Raphael Lemkin

Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in November 1944, was the first place where the word "genocide" appeared in print.
Raphael Lemkin coined the new word "genocide" in 1943 (see the book's preface, dated November 15, 1943) both as a continuation of his 1933 Madrid Proposal and as part of his analysis of German occupation policies in Europe. In this 670 page book, Axis Rule, Lemkin introduced and directly addressed the question of genocide in 16 pages of Chapter IX entitled "Genocide" (below).
Lemkin uses the word genocide broadly, not only to describe policies of outright extermination against Jews and Gypsies, but for less immediate Nazi goals as well. In Lemkin's analysis Nazi Germany had undertaken a policy for the demographic restructuring of the European continent. Therefore he also used the word genocide to describe a "coordinated plan of different actions" intended to promote such goals as an increase in the birthrate of the "Aryan" population, the physical destruction of the Slavic population over a period of years, and policies to bring about the destruction of the "culture, language, national feelings, religion" and separate economic existence (but not physical existence) of non-German "Aryan" nations thought to be "linked by blood" to Germany.
In recent years the word "genocide" has most often been used to refer to the destruction of groups within a single country ("domestic genocide"). In Axis Rule, however, the word applies to occupation polices conducted across an entire continent. Policies within Germany are addressed only to the extent that these policies impacted Austria, and those parts of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, the Memel Territory and Poland formally incorporated into Germany.

This thesis analyzes the charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the context of the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trial (1947-48) and the role that each charge played in the formation of modern international criminal law. Prior to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945-46), international law was designed to govern the laws and customs of combat between sovereign states. However, the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II prompted contemporary legal thinkers to consider expanding the purview of international law in order to protect the human rights of civilians. On the eve of the International Military Tribunal, Hersch Lauterpacht minted the concept crimes against humanity for use in the courtroom. The new legal phrase was used to prosecute Nazis who had committed atrocities against civilians as part of a state-sponsored campaign. Around the same time, Raphael Lemkin devised the word genocide to refer to the intent to destroy an ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part.
The legal basis for the main Nuremberg Trial, Control Council Law No. 10, enabled each victorious Allied country to conduct their own series of trials against Nazi war criminals. American prosecutors conducted a series of twelve additional trials between 1946-49, which are now known as the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings (SNT). The Einsatzgruppen trial was the ninth SNT where American lawyers prosecuted twenty-two high-ranking officials who oversaw the murder of Polish and Soviet Jews by way of mass shootings.
In this thesis, I argue that the Einsatzgruppen trial represented the most apparent legal confrontation with the crime of genocide to date. However, the processes and politics surrounding the Nuremberg trials made the formal prosecution of genocide virtually impossible during the time that the trial was taking place. Instead, crimes against humanity was used as the principle charge during the Einsatzgruppen trial. The difficulties encountered by American lawyers at Nuremberg provide a reflection of the challenges faced by modern-day human rights lawyers in securing convictions for the charge of genocide.

A hundred years ago, on the late morning of March 15, 1921, the Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian (Soġomon T’ehlirean - Սողոմոն Թեհլիրեան; also: Soghomon Tehliryan; Soġomon T’ehlerean -
Սողոմոն Թեհլերեան (1897-1960)) shot the former Ottoman Minister of the Interior (21 January 1913 to 4 February 1917), Minister of Finance (November 1914 to 4 February 1917) and head of government (Grand Vizier; 4 February 1917 to 8 October 1918), Mehmet Talaat (1874-1921) on Berlin’s Hardenbergstrasse. In an unusually short time by today’s standards, after two and a half months, the assassin was put on trial on 2 and 3 June of the same year at the jury court of Berlin District Court
III (Landgericht Berlin III) in Berlin-Moabit. The trial lasted one and a half days, which was also unusually short. Obviously, the German or Prussian judiciary wanted to get rid of the accused and with him the subject of German-Turkish relations as quickly as possible. Tehlirian was acquitted on 3 June 1920, on the grounds of incapacity of guilt and was immediately deported from Germany. This article explains the background, context and lasting effects of his crime.

Analyse de documents soviétiques de 1929 à 1934 qui révèlent la politique génocidaire de Staline et le Parti communiste contre la nation politique et l’ethnie culturelle ukrainiennes, le premier groupe composé de tous les citoyes de la RSS d’Ukraine, et le second des Ukrainiens ethniques de l’URSS entière, dont 8 millions dans la RSFSR.
Communication présentée à la conférence « La grande famine en Ukraine – Holodomor. Connaissance et reconnaissance. » Paris, 2013. Publication sous la direction de Iryna Dmytrychyn. L’Harmattan, 2016.

Book Review of Martin Shaw.  What Is Genocide?  Cambridge, England:  Polity Press, 2007.  Pp. viii + 222.  In Ethnic and Racial Studies 31:7 (Oct. 2008):  pp. 1352-1354. 

© 2008 Eric J. Schmaltz
Department of Social Sciences
Northwestern Oklahoma State University

With the development of international criminal law, including protection against the most severe crimes, came an interest in the life and activity of the man who was the creator of the notion of “genocide” and the main author of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948.
    This man was Rafał Lemkin (1900–1959), a Polish jurist, a prosecutor and later an advocate, alumnus of the Lwów school of criminal law of Juliusz Makarewicz, and lecturer of the Free Polish University in Warsaw.

Un análisis del nacimiento y evolución del concepto de Genocidio y la participación en el mismo de Raphael Lemkin, cómo fueron sus premisas iniciales y cómo de ser un término inexistente paso a ser una norma ius cogens de acuerdo con la Corte Internacional de Justicia. Se trata de una narrativa sobre la lucha contra crímenes atroces que sigue tan vigente como el primer día

In this article, I present a critique of existing approaches to the distinctive harm of genocide and offer an alternative approach. I draw on Hannah Arendt’s unique conception of genocide, to suggest an ‘existential’ account of the harm of genocide. For Arendt, the distinctive loss in genocide was not a moral loss, strictly speaking, but rather an existential loss to humanity. By destroying a nation in whole or in part, genocide robs us of a variety of possible ways of experiencing and understanding the world. This approach, I argue, is original and valuable, and merits further consideration by anyone who is interested in the problem of genocide. You can access the full article through this link (first 50): http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/3erPrwy2GEsuK5QWHPKt/full

When did the first genocide take place in history? In theory, a universal crime transcends time and space. In practice, the moral imagination demands a specific origins-story. In this article, I explain how and why Raphael Lemkin chose to locate genocide’s archetypal origins in the early Christian martyrdom at the hands of the ancient Romans. That choice emerged from a dramatic public confrontation with Catholic antisemitism in interwar Poland. Haunted by the lingering charge of Jewish moral parochialism, after the war Lemkin fashioned a cosmopolitan narrative for his discovery of genocide.
Scholars today are consumed by debates about the historical and conceptual relationship between the Holocaust and other genocides. They frequently return to Lemkin’s life and ideas in order to reframe these problems for a global age. Yet we cannot think properly with Lemkin until we retrieve his Polish Jewish past. Then we can truly perceive how his historical struggle with antisemitism continues to shape our imagination of global atrocity.

On 9 December 1948, the United Nations adopted the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The first humanitarian law of the UN, the Convention was singlehandedly pushed by the jurist Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). Using Lemkin’s unpublished writings, this essay seeks to correct several misunderstandings of Lemkin’s thinking on genocide as the destruction of nations. Lemkin defined nations more broadly than simply a group of people inhabiting a particular state. Instead, Lemkin used the work of an art historian to define nations as ‘families of minds’, arguing that the idea of a nation exists within the minds of people. In doing so, Lemkin broke from the tradition that nations had an objective organic existence defined by language, blood and territory. He took on an understanding of nations that sided with the political thought of Mazzini, who offered the dictum: ‘the Patria is the consciousness of the Patria’. The Genocide Convention, Lemkin wrote, protected the minds of people. Such human groups protected by the convention under the rubric of nations, he continued, could range from religious minorities to criminals—any ‘family of mind’ who genocidists attempted to destroy. The article analyzes Lemkin’s ideas using his writings on the Soviet genocide in Ukraine and France’s genocide in Algeria.

This article calls attention to the role played by Raphael Lemkin
(1900–1959), the Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the term
“genocide,” in providing the metadata for 30 of the 78 Soviet
propaganda posters currently held by Duke University Library.
The author presents new evidence about the provenance of
the “General Political Poster Series,” substantiates Lemkin’s
personal role in its description, and juxtaposes the hand-written,
English-language translations with the posters’ original,
Russian-language titles, thereby shedding light on the émigré
scholar’s view of communist Russia. The annotated Soviet
posters, which are reproduced in this article, have been digitized
and can be viewed online at the Duke Digital Repository.
DOI:
10.1080/15228886.2018.1538863

This article was published at the occasion of the centennial of Mehmet Talat's assassination (Berlin, 15 March 1921) and the subsequent trial of Soghomon Tehlirian (2/3 June 1921). It evaluates the meaning of both events for international law, in particular the UN Genocide Convention.

This is the PDF-PowerPoint I used for the contribution I exposed during the IV International Scientific-Methodological Seminar MYTHOLOGEMS OF LAW: IRRATIONAL IN LAW - Kutafin Moscow State Law University, December 3, 2021. The title of my contribution was: 'The concept of cosmopolitan rights'.

Our modern language of global justice emerged from the mind of lawyer Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), who coined the word “genocide” and convinced the world to criminalize atrocity. Our common assumption that economic prosperity begets international peace originated in the ideas of industrialist and pacifist Jan Bloch (1836–1902). Likewise, our arguments over global inequality and democracy bear the unmistakable traces of the theories and polemics of revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (1870–1919). Each of these Polish Jewish utopians has acquired the status of a global icon. Yet the ties between their Polish Jewish lives and visionary ideas remain something of a mystery. What caused them to re-imagine the world in such radically new ways? What do they have in common as Polish Jewish utopians? Can we explain their ideas as a feature of Polish or Jewish history?

In diesem Beitrag wird nach der Bedeutung der Judenvernichtung in den Kategorien des Genozid für einen Historiker gefragt. Um die Komplexität dieser Problematik zu zeigen, werden drei Schwerpunkte erörtert. Ausgangspunkt ist die theoretische Auffassung des Begriffes Völkermord mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Konzeption Raphael Lemkins. Dann wird ein Problem der Historisierung des Holocaust und Bedeutung dieses Prozesses für die Geschichtsschreibung und kollektives Gedächtnis besprochen. Am Ende wird die kurze Beschreibung das Schicksal des menschlichen Körpers im Konzentrationslager als Herausforderung für eine historische Interpretation dargestellt.

Abstract: Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) was a Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the term genocide and worked tirelessly for its codification in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide as a crime under international law. Most of his writings on genocide were published around fifty years posthumously as the core of the field of genocide studies that emerged in the 1990s. Bearing the sense of inseparability of Lemkin the author and his writings, this article concerns the death-of-the-author postulate amid the origin myth that surrounds him. It engages in his strategies for resisting his death as an author and with the multiple professional, political, and social languages that probe and transgress their respective genres. While genocide studies now seem to reluctantly critique Lemkin’s ideas, they nevertheless remain captivated by Lemkin the author and seem to be affected by his passion, multiple voices, languages, and genres. In this they tread in his foo...

Adam Redzik, Lexicon of Polish Lawyers and Economists: Raphael Lemkin – 2019 patron of “The Voice of Law”

This section presents  figures of the most  distinguished Polish lawyers and economists.  The aim is to provide a possibly broad depiction of their scientific, organizational, didactic and social achievements. In 2018, the patron of “ The Voice of Law” is Raphael Lemkin.

Rafał Lemkin's genocide ban and the eliminationism of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. An attempt to redefine the theory of mass murder?

[PL] Zjawisko masowych eksterminacji towarzyszy ludzkości od zarania dziejów. Jednakże dopiero w początkach XX wieku rozpoczęto badania nad tym prawnym i politycznym fenomenem. Analiza przeprowadzona przez Rafała Lemkina doprowadziła do sformułowania pierwszej koncepcji ludobójstwa w 1944 roku, którą autor postulował uwzględnić w przyszłej międzynarodowej kodyfikacji. Dopiero w 2009 roku Daniel Jonah Goldhagen zaproponował nowe ujęcie ludobójstwa w ramach teorii eliminacjonizmu. Z punktu widzenia prawa uniwersalnego cenne jest nie tylko przedstawienie i porównanie tych idei, ale również wskazanie brakujących w nich, z prawnego punktu widzenia, elementów. Nie bez znaczenia jest kontynuacja refleksji nad udoskonalaniem, regulującego tak doniosłą materię, prawa międzynarodowego. [ENG] "The Raphael Lemkin’s concept of genocide and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s eliminationism. The attempt to redefine the theory of mass murders?": The mass extermination accompanied mankind since the dawn of history. However, it was in the early twentieth century, when the studies on the legal and political phenomenon started. Raphael Lemkin’s analysis led to the formulation of the first concept of the genocide in 1944, which was proposed to be included in a future international codification. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen suggested in 2009 a new approach towards the genocide in the framework of the theory of eliminationism. It is valuable from the universal law point of view not only to present and compare abovementioned ideas, but also to indicate their deficiencies. Not without significance is continuation the reflections on improvement of, regulating such an important matter, international law.

When did the first genocide take place in history? In theory, a universal crime transcends time and space. In practice, the moral imagination demands a specific origins-story. In this article, I explain how and why Raphael Lemkin chose to locate genocide’s archetypal origins in the early Christian martyrdom at the hands of the ancient Romans. That choice emerged from a dramatic public confrontation with Catholic antisemitism in interwar Poland. Haunted by the lingering charge of Jewish moral parochialism, after the war Lemkin fashioned a cosmopolitan narrative for his discovery of genocide. Scholars today are consumed by debates about the historical and conceptual relationship between the Holocaust and other genocides. They frequently return to Lemkin’s life and ideas in order to reframe these problems for a global age. Yet we cannot think properly with Lemkin until we retrieve his Polish Jewish past. Then we can truly perceive how his historical struggle with antisemitism continues to shape our imagination of global atrocity.

Przedmiotem moich rozważań będzie próba odpowiedzi na pytanie, jakie były wartości i motywy, kierujące pierwszym ze wspomnianych prawników, czyli Rafałem Lemkinem. Ich zrozumienie utrudnia fakt, że często z perspektywy późniejszych doświadczeń życiowych motywy działań ulegają mitologizacji, opisywane są jako logiczna i konsekwentna droga, prowadząca od wczesnych lat życia do realizacji wyznaczonego wówczas celu. Tak też działo się w przypadku Lemkina.

Projects of nation-state building and their representation in historography and historical memory: Croatia, Germany, Poland and Ukraine in the twentieth century’. The prject was conducted at the Institute of Political Studies od the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). The aim of the participants in the project, developed jointly by the Department of German Studies and the Department of History of Eastern Territories, was to provide a broad perspective on nation-building processes in Central Europe in the nineteenth centuries and to determine the place of projects on population policy (social engineering) in these processes. The authors also analyse the role of memory of these projects in developing nation states in this region of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century and contemporary times.

The subjects analysed cover a broad spectrum of issues related to the emergence of modern states, demography, eugenics, racial hygiene, statistics, geography and specific policies – from supporting the birth of preferred groups to genocide. The book concerns both the development of modern societies and the problems of nationalism, racial ideology and the idea of ‚the body of the nation’.

Throughout the debate over the harm of genocide, intuitions about cultural dimensions are a common occurrence. The line of reasoning frequently follows a semantics of loss. Therefore, the specificity of genocidal events can be identified as the loss of cultures. (Cf. Lemkin's work or ex negativo the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity). Such arguments presuppose what I call the thesis of the value of culture. This position comes in multifarious versions, all of which draw on the usual distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic values for their justification of the value of culture. Moreover, almost all the positions currently available are closely related to certain normative arguments, which aim to establish the value of cultural diversity. The aim of this paper is to thoroughly analyze these positions from a moral and social-philosophical point of view, showing most of them to be flawed on account of their inducing essential structures. I discuss the following questions: What counts as a value of culture? According to the thesis of the value of culture, who is losing what in a genocidal event? Why should cultural diversity be a summum bonum for societies? I argue that a refutation of variants of the thesis of the value of culture could shift the focus of genocide studies away from the semantics of loss to a semantics of (identity-)transformations in order to salvage a multi-causal meaning of genocide beyond essentialist ontologies and (hopefully) the minefields of political uses/abuses.