The chapter explores the workings of gender in genocidal processes. It frames the subject inclusively, to address women and men; masculinities and femininities; the specific vulnerabilities of LGBT people; survivor, victim and perpetrator experiences; and structural and institutional forms of sexualized violence alongside event-specific ones. The chapter encourages readers to rethink major categories of analysis and themes in genocide studies as gendered phenomena.

Although pervasive, gender is often overlooked for its role in how genocide is conceived, performed, and experienced. The chapter traces its influence in connection to other explanatory narratives and theories such as the roles of the state, militarism, war, imperialism, racism, and sexism. Was gender one of many facets or a primary force in escalating or de-escalating the violence over time and space? Variables of race and ethnicity, themselves typically intersecting with social class, crucially shape how gender identities are imposed, interpreted, and experienced. The interaction of gender with an age variable is also noted. The coverage spans case studies of genocide in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa in order to illuminate the universal and particular. The authors also present on the role of courts in prosecuting mass rape and sexual violence as acts of genocide. The conclusion points out key intellectual, ethical and policy challenges ahead.

In October 1945 the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were charged, for the first time in international law, with ‘genocide’. The Nuremberg indictments included, under war crimes, ‘deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others’.1

The history of the Nazi-led genocide against the Jews is inseparable from Operation Barbarossa and the Axis occupation of the Soviet Union. Today such a statement is taken as a given in the fields of Holocaust studies and World War II. But this was not always the case. Prior to the 1990s, few military specialists followed the lead of Gerhard Weinberg and Jürgen Förster by connecting the battles on the front with the genocide behind the lines. Even the pioneering study by American Sovietologist Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945, while paying much attention to the totalitarian framework of the SS terror, skimmed over the unique plight of the Jews, dealing with it marginally as a demonstration of Nazi internecine struggles over Ostpolitik. In the past twenty years a veritable deluge of studies on the Holocaust has shifted the focus of military history to studies of genocidal violence and its development in military planning and security measures in times of war. In Holocaust studies specifically, Operation Barbarossa has been the primary focus for reconstructing the history of decision making and the escalation of atrocities against Jews in the summer and fall of 1941.

Historians Christopher Browning, Jürgen Matthäus, and Christian Gerlach have delved into the peripheral and central events that came together in the Soviet Union and precipitated the mass murder of Jews. Besides the Einsatzgruppen, we have now created an expanding and more detailed picture of SS-police involvement, especially the role of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) and the Waffen-SS.