The Khmers Rouges and the Final Solution

Of course there is no comparison. The event which left its mark on my generation defies analogy. Those who talk about "Auschwitz in Asia" and the "Cambodian Holocaust" do not know what they are talking about.

Elie Wiesel¹

All history that aims at explanation or interpretation involves some type of explicit or implicit comparison.

George Fredrickson²

The events in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 both invite and defy comparison. When held against particular aspects of the policy of extermination and annihilation (Ausrottungs-und Vernichtungspolitik) of the Third Reich, not only the strikingly different cultural context but also the deviant political developments (providing the external conditions of the Khmers Rouges atrocities) appear to impede any direct comparisons.

Because the atrocities committed in Democratic Kampuchea³ require specific elaboration and elucidation, attempts have been made to place the violence of the Khmers Rouges within the same category as other revolutions that have distinguished themselves by an exorbitant amount of bloodshed. ⁴ Moreover, the heavy American bombardments of 1973 are sometimes evoked to describe the disposition on the part of the Khmers Rouges to resort to unrestricted violence after 1975. However, even though it is estimated that, largely because of these bombardments and those of 1969, over half a million Cambodians lost their lives as a direct cause of the Second Indochina War, ⁵ it seems unwarranted to infer a higher degree of postrevolutionary violence from events preceding the fall of the Khmer Republic. On the contrary, the violence of the Khmers Rouges' revolution is rooted in their policy toward Vietnam. In this first part of the article I endeavor to demonstrate how the attitude of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) toward the Vietnamese nation in general and the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) in particular conditioned internal events in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.

Comparative history has been a stillbirth ever since comparisons of whole cultures and civilizations were first begun in the early twentieth century. Even the comparison of particular aspects of society and similar institutional frameworks of the latter after 1945 did not lead to the establishment of a recognized subfield. Toynbee's and Spengler's prewar comparative analyses of civilizations largely resorted to units of comparison (culture, civilization) which were vaguely defined and did not spur subsequent research in the same direction. ⁶ Bloch's essay "Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européenes" (1927) held that at least geographical neighbors constantly influencing one another could be compared. ⁷ However, this did not imply proving hypotheses based on comparative historical analysis. In the United States, only slavery has, according to George Fredrickson, received more systematic comparative historical treatment. He was quick to add, however, that until now there is "no firm agreement on what comparative history is or how it should be done." ⁸

Besides trying to establish whether the scholarly debates on the Final Solution may have influenced our understanding of the Khmers Rouges atrocities, this article attempts to elucidate which aspects of Democratic Kampuchea lend themselves more readily to direct comparisons with the events surrounding the Final Solution. It is no attempt to write comparative history allowing for the use of direct comparisons to prove more general "laws" of historical development but rather an endeavor to show that even the limited comparability of certain aspects of the atrocities committed by the Khmers Rouges may help us better understand not only the events related to the Final Solution but those in Cambodia as well. In each case, events in Cambodia bearing resemblance to events in Germany and the occupied territories demonstrate the limit of their comparability and concordance. The reasons for this may vary from case to case, from similar measures that were taken for different reasons to identical intentions but different measures.

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Despite intensive media coverage and, since the mid-1980s, more and more serious scholarly studies, Democratic Kampuchea has remained a locus incognitus on the scholarly map of historians working on the...