On the evening of 28 August 1959 a sixty-year-old man wearing a worn dark suit collapsed at a bus stop on the corner of Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. He had a heart attack. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived. He had a few coins in his pocket, a notebook full of his careful handwriting, and an unposted letter to a colleague at the United Nations. He had no family in America. He had been living for the previous six years in a small bedsit on the West Side, paying his rent in arrears, eating in cafeterias when he ate at all, and surviving on small honoraria from his teaching at Yale Law School and Rutgers. The funeral, four days later, was attended by seven people. The man’s name was Raphael Lemkin. He had coined the word genocide in 1944 in a book titled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, drafted at Duke University in North Carolina between 1942 and 1944 from documents he had carried out of Europe in his suitcase in 1941. He had drafted, single-handedly, the working text of the United Nations Genocide Convention adopted by the General Assembly on 9 December 1948. He had spent the eleven years between the adoption of the Convention and his death lobbying the world’s governments to ratify it. The Convention had been the work of his life. The world had received it with a measured indifference. He had died at a bus stop in his second-best suit. His seven mourners had included no representative of any government.
Lemkin invented the word genocide because the languages available to him in 1944, English, French, Russian, German, Polish, did not have a word for what was happening to his family in Eastern Europe. The killing of his mother, his father, his brother, his sister-in-law, his nieces and nephews, his cousins, his uncles, his aunts, his neighbours from the small town of Bezwodne in eastern Poland, and the millions of others in similar positions across the European continent, did not have a name. The English word massacre suggested an event of restricted scale. The English word atrocity suggested specific acts of cruelty. The English phrase mass murder suggested an aggregation of individual murders. None of the words available named the thing that was happening: the deliberate, organised, sustained attempt by a state to eliminate an entire people. Lemkin set himself the task of producing a word for the thing. He needed the word because, in his working theory of how international law develops, the law cannot prohibit what it cannot name. He invented the word so that the law could be made.
The man
Lemkin had been born in 1900 on a small farm near the town of Wolkowysk, then in the Russian Empire, now in Belarus. His parents were Polish-Jewish farmers. He had attended the law faculty at the University of Lwów (Lviv), the same faculty from which Hersch Lauterpacht (the British international lawyer who would draft the crimes against humanity provisions for the Nuremberg Charter) had graduated a decade earlier. The two men had been students of the same teachers, had read the same books, and had developed in parallel two different but complementary frameworks for the postwar international law of mass atrocity. They had not been close friends in their student years and would not, in their later careers, develop the personal relationship that the parallel of their work might have suggested. Lauterpacht’s career was the more academically successful: a chair at Cambridge, a knighthood, a seat on the International Court of Justice. Lemkin’s career was the more publicly consequential and the more privately disastrous.
The personal foundation of Lemkin’s career was a single conversation he had with one of his law professors at Lwów in 1921. He had asked the professor why the perpetrators of the 1915 Armenian genocide had not been brought to trial under any international legal framework. The professor had replied that there was no such framework and that the killing of Armenians by the Ottoman state had been, in the technical legal sense, an internal matter of the Ottoman Empire. Lemkin, then twenty-one years old, had been incredulous. He had asked the professor whether a man who had killed a chicken would be brought to trial under the existing law. The professor had agreed that he would. Lemkin had asked whether a state that had killed a million Armenians should be similarly held responsible. The professor had not had an answer that Lemkin found satisfactory. The conversation, by Lemkin’s own account in his unpublished memoir, had set the direction of his subsequent career.
The 1933 Madrid proposal
Lemkin’s first attempt to produce an international legal framework for what would become genocide was his 1933 proposal to the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law, held at Madrid in October 1933. He had drafted, working from his Warsaw law office, a proposal for two new international crimes: the crime of barbarity (acts intended to destroy a national, religious, or social collectivity) and the crime of vandalism (the destruction of cultural and artistic works of such a collectivity). The proposal had been substantively rejected by the Madrid conference, partly on the grounds that the proposed crimes were too broadly defined and partly on the grounds that the proposal was politically contentious in the international climate of 1933. Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. The Polish foreign ministry, fearing that the proposal might be read in Berlin as an anti-German statement, had instructed its delegation to vote against it.
The Madrid rejection was, in the broader sense, a failure that produced its own success. Lemkin had been refining the proposal in his head for the next decade. The Madrid proposal contained, in early form, most of the substantive elements that would eventually appear in the 1948 Genocide Convention. The decade of refinement, conducted under the pressure of the events of 1933 to 1944, would produce the specific working framework of the Convention.
The escape
Lemkin escaped Poland in September 1939, on the day after the German invasion. He had been on a working trip to Sweden when the war had begun. He had taken passage on a Swedish freighter to America, arriving in New York in April 1941. He had brought with him a substantial collection of documents he had been collecting on the legal practices of the Nazi regime in occupied Europe. He had been working, in his Warsaw practice through the late 1930s, as a counsel to a number of Polish-Jewish business interests with European operations, and had been collecting in that work the documentary record of the regime’s anti-Jewish legislation in Germany, Austria, the Sudetenland, and the parts of Poland that had been annexed to the Reich after September 1939.
The documents, which he carried in a single large suitcase, were the foundational primary source for his subsequent academic work. He had been offered, on the basis of the documents, a position at Duke University Law School at Durham, North Carolina, where he had spent the period 1941 to 1944 drafting the book that would become Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The book was published in November 1944 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was the first systematic English-language analysis of the legal structure of the Nazi occupation of Europe. It was also the book in which Lemkin had first used the word genocide.
The word
Lemkin had constructed the word from the Greek root genos (meaning race, tribe, or people) and the Latin suffix -cide (meaning the killing of). The construction had a precedent in the English word homicide, which was similarly constructed. He had considered other possibilities, including the words ethnocide and Nazicide, before settling on genocide. The Latin-Greek hybrid had the operational advantage that the word could be transferred without modification into most European languages: French génocide, German Genozid, Spanish genocidio, Italian genocidio, Russian gennotsid. The word’s etymology gave it a working sense of generality that the alternatives lacked. Genocide was, in his definition, the destruction of a people as such, regardless of which specific people the perpetrators had targeted in any particular case.
The definition Lemkin gave in the 1944 book was substantially broader than the definition that would eventually appear in the 1948 Convention. Lemkin’s original definition included not only the killing of members of the targeted group but also the destruction of the cultural, social, economic, and political institutions of the group, the imposition of conditions designed to prevent the group’s biological reproduction, and the forced transfer of children of the group to other groups. The Convention’s definition, after the diplomatic negotiations of 1947 to 1948, was narrower in some respects: it excluded the destruction of cultural institutions in the strict sense (the so-called cultural genocide that Lemkin had wished to include) and it excluded the destruction of political groups (which the Soviet delegation had successfully argued for the exclusion of, on the grounds that it might be applied to the Soviet treatment of its own internal political opposition). The narrower definition was the price of the Soviet ratification, which had been required for the Convention to attract the necessary number of signatures.
The Convention
The negotiations that produced the United Nations Genocide Convention ran from late 1946 through to the General Assembly’s adoption of the final text on 9 December 1948. Lemkin’s role in the negotiations was the role of a private lobbyist. He had no formal position. He had been refused a position at the United Nations Secretariat on the grounds that his advocacy work would be incompatible with the neutrality required of UN officials. He had funded his own travel between New York, Lake Success (where the General Assembly met in 1946 to 1948), Paris (the Third Session of the General Assembly, in autumn 1948), and the various national capitals where the negotiations took place. He had operated from a small office at Yale Law School in 1947 to 1948 (where he held a visiting lectureship), from the offices of various American Jewish organisations that supported his work, and frequently from the press galleries and corridor benches of the meetings he was attempting to influence.
The methodology was direct. Lemkin would identify the delegates who would be likely to support the Convention and the delegates who would be likely to oppose it. He would meet personally with each of them, sometimes in their offices, sometimes in hotel lobbies, sometimes at airports as they were travelling between meetings. He would draft, on his own initiative, language that he believed might bridge the disagreements between the delegations. He would lobby individual delegates to support specific clauses. He would, when necessary, draft entire diplomatic notes for sympathetic governments to adopt as their own. The aggregate output was, by any reasonable measure, the largest single contribution to the production of the Convention’s final text. The American delegate Ernest A. Gross acknowledged in his postwar writings that the Convention was, in operational terms, Lemkin’s draft.
The Convention was adopted by the General Assembly without dissent on 9 December 1948. It was opened for signature the following day. By the end of 1948 thirteen states had signed. By the end of 1949, twenty-five had signed. By the time of Lemkin’s death in 1959, fifty-five states had signed and forty-two had ratified the Convention. The Convention had come into force on 12 January 1951 after the deposit of the twentieth ratification instrument.
The ratification campaign
Lemkin’s life from 1949 to 1959 was the campaign for the ratification of the Convention by individual member states. He had calculated that the Convention’s operational value depended on the largest possible number of state ratifications. He had set himself the target of universal ratification within ten years. He had not achieved the target. The work had nevertheless produced fifty-five signatures and forty-two ratifications by the time of his death, an outcome that, by the standards of postwar international treaty negotiations, was a substantial achievement.
The campaign had focused on the principal Western states whose ratifications would be operationally important: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia. The United Kingdom had ratified in 1970, the United States in 1988. The American ratification had been the longest single struggle of Lemkin’s life. He had written approximately three hundred letters to American senators between 1949 and 1959 in support of ratification. He had visited the offices of every member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He had drafted the testimony of multiple American Jewish organisations that had appeared at the relevant hearings. He had not lived to see the ratification, which came twenty-nine years after his death, on 25 October 1988, after a sustained campaign by Senator William Proxmire who delivered approximately 3,200 floor speeches between 1967 and 1986 on the subject.
The personal cost
Lemkin’s family in Poland had been substantially destroyed in the killing of European Jewry. His mother and father had been killed in the German occupation of eastern Poland in 1942 to 1943. His brother and sister-in-law had been killed in the Treblinka killing centre in 1943. His brother’s two children had been hidden in a Polish village by a Catholic family for the duration of the war and had survived; they had emigrated to Palestine in 1947. The aggregate Lemkin family losses ran to forty-nine identified individuals. Lemkin had received the news of the deaths in instalments over the period 1944 to 1947 as the postwar information became available. He had not, on the available record, ever recovered from the news in the personal sense. He had drawn from the news, however, the sustained energy that had produced the Convention.
His financial position was always marginal. The Yale Law School position had paid a small honorarium. The Rutgers position had paid a smaller honorarium. The royalties from Axis Rule in Occupied Europe had been minimal; the book had sold in academic markets only and had not produced any commercial income. He had occasionally been offered better-paid positions at private law firms, including a substantial offer from a New York firm in 1952 that would have paid him approximately eight thousand dollars per year (a substantial sum at the time). He had declined the offers on the grounds that the work would have prevented him from pursuing the ratification campaign.
The funeral
Lemkin’s death on 28 August 1959 was reported in the New York Times the following day in a brief obituary. The funeral, held at the Riverside Memorial Chapel at Amsterdam Avenue and 76th Street on 1 September 1959, was attended by seven people. The mourners included the Cuban representative to the United Nations, Mario de Pazos, who attended in a personal capacity; a representative of the World Jewish Congress; two of Lemkin’s surviving Polish-Jewish friends from his prewar Warsaw practice; and three of his colleagues from Yale Law School. The Chapel had not been informed in advance of the small expected attendance. The funeral expenses were paid for by a small fund collected by Lemkin’s American Jewish organisational supporters in the days after his death. He was buried at the Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens. His grave is marked by a simple stone bearing his name, his dates, and the words Father of the Genocide Convention. The stone was paid for by the same supporters who had paid for the funeral.
What Lemkin produced
The Genocide Convention is, by any reasonable measure, the single most consequential legal instrument of the postwar international order. It established, in international treaty law, the principle that the killing of a people is a crime regardless of where it is committed, regardless of who commits it, and regardless of whether the state on whose territory it is committed wishes to permit it. The principle has been applied, in subsequent international and national legal proceedings, to the prosecution of the Cambodian genocide of 1975 to 1979 (the Khmer Rouge tribunal), the Yugoslav genocide of 1992 to 1995 (the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which produced the Srebrenica genocide conviction), the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda), and the Yazidi genocide of 2014 (the German Federal Court of Justice’s 2021 conviction of the ISIS member Taha al-Jumailly under the German implementing legislation of the Genocide Convention).
None of these proceedings would have been possible without the Convention. The Convention would not have existed without Lemkin. The proposition is the proposition that the historical literature has now substantially established. Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell (2002) is the foundational popular treatment; Philippe Sands’s East West Street (2016) is the more recent and more academically rigorous treatment that places Lemkin’s work in the context of Lauterpacht’s parallel work on crimes against humanity. The Sands account is particularly useful for understanding the relationship between the two doctrines. Lemkin’s genocide framework focuses on the destruction of groups; Lauterpacht’s crimes against humanity framework focuses on the violation of the rights of individuals. The two frameworks complement each other. They both came out of the prewar Lwów law faculty. They both produced the substance of the postwar international criminal law.
The wider lesson of Lemkin’s life is the lesson of the gap between consequential public work and adequate personal recognition. Lemkin had produced the legal foundation on which the postwar international law of mass atrocity rests. The personal recognition for the work had not been forthcoming during his life. He had died alone, in a strange country, in a borrowed second-best suit, with seven mourners at his funeral. The recognition came afterwards. The Lemkin Prize is awarded annually by the United Nations Association of the United States. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has been operational since 2019. The Lemkin grave at Mount Hebron has become a small site of pilgrimage for academics and human-rights activists. The recognition is genuine and appropriate. It came too late for the man it should have honoured during his life.
See also
- The Genocide Convention 1948
- Crimes Against Humanity, a New Concept in International Law
- Raphael Lemkin
Sources
- Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944
- Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, edited by Donna-Lee Frieze, Yale University Press, 2013
- Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Basic Books, 2002
- Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016
- John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
- William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 2009
- Steven L. Jacobs, ed, Lemkin on Genocide, Lexington Books, 2012
- United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 260 (III), Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 9 December 1948