- Person
- Raphael Lemkin
- Lived
- 1900–1959
- Field
- International law
- From
- Polish-American
The story
When Raphael Lemkin reached the United States in 1941, he had already lost his country. The Polish Jewish lawyer and former Warsaw prosecutor had fled the German invasion in September 1939 and spent 1940 in Sweden, collecting the decrees the Nazis were issuing in the lands they occupied. With help from his pre-war colleague Malcolm McDermott, a Duke University law professor, he obtained permission to enter the country and joined Duke's law faculty in North Carolina. He brought his collection of documents with him, and the Duke librarian helped him enlarge it.
He did not stay in the classroom for long. In the summer of 1942 he lectured at the School of Military Government at the University of Virginia, teaching from the decrees he had gathered. That summer he moved to Washington, DC, to join the War Department as an analyst. In 1942 he also compiled a reference collection of the key laws, decrees and regulations issued by the Axis in occupied Europe for the Board of Economic Warfare, the agency then headed by Henry Wallace.
In 1943 he became a consultant to the Board of Economic Warfare and its successor, the Foreign Economic Administration, and he later served as a special adviser on foreign affairs to the War Department, largely because of his expertise in international law. The economic work gave him a close view of how Germany was exploiting the countries it controlled, and it sharpened his thinking about what Nazi rule was really for.
During these years he wrote Military Government in Europe, an early version of his major work, and he completed the manuscript of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in 1941 and 1942. A contract dispute delayed publication until November 1944, when the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace issued it. Lemkin deliberately grounded the book in law rather than wartime propaganda, measuring German practice against the occupation rules of the 1907 Hague Convention and ending with proposals for redress. Its longest part reproduced translations of the decrees themselves, and a chapter titled "Genocide" gave a new name to the pattern they revealed.
The work prepared him for what followed. His idea of genocide as a crime against international law became one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg trials, and in 1945 and 1946 he advised the American chief prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. A refugee scholar had turned his knowledge of occupation law into a resource that helped the Allies understand, and later prosecute, the crimes of the Nazi regime.
Why it matters
Lemkin's analysis helped American officials understand how Nazi occupation worked, and laid the groundwork for prosecuting its crimes after the war.
About Raphael Lemkin
Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the word “genocide” in 1944 and campaigned almost single-handedly until the United Nations outlawed the crime in 1948.
More about Raphael Lemkin
- Raphael Lemkin asked why mass murderers went unpunishedAs a young student, Raphael Lemkin challenged the idea that state sovereignty let governments kill their own people, replying to his professor: "But the Armenians are not chickens."
- Raphael Lemkin named genocide and made it a crimeRaphael Lemkin coined the word 'genocide' in 1944, then campaigned until the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention on 9 December 1948.
- Raphael Lemkin collected Nazi decrees as evidenceAfter fleeing Poland in 1939, Raphael Lemkin gathered and analysed Nazi decrees in Stockholm's libraries, uncovering a deliberate plan to destroy whole nations.
- Raphael Lemkin kept campaigning until the treaty took effectAfter the 1948 vote, Raphael Lemkin kept lobbying until the Genocide Convention came into force in 1951, and then helped countries write genocide into their own laws.
- Raphael Lemkin got "genocide" into the Nuremberg indictmentAdvising US chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson in 1945–1946, Raphael Lemkin succeeded in having the new word "genocide" included in the indictment of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg.
- Raphael Lemkin's idea came of age in the 1990sLittle known when he died in 1959, Raphael Lemkin was rediscovered in the 1990s as international courts began prosecuting genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
- Raphael Lemkin proposed outlawing "barbarity" in 1933In 1933, years before the Holocaust, Raphael Lemkin proposed to an international law conference in Madrid that the destruction of groups be made a crime under international law.
Sources
- Raphael Lemkin Wikipedia
- Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Raphael Lemkin Jewish Virtual Library
- Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Wikipedia
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