Raphael Lemkin: The Origin of the Word Genocide

Raphael Lemkin was the architect of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted on 9 December 1948. In 1951 the Convention entered into force, after the twentieth nation had ratified the treaty.

During his lifetime Raphael Lemkin received a series of honours, including the Cuban Grand Cross of the Order of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in 1950, the Stephen Wise Award of the American Jewish Congress in 1951, and the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. On the 50th anniversary of the UN Convention, Dr Lemkin was also honoured by the UN Secretary-General as “an inspiring example of moral commitment.”

The Life of Raphael Lemkin

The undertaking that made Raphael Lemkin’s name, a Jew of Polish origin, began in 1913, when the boy of 12 read the account of the massacres ordered by the Roman emperor Nero against Christian converts in the first century, in the book Quo Vadis?, written by the Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz. His life was marked from the outset by an intimate and often involuntary relationship with crimes committed against humanity.

Raised in the Polish region of Białystok, Lemkin came to know this absurd reality as early as 1906, when pogroms (the systematic extermination of Jews) were carried out in the region at the behest of the Russian imperial authorities, in events that left seventy dead and ninety wounded among the Jewish population living in the area.

During the First World War, Raphael Lemkin, his parents and his brothers were forced to take refuge in the forest while German artillery fire destroyed the farmhouse where they lived. The Germans also seized the harvest, the cattle, the horses and all the family’s possessions. While sheltering in the forest, one of Lemkin’s brothers, Samuel, died of pneumonia and malnutrition, arising directly from the family’s precarious conditions of subsistence brought about by German military action.

The Armenian Genocide

A report in the American newspaper “The New York Times” on the extermination of Armenians in 1915.

At 21, while studying linguistics at the University of Lviv, the young scholar Lemkin came across the newspaper headline about the killing of Talaat Pasha, the former Interior Minister of Turkey and the man directly responsible for the massacre of around a million Armenians on Turkish territory during the First World War. On 14 March 1921, in the small Berlin district of Charlottenburg, the 24-year-old Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian fired a shot at point-blank range into the back of Talaat’s head, killing him instantly. Tehlirian was quickly overpowered and beaten by passers-by.

Lemkin could not grasp the incoherence of it being a crime for Tehlirian to kill one man while it was not a crime for his oppressor to have killed more than a million. Although he had not yet coined the term “genocide” at that point, Raphael Lemkin was already outraged that the sovereignty each state held in those years could be used with impunity to carry out the discrimination, segregation and killing of entire portions of its own population.

In those years Lemkin also followed closely the failed British effort to punish the Turkish war criminals responsible for the slaughter of Armenians, an effort definitively buried in 1920, when the Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal (known as Atatürk) arrested 29 British soldiers who were in Turkey. Those soldiers would only be released through a prisoner exchange agreement between the two countries, in which all the Turkish suspects in the Armenian genocide held in British custody were repatriated.

The Trial of Tehlirian

Soghomon Tehlirian, regarded by Armenians as a national hero.

Tehlirian’s trial laid bare to the world the horrors committed by the Turkish state against the Armenians. The evidence and witnesses brought forward by Tehlirian’s defence demolished the Turkish claim that the Armenians had been “merely deported” rather than annihilated. At the end of the trial the Armenian was acquitted, on the grounds that he had acted as an executor of the conscience of humanity.

The outcome of the case is said to have troubled Lemkin deeply, because of the opportunity lost to create international legal instruments capable of holding directly to account both state policies and the perpetrators of mass extermination. Shortly after the trial for Talaat’s killing, the young Lemkin, previously a convinced believer in the enlightening power of words in society, abandoned philology (the evolution of languages) and transferred to the law faculty of Lviv, where he devoted himself to the study of instruments for prohibiting and punishing massacres.

Lemkin’s Failed Attempt to Create “Universal Repression” in the 1930s

It was as a lawyer fluent in several languages, serving as a public prosecutor in Poland, that in 1933 Raphael Lemkin drafted a bill to be presented at a conference on international law in Madrid, in a context marked both by the rise of the Nazis in Germany and by the progressive forgetting of the crimes committed against the Armenians by the Turkish state. In Lemkin’s view, the absence of legal instruments to address these matters served directly to perpetuate the possibility that new crimes of the kind might be committed.

To combat this impunity, Lemkin proposed an international law prohibiting the destruction of nations, races and religious groups, thereby creating “universal repression”, a forerunner of “universal jurisdiction”. Those responsible for such acts should be punished wherever they were detained, regardless of the place, the nationality or the official position of the criminal at the time of arrest. Raphael Lemkin believed that a real threat of punishment would produce a change in practice.

The law he proposed also barred two practices associated with this type of crime: barbarity, defined as “the premeditated destruction of national, racial, religious and social collectivities”, and vandalism, classified as the “destruction of artistic and cultural works that are the expression of the particular genius of those collectivities”.

The Conference on International Law in Madrid

Lemkin never took part in the conference on international law held in Madrid, since the Polish Foreign Ministry, following the Polish state’s political line of the time of rapprochement with Nazi Germany, refused him permission to travel. His paper had to be read aloud in his absence, which may explain the lack of interest and the absence of forceful support for his proposal.

Moreover, in a troubled context of potential conflicts arising from the demarcation of borders in Europe and in the African and Asian imperial possessions, the League of Nations itself did not see a joint resolution in defence of threatened population minorities as a priority. For authoring this proposal, Lemkin was accused not only of trying to raise the status of Jews in the societies where they lived but also, according to the Polish Foreign Minister Joseph Beck, of “insulting our German friends”, with regard to his criticism of the Nazi regime then rising in Germany.

The Invasion of Poland at the Start of the Second World War and Lemkin’s Flight

On 1 September 1939, confirming Raphael Lemkin’s own predictions, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Six days later Lemkin began a desperate flight from Poland, in which he not only saw the train he was travelling on bombed by the Luftwaffe (the German air force) but also found himself forced to walk for days through the Polish forests to try to shelter from the heavy German air attacks.

After taking refuge in a small town in the part of Polish territory then occupied by Soviet forces, Lemkin took a train to the city where his family lived, with the unsuccessful aim of persuading them to flee the country. Having managed to escape Poland, Raphael Lemkin went first to Lithuania, where he lived until February 1940, when he obtained asylum from the Swedish government.

In Sweden, Lemkin began teaching international law at the University of Stockholm, where he set about compiling the legal decrees the Nazis had issued in each of the countries they occupied. His aim at that moment was to demonstrate how law itself could be used to spread hatred and incite mass killing in the absence of instruments criminalising such practices.

In April 1941 Raphael Lemkin moved to the United States, where he began teaching at Duke University. On American soil Lemkin also set about publicising the crimes committed by the Nazis in numerous lectures he gave at chambers of commerce, women’s groups and colleges. During his time in the United States, Lemkin was also hired in 1942 as chief consultant by the Board of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Economic Administration in Washington and, in 1944, as an expert in international law by the United States Department of War. His appeals, however, including those addressed to President Roosevelt, had no effect.

The Coining of the Term “Genocide”

Delegates of nations signing the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In front, from the left: Korea, Haiti, Iran, France and Costa Rica. Behind, from the left: Assistant Secretary-General for Legal Affairs, Secretary-General, the representative of Costa Rica and Raphael Lemkin, the leading advocate of the convention. Photo: UN archive

Raphael Lemkin (right) with the Brazilian ambassador Gilberto Amado (left), before a plenary session of the General Assembly at which the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide was adopted. Palais de Chaillot, Paris, 11 December 1948. Photo: UN archive

On hearing a speech by Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, who referred to the German extermination in Europe as “a crime without a name”, Lemkin was moved to seek a new term that could define this type of crime in what would be uniquely and perversely intrinsic to it: thus the term Genocide was born.

The Draft Resolution for a Convention on Genocide

Lemkin presented a draft resolution for a convention on genocide to be adopted by various countries. With the support of the United States, the resolution was placed before the General Assembly for consideration. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally presented and adopted on 9 December 1948. In 1951 the Convention entered into force, after the twentieth nation had ratified the treaty.

In conceptual terms, any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group would be considered the crime of Genocide.

The condemned acts included:

• Serious harm to the physical or mental integrity, and the killing, of members of groups;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its total or partial destruction;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and the forcible transfer of children from one group to another.

Broadly speaking, genocide does not mean the immediate destruction of a nation or of an ethnic, racial or religious group, but rather the adoption of actions aimed at destroying the essential foundations of the life of all the members of such a group, with a view to its annihilation.

The Final Years of Raphael Lemkin

A plaque in honour of Raphael Lemkin, in Warsaw, the capital of Poland.

For his work in international law and the prevention of war crimes, Lemkin received a series of honours, including the Cuban Grand Cross of the Order of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in 1950, the Stephen Wise Award of the American Jewish Congress in 1951, and the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. On the 50th anniversary of the Convention, Dr Lemkin was also honoured by the UN Secretary-General as “an inspiring example of moral commitment.”

Raphael Lemkin died of a heart attack at the public relations office of Milton H. Blow, in New York, in 1959, aged only 59. Just seven people attended his funeral. (A. M. Rosenthal, “A Man Called Lemkin,” New York Times, October 18, 1988, p.A31).