Abstract

The fact diat die first formal recognition of die crime of genocide (crimen lesae humanitatis) took place at Nuremberg in 1945 is extremely significant. Those who, to quote Adorno, record the extermination camps as “working incidents” in the victorious advance of civilization, or see “the martyrdom of die Jews as an irrelevant episode in the context of universal history,” fail to grasp die dominating trait of twentieth century atrocities: the perverse secularization of die religious motivations of genocide in modern totalitarian political ideologies. The Nazi regime, with its dystopian vision of a hierarchy of races and societies under German hegemony, represented the most complete expression of diis process of total conditioning of the existence of individuals, with all its genocidal potentials.