Introduction. Extremely Violent Societies

Abstract

In 1995 the German public was confronted with an exhibition of crimes committed by the German Armed Forces when they participated in the Holocaust in East Europe during the Second World War. The displayed photographs showed in graphic detail the killings committed by German soldiers, and documented the direct involvement in mass murder by many men (and some women). In 2015, an exhibition of photos of torture and murder by security forces in Syria was shown in the United Nation’s headquarters in New York and later in the European Parliament in Brussels; these photos had been allegedly taken by one or more photographers working for the Syrian security forces and later been brought out of the country. Stephen Ferry’s Violentology – A Manual of the Colombian Conflict (2012) is a collection of images of massive and persistent violence during the Colombian conflict. These exemplary photo documentations present im-ages of mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first century and they reveal the major changes in atrocity crimes and mass violence since the Holocaust, as shown in the first, 1995 exhibition.