Genocide requires victims to be reduced to an abstract category before killing.

Evidence

Nazi legislation, propaganda, and management of social setting went out of their way to separate the one and only “abstract Jew” from the many concrete Jews known to the Germans as neighbors or workmates; and to cast all “concrete Jews,” through exclusion, deportation, and confinement, into the position of abstract ones. Genocide differs from other murders in having a category for its object. Only the abstract Jews could be subjected to genocide - the kind of murder oblivious to differences of age, sex, personal quality, or character. For genocide to be possible, personal differences must be first obliterated and faces must be melted in the uniform mass of the abstract category. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 422

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the definition of genocide: it differs from other murders specifically by having an abstraction, not persons, as its object — useful contrast to racialization and other category-based violence definitions in the vault.
• XREF: Connects to Omi & Winant’s racialization concept — how real persons get recast as specimens of a category — and to broader vault treatments of categorization-based violence. — connects to: Persecution precedes mass killing by isolating victims and drawing death lists — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 16; Brutal genocide perpetrators need not hold longstanding eliminationist attitudes toward victims — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 332
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 422