Post-Totalitarian Elements And Eichmann's Mentality In The Yugoslav War And Mass Killings

In the large body of literature about the Holocaust and Nazi totalitarianism today, the extinction of the European Jewish population is treated as an unparalleled act that cannot and should not be repeated. "Never again" has become the motto of commemorations of the victims of Nazi terror in general and as such it represents the heart of the politics of memory, which, through awareness of the Holocaust's warning, has attempted to create conditions in which the repetition of such an unparalleled crime would be impossible. However, in spite of the persistent claims in the genocide scholarship of its uniqueness and in spite of the refusal to compare it to contemporary genocides, the Nazi Holocaust has inevitably been linked to the events in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Rwandan genocide, in particular— owing to the number of victims and the way the crime was accomplished—has emerged as the most suitable case for emphasizing a "crucial similarity," while the name "Srebrenica" has become associated with "the worst massacre in Europe after the Second World War."