Raphael Lemkin
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Raphael Lemkin (June 24, 1900 – August 28, 1959) was a
Polish lawyer of
Jewish descent. He is best known for his work against
genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words
genos (
Greek for family, tribe, or race) and -cide (
Latin for killing).
[1] He first used the word in print in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress (1944).
Contents
Lemkin was born Rafał Lemkin in the village of Bezwodne in
Imperial Russia, now the
Vawkavysk district of
Belarus. Not much is known of Lemkin's early life. He grew up in a Jewish family and was one of three children born to Joseph and Bella (Pomerantz) Lemkin. His father was a farmer and his mother a highly intellectual woman who was a painter, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books on literature and history. With his mother as an influence, Lemkin mastered ten languages by the age of 14, including French, Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian.
After graduating from a local trade school in
Białystok he began the study of linguistics at the
John Casimir University in
Lviv. It was there that Lemkin became interested in the concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, which was based on the Armenian experience at the hands of the Ottoman Turks then later the experience of Assyrians
[2] massacred in Iraq during the 1933
Simele massacre. Lemkin then moved on to the
University of Heidelberg in
Germany to study philosophy, and returned to Lwów to study law in 1926, becoming a prosecutor in
Warsaw at graduation.
[
edit] Working life
The plaque (Polish/English), 6 Kredytowa Street,
Warsaw,
PolandFrom 1929 to 1934, Lemkin was the Public Prosecutor for the district court of Warsaw. In 1930 he was promoted to Deputy Prosecutor in a local court in
Brzeżany. While Public Prosecutor, Lemkin was also secretary of the Committee on Codification of the Laws of the Polish Republic, which codified the penal codes of Poland, and taught law at Tachkimoni College in Warsaw. Lemkin, working with
Duke University law professor
Malcolm McDermott, translated the The Polish Penal Code of 1932 from Polish to English. McDermott would later provide Lemkin with help in leaving Europe.
In 1933 Lemkin made a presentation to the Legal Council of the
League of Nations conference on international criminal law in
Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. The concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, was based on the
Armenian Genocide and prompted by the experience of
Assyrians[2] massacred in
Iraq during the 1933
Simele massacre.
[3] In 1934 Lemkin, under pressure from the Polish Foreign Minister for comments made at the
Madrid conference, resigned his position and became a private solicitor in Warsaw. While in Warsaw, Lemkin attended numerous lectures organized by the
Free Polish University, including the classes of
Stanisław Rappaport and
Wacław Makowski.
In 1937, Lemkin was appointed a member of the Polish mission to the 4th Congress on Criminal Law in
Paris, where he also introduced the possibility of defending peace through criminal law. Among the most important of his works of that period are a compendium of Polish criminal and taxation law, Prawo karne skarbowe (1938) and a
French language work, La réglementation des paiements internationaux, regarding international trade law (1939).
[
edit] World War II
During the
Polish Defensive War of 1939 Lemkin joined the
Polish Army and defended Warsaw during the
siege of that city, where he was injured by a bullet to the hip, afterward evading capture by the Germans. In 1940 he traveled through
Lithuania to reach
Sweden, where he first lectured at the
University of Stockholm. With the help of Malcolm McDermott, Lemkin received permission to enter the
United States, arriving in 1941.
Although he managed to save his life, he lost 49 relatives in
the Holocaust; they were among over 3 million
Polish Jews and
Lithuanian Jews who were murdered during the German occupation. Some members of his family died in areas annexed by the Soviet Union. The only European members of Lemkin's family who survived the Holocaust were his brother, Elias, and his wife and two sons, who had been sent to a Soviet
forced labor camp. Lemkin did however successfully aid his brother and family in emigrating to
Montreal,
Canada in 1948.
After arriving in the United States Lemkin joined the law faculty at
Duke University in
North Carolina in 1941. During the Summer of 1942 Lemkin lectured at the School of Military Government at the
University of Virginia. He also wrote Military Government in Europe, which was a preliminary version of his more fully developed publication Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In 1943 Lemkin was appointed consultant to the U.S.
Board of Economic Warfare and
Foreign Economic Administration and later became a special adviser on foreign affairs to the War Department, largely due to his expertise in
international law.
In 1944, the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin's most important work, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in the United States. This book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by
Nazi Germany during the course of
World War II, along with the definition of the term
genocide.
[4] Lemkin's idea of genocide as an offense against international law was widely accepted by the international community and was one of the legal bases of the
Nuremberg Trials. In 1945 to 1946, Lemkin became an advisor to
Supreme Court of the United States Justice and
Nuremberg Trial chief counsel
Robert H. Jackson.
[
edit] Post-War
After the war, Lemkin chose to remain in the United States. Starting in 1948, he gave lectures on criminal law at
Yale University. In 1955, he became a Professor of Law at
Rutgers School of Law in Newark. Lemkin also continued his campaign for international laws defining and forbidding genocide, which he had championed ever since the Madrid conference of 1933. He proposed a similar ban on crimes against humanity during the
Paris Peace Conference of 1945, but his proposal was turned down.
Lemkin presented a draft resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty to a number of countries in an effort to persuade them to sponsor the resolution. With the support of the United States, the resolution was placed before the General Assembly for consideration. The
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally presented and adopted on December 9, 1948. In 1951, Lemkin only partially achieved his goal when the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into force, after the 20th nation had ratified the treaty. This treaty had confined its consideration solely to physical aspects of genocide which The Convention defines as:
…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:
· (a) Killing members of the group;
· (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
· (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
· (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
· (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Lemkin's broader concerns over genocide, as set out in his "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe",
[5] also embraced what may be considered as non-physical, namely, psychological acts of genocide which he personally defined as:
· "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 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."
· "Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the 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 by the oppressor's own nationals."
He also outlined his various observed "techniques"
[6] on achieving genocide which ranged from:
· Political
· Social
· Cultural
[7][8]· Economic
· Biological
· Physical:
· Endangering Health
· Mass Killing
· Religious
· Moral
Less well known was Lemkin's view on crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Soviet Union. In 1953, in a speech given in New York City, he described the "destruction of the Ukrainian nation" as the "classic example of Soviet genocide," going on to point out that "the Ukrainian is not and never has been a Russian. His culture, his temperament, his language, his religion, are all different...to eliminate (Ukrainian) nationalism...the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed...a famine was necessary for the Soviet and so they got one to order...if the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priest, and the peasant can be eliminated [then] Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation...This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is as case of genocide, of the destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation."[
citation needed]
[
edit] Recognition
For his work on international law and the prevention of war crimes, Lemkin received a number of awards, including the
Cuban Grand Cross of the Order of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes in 1950, the
Stephen Wise Award of the
American Jewish Congress in 1951, and the
Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. On the 50th anniversary of the Convention entering into force, Dr. Lemkin was also honored by the
UN Secretary-General as "an inspiring example of moral engagement."
Lemkin is the subject of the 2005 play Lemkin's House by
Catherine Filloux, and a one-act play by Robert Skloot (2006, Parallel Press) called If The Whole Body Dies: Raphael Lemkin and the Treaty Against Genocide.
[
edit] Death
Lemkin died of a heart attack at the public relations office of Milton H. Blow in
New York City in 1959, at the age of 59. In an ironic final twist for a man whose life was dedicated to the remembrance of millions of victims of genocide, only seven people attended his funeral.
[9]
