Lemkin on coining the term genocide and on the Armenian Genocide

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From Samantha Powers book A Problem from Hell : America and the Age of Genocide (2002)

In 1957 the New York Times described the Polish-born Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, as that exceedingly patient and totally unofficial man. They were referring to Lemkin s single-minded and virtually single-handed struggle to establish a convention in international law that would prevent and punish the crime of genocide. By the time the New York Times description had been written, Lemkin had already labored tirelessly for almost a quarter-century toward the realization of this goal. During the intervening years, Hitler and the Nazis waged a crusade of unprecedented hatred and systematic violence that led to the slaughter of approximately six million Jews and five million others.

When the Holocaust began, the word genocide did not even exist and there were no treaties among the world s nations to compel action against such atrocities. Raphael Lemkin recognized the need for such an international law and pact long before his contemporaries, and launched an official campaign just about the time Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s. Lemkin s foresight, however, predates the Nazi era and began to come into focus even during his childhood years.

The Emergence of a Vision

From an early age, Raphael Lemkin experienced hatred and wanton violence firsthand. In 1906, when he was just a boy of 6 years, 70 Jewish people were murdered and 90 gravely injured in a pogrom that took place in the Bialystok region of Poland where Lemkin lived. Following the massacre, an angry mob tore open the victims stomachs and stuffed them with feathers.

During World War I, Lemkin then a teenager fled with his family from the advancing German army into the forest, where one of his brothers died of pneumonia and malnourishment. Their farmhouse was destroyed by artillery fire and the soldiers made off with their crops, cattle, and horses.

At about the same time, hundreds of miles from Poland, the Young Turk government stating that there was no room for Christians in Turkey had set in motion the brutal starvation and murder of nearly a million Armenians. Mehmed Talaat, the Turkish interior minister at that time, was one of the engineers of the savage campaign.

Soghomon Tehlirian was a survivor of what is known today as the Armenian genocide, but his relatives were not as fortunate. At the age of 19, Soghomon and his family were marched out of their town with other Armenians. During this death march, his sisters were raped, his brothers head was split open with an ax, and his mother was shot. Soghomon woke one day from a blow to his head that left him unconscious to find himself in a field of corpses and to learn that he was his family s only survivor.

After the war, Soghomon had difficulty sleeping and experienced frequent epileptic seizures. Overcome by grief and anger, he joined an Armenian group secretly plotting to assassinate Turkish leaders responsible for the slaughter. In March of 1921, twenty-four year old Soghomon traveled to Berlin, where Mehmed Talaat the former Turkish interior minister was living peacefully as a private citizen in Germany. Though a Turkish court had found Talaat and other leaders responsible for mass murder and sentenced them to death, the German government refused to transfer Talaat back to Turkey. On March 14, Soghomon Tehlirian approached Talaat on a Berlin street and shot him in the back of the head, shouting, This is to avenge the death of my family! Soghomon was later acquitted of the crime by reason of what would be called today temporary insanity.

Raphael Lemkin was a student in Poland at the time of the assassination. He was troubled by the turn of events and questioned his professors about why Talaat was not arrested for his crimes. Lemkin was disturbed by the answer: There was no law in existence under which he could be arrested. The inviolability of state sovereignty at that time the exclusive right of a government or ruler to exercise supreme authority over a nation kept the Germans from interfering in the affairs of an autonomous state. It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, Lemkin challenged, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?

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Powers on Lemkin continued

A Law against Barbarity and Vandalism

Lemkin was chilled by what he had learned of the Armenian slaughter and the failure of the world community to act both during and after the massacre. He believed that if such an atrocity could happen once, it could happen again unless far-reaching changes were made in international law and practice.

In 1933, Lemkin, then a lawyer, made plans to speak at an international criminal law conference in Madrid about the Armenian slaughter and Hitler s rise to power. He drafted a new law that would prohibit the destruction of nations, races and religious groups, and punish the perpetrators wherever they were caught regardless of their nationality or where the crimes were committed. The proposed law sought to safeguard against barbarity the physical destruction of a group and vandalism the destruction of a group s culture.

Lemkin found few supporters for his ideas despite growing Nazi oppression and the flight of Jewish people from Germany by the thousands. Most European countries between the world wars were struggling economically, looking inward toward their own growth and stability, and unwilling to rethink the sacred notion of state sovereignty. Many were skeptical of Lemkins predictions about Hitler. In Poland, Lemkin was reprimanded by the Foreign Minister for insulting our German friends and was fired by the Warsaw government as deputy public prosecutor for refusing to limit his criticisms of Hitler. Lemkin was blocked from presenting his new law at the Madrid conference, but refused to give up and went on to speak at law conferences throughout Europe during the 1930s.

World War II Begins

In 1939, one week before invading Poland, Hitler is said to have commented to his military chiefs: It was knowingly and lightheartedly that Genghis Khan sent thousands of women and children to their deaths. History sees in him only the founder of a state . The aim of war is not to reach definite lines but to annihilate the enemy physically. It is by this means that we shall obtain the living space we need. Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?

The invasion of Poland marked the official start of World War II, but the Jews and other undesirable groups had already suffered for six long years under Nazi rule. Though many throughout Europe and America turned a blind eye to the coming horror, Raphael Lemkin understood the harsh reality. As the Nazi army entered Poland, Lemkin fled to the train station with only a shaving kit and summer coat. When the train station was bombed, Lemkin was forced to retreat to the woods, where he witnessed further bombing attacks and the death of many from starvation, disease and exhaustion. Lemkin was fortunate to eventually find a Jewish family in Soviet-occupied Poland who agreed to shelter him. From there, he was able to catch a train to Eastern Poland, where his brother and parents lived. He begged them to flee with him, but they refused to believe their lives were at risk. I read in the eyes of all of them one plea, wrote Lemkin. Do not talk of our leaving this warm home, our beds, our stores of food, the security of our customs We will have to suffer, but we will survive somehow.

Lemkin Flees to Safety

Lemkin fled alone to Lithuania and then on to Sweden, where he lectured on international law. It was there that he started collecting the legal decrees recorded by the Nazis in each occupied country. Lemkin reasoned that if he could demonstrate the systematic abuse of the law as an instrument of hate and murder, he would generate support for his campaign against barbarity and vandalism. In 1941, Lemkin was offered a position at Duke University in North Carolina thanks to a colleague there for whom he had done some translating. From Sweden, Lemkin traveled by rail through the Soviet Union, by ship to Japan and then on to Canada and finally Seattle. Another long train ride brought Lemkin across the U.S. to North Carolina, where he delivered a speech on the day of his arrival at a dinner with the President of Duke University. If women, children and old people would be murdered a hundred miles from here, wouldn t you run to help?, Lemkin appealed to the American audience. Then why do you stop this decision of your heart when the distance is 3,000 miles instead of a hundred?

Lemkin wasted no time in arranging hundreds of similar presentations to womens organizations, colleges, chambers of commerce, and other groups, trying to win support for his law. His assertion that Jewish people were being annihilated by the Nazis, however, was frequently met with disbelief or indifference.

When Hitler declared war on the United States in December of 1941, the U.S. War Department hired Lemkin as an international law expert, but they too were unmoved by his claims of a Jewish extermination. Undeterred, Lemkin reached out directly to President Roosevelt, but was told to put his proposal in a one-page memo. [How do you] compress the pain of millions, the fear of nations, the hopes for salvation from death [into one page]?, Lemkin questioned.

Several weeks later a courier delivered Roosevelt s response, which said that he saw difficulty adopting such a law at the present time. While the Allies persisted in their efforts to defeat the Nazis, they refused to declare as a war aim the rescue of the Jews, and rejected proposals to expand the number of Jewish refugee admissions. The widespread lack of concern that Lemkin encountered again and again led him to state that a double murder was taking place one by Hitler and the other by the allied leaders, who knew full well what was taking place but refused to take action.

In May 1943, a Polish Jew named Szmul Zygielbojm took his own life to protest this lack of action. Zygielbojm was a member of the Polish National Council in London and, like Lemkin, traveled throughout Europe trying to raise awareness about the plight of the Jews. In his final letter, which he addressed to the Polish government in exile, he wrote: By my death I wish to make the strongest possible protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little human life is worth today, but as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall help to break down the indifference of those who have the possibility now, at the last moment to save those Polish Jews still alive, from certain annihilation. Sadly, Zygielbojm s suicide made little impact on public opinion. Most people perhaps because they could not grasp the notion of an entire group being exterminated simply for existing continued to respond with disbelief. After meeting with a Polish diplomat about the fate of the Jews, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter responded, I don t believe you. When the diplomat protested, Frankfurter explained, I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you. Walter Laqueur, a historian who studied why the world community remained passive in the face of eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust, wrote, While many thought that the Jews were no longer alive, they did not necessarily believe that they were dead.

The Crime That Has No Name

Beset by public indifference and despair, Raphael Lemkin considered taking his own life as Szmul Zygielbojm had done, but he had invested too much in his cause to give up. Moved by the words of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill We are in the presence of a crime that has no name Lemkin decided that his campaign needed a name that would stir compassion and outrage. He sought a term to replace barbarity and vandalism, a word that would suggest not only mass extermination, but also other forms of systematic annihilation of people and cultures deportation, the separation of men from women and children from parents, suppression of intellectual life, destruction of art, and so forth. Lemkin was inspired by George Eastman, who named his new camera Kodak in 1888 because it was short, hard to mispronounce, and unlike other product names in the field. Lemkin similarly searched for a word that would be easy to remember and distinctive, and that would also arouse strong feelings of moral outrage. He eventually chose genocide, which is a combination of the Greek for race or tribe (geno) and the Latin for killing (cide).

Lemkin defined his new term as 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. He stressed that although murder is the worst expression of genocide, death is not the only indicator that genocide is taking place. Other signs include the destruction of political and social institutions, language, religion, economic security, health, and culture. It takes centuries and sometimes thousands of years to create a natural culture, Lemkin asserted, but genocide can destroy a culture instantly, like fire can destroy a building in an hour. Lemkin s new term and his campaign to establish an international law against genocide brought much criticism from around the world. Would a simple word make a difference? Could the existence of such a term stop a ruthless leader like Hitler? If genocide only exists where there is intent to annihilate a group, how could such intent be proven? Even some of the survivors of Nazi brutality preferred silence over the establishment of such a term, claiming that no word could ever capture the horrors they had experienced. Despite the skepticism, Lemkin put all of his hope in the new term, which quickly caught on throughout the world and was entered into Webster s New International Dictionary in 1944.

During that same year, Lemkin published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, a 712 page book on the laws instituted by Axis powers in 19 Nazi-occupied countries and territories in Europe. The book discussed his proposed international law and treaty to prevent and punish genocide, as well as ways to compensate survivors. It also argued that citizens who do nothing to stop genocide and those who offer aid to the perpetrators bear a certain degree of guilt: The present destruction of Europe would not be complete and thorough had the German people not accepted freely [the Nazi] plan, participated voluntarily in its execution and up to this point profited greatly therefrom.

The Aftermath of World War II

After World War II, the world was shocked as the Nuremberg trials revealed the full extent of Nazi atrocities. The indictment of all 24 defendants for deliberate and systematic genocide marked the first official use of the new term, but Lemkin was frustrated by the outcome of the trial. Though some 5,000 Nazis were charged with war crimes and many high-ranking Nazi officials were convicted and punished, the court prosecuted only those crimes against humanity committed after Hitler invaded other countries. In doing so, the court was treating the violation of state sovereignty as the basis for all charges rather than asserting that mass murder is a crime whenever and wherever it takes place. None of the defendants were officially convicted of genocide as Lemkin had defined it, leaving open the possibility that future tyrants could exterminate a group inside their own borders without consequence.

This possibility was made all the more horrifying as Lemkin discovered the fate of his own family during the Holocaust. After the war, he spent a great deal of time trying to track down his relatives. In Nuremberg, Lemkin met up with his brother, his brother s wife and their two sons. There he learned that they were the sole survivors of the Lemkin family at least 49 others had perished in the Warsaw ghetto, the concentration camps or on Nazi death marches. Though distraught, Lemkin grew more resolute in his efforts to prevent another genocide.

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More from Samantha Power's book (not directly concerning Lemkin - but related)

Although U.S. diplomats had condemned the genocide as early as 1915, the U.S. Government did not take any action to redress the injustices after the war. It is worth remembering that U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr., had called the massacres “race murder” and that on 10 July 1915 he had cabled Washington with the following description of the Ottoman policy: “Persecution of Armenians assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, whole-sale expulsions and deportations from one end of the empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed form Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place.”

Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell. America and the Age of Genocide , Basic Books, New York, 2002, p. 6.

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And another

“At least 1 million, and possibly well over half of the Armenian population, are reliably estimated by independent authorities and eye-witnesses to have been killed or death-marched. This is corroborated by reports in United States, German and British archives and of contemporary diplomats in the Ottoman Empire, including those of its ally Germany.

The German Ambassador, Baron Hans von Wangenheim, for example, on 7 July 1915 wrote “the government is indeed pursuing its goal of exterminating the Armenian race in the Ottoman Empire” (Wilhelmstrasse archives).

Though the successor Turkish Government helped to institute trials of a few of those responsible for the massacres at which they were found guilty, the present official Turkish contention is that genocide did not take place although there were many casualties and dispersals in the fighting, and that all the evidence to the contrary is forged.

See, inter alia, Viscount Bryce and A. Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16 (London, HMSO, 1916); G. Chaliand and Y. Ternon, Génocide des Arméniens 1915-16 (Brussels, Complexe, 1980); H. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (New York, Doubleday 1918); J. Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien (Potsdam, 1921 …”

p. 9, footnote 13; Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell. America and the Age of Genocide , Basic Books, New York, 2002