AP Euro Atrocities
ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S DAY MASSACRE (1572)
France had been riven by religious strife for decades. The Catholic majority did not approve of the Huguenot minority. Huguenots made up no more than ten percent of the population, but were mostly made up of wealthy merchants and nobles. Many nobles had been drawn to Calvinism as a way to weaken the Catholic king's control over them. This premeditated massacre of French Huguenots began in Paris and spread to the provinces. Many Huguenots were in Paris at the time, to attend the wedding of Henry of Navarre (a Huguenot) to the king's sister, Margaret. Henry went on to become Henry IV, converting to Catholicism in order to inherit the throne and starting the Bourbon Dynasty. He issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, one of the great examples of religious toleration. Later, he was assassinated.
GERMAN PEASANTS' WAR (1525)
German peasants, inspired and fired up by Martin Luther's attacks against the authority of the Catholic Church, rose up against their noble landlords masters. They were also spurred on by hunger; there had been recent crop failures, always a bad thing. Luther initially supported the peasants, but turned against them when he saw their violence against the nobles. The real violence kicked in when the nobles, with Luther's support, bloodily and mercilessly crushed the uprising. After this, Lutheranism ceased to be the driving force in Protestantism, shifting to Calvinism.
BELGIAN CONGO (as Congo Free State; 1885-1908)
King Leopold of Belgium took personal control of the Congo, and had it recognized by other governments, in 1885. What followed was a brutal pillaging of an enormous part of Central Africa. Millions of Africans were terrorized into virtual if not actual slavery. Some have argued that the atrocities involved (routine murder and massacre) qualify as genocide. Even after Leopold was forced to relinquish the Congo, the area remained wracked by poverty and violence, even today.
HUNGARIAN UPRISING (1956)
After WW2, the USSR had a firm grip on Eastern Europe, forcing its countries to accept Soviet dominance. In 1956, the people of Hungary, led by a reformer named Imre Nagy, wanted to liberalize their country and forge closer ties with the West. At first the Soviets held off, allowing Hungary a small measure of freedom. In the end, Khrushchev sent in the tanks, and the uprising was crushed. The Hungarians had hoped the West, especially the US, would come to their aid, but adherence to the policy of containment, and fears of triggering a nuclear conflict, kept the West out. Also, the timing was bad; the world was preoccupied with the Suez Crisis. The Soviets proved their willingness (even after Stalin) to use force to keep countries in the Eastern Bloc, and no country would flirt with liberalization again until Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring of 1968.
GREAT EUROPEAN WITCH-HUNT (1480s-1660s)
Although "witches" and witch-hunts had been around for centuries, things exploded around the time of the Protestant Reformation. The intense religious conflicts of the time contributed to an atmosphere of fear and violence. Most victims were women, though some men were also persecuted. Executions took many forms, most infamously burning at the stake.
THE HOLOCAUST (1942-1945)
Although Jews had been persecuted in Nazi Germany for years, the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question" was unleashed in 1942, and continued until the concentration camps were liberated by the Allies. The Holocaust (also called "the Shoah" by Jews) was remarkable for its method; it industrialized killing in a businesslike, almost assembly line fashion. Jews were first ghettoized then later packed into railway cars and taken to camps, where some were murdered in gas chambers right away, and others were worked to death. Jews were not the only ones targeted for death by the Nazis; Gypsies, homosexuals, Communists, priests and others were sent to camps.
THE GREAT FAMINE (1845-1851)
Although not purposefully engineered (like the famine in Ukraine later on) the Great Famine of Ireland was a catastrophe of epic proportions that seems avoidable, or at least partially preventable, in hindsight. The Irish had become dependent on the potato, one of the new staples introduced from the New World during the Columbian Exchange. The potato crop failed numerous times beginning in 1845, but what turned a bad situation into a nightmare was the socioeconomic structure of Ireland; as part of the British Empire, their economy was not geared toward their own benefit, but toward the benefit of their imperial overlords. Although some relief measures were undertaken, ignorance and anti-Irish attitudes destroyed any chance of truly saving the country. A great multitude died of starvation and disease, and about an equal number fled the country, emigrating to many nations across the globe, inadvertently giving rise to a vibrant Irish diaspora.
WARS OF THE VENDÉE (1793-1796)
Although referred to in many sources as "wars," they may also be thought of as massacres, the suppression of rebellion and, some have argued, genocide. When anti-Christian laws became common in the Revolution, the Vendée region, in the western part of France, grew militantly counterrevolutionary. The region was fervently Catholic, and also rather Royalist. During and after the Reign of Terror, the Revolutionary government viciously put down the rebellion in a series of battles and vicious reprisals against the Vendeans. Priests and nuns were especially targeted for murder during this time.
THE SLAVE TRADE (1518-1807)
Although slavery had been around forever, it reached new lows after the Europeans discovered the Americas. The Spanish inaugurated the Atlantic/African slave trade in 1518; the reason being the native workers of the Americas had been decimated by disease and overwork. If they survived the "middle passage" in "coffin ships," the enslaved Africans arrived in a world of forced labor and harsh punishment. Slavery became a big business, with many different nations trying to horn in on the action, including the Dutch and the British. The British won the "asiento," or exclusive right to bring slaves to the New World in the Peace of Utrecht at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. The British eventually banned the slave trade in 1807, and enforced the ban with their powerful navy. Slavery itself continued as a practice in parts of the New World until the 1880s.
THE GREAT PURGE (1936-1938)
By the late 1930s, Stalin was the unquestioned master of the Soviet Union. Even so, he chose to further consolidate his power through terror. The Purge was aimed at his fellow Communists, especially the so-called "Old Bolsheviks," the original revolutionary leaders who had worked with Lenin and engineered the Russian Revolution. Stalin orchestrated a series of "show trials' in which falsely accused "enemies" publicly admitted their guilt to all sorts of trumped up charges. The victims were either shot or sent to the network of forced-labor camps in Siberia, the Gulag.
HOLODOMOR (1932-1933)
Stalin had big plans for the USSR, including the collectivization of agriculture. Peasants who resisted collectivization were dealt with harshly by the army and the secret police. In Ukraine, the resistance was particularly strong, led by a somewhat wealthy group of peasants called kulaks. Stalin wanted to make an example of them, and so a forced, manmade famine was unleashed on the people of Ukraine. The idea was to break the back of kulak resistance and send a clear warning to others who might want to go against Stalin. Some have called it genocide.
THE REIGN OF TERROR (1793-1794)
The French Revolution had been underway for four years, but its survival seemed doubtful in 1793. The foreign enemies of the Revolution (Austria, Prussia, Britain) had invaded France, and within France support for the Revolution was slipping. The moderate phase gave way to the radical phase: Thus the Jacobins, the most radical of the Revolutionaries, formed the Committee of Public Safety, led by Maximilien Robespierre, to take extraordinary measures to save the Revolution. Saving it meant suppressing those who opposed it, and "terror" was the chosen method. The guillotine became the symbol of this blood-soaked year (though other forms of execution were also used) and though the Terror may have saved the Revolution from its enemies, it also caused a backlash; Robespierre and his closet allies were themselves guillotined in the Thermidorian Reaction, and the Directory took power, later to be toppled by Napoleon. The radical phase had fallen to the reactionary phase.
PARIS COMMUNE CRUSHED (1871)
The Paris Commune existed from March to May of 1871. They rejected the authority of the new French government, which had come to power after the Franco-Prussian War. The new government was dominated by representatives from the countryside, and was thus more conservative and moderate than the always-revolutionary city of Paris, thus setting up a classic core-periphery disparity. This time the periphery won; government troops assaulted Paris and crushed the rebels, birthing the Third Republic in blood.
ARMENIAN GENOCIDE (1915-1918)
The Young Turks, a group of Ottoman leaders intent on saving and reforming the Ottoman Empire along Western lines, used the backdrop of the Great War as an excuse to deport (and, supposedly, only deport) the Armenians, whom they accused of collaborating with the Russians. Although the Christian, Armenian minority of Turkey was in fact deported, they were also in fact murdered en masse, in the first modern genocide, and the first of the twentieth century. Methods both crude and sophisticated were employed, including crucifixion and the use of railways to transport the victims; even desert caves were rigged into primitive gas chambers. To this day Turkey denies the genocide, admitting only that some unfortunate deaths and suffering did occur, but on both sides. The European Union has indicated it will not allow Turkey to be a member until it acknowledges the genocide. The denial remains a big sore point between Turkey and Armenia.
KATYN FOREST MASSACRE (1940)
The world was shocked by the Nazi-Soviet (also called the Ribbentrop-Molotov) Pact of 1939, in which sworn enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union became allies. Together they invaded Poland in September of 1940; the Germans took western Poland, the Russians eastern Poland. The Polish army fought valiantly but hopelessly, and many were killed and captured. Stalin didn't want the captured officers of the Polish army to cause any trouble in the future, so he had them secretly transported to a forest in the USSR, where they were all summarily shot. When the Nazis turned on the Soviets and invaded the USSR, they discovered the mass graves of Katyn and revealed them to the world as an example of Communists atrocities. The Soviets claimed (falsely) that the Nazis had carried out the massacre, and they continued to claim that until the end of the Cold War.
ETHNIC CLEANSING IN YUGOSLAVIA (1990s)
Yugoslavia became a country after WWI. It was a patchwork collection of various ethnic groups, not all of whom liked each other. During WW2, Yugoslavia was active in partisan resistance to the Nazis. After WW2, it became a Communist country led by the charismatic leader Tito, who refused to align himself with the USSR; throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia blazed an independent path, neither totally with the West nor with the East. When the Cold War ended Yugoslavia broke up, with much fighting and bloodshed accompanying its disintegration. Because of its great ethnic diversity, tribal and religious conflicts spiraled into all-out war. So-called "ethnic cleansing" occurred, which was a form of genocidal violence against minority groups. The mass killings in the former Yugoslavia remain the worst violence Europe has endured since WW2.
