On August 22, 1939, at a meeting in his Obersalzberg chalet in the Bavarian Alps where he encouraged his confidants to invade and massacre Poland, Hitler announced: “Who is talking about the extermination of the Armenians today?”
Raphael Lemkin, Polish-Jewish lawyer, had not forgotten this. During World War I, the Armenian population in Turkey was forcibly deported. More than a million people died, but those most responsible for the crime escaped justice. This shocked Lemkin, then a law student in Lemberg (formerly Poland, now Ukraine). He was young, but he already had “a movement of ideas in search of justice” in his blood, writes Philippe Sands in Calle Este-Oeste: on the origins of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” (Anagrama, 2017).
Lemkin was the father of the concept of genocide: he described it publicly in 1944 in his book Axis Domination in Occupied Europe (Prometheus Books), first published in the United States, in which he detailed the atrocities they committed under that name Nazis against the Jews. Until then, there was no legal word to describe crimes like this, but the world is changing and, as Lemkin noted, “new concepts require new terms.” In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which applies to acts such as the intentional subjugation of a group that result in its total or partial physical destruction or serious violation of physical or mental integrity. On January 26, the court in The Hague demanded that Israel take measures to prevent genocide against the Palestinian population.
Together with the concept of crime against humanity coined by Hersch Lauterpacht, another Lemberg-trained jurist, the concept coined by Lemkin shaped the development of international law and human rights. “As a legal concept, it is innovative. Before him, the world could not imagine a crime worse than individual murder,” reflects Hilary Earl, professor of modern European history at Nipissing University (Canada) and a specialist in war crimes trials. “The Holocaust changed all that, and collective destruction is now the worst crime we can imagine,” he emphasizes.
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Genocide is already a well-known concept, but Lemkin didn't have it easy in the beginning. For years he focused solely on the most terrible stories: the pogroms in Eastern Europe, the violations of the law in Soviet Russia and the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and Poland. He also studied the work of Vespasian V. Pella, a Romanian scholar who promoted the idea of universal justice. In addition, in Lviv he witnessed how German troops began to organize the isolation and marking of the Jewish population. “What Lemkin, his family and those around him experienced was a decisive factor in the development of the concept of genocide,” explains Manuel Ollé, professor of international criminal law at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In October 1933, Lemkin was invited to the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law in Madrid. He was unable to attend because the Polish government refused him a visa, but his document was read out at the conference. Under the title “Laws that constitute a general (interstate) danger and are considered crimes against international law,” the lecture spoke of the existence of a “legal conscience of the civilized international community” that should pay attention to the crime of “barbarism.” “with the desire to harm not only the individual, “but above all the community to which he or she belongs.” The lawyer was concerned about the rise of National Socialism in Germany and also warned of “the contagious nature of all social psychoses.”
Six years after this letter, Lemkin was forced to flee Poland and seek refuge in several countries until he arrived in the United States in 1941. There, in a small office at the University of Durham (North Carolina), with no news of his family, he continued to document Nazi barbarism, thanks in part to the help of his contacts in Europe, who provided him with Hitler's decrees and circulars regime sent. Among many other documents, he studied the minutes of a meeting in Berlin in January 1942 at which Adolf Eichmann recorded the agreement to “cleanse the German living space of Jews by legal means.” He also analyzed the decrees of Hans Frank, the Nazi governor in Poland, who wrote sentences such as “I will approach Jewish affairs with the perspective that the Jews will disappear.”
These guidelines painted a meticulous landscape of destruction and formed the basis on which Lemkin coined the term genocide, a combination of the Greek words “genos” (tribe or race) and “cide” (from the Latin “cidere,” meaning to kill). After the war ended in 1945, the Nuremberg Trials became the main goal. “The truth is that he has done a gigantic job of developing and disseminating the concept. Not a day went by without him insisting that genocide be recognized as a new crime,” says Ollé.
With the support of some high-ranking Allied officials, and sometimes against their advice, Lemkin tirelessly contacted prosecutors, soldiers, and lawyers (even the Nazi leaders' legal defense) over several months by telephone, letter, and in person. At times he was so exhausted that he said he was suffering from “genocide.”
In December 1945, Lemkin explained his concept in Le Monde, stating: “If a state acts in the future in such a way as to destroy a national or racial minority within its population, any of those responsible may be arrested when they leave the country.” “.
Documented evidence of the systematization of terror, the so-called Final Solution, was seen in Nuremberg. Victoria Ocampo, who attended the trials, described in a letter that these tests filled her heart with “a kind of atomic silence.”
At trial, there were references to Lemkin's dismissal in prosecutors' oral allegations, but these were neither formally accepted nor used in the verdicts. The Nazi leaders were accused of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
When the trials ended, Lemkin did not give up his efforts: he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the then President of the United States; to United Nations Secretary Trygve Lie and many other people until his persistence finally paid off in 1948. “Law is not static, but dynamic, and sometimes utopias become reality.” We need many Lemkins to solve today’s problems legally,” reflects Ollé.
Until now, the Holocaust, the extermination of Hutus and moderate Tutsis in Rwanda, the crimes of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, the massacres of Yazidis in Iraq and the massacres of Rohingya in Myanmar were considered genocide. Genocide does not obliterate itself: it remains in the attention of the courts and also in the memory.
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