The expression « extreme violence » is employed by scholars to refer to highly variable contexts, that are marked by violence, rage, hatred, massacres, and all that can be called cruelty. My aim is to account for the dehumanizing of the other who is being annihilated. The ethnic conflict in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s exemplifies this phenomenon. In this paper, I examine the different forms of cruelty and crimes of profanation that destroyed the physical, psychological, moral, individual, and collective integrity of the Yugoslavian population, that occured during this conflict. Going beyond statistics of the macabre, the concepts of cruelty and profanation make it possible to restore the intentionality of social agents to anthropological analysis.