The Origins of Genocide

Raphael Lemkin as a historian of mass violence

Dominik J. Schaller, Jürgen Zimmerer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317990413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This year the United Nations celebrated the 'Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide', adopted in December 1948. It is time to recognize the man behind this landmark in international law. At the beginning were a few words: "New conceptions require new terms. By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group". Rarely in history have paradigmatic changes in scholarship been brought about with such few words. Putting the quintessential crime of modernity in only one sentence, Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), the Polish Jewish specialist in international law, not only summarized the horrors of the National Socialist Crimes, which were still underway, when he coined the term "genocide" in 1944, but also influenced international law. As the founding figure of the UN Genocide Convention Lemkin is finally getting the respect he deserves. Less known is his contribution to historical scholarship on genocide. Until his death, Lemkin was working on a broad study on genocides in the history of humankind. Unfortunately, he did not manage to publish it. The contributions in this book offer for the first time a critical assessment not only of his influence on international law but also on historical analysis of mass murders, showing the close connection between both.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

Introduction: The Origins of Genocide – Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence

DOMINIK J. SCHALLER and JÜRGEN ZIMMERER

“An analysis of the laws and decrees promulgated by the Nazis and their puppet governments in the conquered areas of Europe has been made by Dr. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer now in this country, in a book called ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’. The book published Wednesday, contains 674 pages. Columbia University Press is distributing it.”¹

This simple abstract, published in the New York Times, shows that Lemkin’s contemporaries did not realize immediately how deeply and significantly Axis Rule in Occupied Europe would influence both international law and the social sciences. The new term and concept of ‘genocide’ was not even mentioned in this laconic text. Only a few years later, international lawyers and observers of the Nuremberg Trials had to conclude that expressions like ‘mass murder’, ‘Germanization’ or ‘crimes against humanity’ were neither adequate nor sufficient to characterize the acts of violence committed by the Nazis during the second World War. Most specialists in international law agreed that a more specific term was needed and soon recognized that Lemkin’s idea of genocide could be a useful framework for the analysis and punishment of the persecution and annihilation of the European Jewry. Waldemar Kaempffert, science editor of the New York Times, for example, proclaimed that ‘genocide is the new name for the crime fastened on the Nazi leaders’. What is more, Kaempffert understood the global and temporal scope of Lemkin’s concept:

Attempts at the wholesale extermination of a population and the transmutation of its culture had been made before and after Rome reduced Carthage to ruins. The wars waged by the Crusaders and Mohammedans of old were largely wars of extermination. The Turks in their time did their best to destroy the Armenians. It was to identify such crimes that Professor Lemkin coined the word genocide.²

The adoption of the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 marked the breakthrough of Lemkin’s concept. However, Lemkin’s wish that the UN Convention would effectively and sustainably prevent further genocides from occurring did not come true. Due to the political constellations determined by the Cold War, the Genocide Convention had not been more than a statement of intent. The superpowers would have had the means at their disposal to prevent or punish the crime of genocide, but they preferred not to meddle in the domestic affairs of their respective allies. Rather, they concentrated on denouncing acts of mass violence perpetrated by the opposing side. It was the end of the bipolar world order that led to a diminishing of the deadlock that had made the Genocide Convention a rather dysfunctional tool. The appointment of the ad hoc tribunals for the wars in former Yugoslavia and the mass murder of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1993 and 1994 respectively, as well as the adoption of the Rome Statute on the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in July 2002, reflected the newly gained significance and acceptance of the Genocide Convention. Finally, on 2 September 1998, the first verdict ever on the count of genocide was handed down, as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) found Jean Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba, guilty as charged. And in July 2008, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC decided to charge the Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir with genocide because of the latter’s role in the organization of the atrocities committed in Darfur.³ If the pre-trial chamber of the ICC confirms the charges by its prosecutor this would be the first genocide indictment of a current head of state.

The growing importance of the Genocide Convention coincides with an increasing general interest in the man who coined the term genocide. After his death in 1959, Lemkin and his work were forgotten for decades. It was the institutional establishment of genocide studies in the mid-1990s that led to a rediscovery of the self-proclaimed ‘founder of the Genocide Convention’. Although genocide researchers revere Lemkin as the pioneer of their discipline, and name libraries and human rights awards after him, historical scholarship on his biography and work is still in its infancy. So far, only one comprehensive biography has been written.⁴ What is still largely forgotten is the fact that Lemkin was not only a campaigner for the UN convention but also a historian of genocide. Large parts of his oeuvre have not yet been examined, let alone published.⁵ The contributions in this volume offer for the first time a critical assessment not only of his influence on international law but also of his historical studies on mass violence, showing the close connection between the two.

After all, who was Raphael Lemkin? And what made him develop a new concept for the analysis of a special form of collective violence and relentlessly struggle for a new international law aimed at the prevention and punishment of the worst form of human rights abuse?

Raphael Lemkin and the Genesis of the UN Genocide Convention

Lemkin was born in 1900 in Bezwodene, a town in then Eastern Poland, into a family of farmers. According to his own testimony, Lemkin had been sensitive to the suffering of ethnic groups from his early days onwards. In his unpublished autobiography, entitled ‘Totally Unofficial’, Lemkin stated how the novel Quo Vadis had had a lasting impact on his thinking and his career, and on the way he – as a Jew – had identified with the fate of the persecuted Christians:

In my early boyhood, I read Quo Vadis by Henry Sienkiewicz – this story full of fascination about the sufferings of the early Christians and the Romans’ attempt to destroy them solely because they believed in Christ. Nobody could save them, neither the police of Rome nor any outside power. It was more than curiosity that led me to search in history for similar examples, such as the case of the Hugenots, the Moors of Spain, the Aztecs of Mexico, the Catholics in Japan, and so many races and nations under Genghis Khan. The trail of this unspeakable destruction led straight through modern times up to the threshold of my own life. I was appalled by the frequency of the evil, by great losses in life and culture, by the despairing impossibility of reviving the dead or consoling the orphans, and above all, by the impunity coldly relied upon the guilty.⁶

Lemkin stated that the analysis of mass violence made him become a lawyer, because he ‘thought that this profession would best qualify, [him] for [his] task of making the destruction of groups of human beings punishable’.⁷ These passages are typical of the expressive and pathetic style of his autobiographical writing. Although his unpublished memoirs are not a reliable source regarding the stages of his career, they shed light on his self-understanding.

What is true is that the fate of the Anatolian Armenians during the first World War, especially the inability of the victorious Allies to prosecute the leading Young Turks, shocked the young Lemkin deeply. In the wake of this experience he concluded that an international law against the wholesale extermination of ethnic and religious groups had to be created. In order to achieve this goal, Lemkin was willing to limit state sovereignty, which most legal philosophers and practitioners of international law rejected: ‘But sovereignty of states implies conducting an independent foreign and internal policy, building of schools, construction of roads, in brief, all types of activity directed towards the welfare of people. Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people.’⁸

After obtaining his doctorate in 1926, Lemkin rose to become a renowned expert on international law and a leading advocate of the protection of minorities. In order to strengthen the security of national, religious and racial minorities, Lemkin proposed, at the Fifth International Conference on the Unification of Criminal Law in Madrid (1933), the establishment of two additional statutory offences in international law: ‘vandalism’ and ‘barbarism’ were to be included in the domestic criminal law of the 37 participant states. By ‘vandalism’, Lemkin meant the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a specific group; by ‘barbarism’, the suppression and extermination of members of a racial, religious or social group. However, the congress rejected Lemkin’s proposals.

After the outbreak of the second World War, Lemkin was confronted with persecution on a very personal level. He had to leave Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and fled via Sweden to the United States, where he taught at Duke University and at Yale before working for the Board of Economic Warfare.⁹

The far-reaching indifference of the US-American public towards the murder of the European Jews depressed and motivated Lemkin at the same time. An international treaty for the protection of ethnic and religious minorities, signed by the Allies and neutral states, might prevent the National Socialists from fulfilling their plan, he hoped naively:

It was still possible to save at least a part of the people. The Allies still had an access to the parliaments of most of the nations of the world at that time. A treaty naming genocide a crime could still be enacted and applied by many parliaments. And then a warning had to be issued to Hitler concomitantly with the treaty. The warning would say that the protection of the very existence of nations is the main aim of the Allies.¹⁰

Restlessly, Lemkin looked for the necessary support for the creation of such a treaty. But the unsuccessful lobbying wore him down, and he himself described impressively how he suffered from his helplessness and inability to win politicians and opinion-makers over to his cause. In addition, he was worried about his remaining family in Poland:

My nights at these times turned into nightmares. Dreams came often incessantly and compellingly. I saw my parents in my dreams very realistically. The worst, however, were the visions which came in a half-sleepy stage. During one of them, I saw the interior of a train. A drab light was falling on people sitting on valises. Among them was my mother with a stony face. Next to her was a small boy. Who was he? I recognized the dark coat of my mother, her high forehead, her eyes were saying nothing. Her mouth was silent ice. Where was she going? Was it her last journey? … My health was deteriorating ostensibly and friends made an appointment for me to see a doctor.¹¹

Nevertheless, Lemkin never abandoned his idea of an international law against the murder of peoples. In 1944, he published his famous Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, both a compilation of documents on and a lucid analysis of the German policy of occupation and destruction in Europe.¹² In this work Lemkin introduced the term ‘genocide’ for the first time, giving a name to what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had called ‘a crime without a name’.¹³ The neologism ‘genocide’, meant, as he defined it

the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. … Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.¹⁴

Furthermore, genocides – according to Lemkin – have to be understood as processes:

Genocide has two phases: one destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.¹⁵

Lemkin hoped that after the end of the war, the statutory offence of genocide would be included in the charges brought by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) against the National Socialist war criminals; but this was not the case. Specialists in international law soon recognized that the lega...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: The Origins of Genocide – Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence
• 2 Raphael Lemkin and the international debate on the punishment of war crimes (1919 – 1948)
• 3 What you see before your eyes: documenting Raphael Lemkin’s life by exploring his archival papers, 1900 – 1959
• 4 Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the Americas
• 5 Raphael Lemkin’s view of European colonial rule in Africa: between condemnation and admiration
• 6 Raphael Lemkin on the Holocaust
• 7 Hostage of politics: Raphael Lemkin on “Soviet genocide”
• Index