Unit 7.8 — Mass Atrocities After 1900

Topic 7.7 covered how World War II was fought as a military and technological conflict. Topic 7.8 covers a distinct and specifically tested category: mass atrocities committed against civilian populations, primarily but not exclusively during this era, driven by ideology, extreme nationalism, and authoritarian power rather than conventional battlefield combat. The exam asks you to explain both causes and consequences across several named, dated cases — not to catalog them in isolation, but to identify the recurring pattern that connects them.

The Armenian Genocide: the course's first named case

During World War I, the Ottoman government (Topic 7.1's declining empire) systematically killed and forcibly deported large numbers of its Armenian population, an event historians identify as the Armenian Genocide, occurring primarily from 1915 onward. This is worth knowing as the earliest case in this topic's timeline and a reminder that mass atrocity in this period was not limited to the Holocaust or to World War II specifically — it emerged directly out of the imperial collapse and intensified nationalism covered in Topic 7.1.

The Holocaust: the exam's central, required example

Nazi Germany's systematic murder of approximately six million Jews, along with Roma people, disabled people, political dissidents, and other targeted groups, during the Holocaust of the early 1940s is the exam's central case study for this topic. It grew directly out of the fascist ideology and racial hierarchy described in Topic 7.6, escalating from discriminatory laws to organized mass killing as the war progressed — a specific, extreme demonstration of how the ideological currents already covered in this unit could be operationalized into genocide once an authoritarian state controlled the machinery of a modern industrial society.

The Holodomor: mass death through state policy rather than direct killing

In Soviet Ukraine, the Holodomor of 1932–1933 caused mass starvation through the state's forced agricultural collectivization policies (connecting directly to Topic 7.4's Five-Year Plans) and grain requisition quotas that left Ukrainian farmers without enough food to survive. This is a useful contrast case: the deaths resulted from deliberate state economic policy rather than direct battlefield violence or organized mass shooting, showing that "mass atrocity" in this topic covers a range of specific mechanisms, not only one method.

Cambodia: genocide under a communist regime

Under the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (1975–1979), the Cambodian genocide killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people through executions, forced labor, and starvation, as the regime pursued a radical, ideologically driven reorganization of society. This case is frequently studied alongside other mass killings carried out under 20th-century communist regimes, giving you a second ideological category (beyond fascism) capable of producing mass atrocity.

Rwanda and Bosnia: atrocity late in the century, still recognizable pattern

In 1994, Hutu extremist militias in Rwanda killed an estimated 800,000 people, overwhelmingly targeting the Tutsi ethnic minority, in a genocide carried out with extraordinary speed over roughly a hundred days. Between 1992 and 1995 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbian forces pursued a policy of "ethnic cleansing," systematically killing and displacing Bosnian Muslims and Croats, with the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 as its most notorious single event. Both cases show that the specific pattern behind earlier 20th-century atrocities — extremist ideology, ethnic or religious targeting, and a state or organized militia with the power to act on it — persisted well after World War II rather than being confined to that conflict.

Why this matters for the exam

Topic 7.8 rewards identifying the recurring causal pattern across these distinct, dated cases: an extremist ideology or intensified nationalism (fascism, radical communism, ethnic nationalism) combined with a state or organized group holding enough power to act on targeting a specific population, producing consequences that include catastrophic loss of life and, afterward, new international attention to human rights and genocide prevention. Keep each case's name, rough dates, and specific mechanism (systematic killing, state-induced starvation, forced labor, ethnic cleansing) distinct and citable rather than treating "mass atrocity" as one undifferentiated category — and know the Holocaust specifically as the exam's required central case.

Sources: Fiveable — Mass Atrocities After 1900.