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History’s Deadliest Method Of Genocide

The tool that killed tens of millions will surprise you

Grant Piper
8 min readAug 23, 2020

Please note the following material and images may be disturbing to some readers. Viewer discretion is advised.

TToday, when people think of genocide, they think of the Holocaust. They think of Rwanda. They think of the Balkans. These genocides are violent, bloody and horrifying. Armed men rounding people up, death squads, bullets, gas chambers, armored trains, mass graves. Those are the images that spring to mind in response to the word genocide.

However, the most insidious and deadly form of genocide did not use weapons, it didn’t use gas chambers and it did not go door to door. Instead, millions of people were killed without firing a shot.

Genocide Definition

For the intents of this overview, I am using the United Nation’s definition of genocide. We will be focusing on the third tenet of this definition.

It reads:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

  1. Killing members of the group;
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of…

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Grant Piper
Grant Piper

Written by Grant Piper

Professional writer. Amateur historian. Husband, father, Christian.

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