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Raphael Lemkin (June 24, 1900 – August 28, 1959) was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words genos (Greek for family, tribe, or race) and -cide (Latin for killing). He first used the word in print in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress (1944), while the Holocaust was occurring.
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Lemkin was born Rafał Lemkin in the village of Bezwodne in Imperial Russia, now the Vawkavysk district of Belarus. Not much is known of Lemkin's early life. He grew up in a Jewish family and was one of three children born to Joseph and Bella (Pomerantz) Lemkin. His father was a farmer and his mother a highly intellectual woman who was a painter, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books on literature and history. With his mother as an influence, Lemkin mastered ten languages by the age of 14, including French, Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian.
After graduating from a local trade school in Białystok he began the study of linguistics at the John Casimir University in Lviv, Ukraine. It was there that Lemkin became interested in the concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, which was based on the Armenian experience at the hands of the Ottoman Turks then later the experience of Assyrians massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre. Lemkin then moved on to the University of Heidelberg in Germany to study philosophy, and returned to Lviv to study law in 1926, becoming a prosecutor in Warsaw at graduation. His subsequent career as assistant prosecutor in the District Court of Berezhany (Ternopil Province of Eastern Galicia, now Western Ukraine) and Warsaw, followed by a private legal practice in the Polish capital, did not divert Lemkin from elaborating rudiments of international law dealing with group exterminations.
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 Polish Republic, which codified the penal codes of Poland, and taught law at Tachkimoni College in Warsaw. Lemkin, working with Duke University law professor Malcolm McDermott, translated the The Polish Penal Code of 1932 from Polish to English. McDermott would later provide Lemkin with help in leaving Europe.
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. The concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, was based on the Armenian Genocide and prompted by the experience of Assyrians massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre. In 1934 Lemkin, under pressure from the Polish Foreign Minister 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 Wacław Makowski.
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 the Polish Defensive War of 1939 Lemkin joined the Polish Army and defended Warsaw during the siege of that city, where he was injured by a bullet to the hip, afterward evading capture by the Germans. In 1940 he traveled through Lithuania to reach Sweden, where he first lectured at the University of Stockholm. With the help of Malcolm McDermott, Lemkin received permission to enter the United States, arriving in 1941.
Although he managed to save his life, he lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust; they were among over 3 million Polish Jews and Lithuanian Jews who were murdered during the German occupation. Some members of his family died in areas annexed by the Soviet Union. The only European members of Lemkin's family who survived the Holocaust were his brother, Elias, and his wife and two sons, who had been sent to a Soviet forced labor camp. Lemkin did however successfully aid his brother and family in emigrating to Montreal, Canada in 1948.
After arriving in the United States Lemkin joined the law faculty at Duke University in North Carolina in 1941. During the Summer of 1942 Lemkin lectured at the School of Military Government at the University of Virginia. He also wrote Military Government in Europe, which was a preliminary version of his more fully developed publication Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In 1943 Lemkin was appointed consultant to the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration and later became a special adviser on foreign affairs to the War Department, largely due to his expertise in international law.
In 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin's most important work, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in the United States. This book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II, along with the definition of the term genocide. Lemkin's idea of genocide as an offense against international law was widely accepted by the international community and was one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials. In 1945 to 1946, Lemkin became an advisor to Supreme Court of the United States Justice and Nuremberg Trial chief counsel Robert H. Jackson.
After the war, Lemkin chose to remain in the United States. Starting in 1948, he gave lectures on criminal law at Yale University. In 1955, he became a Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law in Newark. Lemkin also continued his campaign for international laws defining and forbidding genocide, which he had championed ever since the Madrid conference of 1933. He proposed a similar ban on crimes against humanity during the Paris Peace Conference of 1945, but his proposal was turned down.
Lemkin presented a draft resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty to a number of countries in an effort to persuade them to sponsor the resolution. 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 December 9, 1948. In 1951, Lemkin only partially achieved his goal when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into force, after the 20th nation had ratified the treaty. This treaty had confined its consideration solely to physical aspects of genocide which The Convention defines as:
Lemkin's broader concerns over genocide, as set out in his "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe", also embraced what may be considered as non-physical, namely, psychological acts of genocide which he personally defined as:
He also outlined his various observed "techniques" on achieving genocide which ranged from:
Less well known was Lemkin's view on crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Soviet Union. In 1953, in a speech given in New York City, he described the "destruction of the Ukrainian nation" as the "classic example of Soviet genocide," going on to point out that "the Ukrainian is not and never has been a Russian. His culture, his temperament, his language, his religion, are all different...to eliminate (Ukrainian) nationalism...the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed...a famine was necessary for the Soviet and so they got one to order...if the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priest, and the peasant can be eliminated [then] Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation...This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is as case of genocide, of the destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation."
On Sunday, 20 September 1953, “10,000 Americans of Ukrainian descent. . .gathered at Washington Square, as many of their compatriots had done on Nov. 18, 1933, in a protest parade that moved up Fifth Avenue to Thirty-fourth Street and hence to the meeting place on Eight Avenue,” reported The New York Times. [11] Among the marchers were members of clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of America and people in Ukrainian folk costumes. Later, an audience 3,000 strong filled the Manhattan Center, while “hundreds more stood on the sidewalks at Thirty-fourth Street.” Ukrainians had gathered to remember “that dark hour in the history of the Ukraine when 5,000,000 inhabitants of the Russian ‘granary’ were starved to quell the resistance of an independent people to the Soviet regime.” Congressman Arthur G. Klein, noted the Times, “urged that the fight for Ukrainian liberation be continued,” while Raphael Lemkin “said that high crime had been employed 100 years ago against the Irish.” The Ukrainian Weekly was more explicit on Lemkin’s speech:
An inspiring address was delivered at the rally by Prof. Raphael Lemkin, author of the United Nations Convention against Genocide, that is, deliberate mass murder of peoples by their oppressors. Prof. Lemkin reviewed in a moving fashion the fate of the millions of Ukrainians before and after 1932-33, who died victims to the Soviet Russian plan to exterminate as many of them as possible in order to break the heroic Ukrainian national resistance to Soviet Russian rule and occupation and to Communism.
Lemkin’s views on the Ukrainian genocide remained obscured for 55 years. His perceptive analysis of the Ukrainian tragedy remained virtually unknown and hardly ever figured in publications on the famine of 1932-1933 or studies of genocide. The text was brought to public attention only in 2008. Lemkin’s holistic approach to the Soviet regime’s systematic destruction of the Ukrainian nation was highly innovative in its time and has not lost its significance today.
For his work on international law and the prevention of war crimes, Lemkin received a number of awards, including the Cuban Grand Cross of the Order of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes 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 entering into force, Dr. Lemkin was also honored by the UN Secretary-General as "an inspiring example of moral engagement."
Lemkin is the subject of the 2005 play Lemkin's House by Catherine Filloux, and a one-act play by Robert Skloot (2006, Parallel Press) called If The Whole Body Dies: Raphael Lemkin and the Treaty Against Genocide.
Lemkin’s original work on the 1948 Convention inspired the Initiative on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy.
Lemkin died of a heart attack at the public relations office of Milton H. Blow in New York City in 1959, at the age of 59. Only seven people attended his funeral.
During a video interview with Raphael Lemkin, the interviewer asked him about how he came to be interested in this genocide. He replied; "Became intersted in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians, after Armenians Hitler took action".<ref
name=RaphaelLemkininterview> Video interview with Raphael Lemkin CBS news. "[1]" </ref>
Лемкин, Рафаэль
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