Raphael Lemkin (, ; 24 June 1900 – 28 August 1959) was a Polish Jewish lawyer who is known for coining the term "genocide" and for campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention, which legally defines the act. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he fled the country and sought asylum in the United States, where he became an academic at Duke University and campaigned vigorously to raise international awareness of the atrocities that the Axis powers were committing across occupied Europe. It was amidst this environment of World War II that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policy.
As a young Jewish law student who was deeply conscious of antisemitism and the persecution of Jews, Lemkin learned about the Ottoman genocide of the Armenian people during World War I and was deeply disturbed by the absence of international provisions to charge, punish, and hold accountable those who were responsible for organizing and executing it. In his view, the suffering of the Jewish people was part of a larger pattern of like-minded atrocities occurring around the world and throughout history, such as the Holodomor.
In either 1943 or 1944, Lemkin coined the term "genocide" from two words: (, 'family, clan, tribe, race, stock, kin')γένος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, on Perseus and -cide (, 'killing'). It was included in the 1944 work of research Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, wherein he documented the mass killings of the peoples that had been deemed "sub-human" () by the Nazi Party. The concept of genocide was defined by Lemkin to refer to the various extermination campaigns that Nazi Germany conducted in an attempt to wipe out entire ethnic groups, including the Holocaust, in which he personally lost 49 family members.
Lemkin's original definition of genocide is distinct from its modern legal definition. The Genocide Convention restricted his initially broad definition to five specific acts. In his own words, he described genocide as:"Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify 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. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups."
After World War II, Lemkin worked on the legal team of American jurist Robert H. Jackson, who served as the chief U.S. prosecutor among the Allied powers at the Nuremberg trials. The now-defined concept of genocide was non-existent in any form of international laws at the time, and this became one of the reasons for Lemkin's view that the trials did not serve complete justice on prosecuting Nazi atrocities against racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Lemkin committed the rest of his life to preventing the rise of "future Hitlers" by pushing for an appropriate international convention. On 9 December 1948, the United Nations approved the Genocide Convention, with many of its clauses based on Lemkin's proposals.
Biography Early life 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). He grew up in a Polish Jewish family on a large farm near Wolkowysk and was one of three children born to Józef Lemkin and Bella née Pomeranz. His father was a farmer and his mother an intellectual, painter, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books on literature and history. Lemkin and his two brothers (Eliasz and Samuel) were homeschooled by their mother.
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. Lemkin 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. About these stories, Lemkin wrote, "A line, red from blood, led from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to the pogrom of Białystok." In his writings, Lemkin demonstrated a belief central to his thinking throughout 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.D. Irvin-Erickson, "Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide", University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, p.24
The Lemkin family farm was located in an area in which fighting between Russian and German troops occurred during World War I. The family buried their books and valuables before taking shelter in a nearby forest. During the fighting, artillery fire destroyed their home and German troops seized their crops, horses and livestock. Lemkin's brother Samuel eventually died of pneumonia and malnutrition while the family remained in the forest.
After graduating from a local trade school in Białystok, Lemkin 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. His first published book was a 1926 translation of the Hayim Nahman Bialik Hebrew novella "Behind the Fence" into Polish, with the title Noah and Marinka.Fogel, Joshua."Khayim-Nakhmen Byalik (Chaim Nachman, Hayim Nahman Bialik)". Yiddish Leksikon. Quote: "Noyekh un marinke (Noah and Marinka) (Warsaw, 1921)". Posted 7 January 2015, accessed 10 July 2022. It was in Białystok that Lemkin became interested in laws against mass atrocities after learning about the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman EmpireYair Auron. The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide. — Transaction Publishers, 2004. — p. 9: ...when Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he cited the 1915 annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide"William Schabas. Genocide in international law: the crimes of crimes. — Cambridge University Press, 2000. — p. 25:Lemkin's interest in the subject dates to his days as a student at Lvov University, when he intently followed attempts to prosecute the perpetration of the massacres of the ArmeniansA. Dirk Moses. Genocide and settler society: frontier violence and stolen indigenous children in Australian history. — Berghahn Books, 2004. — p. 21:"Indignant that the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide had largely escaped prosecution, Lemkin, who was a young state prosecutor in Poland, began lobbying in the early 1930s for international law to criminalize the destruction of such groups." and later the experience of AssyriansRaphael Lemkin – EuropaWorld, 22 June 2001 killed in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre. He became interested in war crimes upon learning about the 1921 Berlin trial of Soghomon Tehlirian for the assassination of Talaat Pasha, the main perpetrator of the Armenian genocide.
After reading about Talaat Pasha's assassination, Lemkin asked Professor why Talaat could not have been tried for his crimes against Armenians 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 "cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people".
Lemkin then moved on to Heidelberg University in Germany to study philosophy, returning to Lwów to study law in 1926.
During the 1920s, Lemkin was involved in Zionist activities. He was a columnist in the Warsaw-based Yiddish Zionist newspaper Tsienistishe velt (The Zionist world). Some scholars think that his Zionism had an influence on his conception of the idea of genocide, but there is a debate about the nature of this influence.
Career in inter-war 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.D. Irvin-Erickson, "Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide", University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, p.69 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. During this period Lemkin also taught law at the religious-Zionist Tachkemoni College in Warsaw, and took part in Zionist fund raising. 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 Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck 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 .
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, (1938) and a French-language work, , regarding international trade law (1939).
During World War II He left Warsaw on 6 September 1939 and made his way north-east towards Wolkowysk. He was caught between the invaders, the Germans in the west, and the Soviets who then approached from the east. Poland's independence was extinguished by terms of the pact between Stalin and Hitler.Philippe Sands, East West Street, p. 159 He barely evaded German capture, and traveled through Lithuania to reach Sweden by early spring of 1940.Paul R. Bartrop. Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection. Vol. I. ABC-CLIO. 2014. pp. 1301–1302. There he lectured at the Stockholm University. 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.Sands, p.165 With the help of his pre-war associate McDermott, Lemkin received permission to enter the United States, arriving in 1941.