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than morally blinkered cogs in a bureaucratic machine whose ‘cumulative radicalization’ they did not individually will. Some perpetrators were merely ordinary men acting under peer-group pressure or systematic military brutalization; others were amoral technocrats obsessed with their own pseudo-scientific theories; still others were brainwashed youths in the grip of an immoral secular religion. Nevertheless, we need to recognize that the racial world view was fundamental to the Third Reich and that this was rooted in a particular conception of human biology – a singularly successful ‘meme’ that had already replicated itself all over the world by the start of the twentieth century. It could be transmitted even to quite remote and seemingly unpro-pitious locations. In the late nineteenth century, Argentina was widely regarded as an ideal destination for Jewish emigrants from Europe precisely because of the absence of anti-Semitism. Yet by the early 1900s writers like Juan Alsina and Arturo Reynal O’Connor were warning that the Jews posed a mortal threat to Argentine culture.‘Only a few years ago,’ lamented the Labour Zionist journal
Brot und Ehre
in 1910,
we could speak about Argentina as a new
Eretz Israel
, a land that opened generously its door for us, where we enjoyed the same freedom the Republic gives all its inhabitants, without distinction of nationalities or beliefs. And now? The whole atmosphere around us is filled with hatred of Jews, eyes hostile to Jews are staring from all corners; they lie in wait in all directions, awaiting an opportunity to attack… All are against us… And this is not simply a hatred of Jews; it is a sign of a future movement, which is long known [elsewhere] under the name of anti-Semitism.
BLOOD BORDERS
    Why did large-scale ethnic conflict occur in some places and not in others? Why in Central and Eastern Europe more than in South America? One answer to that question is that in certain parts of the world there was an exceptional mismatch between ethnic identities and political structures. The ethnic map of Central and Eastern Europe, to take the most obvious example, was a true patchwork ( Figure I.2 ). In the north – to name only the largest groups – there were Lithuanians, Latvians, Byelorussians and Russians, all linguistically distinct; in the middle, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles; in the south, Italians, Slovenes, Magyars, Romanians and, in the Balkans, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, Greeks and Turks. Scattered all over the region were German-speaking communities. Language was only one of the ways the different ethnic groups could be distinguished. Some of those who spoke German dialects were Protestants, some Catholics and some Jews. Some of those who spoke Serbo-Croat were Catholics (Croats), some Orthodox (Serbs and Macedonians) and some Muslims (Bosniaks). Some Bulgarians were Orthodox; others (the Pomaks) were Muslim. Most Turkic-speakers were Muslims; a few (the Gagauz) were Orthodox.
    Figure I.2
Majority population as a percentage of total population
    The political geography of Central and Eastern Europe before the nineteenth century had been consistent with this exceptionally heterogeneous pattern of settlement. The region had been divided between large dynastic empires. Most people had primarily local loyalties while at the same time owing allegiance to a remote imperial sovereign. Many had identities that defied rigid categorization, speaking more than one language; typically, Austrian demographers drew a distinction between ‘mother tongue’ and ‘language of everyday use’. Most Slavs continued to work the land, as they had as serfs before the emancipations of the nineteenth century. The towns of Central and Eastern Europe, by contrast, were often quite ethnically distinct from the surrounding countryside. In the north, Germans and Jews predominated in urban areas, as they also did in the basin of the Danube; further east the towns were