Moral Responses to the Great Mass Murders of Our Century

The American mass media greeted the discovery of Soviet mass graves with remarkable equanimity. It is the differences between the character and procedures of the Nazi and Soviet mass murders which most plausibly explain the different moral responses to the unparalleled slaughters. In Nazi Germany the state set up highly productive extermination plants with no less of a goal than the total elimination of the Jewish population of Europe, perhaps some day of the whole world. The Nazi system was destroyed; cameramen freely entered the former camps; archives had been opened; many perpetrators of these crimes were studied, interrogated, and brought to justice. The Soviet mass murders were in significant ways different from the Nazi ones. While in the post-Stalin era the quantitative dimensions of Soviet mass murders began to emerge, they remained an abstraction for the public at large, even for the well educated.