WThe Albigensian Crusade or the Cathar Crusade was a 20-year military campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc, in southern France. The Crusade was prosecuted primarily by the French crown and promptly took on a political flavour, resulting in not only a significant reduction in the number of practising Cathars, but also a realignment of the County of Toulouse in Languedoc, bringing it into the sphere of the French crown, and diminishing both Languedoc's distinct regional culture and the influence of the counts of Barcelona.
WThe Bosnian genocide refers to either the Srebrenica massacre or the wider crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing throughout areas controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. The events in Srebrenica in 1995 included the killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, as well as the mass expulsion of another 25,000–30,000 Bosniak civilians by VRS units under the command of General Ratko Mladić.
WThe Chetniks, a Yugoslav Royalist and Serbian nationalist movement and guerrilla force, committed numerous war crimes during the Second World War, primarily directed against the non-Serb population of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, mainly Muslims and Croats, and against Communist-led Yugoslav Partisans and their supporters. Several historians regard Chetnik crimes against Muslims and Croats during this period as constituting genocide.
WThe Circassian genocide was the Russian Empire's systematic mass murder, ethnic cleansing, forced migration, and expulsion of 800,000–1,500,000 Circassians from their homeland Circassia, which roughly encompassed the major part of the North Caucasus and the northeast shore of the Black Sea. It has been recorded that during the events, the Russian and Cossack forces used various brutal methods to entertain themselves, such as tearing the bellies of pregnant women and removing the baby inside, then feeding the babies to dogs. Russian generals such as Grigory Zass described the Circassians as "subhuman filth", and justified their killing and use in scientific experiments. This occurred in the aftermath of the Caucasian War in the second half of the 19th century. The displaced people were settled primarily to the Ottoman Empire.
WDecossackization was the Bolshevik policy of systematic repressions against Cossacks of the Russian Empire, especially of the Don and the Kuban, between 1917 and 1933 aimed at the elimination of the Cossacks as a separate ethnic, political, and economic entity. This was the first example of Soviet leaders deciding to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory," which they had taken to calling the "Soviet Vendée" The decossackization is frequently described as a genocide of the Cossacks, a process described by scholar Peter Holquist as part of a "ruthless" and "radical attempt to eliminate undesirable social groups" that showed the Soviet regime's "dedication to social engineering".
WThe Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush, also known as Aardakh, Operation Lentil ; Ingush and Chechen: Вайнах махкахбахар Vaynah Mahkahbahar) was the Soviet forced transfer of the whole of the Vainakh populations of the North Caucasus to Central Asia on February 23, 1944, during World War II. The expulsion was ordered by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria after approval by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, as a part of a Soviet forced settlement program and population transfer that affected several million members of non-Russian Soviet ethnic minorities between the 1930s and the 1950s.
WThe deportation of the Crimean Tatars or the Sürgünlik ("exile") was the ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars in 18–20 May 1944 carried out by the Soviet government, ordered by Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet state security and secret police, acting on behalf of Joseph Stalin. Within three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport mostly women, children, the elderly, even Communists and members of the Red Army, to mostly the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of the several ethnicities who were encompassed by Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.
WThe Genocide of the Serbs was the systematic persecution of Serbs which was committed during World War II by the fascist Ustaše regime in the Nazi German puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945. It was carried out through executions in death camps, as well as through mass murder, ethnic cleansing, deportations, forced conversions, and war rape. This genocide was simultaneously carried out with the Holocaust in the NDH as well as the genocide of Roma, by combining Nazi racial policies with the ultimate goal of creating an ethnically pure Greater Croatia.
WThe Holocaust in Hungary was the final act of mass murder of a Jewish community by Nazi Germany during the 1941–1945 genocide of the European Jews. New restrictions against Jews were imposed soon after Germany occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944. The invading troops included a Sonderkommando led by SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who arrived in Budapest to supervise the deportation of the country's Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, over 434,000 Jews were deported on 147 trains, most of them to Auschwitz, where about 80 percent were gassed on arrival.
WThe Holocaust in Poland was part of the European-wide Holocaust and took place within the September 1, 1939, boundaries of Poland, which ceased to exist as a territorial entity after the German and Soviet invasion of Poland. The genocide took the lives of three million Polish Jews, half of all Jews killed during the Holocaust.
WThe Holocaust in Ukraine took place in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the General Government, Crimean General Government and some areas under military control to the East of Reichskommissariat Ukraine and as well in the Transnistria Governorate and Northern Bukovina and Carpathian Ruthenia in World War II. Between 1941 and 1944, more than a million Jews living in the Soviet Union were murdered by Nazi Germany's "Final Solution" extermination policies. Most of them were killed in Ukraine because most pre-WWII Soviet Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, of which Ukraine was the biggest part.
WThe Holodomor, also known as the Terror-Famine and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The term Holodomor emphasises the famine's man-made and intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement. As part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.
WThe massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or the UPA, with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and Lublin region from 1943 to 1945. The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. Most of the victims were women and children. The UPA's actions resulted in between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths.
WCrimes against the Polish nation committed by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion of Poland, along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II, consisted of the murder of millions of ethnic Poles and the systematic extermination of Jewish Poles. The Germans justified these genocides on the basis of Nazi racial theory, which regarded Poles and other Slavic peoples as racially inferior Untermenschen and depicted Jews as a constant threat. By 1942, the Nazi Germans were implementing their plan to kill every Jew in German-occupied Europe, and had also developed plans to eliminate the Polish people through mass murder, ethnic cleansing, enslavement and extermination through labor, and assimilation into German identity of a small minority of Poles deemed "racially valuable". During World War II, the Germans not only murdered millions of Poles, but ethnically cleansed millions more through forced deportation to make room for “racially superior” German settlers. The genocides claimed the lives of 2.7 to 3 million Polish Jews and 1.8 to 2.77 million non-Jewish ethnic Poles, according to various sources such as Poland's Institute of National Remembrance.
WThe Romani genocide or the Romani Holocaust—also known as the Porajmos, the Pharrajimos, and the Samudaripen —was the effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies to commit ethnic cleansing and eventually genocide against Europe's Romani people.