"A crime without a name” is how Sir Winston Churchill described Nazi atrocities in 1941. Three years later, a Polish lawyer named Raphäel Lemkin coined a word for the systematic mass murder of Jews, Poles, and Romani perpetrated during World War II—genocide. After the war, Lemkin would help prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials. But the absence of any standalone charge of genocide left him concerned about the future.

[T]he allies decided in Nuremberg a case against a past Hitler, but refused to envisage future Hitlers… the Germans were punished only for crimes committed during or in connection with the war of aggression. Crimes against humanity were not an independent category of crimes in themselves. [1]

Lemkin began a campaign for the recognition of genocide as a crime under international law. After three years of campaigning around various UN offices in New York, London, Paris, and Geneva, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“the Convention”). The Convention, based on Lemkin’s draft, defined and criminalised genocide for the first time under international law. Since 2015, the UN has commemorated the adoption of the Convention each year on 9 December as World Genocide Commemoration Day—the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Punishment of this Crime. On the 72nd anniversary of the Convention, we consider the life of Raphäel Lemkin, father of the Genocide Convention.

LEMKIN’S CHILDHOOD & EARLY CAREER

Raphäel Lemkin was born in 1900 and grew up on a small farm near Wolkowysk in the Russian Empire, now Belarus. Lemkin’s early childhood was sheltered. Although legally prohibited from farming because he was Jewish, Lemkin’s father bribed the local police to leave his family alone. It was their rural location that protected them from the violent anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out regularly in Russian cities.

During this idyllic childhood Lemkin first confronted that aspect of human nature that was to become his life’s work to limit—human cruelty. While reading Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical novel Quo Vadis, set in Ancient Rome, Lemkin was terrified by the depictions of crowds cheering as Christians were fed to the lions. He said to his mother “they applauded; why didn’t they call the police?”

Later as a law student in Lwów, Lemkin was appalled by the slaughter of Armenians taking place in the Turkish Empire. Just as he had queried his mother, he questioned his professors as to why states could destroy entire peoples with impunity when an individual accused of less would face prosecution. One professor responded to this earnest questioning by pointing to national sovereignty: intervention would be as unlawful as stopping a farmer from slaughtering his chickens. [2] “But, Lemkin replied, “the Armenians were not chickens”. [3]

In 1933, now a public prosecutor, Lemkin presented a paper to the League of Nations legal committee in Madrid, calling for “the Crime of Barbarity” (a precursor to the word genocide) to be prohibited. However, his proposals were smeared as protecting only Jews and therefore un-Polish. He was pushed to withdraw his proposals by his own Polish delegation. Lemkin promptly resigned as a public prosecutor and went on to pursue a successful career as a commercial lawyer in Warsaw until the Second World War.

ESCAPE TO THE USA

Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Lemkin escaped Warsaw, but his train was bombed forcing him to flee on foot. He visited his family but was unable to convince them to flee. Lemkin said his goodbyes and escaped to Sweden via Lithuania.

In Sweden, Lemkin used his academic contacts to send him every law and decree issued in Nazi-occupied Europe. When Lemkin arrived in the USA in April 1941, he brought with him a suitcase full of documents that would inform his seminal book on the Holocaust, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, an extensive legal analysis of Nazi rule. It was in this book that he coined and defined, for the first time, the word genocide.

NUREMBERG AND THE GENOCIDE CONVENTION

After the war, Lemkin served as an advisor to US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. Lemkin lobbied unsuccessfully for genocide to be included as a standalone charge. Although the word crept into cases, no one was charged specifically for genocide. Lemkin’s disappointment at Nuremberg was compounded by his discovery that every member of his family, save his brother, had died in the Holocaust. Later he would refer to the Nuremberg judgment as “the blackest day of my life”. 

Lemkin remained committed to making genocide a crime under international law. He began stalking the corridors of the newly created United Nations, not as a delegate but solely as a private individual. According to Lili Eylon who was a UN correspondent for an Israeli newspaper at the time, Lemkin would badger delegates as “they passed by him… between formal sessions”. He was labelled a “nuisance” and his health suffered from exhaustion and lack of food.

But the critical breakthrough in his campaign came “[one] morning in a Geneva park when, unable to sleep,” he bumped into the Canadian ambassador who was also having trouble sleeping. Lemkin convinced the ambassador to arrange a meeting for him with the president of the UN General Assembly. In December of the same year, the assembly met in Paris to consider a “solemn appeal” prepared by Lemkin and signed by organisations from around the world. On 9 December 1948, the assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Exhausted, Lemkin checked himself into a Parisian hospital.

AFTER THE GENOCIDE CONVENTION 

Lemkin did not live to see anyone prosecuted under the Convention; that would take another fifty years. Nor did he live to see his adopted country of the USA ratify it, that would take forty years. Tragically, having given up his teaching position at Yale to campaign, Lemkin died penniless and alone in 1959. Only seven mourners attended his funeral. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize ten times. He did not get it. 

But anyone who doubts Lemkin’s achievement need only look at the last three decades. The charge of genocide has been brought in respect of Cambodia, Myanmar, Rwanda, Sudan, and Yugoslavia; and complaints have been brought against even the most powerful of nations (here). Quite an achievement for one man.

[1] From Lemkin’s unpublished memoir.

[2] Vasel, J.J. (2019) In the Beginning, there was no Word…’ European Journal of International Law. Vol 29 Iss 4 p 1053-1056 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chy087

[3] P. Sands, East West Street (2016), at 143.

Samuel is a trainee solicitor and postgraduate at Cardiff University. He is active in several U.K.-based organisations campaigning on behalf of Hong Kong and BNOs. His research interests include transitional justice and the rule of law.

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