- Person
- Raphael Lemkin
- Lived
- 1900–1959
- Field
- International law
- From
- Polish-American
The story
When the Second World War ended, the Allies prepared to put the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany on trial before an International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who had escaped to the United States, was well placed to help. He had spent the war documenting the laws of Nazi occupation, and in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he had introduced the word "genocide" for the deliberate destruction of national, ethnic and religious groups.
From 1945 to 1946 Lemkin served as an adviser to Robert H. Jackson, the US Supreme Court justice who was chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg. Working with the team preparing the trials, he succeeded in having the new term included in the indictment against the Nazi leadership. His idea of genocide as an offence against international law became one of the legal bases of the trials.
Nuremberg also brought him personal grief. While he was there, Lemkin learned that 49 members of his family, including his parents, had been murdered in killing centres and concentration camps, in the Warsaw ghetto and on death marches.
The outcome left him dissatisfied. Genocide was not yet a crime in any international law, and the Nuremberg verdict covered crimes against groups only when they were committed in connection with an aggressive war. Attacks on groups in peacetime fell outside its reach. Lemkin saw this as a reason the trials could not do complete justice for Nazi crimes against racial, ethnic and religious groups, and it convinced him that a separate international treaty was needed.
He returned from Europe determined to see genocide added to international law and began lobbying at the early sessions of the United Nations. In 1946 the General Assembly recognised genocide as a crime under international law, and on 9 December 1948 it adopted the Genocide Convention, making genocide a crime in its own right rather than an offence tied to aggressive war. The word Lemkin brought into the courtroom at Nuremberg had become a permanent part of international justice.
Why it matters
Bringing "genocide" into the Nuremberg indictment gave the crime its first footing in international justice and set the stage for the Genocide Convention.
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 advised the US war effort on occupied EuropeFrom 1942 Raphael Lemkin worked for the US War Department in Washington and advised the Board of Economic Warfare, bringing his expertise on Nazi occupation law to the Allied cause.
- 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'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
- Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Raphael Lemkin Jewish Virtual Library
- Raphael Lemkin Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.