LEMKIN, RAPHAEL (1900–1959)

Inventor of the term genocide.

Raphael Lemkin was born in tsarist Russia, in a village that became part of Poland in 1918 and of Belarus in 1945. In 1941 he emigrated to the United States, a typical itinerary for a "Polish" Jew and intellectual.

Lemkin had studied philology at the University of Lvov, becoming fluent in many languages. Then, after earning a doctorate in law, he became a public prosecutor for the District Court of Poland. In his unpublished autobiography, Totally Unofficial Man (1957), he said that he had long been interested in accounts of exterminations of national, racial, and religious minorities. Indeed, during World War I, he had witnessed the occupation of territories on the western and eastern fronts and the extermination of the Armenians. In 1921, during the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, who had killed one of the perpetrators, the former Great Vizier Talât Paşa, in Berlin, Lemkin asked why the Germans had not arrested Talât: "It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men? This is most inconsistent" (quoted in Power, p. 17). He would spend the rest of his life devoted to eliminating this inconsistency, ensuring that these crimes were treated as crimes. In 1933 he presented a report to the Madrid International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law, arguing that actions taken with the purpose of elimination and oppression of populations ought to be penalized.

In 1939, while fighting the Germans during the invasion of Poland, Lemkin was wounded; he managed to escape to Sweden, where he began the work of compiling documents on Nazi rule in Europe. After making his way to the United States via Russia and Japan, he joined the law faculty at Duke University in 1941. He was then appointed chief consultant of the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare, Foreign Economic Administration.

In a speechon24August1941Winston Churchill called the slaughter of the Jews and other ethnic groups "a crime without a name" (British Library of Information transcription, Internet page). Raphael Lemkin gave that crime a name in 1943. He called it "genocide"—a compound made up of the Greek word genos (race) and the Latin occidere (killing)—in his seminal work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). In his 1945 article "Genocide, a Modern Crime," Lemkin summarized his thinking. He quoted Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundsted "aping the Führer" in 1943: "One of the great mistakes of 1918 was to spare the civil life of the enemy countries, for it is necessary for us Germans to always at least double the numbers of the peoples of the contiguous countries. We are therefore obliged to destroy at least a third of their inhabitants" (quoted in Lemkin, 1945, p. 39). Then Lemkin added: "Hitler was right. The crime of the Reich in wantonly and deliberately wiping out whole peoples is not utterly new. It is only new in the civilized world as we have come to think of it. It is so new in the traditions of civilized man that he has no name for it. It is for this reason that I took the liberty of inventing the word, 'genocide"' (Lemkin, 1945, p. 39).

He went beyond the invention of words. Material from Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was used in establishing a basis for the Nuremberg war trials, and Lemkin was appointed an advisor to the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg trial, U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson. In 1946 the UN General Assembly approved a draft resolution naming genocide a crime under international law. With Lemkin as advisor, the draft was rewritten; in December 1948 in Paris, the UN General Assembly approved the first legally binding human rights international treaty by a vote of fifty-five to zero. Lemkin went on lobbying: by the time of his death in 1959, sixty countries had ratified the treaty, a majority of UN members at the time. Twice Raphael Lemkin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. But his crucial invention was truly recognized only in the 1970s, when the Holocaust and other genocides began to be better understood in their complete horror.

See alsoArmenian Genocide; Holocaust; Nuremberg War Crimes Trials .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

British Library of Information. "Prime Minister Winston Churchill's Broadcast to the World about the Meeting with President Roosevelt." Available at http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/410824awp.html

Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation. Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress. Washington, D.C., 1944.

——. "Genocide, a Modern Crime." Free World 9, no. 4 (1945): 39–43.

Power, Samantha. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York, 2002.

"Prevent Genocide International." Available at http://www.preventgenocide.org/

Totten, Samuel, and Steven Leonard Jacobs, eds. Pioneers of Genocide Studies. New Brunswick, N.J., 2002.

Totten, Samuel, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds. Genocide in the Twentieth Century: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. New York, 1995.

Annette Becker