Total war and genocide:: Reflections on the Second World War

This paper draws on the findings of a series of international conferences on the question of "total war" in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to investigate possible connections between "total war" and the problem of genocide. Both "total war" and genocide appear to have reached a terrible culmination in the years 1937-1945, raising the question of the connection between the two phenomena. This paper considers the usefulness of concepts such as "total war" and "genocide" as social-scientific ideal types, before going on to reflect on the state of research on the linkage between Nazi Germany's drive for "total war" and its implementation of policies of genocide.