ABSTRACT
While debate has raged over the extent of the complicity of “ordinary Germans” in the genocide against the Jews and others, the German killers were in uniform, and strict measures were taken to ensure that the civilian population did not witness the mass slaughter. In Rwanda, by contrast, the civilian Hutu population – men, women, and even children – was actively conscripted and comprised the bulk of génocidaires: “For the first time in modern history, a state succeeded in transforming the mass of its population into murderers.”2
