Raphael Lemkin

Raphael Lemkin invented the word genocide. He invented it because what was happening to the Jews of Europe needed a word, and the existing legal vocabulary did not contain one. He was a Polish Jewish lawyer, born in 1900 in the small town of Bezwodne, in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Belarus. He had been working on the problem of state-organised mass murder since the early 1930s, prompted by the Armenian genocide of 1915 and by the inability of international law to do anything about it. He left Poland in 1939 ahead of the German advance, lost forty-nine members of his own family in the Holocaust, including his parents, and reached the United States in 1941.

The word genocide first appeared in print in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, written from his post at Duke and the Department of War in Washington. The book was a documentary study of the laws and decrees the Reich had imposed on the territories it occupied, drawn from over two hundred and fifty original German sources. It was meant as an evidentiary basis for postwar prosecution. The chapter on genocide, the ninth in the book, defined the word and argued that it should become a crime under international law. Genocide, Lemkin wrote, was not just the killing but the coordinated destruction of a national or religious group through a range of acts including killing, destruction of cultural institutions, prevention of reproduction, removal of children and forced denationalisation. The definition is broader than what most readers now understand by the word. It is also the definition that became law.

Lemkin spent the next four years lobbying. He was an irritating, single-minded, badly dressed man who slept on benches in the United Nations buildings and pestered diplomats from every member state. He carried a worn briefcase containing his draft convention. He wrote letters in five languages. He had no institutional backing and very little money. He almost destroyed his own health. He was successful. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948, the day before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Genocide became a crime under international law.

Lemkin then began the next campaign, to get individual states to ratify the convention. He worked through the early 1950s on this and on his unfinished history of genocide. He died of a heart attack at a New York bus stop on 28 August 1959, alone, on his way to a job interview. Seven people attended his funeral. The United States did not ratify the Genocide Convention until 1988, almost thirty years after his death.

His work has been the legal basis of every genocide prosecution since 1948, including those for Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica and the war in the former Yugoslavia. The current cases at the International Court of Justice on Gaza and on the Rohingya are argued under his Convention. The word he made is now used loosely in public debate, often by people who do not know its origin. Lemkin would not have minded the looseness. He would have wanted the cases brought.

See also

Sources

  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
  • Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
  • Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards