Scholars who connect the First World War to genocide

There is an important distinction between scholars who describe the First World War (1914–1918) itself as genocidal and scholars who identify particular genocides committed during the war.

The second position is well established in genocide studies. The first is a more expansive argument about the nature of modern warfare, nationalism, mass mobilization, and the destruction of human populations.

For your research, Mark Levene, Jay Winter, and Donald Bloxham are particularly relevant starting points. Their work examines how the First World War created conditions for genocide, not simply how genocide occurred alongside conventional military operations.

Understood. You mean the prosecution of the war itself was genocidal: governments mobilized millions of men, knowingly exposed them to industrialized slaughter, and continued doing so even when the destruction of human life had become central to military strategy.

That is a different and more specific argument than identifying the Armenian genocide or other atrocities committed during the war. My earlier answer blurred the distinction.

The scholars to examine are those who treat the mass destruction of soldiers as something more than an unfortunate consequence of warfare—particularly those who question why genocide studies generally exclude soldiers killed in organized combat.

Scholars who interpret the conduct of WWI as genocidal

The distinction you're drawing is between genocide committed during the war and the possibility that the organized destruction of millions of soldiers was itself a genocidal process.

Several scholars have examined this proposition. They differ, however, on whether they actually call the battlefield killing genocide.

1. Richard A. Koenigsberg — War as collective self-destruction

In Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War (2009), Koenigsberg examines why European governments continued sacrificing their soldiers during the First World War even when offensive operations repeatedly produced enormous casualties.

His argument is that nationalism made the deaths of individuals meaningful as sacrifices for the imagined national body. He connects the logic of sacrificing soldiers to the logic that subsequently justified genocide.

In Awakening from the Nightmare of History, he develops an explicit comparison between soldiers transported to the Western Front and Jews transported to Nazi death camps.

Koenigsberg treats the First World War as an example of organized national self-destruction, although his argument is principally psychological rather than a formal legal classification of the entire war as genocide.

2. Martin Shaw — The relationship between warfare and genocide

In War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (2003), Shaw examines how industrialized warfare made mass killing a routine instrument of states.

He identifies the slaughter of conscripted soldiers in the First World War as a foundational experience of modern mass killing, connecting it to the subsequent destruction of civilian populations.

Shaw argues that the boundaries between warfare and genocide are historically less distinct than conventional interpretations suggest.

His argument does not simply classify every soldier killed in 1914–1918 as a genocide victim. Rather, it challenges the separation of legitimate warfare from the mass destruction that modern warfare produces.

3. Richard L. Rubenstein — Deliberate mass sacrifice

In The Cunning of History (1975), Rubenstein examines the battles of Verdun and the Somme.

He questions whether military commanders and their governments were merely accepting casualties as the price of victory, or whether the enormous destruction of their own soldiers served a deeper function within European society.

His analysis raises the possibility that the war provided a socially accepted mechanism for the destruction of populations considered expendable.

Importantly, Rubenstein does not explicitly establish that the battlefield slaughter constituted genocide. Christopher Harrison identifies this distinction when discussing Rubenstein's argument.

4. Alan Kramer — The dynamic of destruction

In Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (2007), Kramer examines how the war developed its own escalating logic of destruction.

His analysis includes the acceptance of unprecedented losses among both enemy soldiers and a nation's own forces.

Kramer describes the destructive and self-destructive character of the war, while distinguishing battlefield annihilation from the genocide of civilian populations.

His work supplies a historical examination of the mechanisms you're asking about, without treating the entire war as genocide.

The central conceptual problem

These scholars establish different parts of an argument, but they do not collectively establish an accepted scholarly classification of the First World War as genocide.

The question turns on the definition of genocide.

Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide requires intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. Enormous casualties, foreseeable losses, or even deliberate military slaughter do not by themselves establish that particular intent.

For the question you're pursuing, this creates three distinct propositions:

• Mass killing: Governments organized military operations that predictably killed enormous numbers of human beings.
• National self-destruction: Governments knowingly sacrificed large numbers of their own citizens in pursuit of national objectives.
• Genocide: The destruction was directed at a protected group with the specific intent required by the definition.

The first two do not automatically establish the third.

One additional scholar explicitly addresses this distinction: Christopher Harrison. In Genocidal Conscription (2023), he develops the concept of genocide by wastage: deliberately placing members of a targeted group in deadly military circumstances to destroy them. His First World War case concerns Ottoman Armenian conscripts, rather than all soldiers sent into battle.

The unresolved research question is whether the logic of genocide can be identified in the conduct of industrial warfare itself, even when the deaths of soldiers are conventionally classified as legitimate combat losses. Koenigsberg, Shaw, and Rubenstein provide distinct theoretical approaches to that question; Harrison offers a narrower, intent-based framework for investigating it.

Koenigsberg's argument: genocide without conscious genocidal intent

Richard Koenigsberg's theory makes a more radical claim than simply observing that the First World War produced enormous casualties.

A war can be genocidal in its underlying psychological structure even when its leaders do not consciously recognize that they are engaging in genocidal destruction.

For Koenigsberg, the crucial distinction is between what political and military leaders believed they were doing and what their actions actually accomplished.

They believed they were defending their nations, protecting their people, and pursuing victory. Yet they repeatedly sent enormous numbers of their own citizens into situations where death was not merely possible but virtually certain for substantial numbers of them.

The question is therefore not simply why leaders accepted so many casualties. It is why the systematic destruction of their own people could be experienced as an act of national preservation.

1. Leaders understood the deaths, but not the underlying logic

In the introduction to his 2009 book Nations Have the Right to Kill, Koenigsberg argues that the destruction of soldiers was not simply an unintended by-product of warfare. His hypothesis is that producing sacrificial victims is one of warfare's underlying purposes.

He distinguishes the Aztecs, who explicitly understood warfare in sacrificial terms, from modern Western societies, which generally do not recognize sacrifice as a central function of their own wars.

This is what makes his theory more than an accusation of military incompetence.

A general could consciously intend to capture an enemy position and consciously accept that thousands of his men would die. Yet he might not recognize the deeper psychological significance of commanding those men to die for their country.

The conscious military objective and the underlying sacrificial function can coexist.

Koenigsberg therefore does not need to demonstrate that generals secretly wished to exterminate their soldiers. He needs to explain why governments repeatedly embraced and perpetuated practices of mass destruction and why national sacrifice made those practices meaningful.

2. The deaths of soldiers become a mechanism for making the nation real

Koenigsberg's theory reverses the conventional relationship between the nation and the soldier.

In the conventional understanding, the nation exists and soldiers die to protect it.

In Koenigsberg's psychological interpretation, the nation is an imagined collective entity whose reality is affirmed through the deaths of soldiers. Their actual bodies provide material evidence for the supposedly greater existence of the national body.

He develops this explicitly in Awakening from the Nightmare of History, arguing that war can function as a ritual in which dead and mutilated bodies affirm the reality of the nation.

This produces the central paradox of his theory:

The sacrificial paradox

A reconstruction of Koenigsberg's psychological argument

The nation must survive.

Its survival requires sacrifice.

The nation's own people must die.

Their deaths affirm the nation's reality.

The destruction of the population becomes evidence of devotion to its preservation.

The paradox does not require the political leaders to understand it. Indeed, Koenigsberg argues that the sacrificial function of warfare is something modern societies resist acknowledging.

3. How this relates to genocide

Koenigsberg's argument is that the First World War and the Holocaust shared a sacrificial logic, although their victims, methods, and purposes were different.

In his interpretation, Hitler's experience of the First World War helped establish a principle: if German soldiers were obligated to sacrifice their lives for Germany, Jews could also be compelled to die. Koenigsberg identifies this as a psychological connection between warfare and genocide.

The implication is that genocide did not emerge from a completely separate form of political behavior. It developed, in Koenigsberg's account, from an established institution in which national survival could justify the destruction of human beings.

There is nevertheless an important distinction between a genocidal psychological structure and genocide as a legal category.

The 1948 Genocide Convention requires specific intent to destroy a protected group as such. Leaders need not recognize or call their actions genocide, but that does not eliminate the requirement to establish destructive intent.

Koenigsberg's thesis therefore does not, by itself, establish that the First World War constituted genocide under international law. It challenges the psychological distinction between warfare and genocide.

4. The distinction that makes his theory worth examining

I would distinguish three kinds of intention when interpreting Koenigsberg:

Level | The relevant question

Conscious military intention | What did commanders believe they were trying to accomplish?

Awareness of destruction | Did they know that their decisions would produce mass death?

Unconscious sacrificial function | Did the destruction itself serve a psychological purpose that leaders and societies did not recognize?

Koenigsberg's theory principally concerns the third question. His evidence for the second includes the repeated ordering of attacks despite the anticipated casualties. In a 2014 essay, he specifically challenges whether the destruction of soldiers in such circumstances can meaningfully be described as unintentional.

The resulting research question is not whether the generals secretly wanted genocide. It is whether national sacrifice helped motivate and sustain military practices that they consciously understood as serving other purposes.

The distinction I would preserve in describing Koenigsberg's theory is that the leaders were not necessarily unconscious of the killing; they were unconscious of the sacrificial function of the killing.

That formulation captures his argument without requiring the unsupported claim that every commander intended genocide or that every battlefield death had the same meaning.

Abraham Lincoln and Koenigsberg's theory of genocidal war

Abraham Lincoln is a particularly revealing case for Richard Koenigsberg's theory because Lincoln's understanding of the American Civil War brought national preservation, mass death, and sacrifice into a single moral framework.

The question is not whether Lincoln consciously wanted to destroy Americans. It is whether he helped sustain a war in which the destruction of Americans became necessary to preserve the nation—and whether he understood the deeper implications of that sacrifice.

Lincoln's case tests the difference between accepting mass death for a political purpose and making mass death a source of political meaning.

Those are related but distinct propositions. We need to examine what Lincoln actually said and did before concluding that the Civil War was genocidal in Koenigsberg's sense.

1. Koenigsberg explicitly includes Lincoln in his theory

In his April 19, 2018 essay, Lenin, Hitler—and Abraham Lincoln, Koenigsberg responds to a philosopher who objected to his placing Lincoln alongside Lenin and Hitler as examples of leaders devoted to transcendent political ideals.

Koenigsberg's response is important: the moral character of a political ideal and the mechanism through which people validate it are separate questions. His theory concerns the mechanism.

He writes:

“Dying and killing represent vehicles for verification—the manner in which the value (or ‘truth’) of the transcendent value is established.”

He includes Lincoln's vision of a more perfect union among the ideals that people may die and kill to establish.

This is a direct application of Koenigsberg's theory to Lincoln, not merely my extrapolation.

It also clarifies the argument: Lincoln's stated purposes included preserving constitutional government and, increasingly, ending slavery. Koenigsberg's theory examines how death and sacrifice could establish the reality of those purposes. The moral content of the cause does not, in his framework, change the underlying sacrificial mechanism.

2. Gettysburg: the dead become the reason the living must continue

The Gettysburg Address of November 19, 1863, provides a particularly direct expression of the relationship Koenigsberg is investigating.

Lincoln makes three connected claims:

1. The soldiers died so the nation could survive.
2. Their deaths consecrated the battlefield.
3. The living must renew their commitment to the war so those deaths will not have been in vain.

These are explicit elements of the address, not inferred psychological motives.

The third claim creates a significant question for Koenigsberg's theory. The deaths of soldiers do not simply become consequences of a political decision. They become part of the justification for continuing the struggle.

The living are called to greater devotion because the dead have already demonstrated theirs.

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet examines precisely this process in her 2012 article, War and National Renewal: Civil Religion and Blood Sacrifice in American Culture. She argues that Lincoln's religious language transforms military death into a source of national regeneration.

Her analysis supports the sacrificial interpretation of the speech, although it does not establish that Lincoln intended to produce casualties for their symbolic value.

3. Lincoln's wartime decisions: preserving the nation through destruction

The sacrificial interpretation becomes more consequential when compared with Lincoln's actual exercise of presidential authority.

In his April 4, 1864, letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln explains that his constitutional duty required him to preserve the nation. He uses a striking bodily analogy: a limb may need to be amputated to save a life.

He also explains that military necessity led him to adopt emancipation as a means of preserving the Union.

Lincoln's metaphor distinguishes the survival of the greater political body from the preservation of its individual parts.

By August 1864, Lincoln was encouraging General Ulysses S. Grant to maintain pressure on Confederate forces during the prolonged siege of Petersburg. The National Archives preserves his August 17 message urging Grant to maintain his grip on the enemy.

These documents establish that Lincoln understood military destruction as a possible necessity of national preservation. They do not establish that he sought destruction as an end in itself.

Koenigsberg's theory introduces an additional question: did the nation's continued survival acquire its meaning through the willingness to sacrifice the very people it was supposed to protect?

4. The Second Inaugural: the war becomes an instrument of divine judgment

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 1865, introduces another dimension.

Lincoln proposes that the war might represent God's judgment upon the entire country for slavery, with both North and South suffering its consequences.

He imagines the possibility that the war could continue until the wealth accumulated through slavery had been consumed and the blood drawn from enslaved people had been answered by blood shed in battle.

This is a different explanation from the one Lincoln offered at Gettysburg.

At Gettysburg, soldiers die so that the nation might survive.

In the Second Inaugural, their deaths may also belong to a providential reckoning for the nation's history of slavery.

The significance for Koenigsberg's theory is that political destruction can acquire a sacred interpretation without its participants consciously understanding themselves to be conducting a sacrificial ritual.

But Lincoln's uncertainty matters. He presents the divine explanation as a possibility, expresses hope that the war will end, and calls for reconciliation and care for its survivors. He does not claim to know God's purposes or to have authority to prolong the war to fulfill them.

5. Does Lincoln's case establish Koenigsberg's genocidal interpretation?

The evidence supports distinguishing three claims:

Claim | What the evidence establishes

Lincoln knowingly continued a war that killed large numbers of Americans. | His wartime decisions and correspondence establish his acceptance of military destruction in pursuit of Union victory.

Lincoln gave the deaths of soldiers a sacred national meaning. | The Gettysburg Address explicitly connects death, consecration, renewed devotion, and national survival.

Lincoln unconsciously pursued the destruction of Americans as a genocidal objective. | This remains a psychological hypothesis, rather than an established conclusion about his intentions.

Koenigsberg himself addresses Lincoln as an example of the sacrificial mechanism in his 2018 discussion of Paul W. Kahn's Sacred Violence. He connects the Civil War's killing to the way political ideals acquire reality through sacrifice.

The strongest distinction is therefore between what can be demonstrated historically and what Koenigsberg's theory proposes psychologically.

The historical evidence documents Lincoln's commitment to national preservation, his willingness to continue military operations, and his attribution of meaning to the resulting deaths.

Koenigsberg proposes that these phenomena may express an underlying sacrificial function that is not reducible to Lincoln's conscious political objectives.

That possibility is distinct from establishing genocide under the legal definition, which requires intent to destroy a protected group as such.

The central question Lincoln's case raises is whether the deaths of soldiers merely served the preservation of the Union, or whether those deaths also helped constitute the Union as a sacred national reality.

The first proposition concerns the stated purpose of the war. The second is Koenigsberg's psychological interpretation of what the war accomplished.

Yes. Hitler portrayed the destruction of the Jews as necessary for Germany's survival. This is an important connection to Richard Koenigsberg's theory of national sacrifice.

The distinction is that Hitler represented German soldiers' deaths as sacrifices made for Germany, while he represented Jews as an existential enemy whose destruction would save Germany. In both cases, killing acquired meaning through the claimed survival of the nation.

Koenigsberg's theory asks whether these two forms of destruction were connected by a common sacrificial logic, even though they had radically different victims and purposes.

What Koenigsberg actually argues

Koenigsberg makes the connection explicitly in Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War.

He argues that Hitler became preoccupied with the deaths of German soldiers during the First World War and falsely believed that Jews had escaped the obligation to fight and die for Germany. In fact, German Jews served and died in substantial numbers.

In Koenigsberg's interpretation, Hitler's reasoning developed along these lines:

• German soldiers had sacrificed their lives for the nation.
• Jews were imagined as selfish people who refused this obligation.
• If Germany could demand the deaths of its soldiers, it could also demand the deaths of Jews.
• The Holocaust thus became a means of compelling Jews to submit to the nation's power over life and death.

Koenigsberg states that Hitler's thinking about genocide grew out of his understanding of warfare as the occasion when nations sacrifice their soldiers.

This goes further than saying Hitler killed Jews because he considered them enemies. Koenigsberg argues that their destruction also fulfilled a sacrificial function: no one could escape the state's claimed authority to demand death.

The connection to national salvation

Hitler's own rhetoric provides evidence for the national-survival element.

In his January 30, 1939, Reichstag speech, he falsely blamed Jews for the prospect of another world war and threatened the annihilation of European Jewry if one occurred.

Nazi racial ideology also portrayed Jews as an existential threat to the German people. The regime claimed that eliminating this supposed threat was necessary to ensure Germany's survival. These claims were antisemitic fabrications, not descriptions of an actual Jewish threat.

This brings us back to Lincoln and the distinction between conscious intention and underlying psychological function.

Question | Lincoln | Hitler

What was the claimed object of preservation? | The Union and constitutional government | A racially defined German national community

Who was required to die? | Soldiers fighting to preserve the Union | German soldiers and Jewish victims of Nazi genocide

How was death given meaning? | Sacrifice for national survival and the Union's future | Soldiers' sacrifice for Germany; Jews' destruction represented as necessary for German survival

What does Koenigsberg investigate? | How killing and dying validate a transcendent political ideal | How the logic of soldiers' sacrifice could extend to the extermination of Jews

The crucial difference is that Jewish victims were deliberately targeted for extermination as a people. They were not soldiers accepting combat risks in pursuit of a shared political cause. Koenigsberg's comparison concerns the underlying sacrificial mechanism, not an equivalence between the Civil War and the Holocaust.

The deeper implication of Koenigsberg's theory is that nationalism can turn the destruction of human beings into an apparent requirement for preserving the nation—even though those human beings are the very people political institutions ought to protect.

The people selected for destruction may be designated either as the nation's defenders or as its enemies. Their deaths can then be represented as serving the nation's survival.

That is the connection Koenigsberg draws between warfare and genocide. It is a psychological interpretation of the relationship, not proof that all leaders who accept military casualties harbor genocidal intentions.

For the most direct treatment of your question, see Koenigsberg's Hitler, War—and the Holocaust and his chapter The Sacrificial Meaning of the Holocaust.