Summary For example, the Holocaust would not have been logistically feasible on such a rapid and mass scale without the initial definition and registration of Jews. The Nazis’ process of using official identification processes and documents made it possible to successively strip Jews of their citizenship, expropriate their property, spatially restrict them to ghettos and camps, and, then finally, commit mass murders. By the end of World War II, Hitler’s Nazi regime had succeeded in killing an estimated six million Jews—two-thirds of all Jews in the European territories controlled by the Nazis and their allies. These killings took place through privation—the systematic denial of adequate food, water, shelter, and medical care—open-air mass shootings, and in extermination camps with gassing facilities, including at Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmo, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Identity documentation similarly contributed to the facilitation of the Rwandan genocide, which started shortly after the airplane carrying Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down, killing both Hutu leaders. Initial reports accused a Tutsi-led rebel group of being responsible for the killings and, within hours of the plane crash, state-sponsored radio announcers called on Hutu “patriots” to kill members of the minority Tutsi population, who constituted approximately 14 percent of the country’s then 7.9 million people. Hutu perpetrators, in some cases, relied on the Rwandan national identification card that included the holder’s ethnic profile to carry out these killings. For example, Hutu militias constructed barricades in urban areas and demanded travelers show their national identification card, massacring Tutsiidentified card-holders and those without documents. During the course of 100 days, Hutu perpetrators killed an estimated 75 percent of the Tutsi population, or roughly 800,000 women, men, and children. Most killings were carried out by hand, with machetes or clubs, and included other acts of violence, such as rape. 22 An American soldier watching German civilians remove dead bodies piled behind the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. ©United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1945