Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945

Speaker: Raz Segal (Stockton University)

Genocide in the Carpathians presents the history of Subcarpathian Rus’, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious borderland in the heart of Europe. This society of Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, Magyars, and Roma disintegrated first under the pressure of state building in interwar Czechoslovakia and, during World War II, from the onslaught of Hungarian occupation authorities. Charges of foreignness and disloyalty to the Hungarian state linked anti-semitism to xenophobia and national security anxieties. Drawing on Raphael Lemkin who coined the term “genocide,” Dr. Segal argues that genocide in the region unfolded as a Hungarian policy aimed at thorough social and cultural destruction, well before the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 and the mass deportations of Jews to Auschwitz that followed it throughout the spring and summer. This perspective reorients our view of the Holocaust not simply as a German drive for continent-wide genocide, but as a truly international campaign of mass violence, closely related to violence against non-Jews unleashed by projects of state and nation building across Europe. This lecture is sponsored by the Raskin Young Family Fund. Listen to audio from the event