The role of forced assimilation in genocide has been overlooked and badly misunderstood. This is partly due to how the Nazis, defeated, were unable to complete their plans for a massive ethno-racial re-ordering of all of Europe, to be completed largely through the forced assimilation of non-German majority populations. After WWII, it was instead the Nazi extermination camps for Jews and other minorities that came to define genocide in the minds of many, even though forced assimilation is a major component of both Nazi and other genocides. This paper discusses forced assimilation as genocide through a sustained comparison of the current Chinese genocide against the Uyghurs, with the Nazi genocide against the Czechs in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, during WWII, which launched massive, targeted ‘Germanization.’ The paper compares the campaigns led by two prominent leaders of these genocides, Reinhard Heydrich and Chen Quanguo, in their historical context, and argues that they are strikingly similar. The paper applauds the recent moves to re-integrate “cultural genocide” (forced assimilation) into the legal identification and prosecution of genocide — after it was partly left out in the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention. Any classification of the ongoing mass atrocities in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) should take into account forced assimilation as a key component of genocide.
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