I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies 34 These patterns, where they occur in combination with several of the common risk factors identified in the U.N. Office of Genocide Prevention’s Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes, signal a much higher likelihood of mass atrocity crimes, ranging from ethnic cleansing to genocide. In the case of Myanmar, when the military junta’s attempted coup ends and civilian leadership returns to a new, federal democracy, domestic reforms will be urgently needed. Renewed international pressure is also urgently needed to prevent the junta from committing further genocidal acts against Rohingya. Holocaust of the Jewish People “The Nazis examined him and when they found that he had been circumcised they branded a Jewish star on his left hand so that everyone would know that he was Jewish.” - From the book, Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Catholic Clergy: The Testimony of Survivors and Rescuers14 The development of methods for recording and classifying people according to different categories within Germany predates the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933.15 But by the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime had fixed a person’s official identity in “racial” terms, which made one’s categorization a matter of life and death, especially for Jews.16 This process of dehumanization rapidly accelerated after 1939. It reached its apotheosis in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, where Jews and other social “undesirables,” including political prisoners and homosexuals among others, received black numerical tattoos. The tattoos represented the ultimate shift from “people-with-names” to “units-with-numbers” that could be worked to death or simply killed outright.17 But out of all the populations targeted, it was “the Jew” that remained the most reviled and feared by those who shared the Nazi’s racist ideology that Jews were “a lethal and active threat to all nations, to the Aryan race, and the German Volk [people].”18 Again, the Nazis were not the first group to regard Jews in this manner, but they took it to the logical extreme as part of what its leaders called the “Final Solution”—the genocidal plan to exterminate all Jews throughout Europe.19 To do so, the Nazi regime created a vast bureaucracy, including Naziissued identity cards (Kennkarte), as a tool for “military, racial, and security controls” that made the genocide bureaucratically possible.20 14 Mark Paul (ed.), Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Catholic Clergy: The Testimony of Survivors and Rescuers, (Toronto: Polish Education Foundation in North America, 2020), p. 36. 15 All modern states, not just Germany, used similar practices to govern their populations. See, for example, James Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University, 1998). 16 Jane Caplan, “‘Ausweis Bitte!’ Identity and Identification in Nazi Germany,” Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective: People, Papers, and Practices, eds. Ilsen About, James Brown, and Gayle Longergan, (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), p. 224. The terms “race” and “ethnicity” are often used interchangeably. However, race is commonly regarded as reflecting objective biological or genetic traits, whereas ethnicity is regarded as reflecting subjective cultural or religious traits. The Jewish people are commonly regarded as both a racial group as well as an ethnic group. Regardless, international jurisprudence increasingly looks to subjective understandings of groups in conjunction with an analysis of objective elements. The Genocide Convention lists four types of protected groups: national, ethnic, racial, and religious. As expressed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the case of Jelisić, there is increasing skepticism of the accuracy of objective definitions of the four protected groups under the Genocide Convention, particularly the ethnic, racial, and national categories. Prosecutor v. Goran Jelisić, ICTY, Case No. ICTY-95-10-T, Judgment (Trial), December 14, 1999, para. 70. See also, Prosecutor v. Rutaganda, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Case No. ICTR-963-T, Judgment (Trial), December 6, 1999, para. 56. 17 Ibid. 18 Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007), p. xix. 19 See, George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 20 Caplan, “‘Ausweis Bitte!’ Identity and Identification in Nazi Germany,” In Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective: People, Papers, and Practices, p. 225.