the official inclusion of the diagnosis in the DSM-​ III suggested relatively quickly that one of its central premises was invalid: the assumption that “in almost everyone,” a traumatic event “generally outside the range of usual human experience” would cause a stress disorder to the same extent.115 Therefore, in the revised version of the DSM-​IV that appeared in 1994, this wording was no longer included. However, this was not accompanied by a limitation on traumatic events and experiences; on the contrary, the spectrum grew. First of all, the range of symptoms that indicated PTSD was expanded. Calls for such an expansion came quickly, especially from psychiatrists and psychologists who criticized the fact that the diagnosis failed to do justice to all cases of sexual abuse. The diagnosis could not be applied to women who were not haunted by the abuse in nightmares or flashbacks, were not listless, and did not suffer from insomnia or memory loss, and therefore lacked confirmation that they were victims of abuse for which they were not responsible. This was grist for the mill of those who, at the time, still maintained that victims were not permanently harmed by such experiences, including even incest. The revised DSM of 1987 (DSM-​III-​R) had already countered this view by including a further symptom of PTSD—​that the person commonly “makes deliberate efforts to avoid thoughts or feelings about the traumatic event.”116 Second, the DSM-​IV of 1994 removed the wording that the event had to be “generally outside the range of usual human experience.” The 1980 version had explicitly excluded bereavement, chronic illness, commercial losses, and marital conflict.117 Fourteen years later, there were no such exclusions. Instead, the new version strove for greater precision in defining possible causes of post-​traumatic reactions. But the palette was broad: it ranged from personal experiences of life-​ threatening events or those harmful to bodily integrity, to observing such events, to news of the unexpected death or great suffering of a close friend or relative. The traumatic experience could occur during war, but could also encompass violence in civilian life, including rape (in the original American version, the word “rape” had already been replaced with the more comprehensive term “sexual abuse”). Natural disasters, car accidents, and life-​threatening illnesses were also included. In regard to children, the DSM-​IV newly stated that “sexually traumatic events may include developmentally inappropriate sexual experiences without threatened or actual

115 DSM-​III, 236, 238. 116 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-​III-​R (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1987), 248; Davis, Accounts of Innocence, 116ff. 117 DSM-​III, 236.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  147 violence or injury.” Most importantly, however, this revised version fundamentally changed the original 1980 diagnosis by adding a subjective element to the symptoms: The person must have felt “intense fear, helplessness, or horror” in reaction to the event.118 Thus what could be declared a “traumatic event” became amenable to individual ascription. All these decisions, which have been outlined here only up until the 1990s, reflected scientific controversies in the fields of psychiatry and psychology that involved problems both fundamental and antagonistic. Some noted that a more narrow definition of what could be considered a traumatic event might exclude many people from the diagnosis, and therefore from therapies. Others argued that strengthening the subjective perspective in order to avoid such problematic narrowness risked over-​diagnosing PTSD. Critics raised forensic as well as scientific issues. Psychiatrist Richard McNally, a member of the expert committee tasked with revising PTSD in the American classification system in the early 1990s, recalled ten years later one of the fears expressed at the time: “Moreover, if any event could qualify as a PTSD-​enducing stressor, as long as it was perceived as traumatic, then the diagnosis would invite abuse in the courtroom.”119 The psychiatrists and psychologists involved in revising the PTSD concept in the 1990s did not succeed in resolving the problem, or even alleviating it.120 For despite what was intended, the diagnosis spread rapidly, though at different rates in the United States, and Western and Eastern Europe. The criticisms were not long in coming. In the United States, popular-​science books appeared even before the turn of the century claiming that the creators of the DSM had opened a Pandora’s box when they included the diagnosis in the 1980 edition.121 Experts argued that PTSD had become such a common diagnosis in the healthcare system that it led to serious problems, pathologizing normal reactions to terrible events. In addition, they claimed it was counterproductive to give a categorical diagnosis to the symptoms experienced by victims of violence; not everyone who suffered after, and due to,

118 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-​IV (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 424. 119 See Richard J. McNally, “Conceptual Problems with the DSM-​IV Criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Issues and Controversies, edited by Gerald M. Rosen (New York: Wiley, 2004), 1–​14, 2f., quote at 3. 120 In the DSM-​V, released in 2013, experts have sought once again to limit the concept of PTSD. They have again eliminated the criteria of a subjective experience of fear, helplessness, or horror. The reasons for this were, first of all, that reactions and triggers had become mixed. Second, however, it was apparently also argued that these subjective elements excluded people who did not claim to have reacted to these traumatic events with fear or helplessness, but fulfilled other criteria for PTSD. Soldiers were apparently a group they had particularly in mind. See Anushka Pai, Alina M. Suris, and Carol S. North, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the DSM-​5: Controversy, Change, and Conceptual Considerations,” Behavioral Sciences 7, no. 1 (2017). 121 Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk, Making Us Crazy: DSM. The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders (New York: Free Press, 1997), 125. From this perspective, see also Allen Frances, Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-​of-​Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-​5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life (New York: William Morrow, 2013).

148  Victims. Perceptions of Harm an event of that sort was necessarily ill. Besides, not every condition was a psychological disorder. The critics therefore saw an additional problem arising from the growing tendency to label conditions PTSD: People who had endured terrible experiences had to show how “sick” they were in order to receive help. In other words, for outside observers, a condition was only “real” and deserving of attention and support if they were convinced the victim was truly traumatized.122 There is no doubt that these critics were calling attention to serious problems that continue to be reflected in more recent debates among psychiatrists and psychologists, although their ideas have become more complex. The creeping expansion of psychological and psychiatric concepts123 like trauma is now so blatant, and so clearly linked to changed understandings of what “normal” behavior toward trauma looks like, that some psychologists and psychiatrists have asked whether their discipline played any role in this process at all.124 Were the expansion of the concept of trauma and its increasing use really the fault of medical reasoning in the narrow sense? Or could it be said that this “creeping expansion” was not the work of psychologists and psychiatrists alone? Was it not instead part of a comprehensive cultural process, taking place mainly in Western industrial societies, in which ideas of vulnerability, suffering, and the extent to which suffering seems reasnoable have changed?125 Perhaps the philosopher of science Ian Hacking was correct in noting, in the 1990s, that classifications in the human sciences can have an effect on how people perceive themselves and their behavior, and that it is precisely this appropriation that leads, in turn, to the further modification of these classifications.126 It will take some time to find satisfactory answers to these questions.127 Unlike the story of PTSD’s origins, the reasons for the expansion of the concept cannot at present be determined analytically. It is still very difficult even to decipher which actors influenced the decision-​making process that has led, since 1980, to four

122 See Kutchins and Kirk, Crazy, 125. 123 Psychiatrists and psychologists speak of “concept creep.” 124 See the debate in the magazine Psychological Inquiry 27 (2016), especially the piece by Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Psychological Inquiry 27, no. 1 (2016): 1–​17. Haslam refers not only to the concept of trauma. He writes that the issue is a general phenomenon that affects a whole range of psychological concepts, including “mental disorder,” “abuse,” “addiction,” “bullying,” and “prejudice.” See also Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 125 The debate here has primarily involved sociological analyses. See especially Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Anxious Age (London: Routledge, 2004); Frank Furedi, The Culture of Fear Revisited: Risk-​Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation (London: Continuum, 2006). 126 See Haslam, “Concept Creep”; Ian Hacking, Menschenarten: The Looping Effect of Human Kinds (Zurich: Sphères, 2012). 127 See also the arguments in Richard J. McNally, “Is PTSD a Transhistorical Phenomenon?,” in Culture and PTSD: Trauma in Global and Historical Perspective, edited by Devon E. Hinton and Byron J. Good (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 117–​134. The question whether PTSD is a super-​historical phenomenon is somewhat different from the problems addressed here; nevertheless, in his text, McNally quite pointedly notes a range of problems that should be considered in an analysis of the PTSD diagnosis and its expansion.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  149 revisions of PTSD in the American classification system (and to still other versions in the WHO’s international classification system). Therefore their arguments cannot be reconstructed or contextualized. Nor can we yet analyze the significance of the ironic remark in 1995 by US psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen, in a prestigious professional journal, that PTSD is the only diagnosis that people (more precisely, one should say, people in Western industrialized nations) really want to receive.128 However, these open questions do not change the fact that the medical category of trauma has spread with remarkable speed since the 1980s. It has long since grown beyond medical research and the clinical field in the more narrow sense. Many areas have been, and are, affected by it, including insurance and pensions, most obviously, but also the very diverse fields of public health and international health policy. International aid programs in conflict and disaster zones have been guided since the 1990s by the idea that untreated psychological trauma is a cause of social and economic problems in the affected regions and also represents a national and international security risk.129 The concept of “world health policy” no longer focuses on infectious disease, as was the case until the 1980s, but on psychological disease. At the turn of the century, the member states of the European region of the WHO registered alarm and confirmed that mental health was one of the major challenges in that part of the world. A 2006 conference report declared that “of the 870 million people living in the European Region, at any one time, about 100 million people are estimated to suffer from anxiety and depression.” The fifty-​two member states felt obliged to respond, and they signed the European Mental Health Action Plan. They believed it was urgent to avoid a situation in which mental health problems might additionally burden families and harm society. Most importantly, they estimated that billions of dollars in economic harm had already been caused as a result.130 Other fields influenced by the medical category of trauma should be mentioned briefly. Asylum law is an example. Today, a diagnosed trauma can prevent deportation if psychiatric or psychotherapeutic treatment cannot be guaranteed in the country of origin.131 Social anthropologists have also shown that a diagnosis of PTSD is often viewed by officials as more reliable evidence of claimed persecution than refugee testimony.132 The situation is different for victim support utilized by 128 See Richard Rechtman, “The Rebirth of PTSD: The Rise of a New Paradigm in Psychiatry,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 39, no. 11 (2004): 913–​915, 914. 129 See, e.g. Vanessa Pupavac, “War on the Couch: The Emotionology of the New International Security Paradigm,” European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 2 (2004): 149–​170; Thomas Zimmer, Welt ohne Krankheit: Geschichte der internationalen Gesundheitspolitik 1940–​1970 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017). 130 Mental Health: Facing the Challenges, Building Solutions: Report from the WHO European Ministerial Conference (Copenhagen, 2006), https://​www.euro.who.int/​_​_​d​ata/​ass​ets/​pdf_​f​i le/​0008/​ 96452/​E87​301.pdf, accessed 22 April 2022. 131 See, e.g., Bundesweite Arbeitsgemeinschaft der psychosozialen Zentren für Flüchtlinge und Folteropfer, Begutachtung traumatisierter Flüchtlinge: Eine kritische Reflexion der Praxis (Karlsruhe: von Loeper Literaturverlag, 2006), 86, 88ff. 132 See, e.g., Didier Fassin and Estelle D’Halluin, “The Truth from the Body: Medical Certificates as Ultimate Evidence for Asylum Seekers,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 4 (2005): 597–​608. This

150  Victims. Perceptions of Harm victims of criminal acts. In that field, the medical concept of trauma has influenced treatment options for psychological conditions among crime victims. However, trauma is not a requirement for a criminal event to be recognized as real.133 Overall, this conforms to developments in the areas of victim compensation and victims’ rights in general, which have expanded in various ways since the 1980s for victims of crimes committed by both ordinary people and the state, in line with the standards of international organizations. Internationally, this process is still far from complete. Nevertheless, it is clear that experts and NGOs in the field have been able to introduce medical knowledge of trauma into international policy and norm-​creation and to redefine the requirements for dealing with victims. Without question, the expansion of victims’ rights cannot be decoupled from the human rights policies that gained momentum in the 1970s.134 But there is also reason to believe that the human rights “boom” since the 1980s has been nourished by the concept of trauma—​at least when human rights activism gains its legitimacy from a focus on the suffering resulting from violence or violation of individual rights. There has been no analysis of this relationship thus far, but a flood of texts since the end of the twentieth century have linked the concepts of trauma, human rights, and victimhood. A good example was the 1999 “Handbook on Justice for Victims,” produced as a handout by the United Nations to strengthen international awareness of the principles contained in the 1985 resolution on aid to crime victims. As presented in the Handbook, programs for victim assistance no longer aimed only to support people who had been harmed by “normal” violations of criminal law; human rights violations were now also prominently considered. An entire chapter, a central part of the book, was devoted to psychological harm, explaining the importance of PTSD as well as the dangers to the individual and society if trauma went untreated. Catch phrases such as “secondary victimization” were employed to draw attention to the additional harm caused when individuals and institutions did not respond properly to victims, for example by not recognizing them as victims or failing to consider their emotional trauma. Lawyers, police, social workers, and educators who dealt with crimes therefore needed to be trained, if possible, or at least provided with relevant informational materials. The Handbook presented techniques for

does not mean, however, that the justice system and administrators actually accept diagnosed PTSD as a given, as Tobias Kelly has elaborated. See Tobias Kelly, “Recognizing Torture: Credibility and the Unstable Codification of Victimhood,” in Histories of Victimhood, edited by Steffen Jensen and Henrik Ronsbo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 144–​160. 133 See, e.g., Gesundheitspolitische Forderungen zur psychotherapeutischen Versorgung von Kriminalitätsopfern, November 2016, http://​weis​ser-​ring.de/​exper​ten/​medi​zin-​psyc​holo​gie, accessed 22 June 2017. 134 See, e.g., Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jan Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten: Menschenrechte in der internationalen Politik seit den 1940ern (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  151 crisis intervention and language to ensure that victims felt their victimhood was recognized (such as the sentence “It isn’t your fault that it happened”). In its explanations of the programs, victims and trauma were always closely linked. Handbooks like this one essentially suggested that victimization and victims could never be separated from trauma.135 It comes as no surprise that comparable approaches have been found since the turn of the century in UN materials recommending instruments states can use to address serious violations of human rights by prior regimes after political transformations.136 In the 1990s, there was even an expectation that tools for dealing with the past, like the truth commissions created in some forty-​three countries over the last thirty years,137 could have a therapeutic effect. The most prominent example is South Africa. From April 1996 to December 1997, its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) allowed more than 21,000 people to recount their experiences and sufferings under the apartheid regime. To do so, they were required to categorize themselves as either “victims” or “perpetrators.”138 The central idea was to bring out the individual truth of human rights violations,139 in order to set a twofold healing process in motion: individual wounds would be healed and national reconciliation would become possible.140 The Commission’s chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, made this connection clear in his famous address at the opening of the hearings, in which the moral appeal to each person to take up the task was unmistakable. “We are meant to be a part of the process of the healing of our nation, of our people, all of us, since every South African has to some extent or other been traumatized. We are a wounded people . . . We all stand in

135 United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, Handbook on Justice for Victims: On the Use and Application of the Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power (New York, 1999), https://​www.unodc.org/​pdf/​crimi​nal_​just​ice/​UNODC_​Hand​ book​_​on_​Just​ice_​for_​vict​ims.pdf, accessed 23 January 2022, quote at 24. 136 However, the international spread of such instruments should not be ascribed merely to supranational organizations like the United Nations. The models are disseminated in a complex, cross-​ border process of integration involving, inter alia, national governments, NGOs, media, and perpetrator and victim groups, as Stephan Scheuzger has shown. See Stephan Scheuzger, “Wahrheitskommissionen, transnationale Expertennetzwerke und nationale Geschichte,” in Vielstimmige Vergangenheiten: Geschichtspolitik in Lateinamerika, edited by Berthold Molden and David Mayer (Vienna: Lit, 2009), 215–​238, 217. 137 Anne K. Krüger, Wahrheitskommissionen: Die globale Verbreitung eines kulturellen Modells (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2014), 13. 138 Perpetrators who made a convincing case that the crimes were politically motivated, and whose testimony contributed to elucidating the crimes, could receive amnesty in this way. However, their testimony was investigated. The South African Commission received 7,000 applications for amnesty from perpetrators; by 2001, 5,287 of them had been rejected. The overwhelming majority of witness testimony came from victims. See Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 139 Gesine Krüger, “Wahrheit—​Erzählen: Zur Arbeit der Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Südafrika,” Werkstatt Geschichte 26 (2000): 5–​21. 140 See, e.g., Claire Moon, “Healing Past Violence: Traumatic Assumptions and Therapeutic Interventions in War and Reconciliation,” Journal of Human Rights 8, no. 1 (2009): 71–​91. In this case, Christian expectations of reconciliation combined with psychotherapeutic beliefs.

152  Victims. Perceptions of Harm need of healing.”141 This message was broadcast throughout the media many times. A poster from the TRC inviting people to attend the public hearings, for example, proclaimed “Revealing is Healing.”142 Another conceded that truth could hurt, but warned that silence could kill.143 Regardless of variations, the promise was always the same: truth is the path to reconciliation. Only by telling the story of the past is it possible to take that path (see Figure 5.1).144 It has been evident for years that these expectations were exaggerated. Social “reconciliation” has not been achieved to the extent many had hoped. Skeptics had predicted this in South Africa from the beginning.145 Some structures and power relations from the apartheid period continue to function to this day. It is an open question, to be left to others to discuss, whether the South African TRC made decisions that fostered this situation.146 It is, however, clear that talking about the rights violations they suffered had very varied effects on those who spoke their truths. For some, it was a relief. Others could not handle the Commission’s questions or could not tell their own stories because they had no words for the atrocities done to them or to others. Still others broke down psychologically after talking about torture, rape, abduction, and murder. For some, it was their first massive psychological breakdown; many required psychological treatment as a result.147 Based on the number of people treated at the Trauma Centre for Victims of Violence and Torture in Cape Town, psychologists there estimated that approximately 50 to 60 percent of all witnesses who gave testimony to the Commission subsequently experienced significant psychological symptoms or regretted taking part in the hearings.148 141 Cited in Wilson, Politics of Truth, 14. 142 Fiona C. Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 79. 143 Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Unit, “The Truth Hurts, But Silence Kills,” official poster from the Truth and Reconciliations Commission, in: Saha. Archive for Justice, collection item AL2446_​4834 (South African History Archive, Johannesburg). 144 Ibid. Another poster urged, “Let’s speak out to each other. By telling the truth. By telling our stories of the past, so that we can walk the road to reconciliation together.” 145 See, e.g., Rita Kesselring, Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-​Apartheid South Africa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Berber Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-​Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (New York: Routledge, 2012), 46ff. 146 See, e.g., Elin Skaar and Camila Gianella Malca, “Transitional Justice Alternatives: Claims and Counterclaims,” in After Violence: Transitional Justice, Peace, and Democracy, edited by Elin Skaar, Trine Eide, and Camila Gianella Malca (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1–​28; Paul Gready, The Era of Transitional Justice: The Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2011); Hugo van der Merwe and Audrey R. Chapman (eds.), Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Lyn S. Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model? (London: Rienner, 2002); Wilmot G. James and Linda von de Vijver (eds.), After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000). See also Alex Boraine’s comprehensive critical reflection on South Africa’s recent history: Alex Boraine, What’s Gone Wrong? South Africa on the Brink of Failed Statehood (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 147 See, e.g., Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York: Routledge, 2011), 152ff. 148 Ibid., 155; Ross, Bearing Witness.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  153

Figure 5.1  Official poster of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissiona Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Unit, in SAHA. Archive for Justice, Collection Item AL2446_​4834.

154  Victims. Perceptions of Harm The TRC had in fact reckoned with the possibility that witnesses would experience psychological breakdowns. Psychiatry had not been spared the effects of segregation,149 yet South African human rights organizations and many doctors who had organized medical aid for former prisoners since the mid-​1980s were fully aware of the psychological effects of torture and arbitrary arrest.150 The experiences of other countries that had established truth commissions, such as Argentina and Chile, were also available. South Africa had therefore taken steps leading up to the hearings to take account of the difficult psychological situation—​even more so, it seems, than other countries that were setting up such commissions at the time.151 These steps included forming a team of trauma therapists who explained to members of the Commission the symptoms of PTSD and how the commissioners could respond if they observed symptoms in victims or in themselves. Techniques for questioning were practiced. People who were there to support those giving testimony were also prepared to deal sensitively with the witnesses and were given at least rudimentary training in crisis management. Overall, an effort was made to create a system that improved the options for psychosocial assistance, even in rural areas where no resources were available for psychological treatment.152 As the Commission admitted in 1998 in its five-​volume final report, all these precautions were insufficient to provide the psychologically trained support necessary at the public hearings, which continued for 244 days. It was appropriate that the final report’s conclusion regarding the healing power of storytelling took a more restrained tone, acknowledging that “not all storytelling heals.”153 Nevertheless, the Commission did not ultimately abandon the thesis of the healing potential of storytelling and compiled examples of it in the report. These included a woman who spoke for the first time at the hearing about being raped by young men, and a man who said that what had made him sick the entire time was the fact that he could not tell his story. He said he felt now as though he had regained his sight, which he had lost when police shot him in the face in the mid-​1980s. They had also tortured him, despite his blindness.154 Upon completion of its work, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission received a great deal of recognition from the international 149 See, e.g., Tiffany Fawn Jones, Psychiatry, Mental Institutions, and the Mad in Apartheid South Africa (New York: Routledge, 2012); Laurel Baldwin-​Ragaven, Jeanelle de Gruchy, and Leslie London, An Ambulance of the Wrong Colour: Health Professionals, Human Rights and Ethics in South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1999). 150 See, e.g., Mar Rayner, “From Biko to Wendy Orr: The Problem of Medical Accountability in Contexts of Political Violence and Torture,” in Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa, edited by N. Chabani Manganyi and Andre du Toit (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 172–​204, 194; E. O. Nightingale, K. Hannibal, H. J. Geiger et al., “Apartheid Medicine: Health and Human Rights in South Africa,” JAMA 264, no. 16 (1990): 2097–​2102. 151 See Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 155ff. 152 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Report (1998), vol. 1, 289ff. 153 Ibid., vol. 5, 351. 154 Ibid., vol. 5, 351f.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  155 community. A main reason was that it heard testimony from thousands of victims, thus including them in the process of addressing politically motivated crime. Within South Africa, in contrast, criticism soon arose from the ranks of victims who had testified before the Commission. Many complained that, after finally bringing themselves to tell their stories, they were again left alone with their suffering. There was concrete evidence of this: the government showed no willingness to follow the Commission’s recommendation that reparations be paid for six years to officially recognized victims.155 This criticism was not muted by the fact that the government bowed in 2003 to national and international pressure, to the extent of giving each victim a one-​ time payment of approximately $3,900. On the contrary, various organizations that considered themselves advocates for victims and survivors of the apartheid regime called the Commission’s very definition of victims into question. They argued that it was too narrow and failed to officially recognize many people who were in fact victims of the apartheid regime—​meaning they had no claim to reparations. Indeed, the TRC had agreed before the hearings to include in the category of “victim” only those who had suffered gross violations of human rights (their family members also counted as victims).156 The Commission also narrowed its definition of “gross violations of human rights,” which had an additional effect in determining who would officially be considered victims. It included only people who had suffered “murder, abduction, torture or severe ill treatment”;157 forced resettlement and detention without trial were not included, let alone numerous other forms of structural violence and humiliation that constituted the apartheid system.158 As illustrated by the South African situation, by the last quarter of the twentieth century, the phenomenon of diverging and politically and morally controversial ascriptions of victimhood that had been in the making in Europe since World War I had spread to the Global South. This was joined by expectations of government aid for victims of crime, which had by then risen to the level of an international norm. In addition, references to the trauma concept played a significant role in South Africa. The term appeared many times in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report; the Commission left no doubt that violence against non-​whites had led to grave psychological harm in many of its victims.159 The 155 The proposal was to pay compensation of around 2,800 to 3,500 US dollars to every officially recognized victim for six years. See Wilson, Politics of Truth, 22. 156 Penelope Andrews, “Reparations for Apartheid’s Victims: The Path to Reconciliation?,” DePaul Law Review 53 (2004): 1155–​1180. 157 Anon, “South Africa: Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34 of 1995, 25. 7. 1995,” in The Handbook of Reparations, edited by Pablo de Greiff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 770–​778, 772. 158 See Rebecca Saunders, “Lost in Translation: Expressions of Human Suffering, the Language of Human Rights, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” SUR –​International Journal of Human Rights 5, no. 9 (2008): 51–​69, 59. 159 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vol. 5, 130ff.

156  Victims. Perceptions of Harm Commission noted that soldiers in the South African Defense Force were often affected as well. Psychologists were quoted as saying that these soldiers had had to fight in border regions under conditions that made PTSD quite probable.160 Young conscripts who participated in violence and oppression in the townships also showed such symptoms.161 The report included excerpts from the testimonies of former soldiers and their families to back up these statements. They included the following passage from a letter written to Desmond Tutu by a mother. She wrote that her son—​a former soldier in the South African military—​had been “normal” before, but had never gotten over the “horror of the war” and had became an aggressive alcoholic. “I hate the government for turning my son into a zombie,” she wrote.162 The trauma concept proved, in a sense, that even white soldiers could become victims of the apartheid regime. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s aim of submitting a final report that was balanced, with an eye to nation-​building, could easily find support, given the most recent trauma research. But the same is no less true of the massive criticism of the government by groups such as the Khulumani Support Group, which complained that the state was making no effort to create a comprehensive restitution program for victims of apartheid. Khulumani, which had over one hundred thousand members in 2022, according to its own figures, and considers itself a lobby group for victims and survivors of human rights violations by the apartheid regime, has insisted for years that many people only began to feel the health effects of mistreatment, especially the psychological effects, long after the TRC ended.163 For this reason, in 2021 the organization urged the government to stop arbitrarily excluding many actual apartheid victims from the list of officially recognized victims and demanded that South Africa finally adhere to international victims’ rights standards. They argued that many severely traumatized people had to be given the opportunity to make reparations claims.164 The crucial point is that 160 Ibid., vol. 4, 239. 161 Ibid., vol. 4, 273. 162 Ibid., vol. 4, 240f. 163 Khulumani Support Group, https://​khulum​ani.net/​about-​us/​, accessed 18 November 2022; Khulumani Support Group, “Building the Future Together: Khulumani Reparations Policy Proposals: Submitted to Government on 29 October 2003,” in Reparations Policy Proposals, edited by Khulumani Support Group (Johannesburg, 2017). See also Oupa Makhalemele, “Still not Talking: The South African Government’s Exclusive Reparations Policy and the Impact of the R30,000 Financial Reparations on Survivors,” in Reparations for Victims of Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, edited by Carla Ferstman, Mariana Goetz, and Alan Stephens (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 541–​566; Tshepo Madlingozi, “Good Victim, Bad Victim: Apartheid’s Beneficiaries, Victims, and the Struggle for Social Justice,” in Law, Memory, and the Legacy of Apartheid, edited by Wessel le Roux and Karin van Marle (Cape Town: Pretoria University Law Press, 2007), 107–​126. 164 See Masego Mafata, “Survivors of Apartheid Violations Sleep Outside Constitutional Court,” in: GroundUp, 27.1.2021, https://​www.groun​dup.org.za/​arti​cle/​surviv​ors-​aparth​eid-​human-​rig​ hts-​vio​lati​ons-​sleep-​outs​ide-​con​stit​utio​nal-​court/​, accessed 18 November 2022; Chad Williams, “Khulumani Support Group Begs Government to Honor Recommendations Made by TRC,” IOL, 21 October 2021, https://​www.iol.co.za/​news/​polit​ics/​watch-​khulum​ani-​supp​ort-​group-​begs-​gov​ernm​ ent-​to-​hon​our-​reco​mmen​dati​ons-​made-​by-​trc-​d4a88​761-​ce10-​4685-​87bb-​fdc8f​6460​f15, accessed 18 November 2022.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  157 this must apply to everyone who suffered from everyday violence and discrimination. It is clear that Khulumani thus has, and advocates, a very different perspective on the politics of memory in regard to apartheid than others who see victims only when “gross violations of human rights” were committed by a minority of white people.165 It is symptomatic of the early twenty-​first century that it is still not entirely clear whom society accepts as a victim. The concept of trauma has not changed this, though it has created new assumptions about human vulnerability in many parts of the world. On the one hand, ascriptions of victimhood have multiplied as a result. At the same time, however, a type of “truth regime” has developed that tends to view psychological harm as legitimate only if it involves diagnosed trauma, or if such trauma is considered plausible. This is true in the private sphere, but most certainly also in the political arena. The concept of trauma has thus led to new insights into the psychological effects of violence and produced new ways of speaking about the experience of violence; but it has also contributed to forcing other narratives about violence and suffering into the private sphere, if not blocking them entirely. The social anthropologist Rita Kesselring demonstrated this impressively in a study several years ago, using the example of Brian Mphahlele of South Africa.166 Mphahlele was tortured by security forces under apartheid, which permanently disfigured the left side of his face. He also suffers from insomnia and depression, his memory is damaged, and police and soldiers cause him to feel uncontrollable rage. The trauma center in Cape Town has diagnosed him with PTSD. Mphahlele is familiar with medical discourse, and when speaking about himself with others in certain situations, he resorts to medical interpretations; he knows, as Rita Kesselring has explained, “that it is this terminology through which victimhood is understood.” At the same time, medical terminology allows one to avoid having to describe in detail the events involved, or one’s reaction to them.167 In her discussions with Mphahlele, Kesselring also discovered that his medical classification only partially encompassed his sense of victimhood. From his point of view, it can be taken as a starting point, but neither comprehends nor explains his state of health. His entire identity is more complex. Mphahlele is not only traumatized; he does not see himself only as a victim. It still matters to him that he was once part of the rebellious youth and was sent to jail for it, and that he is a human rights activist, a member of the Pan Africanist Congress, a loner—​and a victim, which he simultaneously describes as a survivor.168

165 See Madlingozi, “Good Victim.” 166 For details, see Kesselring, Bodies of Truth, 100ff. 167 Ibid., quote at 100; Christopher C. Colvin, Traumatic Storytelling and Memory in Post-​Apartheid South Africa: Performing Signs of Injury (London: Routledge, 2018), 61f. 168 Ibid., 100.

158  Victims. Perceptions of Harm The psychologist Ashraf Kagee, professor at the University of Stellenbosch, encountered similar narratives in his research. This is rather surprising in the context of psychological studies dealing with the emergence of PTSD following human rights violations. His unexpected results were due to the research methods he employed. Epidemiological and clinical studies are generally based on standardized interviews that specifically ask for the criteria for the diagnosis and its symptoms. Because Kagee was skeptical of the process, he took a different approach, holding non-​structured interviews with survivors of imprisonment, mistreatment, and torture in which none of the subjects were aware that they were taking part in a medical study. Kagee also came to the conclusion that traumatization existed among former prisoners. However, he argued that PTSD was much less common than often claimed. He did not deny that former prisoners had experienced terrible things or that this experience continued to affect their lives; but he rejected the assumption that psychological disorders among people mistreated during the apartheid regime could be blamed solely on past violent events. He saw something else in their narratives. Former anti-​apartheid fighters did talk about psychological pain, but they rarely blamed it on physical abuse during detention. Instead, their problems were associated more with their current conditions of life. Almost all former prisoners spoke about material hardship as their main problem. Kagee added that they showed extreme dissatisfaction with the political situation, saying that the government was doing nothing to improve their lives.169 Kagee concluded that the cause of former prisoners’ difficulties lay overwhelmingly in the present and much less frequently in the past, and therefore an event-​ related diagnosis of PTSD was inappropriate. He was convinced that this diagnosis even risked pathologizing and victimizing the survivors.170 According to Kagee, former prisoners and torture victims not only described themselves differently than other trauma studies claimed, but also ascribed different significance to their suffering during the apartheid period. As Kagee explains, they did not see themselves exclusively as victims of apartheid. For the subjects, the most important thing was the sacrifices they had made for democracy. It was these active sacrifices that they wanted to see recognized through changes in policy, including financial assistance. The appropriateness of the diagnosis is not the issue here. The crucial point is that Ashraf Kagee’s study calls attention to an important problem with continuing relevance: Psychological problems diagnosed as PTSD almost automatically refer to past events. The concept of trauma has so far rarely been applied to more subtle

169 Ashraf Kagee, “Present Concerns of Survivors of Human Rights Violations in South Africa,” Social Science & Medicine 59, no. 3 (2004): 625–​635, 628. 170 Ashraf Kagee and Anthony V. Naidoo, “Reconceptualizing the Sequelae of Political Torture: Limitations of a Psychiatric Paradigm,” Transcultural Psychiatry 41, no. 1 (2004): 46–​61, 48.

Trauma and Morality (1945–2015)  159 forms of violence or structural violence that have been part of everyday life and may even continue into the present.171 Extreme poverty is still not considered a cause of trauma. Everyday racism has in fact begun to be recognized as such a cause, but this recognition cannot be taken for granted.172 This is true not only in South Africa, but in many other countries around the world. In the United States, racial segregation, which did not officially end until 1964, has only recently begun to be discussed as a potential trauma for African Americans. The concept of trauma thus has an effect on which experiences of violence are acknowledged and can be expressed. It has ambivalent effects on the possibility of articulating psychological suffering. On the one hand, a whole range of violent experiences cannot be spoken of using the language of trauma. On the other hand, for certain experiences, the concept of trauma offers a recognized way of expressing one’s pain. Quite powerful interpretive contexts may be produced in this way—​but only if personal experience can be articulated in this specific form. The same is true of the figure of the victim. One need not look to South Africa to observe this; we can see it in Europe, where the concept has increasingly become a shorthand for the experience of injustice. Since the 1980s it has even moved to the center of social and political debates regarding legitimate and illegitimate behavior. At the same time, the figure of the victim has become a discursive starting point for claiming or defending civil and human rights. Here the basic pattern described above is visible: Ascriptions of victimhood make it possible to address violations of rights, but they also require adjusting and limiting stories of violence and life histories to the figure of the victim. This causes other narratives and aspects of life to disappear, as can be seen in many different cases, such as the case of NGOs engaged in humanitarian aid. They have succeeded in calling attention to urgent situations in war and crisis zones by defining those affected as victims. At the same time, their media campaigns have to a great extent caused large parts of the Global South, especially Africa, to be seen only as places of war and crisis—​and the people who live there almost solely as helpless victims.173 On the other hand, reparations for Eastern Europeans deported for forced labor by the Nazis, which began to be paid in the mid-​1990s, for the first time introduced a positive connotation to ascriptions of victimhood in regard to forced labor. In the Soviet Union, these workers had been suspected of collaboration; only the active “fighter” was seen as a legitimate subject position for survivors of World War II at the time. The application 171 For a brief critical discussion of the diagnosis with other examples, see Andreas Maercker, Trauma und Traumafolgestörungen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2017), 77ff.; see also Christopher J. Colvin, “Trauma,” in New South African Keywords, edited by Nick Shepherd and Steven Robins (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 223–​234, 229. 172 See also Anon., “Testing the DSM Model in South Africa: An Interview with Ashraf Kagee,” in Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, edited by Ewald Mengel et al. (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2010), 127–​136. See also Colvin, “Trauma.” 173 See Aubrey Graham, “One Hundred Years of Suffering? ‘Humanitarian Crisis Photography’ and Self-​Representation in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Social Dynamics 40, no. 1 (2014): 140–​163.

160  Victims. Perceptions of Harm process that the aging former forced laborers had to navigate was therefore complicated. Reparations processes permit those who have suffered harm no option but to tailor their complex life stories to the limiting demands, categories, and therefore implied judgments of these processes.174 This is reflected in public discourse and political negotiations. The logic of the Western reparations discourse makes it essential to describe oneself as a victim, and only as a victim, when making reparations claims.175 This process can now be observed around the world. Finally, our view of the past has not been unaffected by these developments. Since the 1970s, the notion of the victim has been used far more frequently than in the past when speaking of suffering in historical and autobiographical accounts. Since the turn of the century, this has also been true of the concept of trauma, which is now applied to entire collectives. In the case of the Soviet Union, for example, we read that, by the end of World War II, pretty much the entire nation was traumatized by the experience of war.176 It is said today that the harkis, the Algerian auxiliaries to the French army, were traumatized by the violence in the Algerian war of independence. And in Switzerland, indentured child laborers (so-​ called Verdingkinder), who were boarded with peasant families and in institutions by the welfare authorities until well into the 1970s, are said to be traumatized. The media says that “they suffer like war veterans.”177 This language certainly indicates that people today are willing to recognize these forms of violence as unjust and as a reason for ongoing problems. This does not mean, however, that we have gained insight into people’s feelings, behavior, and psychological conditions at the time the events occurred. Anyone projecting the concept of trauma backward into the past is taking a tempting shortcut that simplifies that past and blocks more complex history.

174 Julia Landau, “ ‘Es ist unzulässig, dass die Worte der Entschuldigung nur an den Grabsteinen erklingen’: Zwangsarbeiterentschädigung in der Ukraine und der Republik Moldau,” in Die Entschädigung von NS-​ Zwangsarbeit am Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts: Die Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft” und ihre Partnerorganisationen, edited by Constantin Goschler (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012), 7–​103, 40–​45. 175 See Luke Moffett, “Reparations for ‘Guilty Victims’: Navigating Complex Identities of Victim-​ Perpetrators in Reparation Mechanisms,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 10, no. 1 (2016): 146–​167. 176 Anna Krylova, “ ‘Healers of Wounded Souls’: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944–​ 1946,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 2 (2001): 307–​331, 309. 177 “Sie leiden wie Kriegsveteranen,” Tagesanzeiger, 21 April 2015.

6

Conclusion A historical overview of two centuries shows that the rise of the figure of the victim of war and violence is a recent phenomenon. Until the mid-​nineteenth century, calling oneself or someone else a victim was the exception in Europe. The fact that this gradually changed in the subsequent 150 years, first in regard to the dead and much later for the living, is the result of a shift in perceptions, the complex history of which has been outlined in this book. One of the starting points for this change was the establishment of processes for registering and identifying dead soldiers, though this did not yet mean these soldiers were viewed as victims of war. The one exception in the last third of the nineteenth century was soldiers who died of diseases that would have been avoidable with better hygienic conditions, proper equipment, and sufficient food. Calling soldiers “victims,” in this case, meant holding the state responsible for their deaths. This was a form of criticism—​a use of the term that would later appear with increasing frequency in both military and civilian contexts. Those who raised claims against the state did not necessarily take the position of passive victim, however; for a long time, it was active sacrifice that legitimized demands made upon the state. This was well illustrated during and after World War I, when Social Democrats demanded full political rights for the working class because of the material and physical sacrifices they had made during the war. Disabled veterans, too, in calling for a right to symbolic and material compensation, regularly referred—​across all political parties (except the communists)—​to the sacrifices they had made for the nation. Active sacrifice was not only demanded by the nation out of solidarity with the community; it was also a strong moral position and a justification for demands on the state. Nonetheless, the trend toward ascribing victimhood to oneself or others who had suffered violence increased immensely during the twentieth century. There were two main reasons for this. The popularization of the concept of the victim was, first of all, linked to distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence; in the course of efforts to “civilize” war beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, this distinction led to new legal concepts and international legal norms. This is the context in which the concept of the civilian entitled to unconditional protection arose, as an internationally recognized idea, alongside legal categories such as “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” Speaking of victims became common in public and political usage, and the victim became a signifier of illegitimate violence. The concept is used to this day, by those on many different Victims. Svenja Goltermann, Oxford University Press. © Svenja Goltermann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192897725.003.0006

162  Victims. Perceptions of Harm sides, in regard to state violence and war when demands are made for criminal prosecution of such acts. In the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, this usage has been employed in a wide variety of contexts, from counter-​violence and revenge (committed by civilians as well as soldiers) to national and international prosecution and humanitarian intervention; the latter has gained political and moral legitimacy since the turn of the century, in face of massive crimes against international law and human rights, with the concept of the “responsibility to protect.” In addition, the instrument of compensation has played, and continues to play, a central role in the ascription of victimhood. Aside from reparations for Nazi crimes, in the last third of the twentieth century compensation measures were first adopted, though slowly, for ordinary crimes. The right to compensation for crimes, including state crimes, became an international norm in the mid-​1980s. But this was only one of many provisions aimed at strengthening the position of crime victims. Defining people or groups as victims has become a basis for compensation claims that now go beyond the realm of criminal sanctions. Reparations claims by the Herero against the German government are just one example. A second factor crucial to the increase in, and pluralization of, ascriptions of victimhood was the emergence of a new concept of trauma, which recognized situations of extreme stress even without physical harm as the cause of long-​term or late-​emerging psychological disorders. The first arguments of this type appeared in various Western European countries beginning in the 1950s; they were basically still applied to specific groups, especially former victims of Nazism. Once the diagnosis of PTSD gained acceptance beginning in 1980, however, the number of people potentially affected by it grew considerably. The reasons for this were, first of all, that this special etiology of psychological pain changed our understanding of violence and its possible effects on people’s lives. Second, the new concept of trauma for the first time made it possible for individuals suffering psychologically following violent events or situations of extreme stress to take the position of innocent victim. Finally, the PTSD diagnosis was a watershed because psychological disorders were no longer blamed on “heredity” or “personality,” but explained solely with regard to external events. In contrast to the medical and social approaches to psychological disorders that had prevailed in Europe until well into the twentieth century, this was a positive development. There are therefore very good reasons for the increase in ascriptions of victimhood. However, more recently this ascription has not always been considered unproblematic. While the women’s movement began using the term “victim” in the 1970s to call attention to the crime of sexual violence, for example, many rejected this label, not wanting to be defined by weakness and passivity. Some in the feminist movement warned early on more generally against allowing victimhood to become a type of identity. Critiques were also formulated from a post-​colonial perspective: describing people in the Global South, especially in crisis areas, as victims attributed to them a position of weakness and neediness—​especially when this

Conclusion  163 generalizing definition came from the Global North. In fact, this reflects a more basic problem: Characterizing others as victims can be presumptuous and linked to inappropriate expectations of particular behavior. It is not only people who call themselves victims who can achieve a powerful position as a result. Those who identify others as victims may also be exerting power. These problems are given only peripheral consideration, at most, in the current popular and media debate about ascriptions of victimhood. More common is the suspicion that many people label themselves as victims only in order to call attention to themselves and their hardships, immunize themselves to criticism, and blame others for their own difficulties. It cannot be denied that such cases exist, and they cannot be avoided. However, there is no evidence for the claim that this is a widespread phenomenon. In fact, the idea that people inflate their status as victims may seem plausible only because it has been repeated so frequently by the mass media. Since the end of the twentieth century, however, there is much to indicate that reactions to extreme stress, and the interpretation of those reactions, have become more flexible than is implied by the claim that “everyone” now calls themselves a victim. Many different groups of people impacted by violence do not claim to be “only” victims. Instead, they prefer the term “survivor,” which is no longer reserved only for Holocaust survivors. In the United States, this process began in the 1980s. By the turn of the century, it was so far advanced that political scientist Alyson Cole wrote pointedly in 2007 that few people still called themselves victims; instead, there were now “legions of ‘survivors.’ ” She pointed out that social workers had already recommended changing the names of victims’ assistance organizations, such as those for battered women, to “survivors’ agencies,” and that this new terminology was “less passive, negative, and disempowering.”1 The same development can now be observed in German-​speaking European countries. The word “victim” has not been abandoned, but the terms “torture survivors,” “survivors of sexual violence,” “incest survivors,” and “survivors of domestic violence” are also used. In psychiatry and psychology, too, significant shifts have occurred since the turn of the century. In 2006, psychologists Tanja Zoellner and Andreas Maercker were already describing a new field of research concerned with the phenomenon of “posttraumatic growth.” A growing number of recent studies, they explained, indicated that “many trauma survivors also experience positive psychological changes after trauma.”2 Some used trauma “as an opportunity for further individual development.” Others simply recovered from trauma and, after a phase of emotional

1 See Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 2f., quote at 3. 2 Tanja Zoellner and Andreas Maercker, “Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Psychology: A Critical Review and Introduction of a Two Component Model,” Clinical Psychology Review 26, no. 5 (2006): 626–​ 653, 627f., quote at 628.

164  Victims. Perceptions of Harm stress, functioned as they had before—​which, the authors emphasized, should not be taken as a personal failure.3 While the concept of “posttraumatic growth” started with the observation that it is possible for some people to react actively to PTSD, psychiatrists who speak of “resilience,” in the sense of psychological strength, concentrate on a very different point. George Bonanno, for example, an American whose theories have also gained widespread media attention in Europe, claims that most people living in New York did not have PTSD after 9/​11. Even among those most affected by the event, one-​ third developed no disorder of this sort; Bonanno called them “resilient.”4 It is this “resilience” that has led a growing number of psychiatrists and psychologists since the turn of the century to ask why individuals can survive even the worst events unscathed. To this question, which is not new, they initially gave an answer that was common until the 1980s: it was a result of “personality.” Now, the dominant approach emphasizes that “resilience” can be learned. Researchers currently point out that this does not mean people can be conditioned to exhibit resilient behavior. They even insist that it is still fundamentally unclear why some individuals are more resilient than others. Only in crisis situations, these scholars emphasize, does it become apparent how individuals really react to stress.5 Nevertheless, in a great variety of areas, “resilience” has become a key concept; it even seems to promise comprehensive problem solving, as shown by the rapid growth in advice literature, the market for psychological training courses, and the thematization of “resilience” in the mass media. Such information and guidance on individual stress and crisis management, along with their dissemination in the mass media, produce expectations of behavior for individuals that deprive them of the opportunity to call themselves victims. Any type of complaint about one’s own situation, any inability to deal with impositions, is considered an expression of victimhood, which is completely delegitimized by resilience discourse. The unanimous credo of all these views is, “Abandon the victim role!” and “Don’t make yourself a victim!”6 This development can be seen in many different contexts, which include the military as well as civilian sectors.7 The United States in particular, but also European 3 See ibid., 628 (the quote is here) and 650. 4 See George A. Bonanno, Anthony D. Mancini, Jaime L. Horton et al., “Trajectories of Trauma Symptoms and Resilience in Deployed US Military Service Members: Prospective Cohort Study,” British Journal of Psychiatry 200, no. 4 (2012): 317–​323. 5 See, e.g., Peter Hofer, Krisenbewältigung und Ressourcenentwicklung: Kritische Lebenserfahrungen und ihr Beitrag zur Entwicklung von Persönlichkeit (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016), 52ff.; George A. Bonanno and Charles L. Burton, “Regulatory Flexibility: An Individual Differences Perspective on Coping and Emotion Regulation,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 8, no. 6 (2013): 591–​612. 6 See, e.g., Wolfgang Bilinski, Resilienz: Krisen erfolgreich meistern und nutzen (Freiburg: Haufe-​ Lexware, 2016); Monika Gruhl, Resilienz –​die Strategie der Stehauf-​Menschen: Krisen meistern mit innerer Widerstandskraft, Taschenbuchausgabe (Freiburg: Herder, 2014). 7 See, e.g., the pieces from various disciplines in: Medico International e.V. (ed.), Fit für die Katastrophe? Kritische Anmerkungen zum Resilienzdiskurs im aktuellen Krisenmanagement (Gießen: Psychosozial-​ Verlag, 2017), and Jan Slaby, “Kritik der Resilienz,” in Was ist Haltung?

Conclusion  165 countries, have been investing for some years in programs that train their soldiers to be resilient and guide them on how to experience and handle traumatic events. Resilience training is geared toward preventing PTSD. As political scientist Alison Howell points out, soldiers are thus made “responsible for their own mental well-​ being.” These programs require that “in the face of traumatic events in warfare, soldiers think positively, stop catastrophizing, or avoid negative thinking traps in order to seize an opportunity for personal growth.”8 More current in German-​language media are demands to increase resilience in both private crises and stress at work. This requires “optimism, acceptance, solution-​orientation, and the ability not to see oneself as a victim and to plan for the future.”9 Particularly given the demands of the “modern working world,” in the form of short-​term contracts or threatened layoffs, resilience training can help, one reads, “to take advantage of opportunities instead of merely withdrawing into the role of victim.”10 This apparently self-​evident response to life’s adversity has already become so common that in 2017 the Börsenblatt des deutschen Buchhandels recommended a broad range of guidebooks advising both employees and employers on how to strengthen their resilience. The Börsenblatt advertised a book of recommendations for parents on how to improve their children’s resilience by claiming that it is easier “if the path to a resilient life is already set in childhood.”11 The desire to develop strategies that can help people out of crises is certainly justified. It also makes sense not to lock people who have had bad experiences into a victim status with prescribed behaviors. However, it would be highly problematic if reacting “resiliently” to stress and “looking to the future” were to become the behavioral norm. We are not far from this, as suggested by the fact that the word “victim” has once again taken on negative connotations, at least when applied to living people. As was the case during much of the twentieth century, those who call themselves victims are suspected of contributing to their own misfortune, refusing to accept responsibility, and even trying to deviously obtain some kind of advantage. Conversely, this way of thinking also allows persons or groups who claim equal rights or equal pay, for example, to be accused of acting “like victims.” When accusations such as these become the rule, the demand for “resilience” becomes an

Begriffsbestimmung, Positionen, Anschlüsse, edited by Frauke Annegret Kurbacher and Philipp Wüschner (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2016), 273–​298. 8 See Alison Howell, “The Demise of PTSD: From Governing through Trauma to Governing Resilience,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37, no. 3 (2012): 214–​226, 221ff., quote at 222. 9 Sabine Hockling, “Resilienz ist in Zukunft gefragt,” Zeit, 9 November 2014. 10 Judith Hyams, “Resilienz-​Schulung: Training für die Seele,” Tagesspiegel, 25 July 2015. 11 Christiane Petersen, “Widerstandsfähig,” boersenblatt.net, 22 June 2017.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by f following the page number Ador, Gustave, 76–​77 Al Maktoum, Muhammed bin Rashid, 1–​2 Alexander, Amanda, 74, 75–​76 American Psychiatric Association, 138–​39 American Red Cross (ARC), 14–​15, 26–​ 27, 103–​4 American Relief Administration (ARA), 104 Amnesty International, 119 Andreasen, Nancy, 148–​49 Ariès, Philippe, 41 Arlington National Cemetery, 44 Association of Blind Fighters (Bund erblindeter Krieger), 105–​6 Association of War Disabled (Association des mutilés de guerre), 105–​6, 113–​14 Association of War Disabled and Veterans (Bund der Kriegsgeschädigten und ehemaligen Kriegsteilnehmer), 105–​6 Association of War Disabled and War Invalids (Associazione Nazionale fra Mutilati e Invalidi di Guerra), 105–​6 Association of War Injured Civil Servants, Teachers, and Employees in the Civil Service (Bund Kriegsbeschädigter Beamter, Lehrer und Angestellter im Beamtendienst), 107n.64 Auschwitz, 135, 137n.82 Austria, 46–​47, 94–​95, 106, 109–​10, 112, 132 Autrêches, 91 Baden, 21 Baeyer, Walter von, 140n.96, 143–​44 Balaklava, 44–​45 Ban, Ki-​moon, 1–​2 Barmbek, 91 Barton, Clara, 26–​27 Beck, Birgit, 137–​38 Belgium, 17, 24n.42, 73–​74, 84–​87 Bircher, Heinrich, 59, 61, 62f Bonanno, George, 164 Bonhoeffer, Karl, 110–​11 Bosnia, 134–​35

Briand, Aristide, 107–​8 Brodrick, St. John, 71 Bromberg, 88–​89 Brüning, Heinrich, 113–​14 Bruns, Paul von, 63–​65 Brussels, 37–​38, 72–​73 Bryce, James, 84–​85 Bulgaria, 83–​84 California, 132 Canada, 129 Cape Town, 152, 157 Caribbean, 29–​31, 33 Carlepont, 92 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), 81–​83 Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens), 127–​28 Central Evidence Bureau (Central-​Nachweise-​ Bureau), 48 Christian Commission (USA), 48–​49 Churchill, Winston, 52–​53 Cole, Alyson, 163 Coler, Alwin von, 61 Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 15–​16 Congo, 48, 68–​69 Conti, Leonardo, 114 Crimea, 9–​10, 28, 38–​39, 42, 44–​46 Czechoslovakia, 4–​5, 17, 95, 106, 109, 114–​15 Daily News and Leader (daily newspaper), 75–​76 Davis, Henry, 63–​64 Dubai, 1–​2 Dunant, Henri, 26–​27 Dundas, Charles Cecil Farquharson, 68 East Africa, 68 Edinburgh, 31 Elias, Robert, 121–​22

202 Index European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO), 134 Extraordinary State Commission (UdSSR), 89–​90 Fassin, Didier, 4, 138, 143 Fawcett, Millicent, 71–​72 Federal Republic of Germany, 6, 120–​21, 132, 135–​36 Fergusson, William, 33 Foreign Office (Germany), 53–​54, 87–​88 Förster, Alice, 137–​38 France, 4–​5, 14–​15, 18–​21, 25n.43, 30–​31, 33, 36, 45–​46, 47, 50, 74, 78, 84–​86, 87, 91, 95, 96n.20, 97–​98, 99–​100, 102, 105–​6, 107, 109, 109n.78, 114–​15, 132 French Red Cross, 97–​98 Friedrich Wilhelm III., 43 Gartenlaube, Die (German newspaper), 64–​65 Geneva, 14, 16, 48, 53–​54, 55–​59, 65–​67, 70, 73, 76–​77, 80–​82, 112 German Red Cross, 97–​98 German Surgeons’ Conference (Deutscher Chirurgenkongress), 63–​64 German War Graves Commission (Volksbund deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge), 15–​16, 91 Germany /​Federal Republic of Germany, 3, 5–​6, 14, 15–​16, 18–​20, 39, 45–​46, 47, 49–​50, 51, 52–​54, 63–​65, 68–​69, 72, 74, 76, 79, 84, 95, 96, 97–​98, 99n.30, 100, 102, 105–​15, 120–​21, 123–​24, 125–​26, 127–​28, 132, 135–​42, 143–​45, 161–​62, 163, 165 Giglioli, Daniele, 3–​4 Gilpin Faust, Catherine Drew, 48–​49 Goebbels, Joseph, 52–​53 Goya, Francisco de, 9–​11 Great Britain, 14, 18–​19, 20–​21, 22–​23, 30–​31, 36–​37, 38–​39, 42–​43, 45–​46, 63–​64, 67, 69–​72, 74, 76, 78, 84–​86, 87, 95, 108, 109, 110–​ 11, 131–​32 Greece, 17, 103–​4 Grenada, 33 Hacking, Ian, 148 Hamburg, 91–​92 Hamburg’s registry office, 91–​92 Hentig, Hans von, 123–​30 Herzegovina, 134 Hiroshima, 135 Hitler, Adolf, 52–​53, 114 Hobhouse, Emily, 70–​72 Hoover, Herbert, 104

Howell, Alison, 164–​65 Hull, Isabel, 74 Hungary, 17, 105, 108 India, 29–​31, 45, 63–​64 Institut de Droit International, 60, 72–​73, 78–​ 79n.122, 80–​81, 81n.133 International Business Times, 1–​2 International Humanitarian Fact-​Finding Commission, 53, 82 International Labour Organisation (ILO), 112–​13 International Association of Victims of War and Labor (Internationaler Bund der Opfer des Krieges und der Arbeit), 106 International Committee for Relief to the Wounded (Internationales Komitee der Hilfsgesellschaften für die Verwundetenpflege), 26–​27 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 14, 26–​28, 47, 50, 52–​53, 55, 56–​57, 66–​67, 70, 73, 76–​78, 80–​81, 104 International Criminal Court, 2–​3, 78, 79 Ireland, 8–​9, 132 Israel, 121–​22, 135–​36, 140–​41 Istanbul, 78–​79 Italy, 4–​5, 17, 18, 45–​46, 105–​6, 107–​8, 114–​ 15, 132 Jahr, Christoph, 127–​28 Jerusalem, 121, 128n.44, 130–​31 Jochnick, Chris af, 65–​66 Kagee, Ashraf, 157–​59 Katyn, 51–​7, 88 Kesselring, Rita, 157 Khulumani Support Group (Association of victims and survivors of the apartheid regime), 156–​57 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, 69–​70 Koch, Robert, 36 Kocher, Theodor, 60, 63 Kony, Joseph, 2–​3 Korea, 48–​49, 116–​19, 138–​39 Kramp, Günther, 91 Kramp, Werner, 91–​94, 97 Kunstwart, Der (monthly journal), 105 Kurdi, Aylan, 1 Kuttner, Erich, 113–​14 Laqueur, Thomas, 41–​42, 43–​44 League of Nations, 76, 103, 113 Leipzig, 78–​79, 85–​86, 87 Lenin (Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilyich), 103

Index  203 Leningrad, 135 Lifton, Robert Jay, 137–​38, 139–​40 Lind, James, 31–​32 Lindner, Ulrike, 68 London, 17, 33, 37, 38–​39, 52–​53, 111–​12 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), 2–​3 Lyttelton, Oliver, 68–​69 Macedonia, 83 Maercker, Andreas, 163–​64 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 8–​9 Marshall, Henry, 34–​36 Martinique, 33 Marx, Karl, 8–​9 Mayenburg, David von, 123–​24 McNally, Richard, 147 Mechnikov, Ilya, 36 Main Medical Conference (Medizinische Hauptkonferenz), 144 Mégret, Frédéric, 57–​58, 68 Mendelsohn, Benjamin, 121–​22, 129–​30 Meywald, Wolfgang, 144 Military Orthopaedic Hospital (Shepherd’s Bush, London), 111–​12 Ministry of Social Welfare (Czech Republic), 112 Morocco, 78 Morrison, Toni, 116–​19 Mphahlele, Brian, 157 Mussolini, Benito, 107–​8 Nagasaki, 135 Nampcel, 91 Napoleon I., 9–​10 Napoleon III., 46 National Relief Agency for Women and Children, Victims of War (Œuvre national de protection en faveur des femmes et enfants, victimes de la guerre), 105–​6 Nationalsocialism, 4–​6, 51–​55, 88–​90, 106–​7, 114–​15, 125–​28, 135–​41, 144, 159–​60, 161–​62 National Socialist Relief Organization for War Victims (Nationalsozialistische Kriegsopferversorgung, NSKOV), 106 National Socialist War Victims Relief (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Kriegsopferversorgung, DKOV, monthly journal), 114 Netherlands, 132, 140 Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), 2–​3 New Zealand, 14, 132 Niederland, William, 140–​41, 140n.94 Nightingale, Florence, 26–​27, 38–​39 Normand, Roger, 65–​66 Northern Ireland, 132

Norway, 132, 140 Nuremberg, 78–​79, 89–​90 Office of Correspondence (USA), 26–​27 Ongwen, Dominic, 2–​3 Orange Freestate, 69–​71 Ottoman Empire, 8–​9, 48 Oxford, 72–​73 Pan Africanist Congress (South African liberation movement), 157 Paris, 17, 47, 48, 107 Pasteur, Louis, 36 Petersburg, 59–​60, 63–​64 Pictet, Jean, 56–​57 Poland, 51, 52–​54, 88–​89, 94, 95, 106, 109–​10 Pross, Christian, 137–​38 Prussia, 19–​20, 21, 22, 23–​24, 25–​26, 43, 47–​48, 59, 72–​73, 78–​79, 80, 86, 87–​88, 105 Quinney, Richard, 121–​22 Rechtman, Richard, 4, 138, 143 Red Crescent, 78, 97–​98 Reich Association of War Disabled, Veterans, and Surviving Dependents (Reichsbund der Kriegsbeschädigten, Kriegsteilnehmer und Kriegshinterbliebenen), 106, 113–​14 Reich Association of German War Victims (Reichsverband deutscher Kriegsopfer), 106 Reich Association of War Victims of Austria (Reichsbund der Kriegsopfer Österreichs), 106 Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), 51 Reich Ministry of Labor (Weimar Republic), 92–​94 Rome, 61, 63 Romania, 17, 121–​22 Russia, 4–​5, 9–​10, 19–​20, 22, 25–​26, 44–​45, 51, 52–​53, 66–​67, 76–​77, 81, 84–​90, 95, 97–​98, 99–​ 100, 101, 102–​3, 110–​11, 114–​15, 135, 159–​60 Russian Red Cross, 66–​67, 76–​77, 97–​98 Sanitary Movement (Great Britain), 37 Saratov, 104 Save the Children Fund (SCF), 76, 104 Schjerning, Otto von, 61 Schlicke, Alexander, 107–​8 Sevastopol, 44–​45 Sengstock, Mary, 129–​40 Shatan, Chaim, 139–​40 Sierra Leone, 33 Smith, Andrew, 38

204 Index Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands SPD), 68–​69, 106–​7, 114 Solferino, 46 South Africa, 6, 39, 68, 69–​71, 81, 133, 151–​60 South African Defence Force (South African regular armed forces), 155–​56 South African Women and Children Fund (SAWCF), 70–​71 Southwest Africa, 68–​69 Soviet Union, 4–​5, 51–​53, 88–​90, 95, 102–​3, 114–​ 15, 135, 159–​60 Spain, 1, 9–​10, 78, 99–​100, 132 St. Vincent, 33 State Archive Hamburg (Staatsarchiv Hamburg), 91 Stalin, Joseph, 3 Strauss, Hans, 142–​43, 144 Sweden, 18–​19, 132 Thailand, 48 The Hague, 2–​3, 53–​54, 55–​56, 58, 60, 63–​66, 72, 73, 76–​77, 78, 79, 82–​83, 86–​88 The Times, 28, 42, 65–​66 Tokyo, 78–​79, 89–​90 Tolstoy, Leo, 9–​11 Transocean (German news agency, from 1933 under the Reich Ministry of Propaganda), 51 Transvaal, 69–​70 Trauma Centre for Victims of Violence and Torture (South Africa), 152 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 68 Trotha, Lothar von, 68–​69 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 6, 151–​ 52, 153f, 154–​57 Tübingen, 92 Tulloch, Alexander Murray, 34–​36 Tutu, Desmond, 151–​52, 155–​56 Uganda, 2–​3 United Arab Emirates, 1–​2

United Nations, 1–​2, 6, 79–​80, 89, 123, 132–​ 33, 150–​52 United Nations International Law Commission, 79–​80 United Nations War Crimes Commission, 89 United States of America (USA), 6–​7, 16–​17, 36, 44, 48–​49, 53, 61–​63, 64, 103, 116, 118–​19, 120–​21, 122–​23, 124–​25, 129, 130–​32, 136–​37, 138–​39, 140, 145, 147–​49, 158–​59, 163, 164–​65 United States Sanitary Commission, 48–​49 Valentino, Charles-​Louis, 107 Venzlaff, Ulrich, 141, 142–​43 Veterans Against the War, 138–​39 Victimology (Journal), 121–​22 Vienna, 109–​10, 111–​12 Vienna Invalid School (Invalidenschule Wien), 111–​12 Vienna Office for Invalids (Invalidenamt Wien, since 1918 Austrian national authority), 109–​10 Viernstein, Theodor, 124 Vietnam, 3, 117–​18, 137–​40 Viktor Emanuel III. (King of Italy), 107–​8 Vorwärts (Party newspaper of the SPD), 113–​14 Wehrmacht investigative office for violations of international law (Wehrmacht-​ Untersuchungsstelle für Verletzungen des Völkerrechts), 88–​89 Wilhelm II., 68–​69 Witter, Hermann, 144–​45 Wolfgang, Marvin Eugene, 121 World Health Organization (WHO), 119, 148–​49 World Society of Victimology, 121 Wurttemberg, 21 Yugoslavia, 17 Zoellner, Tanja, 163–​64