Books in Bearing Witness: Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing series

Nazi Germanys Holocaust has become something of a benchmark for all other genocides. This instructive volume offers readers insight into the background of its mastermind, Adolf Hitler, and sets the stage for the appalling fates of so many minorities, including Jews, Catholics, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other allegedly inferior groups of people in Germany, who were tortured, held captive, and slaughtered. Readers will also learn about their lives before the terrors began and the curious and terrifying views of Hitler and his followers, which changed the lives of Jews and other minorities in Germany forever.

In Rwanda, a small but populous country in Africa, a ghastly genocide started on April 6, 1994. Although it lasted only one hundred days, almost a million people were slaughtered by its end. This illuminating resource reviews one of the most horrible genocides in history, explaining the definition of genocide itself. Readers will learn about Rwanda's history, with a focus on the events that led to those terrible days. The book is rounded out with a brief look at post-genocide Rwanda, as the country copes and the people take back their lives after such a terrible tragedy.

The appalling Cambodian genocide remains barely studied even to this day. Yet nearly two million Cambodians (around 20 percent of Cambodias population) died between 1975 and 1979 as a result of the dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Communist government. Innocent Cambodians were murdered, starved, and tortured. This fascinating book offers an overview of this tiny Asian countrys history, framing the events that led up to this tragic genocide. Readers will learn about the key players in the genocide, as well as the complications in obtaining justice in its aftermath.

It is a profoundly sad fact that one of the hallmarks of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the emergence of genocide as a way of waging war. Before 1944, there was not even a name for the systematic slaughter of a large mass of innocents, killed because of their nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion, in order to annihilate and eliminate the entire group. In the decades since the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, we’ve become sickeningly familiar with the term. This series examines the major genocidal acts of modern history by analyzing the typical dynamics that give rise to extreme mass violence, the manipulations of politicians, the pathology of the perpetrators, the experience of the victims, and, in the aftermath, the attempts to achieve both justice and reconciliation. In reviewing these dark chapters of the modern era, it is hoped that, in the act of remembering, we will never allow this history to be repeated.