Raphael Lemkin

Lemkin was born Rafał Lemkin on 24 June 1900 in Bezwodne, a village in the Volkovyssky Uyezd of the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus).[6][7][Note 1] He grew up in a Polish Jewish family on a large farm near Wolkowysk and was one of three children born to Joseph Lemkin and Bella née Pomeranz.[6][8] His father was a farmer and his mother an intellectual, a painter, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books on literature and history.[9] Lemkin and his two brothers (Elias and Samuel) were homeschooled by their mother.[6]

As a youth, Lemkin was fascinated by the subject of atrocities and would often question his mother about such events as the Sack of Carthage, Mongol invasions and conquests and the persecution of Huguenots.[8][10] Lemkin apparently came across the concept of mass atrocities while, at the age of 12, reading Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz, in particular the passage where Nero threw Christians to the lions.[10] About these stories, Lemkin wrote, "a line of blood led from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to the pogrom of Bialystok." Through his writings, Lemkin demonstrates a belief central to his thinking through his life: the suffering of Jews in eastern Poland was part of a larger pattern of injustice and violence that stretched back through history and around the world.[11]

During World War I, the Lemkin family farm was located in an area of fighting between Russian and German troops.[12] The family buried their books and valuables before taking shelter in a nearby forest.[12] During the fighting, artillery fire destroyed their home and German troops seized their crops, horses and livestock.[12] Lemkin's brother Samuel eventually died of pneumonia and malnutrition while the family remained in the forest.[12]

After graduating from a local trade school in Białystok he began the study of linguistics at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine). He was a polyglot, fluent in nine languages and reading fourteen.[13] His first published book was a 1926 translation of the Hayim Nahman Bialik novella Noach i Marynka from Hebrew into Polish.[14] It was in Bialystok that Lemkin became interested in laws against mass atrocities after learning about the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire,[15][16][17][18][19] then later the experience of Assyrians[20] massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre.[21]

After reading about the 1921 assassination of Talat Pasha, the main perpetrator of the Armenian Genocide, in Berlin by Soghomon Tehlirian, Lemkin asked Professor Julius Makarewicz why Talat Pasha could not have been tried for his crimes in a German court. Makarewicz, a national-conservative who believed that Jews and Ukrainians should be expelled from Poland if they refused to assimilate, answered that the doctrine of state sovereignty gave governments the right to conduct internal affairs as they saw fit: "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them, and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing." Lemkin replied, "But the Armenians are not chickens". His eventual conclusion was that "Sovereignty, I argued, cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people".[22][23]

Lemkin then moved on to Heidelberg University in Germany to study philosophy, returned to Lwów to study law in 1926.

2008 plaque commemorating Lemkin's prewar residence, 6 Kredytowa Street, Warsaw, Poland

Lemkin worked as an assistant prosecutor in the District Court of Brzeżany (since 1945 Berezhany, Ukraine) and Warsaw, followed by a private legal practice in Warsaw.[24] From 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 Republic of Poland, which codified the penal codes of Poland, and taught law at Tachkemoni College in Warsaw. Lemkin, working with Duke University law professor Malcolm McDermott, translated The Polish Penal Code of 1932 from Polish to English.

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. 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 Emil 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 fiscal law, Prawo karne skarbowe (1938) and a French-language work, La réglementation des paiements internationaux, regarding international trade law (1939).

He left Warsaw on 6 September 1939 and made his way towards Wolkowysk, north east of Lwow, caught between the Germans in the west, and the Soviets, who now approached from the east, Poland's independence extinguished by the pact between Stalin and Hitler.[25] He barely evaded capture by the Germans and traveled through Lithuania to reach Sweden[26] by the early spring of 1940 where he lectured at the University of Stockholm. Curious about the manner of imposition of Nazi rule he started to gather Nazi decrees and ordinances, believing official documents often reflected underlying objectives without stating them explicitly. He spent much time in the central library of Stockholm, gathering, translating and analysing the documents he collected, looking for patterns of German behaviour. Lemkin's work led him to see the wholesale destruction of the nations over which Germans took control as an overall aim. Some documents Lemkin analysed had been signed by Hitler, implementing ideas of Mein Kampf on Lebensraum, new living space to be inhabited by Germans.[27] With the help of his pre-war associate McDermott, Lemkin received permission to enter[28] the United States, arriving in 1941.[26]

Although he managed to save his life, he lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust;[26] 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 help his brother and family to emigrate to Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1948.

Dedication by Lemkin in "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe" to Max Huber, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross

After arriving in the United States, at the invitation of McDermott, Lemkin joined the law faculty at Duke University in North Carolina in 1941.[29] 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 US 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 November 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.[30] Lemkin's idea of genocide as an offence 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. The book became one of the foundational texts in Holocaust studies, and the study of totalitarianism, mass violence, and genocide studies.[31]

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 9 December 1948.[32] 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.

Lemkin's broader concerns over genocide, as set out in his Axis Rule,[33] also embraced what may be considered as non-physical, namely, psychological acts of genocide. The book also detailed the various techniques which had been employed to achieve genocide.[34]

Between 1953 and 1957, Lemkin worked directly with representatives of several governments, such as Egypt, to outlaw genocide under the domestic penal codes of these countries. Lemkin also worked with a team of lawyers from Arab delegations at the United Nations to build a case to prosecute French officials for genocide in Algeria.[35]

In the last years of his life, Lemkin was living in poverty in a New York apartment.[36] 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. Lemkin's funeral was well-attended at Riverside Church in New York City.[37] He was buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery, Flushing, Queens, New York.[38] At the time of his death, Lemkin left, among others, two works unfinished: the Introduction to the Study of Genocide, and an ambitious three-volume History of Genocide that contained seventy proposed chapters and a book-length analysis of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg.[39]

The United States, Lemkin's own adopted country, did not ratify the Genocide Convention during his lifetime. Lemkin described his efforts to prevent genocide as a failure, writing, "The fact is that the rain of my work fell on a fallow plain, only this rain was a mixture of the blood and tears of eight million innocent people throughout the world. Included also were the tears of my parents and my friends." [40] Lemkin was not widely known until the 1990s, when international prosecutions of genocide began in response to atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and "genocide" began to be understood as the crime of crimes.[41]

Over one and half million Armenians died in the Armenian Genocide, which took place between the years of 1914 and 1923. Lemkin's interest in prosecuting the perpetrators was sparked when he first learned about the genocide during his studies at University of Lwów (from which he graduated in 1926). In his autobiography, Lemkin wrote that he had been influenced by the 15 March 1921 assassination of Talaat Pasha:

Then one day I read in the newspapers that all Turkish war criminals were to be released... The Turkish criminals released from Malta dispersed all over the world. The most frightful among them was Talaat Pasha, the minister of the interior of Turkey, who was identified with the destruction of the Armenian people... One day he was stopped in the street by a young Armenian with the name Tehlirian. After identifying Talaat Pasha, Tehlirian shot him saying, 'This is for my mother.'[42]

This event became a topic of discussion for Lemkin during his studies on the topic of sovereignty at Lwów: "Sovereignty… 'cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of people." [42] The murder of Talaat Pasha and trial of Tehlirian prompted Lemkin's future path. Lemkin wrote: "At that moment, my worries about the murder of the innocent became more meaningful to me. I didn't know all the answers but I felt that a law against this type of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world." [42]

Commemorative (propagation) poster issued by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, 2015

In 1953, in a speech given in New York City, Lemkin described the Holodomor as one part of "perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification—the destruction of the Ukrainian nation", 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 a case of genocide, of the destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation."[43]

On 20 September 1953, as part of a protest in New York, The Ukrainian Weekly reported a speech by Lemkin:[44]

An inspiring address was delivered at the rally by Prof. Raphael Lemkin, author of the United Nations Convention against Genocide, that is, deliberate mass murder of peoples by their oppressors. Prof. Lemkin reviewed in a moving fashion the fate of the millions of Ukrainians before and after 1932–33, who died victims to the Soviet Russian plan to exterminate as many of them as possible in order to break the heroic Ukrainian national resistance to Soviet Russian rule and occupation and to Communism.

• Ishay, Micheline R. (2008), The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era, Berkeley (CA): University of California Press
• Jenkins, Bruce (2008). The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died. New York: HarperOne. ISBN 978-0-06-147280-0.
• Kornat, Marek (2010), "Rafal Lemkin's Formative Years and the Beginning of International Career in Inter-war Poland (1918-1939)", in Zbiorowa, Praca (ed.), Rafał Lemkin: a Hero of Humankind, Polski Instytut Spraw Miedzynarodowych, ISBN 978-83-89607-85-0
• Power, Samantha (2002). A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-06150-8.
• Schaller, Dominik; Zimmerer, Jürgen (2009). The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780415480260.
• Szawłowski, Ryszard (2005). "Diplomatic File: Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) – The Polish Lawyer Who Created the Concept of 'Genocide'". Polish Quarterly of International Affairs (2): 98–133.
• Irvin-Erickson, Douglas (2017). Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 9780812248647.

• Irvin-Erickson, Douglas. Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. ISBN 9780812293418.
• Cooper, John. Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention. Palgrave/Macmallin, 2008. ISBN 0-230-51691-2.
• Power, Samantha. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Basic Books, 2002 (original hardcover). ISBN 0-465-06150-8. (Chapters 2–5)
• Sands, Philippe (2016). East West Street : on the origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity". New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-385-35071-6.
• Shaw, Martin, 'What is Genocide?'. Polity Press, 2007. ISBN 0-7456-3183-5. (Chapter 2)
• Olivier Beauvallet, Lemkin: face au génocide, (with a French translation of "The legal case against Hitler" released in 1945), Michalon, 2011– ISBN 9782841865604.
• Lemkin, Raphael (author); Frieze, Donna-Lee (editor). Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (24 Jun 2013)
• Civilians in contemporary armed conflicts: Rafał Lemkin's heritage, red. nauk. Agnieszka Bieńczyk-Missala, Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2017
• A. Redzik, Rafał Lemkin (1900–1959) – co-creator of international criminal law. Short biography, Warsaw 2017, ss. 70; ISBN 978-83-931111-3-8
• A. Bieńczyk-Missala, S. Dębski (red.), Rafał Lemkin: A Hero of Humankind, The Polish Institute of International Affairs, 2010.
• A. Bieńczyk-Missala (red.), Civilians in contemporary armed conflicts: Rafał Lemkin’s heritage , Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2017

• A. Bieńczyk-Missala, Raphael Lemkin's Legacy in International Law, (in:), M. Odello, P. Łubiński, The Concept of Genocide in International Criminal Law. Developments After Lemkin, Routledge 2020.
• Guide to the Papers of Raphael Lemkin, by Tanya Elder, at the Center for Jewish History, New York
• Lemkin Discusses Armenian Genocide In Newly-Found 1949 CBS Interview, in: armeniapedia.org
• Totally Unofficial: Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention A study guide on Lemkin and his contributions to human rights law and activism, downloadable pdf at facinghistory.org
• Key writings of Raphael Lemkin on Genocide, 1933–1947, at preventgenocide.org
• Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offenses Against the Law of Nations (for definitions of "barbarity" and "vandalism"), at preventgenocide.org
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
• Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) – The Polish Lawyer Who Created the Concept of "Genocide", by Ryszard Szawłowski, in: Polish Quarterly of International Affairs (2005), 98–133.
• Elder, Tanya (December 2005). "What you see before your eyes: Documenting Raphael Lemkin's life by exploring his archival Papers,1900–1959". Journal of Genocide Research. 7 (4): 469–499. doi:10.1080/14623520500349910. S2CID 56537572.
• Marrus, Michael R. "Three Roads from Nuremberg"; Tablet magazine; 20 Nov. 2015.
• Winter, Jay (7 June 2013). "Prophet Without Honors". The Chronicle Review: B14. Retrieved 10 June 2013.
• Christopher R. Browning, "The Two Different Ways of Looking at Nazi Murder" (review of Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity", Knopf, 425 pp., $32.50; and Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews, Cambridge University Press, 508 pp., $29.99 [paper]), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIII, no. 18 (24 November 2016), pp. 56–58. Discusses Hersch Lauterpacht's legal concept of "crimes against humanity", contrasted with Rafael Lemkin's legal concept of "genocide". All genocides are crimes against humanity, but not all crimes against humanity are genocides; genocides require a higher standard of proof, as they entail intent to destroy a particular group.
• A. Redzik, I. Zeman, Masters of Rafał Lemkin: Lwów school of law [w:] Civilians in contemporary armed conflicts: Rafał Lemkin's heritage, red. nauk. Agnieszka Bieńczyk-Missala, Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2017, s. 235–240.
• Ryszard Szawłowski, Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) • The Polish Lawyer Who Created the Concept of "Genocide", "The Polish Quarterly of International Affairs" 2005, nr 2, s. 98–133
• Ryszard Szawłowski, Rafał Lemkin, warszawski adwokat (1934–1939), twórca pojęcia "genocyd" i główny architekt konwencji z 9 grudnia 1948 r. ("Konwencji Lemkina"). W 55-lecie śmierci, Warszawa 2015.
• Balakian, Peter (Spring 2013). "Raphael Lemkin, Cultural Destruction, and the Armenian Genocide". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 27 (1): 57–89. doi:10.1093/hgs/dct001. S2CID 145008882. - Published on April 1, 2013
• Jacobs, Stephen Leonard (2019). "The Complicated Cases of Soghomon Tehlirian and Sholem Schwartzbard and Their Influences on Raphaël Lemkin's Thinking About Genocide". Genocide Studies and Prevention. 13 (1): 33–41. doi:10.5038/1911-9933.13.1.1594. - Source
• Weiss-Wendt, Anton (December 2005). "Hostage of politics: Raphael Lemkin on "Soviet genocide"". Journal of Genocide Research. 7 (4): 551–559. doi:10.1080/14623520500350017. S2CID 144612446.