Raphael Lemkin

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Raphael Lemkin

Raphael Lemkin (born June 24, 1900 as Rafał Lemkin in Bezwodne , Russian Empire , today in Selwa Rajon , Belarus ; † August 28, 1959 in New York ) was a Polish-Jewish lawyer and peace researcher . In 1947 he worked out a draft law on the punishment of genocide for the UN . The draft was considered almost unchanged a year later by the General Assembly of the United Nations with 55: 0 votesConvention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide adopted .

Lemkin also coined the term genocide : in 1943 he used the term ludobójstwo (from Polish lud , people and zabójstwo , murder) for the draft law of the Polish government-in-exile to punish not only German crimes in Poland . In 1944 he translated the term genocide (from Greek genos , people and Latin caedere , to kill) into English. The German translation is genocide .

Lemkin is one of those personally affected by the genocide by the Nazi regime . Except for his brother and sister-in-law, he lost his entire family in the Holocaust .

Life

1900 to 1932

Lemkin was born in the village of Bezwodne at a time when it was still part of the Vilna governorate . He was one of three sons of farmer Joseph Lemkin and his wife Bella. Bella Lemkin nee Pomerantz was unusually educated. As a painter, linguist, and philosophy student, she preferred home-schooling her three children rather than sending them to school. As part of a Jewish community , Lemkin grew up aware of the numerous pogroms : in 1906, more than 70 Jews were massacred and another 90 were seriously injured in the region where he was born .

Lemkin began to grapple with genocide in the early 1920s, when he was still studying linguistics at the University of Lviv . The trigger was the murder of the former Turkish Interior Minister Talaat Pascha , who was largely responsible for the genocide of the Armenians and other Christian minorities in Turkey. Talaat, who had fled to Berlin with German help after the war, was sentenced to death by a Turkish court in absentia for this. The German government had refused extradition requests from the Allies. On March 15, 1921, the young Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian shot him in Hardenbergstrasse in Berlin-Charlottenburg . Tehlirian had lost 89 people in his family to the genocide of the Armenians during the First World War .

Memorial plaque in Warsaw

Lemkin had become aware of the trial against Tehlirian, who was accused of murder in Berlin, through a short newspaper note. Through one of his professors he learned that it was not possible for Armenians in Germany to bring Talaat to justice. The concept of state sovereignty made it impossible to convict a man for his responsibility for genocide in another country. For Lemkin this was the reason to change his subject and study law. In 1926 Lemkin, who had meanwhile also studied philosophy in Heidelberg, obtained a doctorate in law from the University of Lemberg. In 1927 he became secretary of the Polish Supreme Court of Appeal and in 1929 a public prosecutor and worked on the unification of Polish law. At the same time, he began to deal increasingly with international law from 1929. His goal was to create international law that would force his government and others to intervene in the targeted murder of ethnic and religious groups. Those responsible for such crimes should be brought to justice regardless of where they committed them and regardless of their official status or nationality.

1933-1939

In 1933, proposals for an international convention against genocide were submitted by Lemkin to the League of Nations body meeting in Madrid . He explicitly referred to the genocide of the Armenians. The Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck , who set store by a good relationship with Hitler , forbade Lemkin from attending the Madrid meeting in person, so that he was not present when his draft was discussed. Most of all, however, it was disappointing how few supporters found Lemkin's proposal. One of the participants in the meeting noted that such crimes against humanity occurred too rarely to warrant such international law. Lemkin's apocalyptic references to Hitler also aroused skepticism, although Germany had just announced its withdrawal from the League of Nations at Hitler's instigation, thousands of Jewish families began to leave Nazi Germany and two German participants demonstratively left the room when Lemkin's proposal was discussed. In Poland, Lemkin was accused of having insulted “our German friends” with his suggestion, and a little later he was dismissed as a public prosecutor. Even this dismissal did not prevent Lemkin from calling on the participants to adopt such a law at legal conferences in Budapest, Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam and Cairo over the next few years.

Escape to Sweden and the USA

When the German invasion of Poland began in 1939 , Raphael Lemkin fled from Warsaw to eastern Poland, where his brother and parents lived. He couldn't convince her to join his escape plans. From Vilnius he sent a telegram to a friend who was Minister of Justice in Sweden asking for asylum. This was granted to him a little later. In February 1940 he traveled by ship to neutral Sweden. Five months later he started lecturing on international law at Stockholm University . The linguistically gifted Lemkin had learned enough Swedish within five months to be able to do so. In parallel with his lectures, he began to analyze the various legal provisions that the National Socialists had passed in the countries they had occupied. He was supported by Swedish embassies in Europe, various delegations from the Red Cross and the company for which he had worked in Warsaw in the meantime. The aim of his collection was to show how inhumane law was used to sow hatred and incite murder. Above all, he wanted to convince those who continued to turn a blind eye to the atrocities of the National Socialists.

In 1941 Lemkin received an invitation to teach international law at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He owed this invitation to one of the professors at the university with whom he had once translated Polish criminal law into English. To get to the United States flew Lemkin to Moscow, where he took the Trans-Siberian Railway as far as Vladivostok , continued from there by ship to Tsuruga (Japan) over and traveled from Yokohama with a steamer to Vancouver and then Seattle , where he at 18 April 1941 arrived. On the day he arrived at Duke University, he gave a speech at an evening dinner hosted by the university rector:

“If women, children, and the elderly were murdered 100 miles from here, wouldn't you come to the rescue? But why doesn't your heart make the same decision when it's not a hundred but 3000 miles? "

It was the first of several hundred speeches Lemkin made in the United States. He appeared in front of chambers of commerce, women's groups and at universities to stand up for his idea. However, his warnings that Germany would wipe out its Jewish population met with disbelief and indifference.

Adviser to US authorities

Lemkin hoped for more influence when he was hired as an advisor by the US Board of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Economic Administration in Washington, DC in June 1942 . From 1944, the US War Department also used him as an expert on international law. Lemkin succeeded, among other things, in submitting a memorandum to US President Roosevelt in which he proposed that the Allies make the protection of European minorities a central war goal. A few weeks later, Lemkin received word that Roosevelt was aware of the problems of ethnic minorities in Europe, but that such a request would require patience. Lemkin, aware that there was no time for such a delay, spoke at the time of the double homicide; one by the National Socialists against the Jewish part of the population and a second by the Allies, who knew about Hitler's crimes but refused to publish this knowledge or even to protest verbally against it.

Publication of his non-fiction book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe

In November 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Lemkins published 712-page book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe ( The rule of the Axis powers in occupied Europe ). It carefully listed all the edicts, laws, and ordinances that the Axis powers had issued in 19 Nazi-occupied countries and areas in Europe. It also contained proposals for the post-war restitution of property to the dispossessed and for reparation for the millions of slave laborers of the Nazi regime. Lemkin also repeated his proposal, which he had already presented in Madrid in 1933: [to introduce] an international convention that would allow the conviction and prosecution of people worldwide who were involved in the targeted extermination of population groups. The book received mostly positive reviews. In January 1945, the New York Times Book Review decided to dedicate its front page to this book. The reviewer of this New York Times literary supplement wrote that out of the dry description of a legal system emerged the contours of a monster, fed up with blood, bestializing its servants, and perverting even the noblest human emotions in order to pursue its sick ends. The reviewer also noted that Lemkin succeeded in recording what the rule of the Axis powers meant for occupied Europe and what consequences it would have had if they had ever also dominated America. On the other hand, the reviewer criticized that Lemkin saw a fault of all Germans. It would be like holding Lemkin personally responsible for all acts of the Polish Piłsudski regime .

Coining of the word genocide

Since 1941 at the latest, Lemkin has been looking for a word that aptly describes crimes such as those of the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians and those of the Nazi regime. The fact that his draft did not convince the League of Nations at the Madrid conference in 1933 was also due to the fact that words like barbarism and vandalism ultimately glossed over the horror of such acts. It should be a word that should make all aspects of targeted attacks on a population group tangible, including measures such as mass deportations , the forced reduction in the birth rate, economic exploitation and the targeted repression of the intelligentsia . A term like mass murder did not cover all of these aspects. Nor should it be a term that, like barbarism and vandalism, has already been used in other contexts. Lemkin ultimately developed the term genocide for this. He also gave a definition of the term in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe . Was genocide

“… A coordinated plan of various actions aimed at destroying the essential foundations of the life of a population group with the aim of destroying the group. … Genocide has two phases: a first in which the typical characteristics and ways of life of the oppressed group are destroyed and a second in which the characteristics and way of life of the oppressing population group are imposed on the oppressed. This enforcement, in turn, can take place in that the oppressed population group is allowed to remain or it is even only enforced on the area alone, in that the population is eliminated and this area is colonized by the oppressive population group. "

The term became popular very quickly after a number of American newspapers began using it when they began to cover the atrocities in Europe at length in late 1944. This is partly due to Lemkin's direct intervention. Lemkin convinced Eugene Meyer , the editor of the Washington Post , that this term alone was suitable for these crimes. In fact, an editorial appeared in the Washington Post on December 3, 1944, citing "genocide" as the only suitable word to describe the discovery that between April 1942 and April 1944, about 1,765,000 Jews in Auschwitz Birkenau were gassed and burned. It would be wrong, the article continued, to use the term “atrocity” (German atrocity), because the term “atrocity” always has an undertone of non-directionality and randomness. The crucial point here, however, is that these acts were systematic and targeted. Gas chambers and crematoria are not improvisations, but rather specifically developed instruments for the extermination of an entire ethnic group.

Webster's New International Dictionary picked up the term relatively quickly. The French Encyclopédie Larousse used the term in its 1953 edition and the term was listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as a 1955 update to the third edition.

After 1945

In the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals in 1945, Lemkin assisted the United States' chief prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson . In March 1948 he was given a teaching position at Yale University . At the age of 59 Lemkin died completely impoverished in a one-room apartment on the West Side (Manhattan) .

Awards, recognitions and bequests

Raphael Lemkin was nominated ten times for the Nobel Peace Prize between 1950 and 1959. He has been honored with a number of other awards:

His estate is administered by the rabbi and genocide researcher Steve Jacobs .

Fonts (selection)

  • Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals For Redress. Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944. 674 pp. ISBN 1-58477-576-9 .
  • Olivier Beuvallet: Lemkin face au génocide. (Attached: “The legal case against Hitler” released in 1945, translated into French), Michalon, Paris 2011 ISBN 978-2-84186-560-4 .

literature

  • Boris Barth : Genocide - Genocide in the 20th Century. History, theories, controversies . Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-52865-1 .
  • John Cooper: Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention. Palgrave Macmillan, London 2008, ISBN 0-230-51691-2 .
  • Adam Jones: Genocide, War Crimes, and the West. Parthas, Berlin 2004. ISBN 3-86601-390-6 .
  • Claudia Kraft : Genocide. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 2: Co-Ha. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02502-9 , pp. 422-426.
  • Samantha Power : "A Problem from Hell". America and the Age of Genocide . Basic Books, New York 2002, ISBN 0-465-06150-8 .
  • Philippe Sands : return to Lviv. About the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity . Translation from the English Reinhild Böhnke . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2018 ISBN 978-3-10-397302-0 .
  • Dominik J. Schaller et al .: Dispossessed - Expelled - Murdered. Contributions to genocide research . Zurich: Chronos-Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-0340-0642-X .
  • Dominik J. Schaller, Jürgen Zimmerer : Raphael Lemkin: The "Founder of the United Nations' Genocide Convention" as a Historian of Mass Violence. Special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research , Vol. 7 (2005), No. 4.

Web links

Commons : Raphael Lemkin  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 20.
  2. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 17.
  3. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 14.
  4. ^ Soghomon Tehlirian and the genocide - 94 years ago: The avenger of Armenia killed in Berlin . The daily mirror . April 20, 2015. Accessed June 29, 2015.
  5. ↑ a b Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 21.
  6. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 19.
  7. ↑ a b c Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 22.
  8. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 23.
  9. ↑ a b c d Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 26.
  10. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 27. In the original the quote is: If women, children and old people would be murdered a hundred miles from here, wouldn't you run to help? Then why do you stop this decision of your heart when the distance is 3000 miles instead of a hundred?
  11. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 27.
  12. ↑ a b Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 28.
  13. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 38.
  14. ↑ a b c Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 40.
  15. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 40. In the original the review reads: Out of its dry legalism there ermeges the countours of the monster that now bestrides the earth .... [This monster] gorges itself on blood, bestializes its servants and perverts some of the noblest human emotions to base ends, all with the semblance of authority and spurious legality which leave the individual helpless. ... what axis rule in occupied Europe means and what it would have meant to us had it ever spread to our shores.
  16. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 43. In the original the quote is: ... 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. ... Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor's own nationals.
  17. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 44. In the original, the leading article says: It is a mistake, perhaps, to call these killings atrocities . An atrocity is a wanton brutality ... But the point about these killings is that they were systematic and purposeful. The gas chambers and furnaces were not improvisations; they were scientifically designed instruments for the termination of an entire ethnic group.
  18. ↑ Power: A Problem from Hell . P. 44.
  19. ↑ List of Raphael Lemkin's Nobel Prize nominations , on the Nobel Prize website , accessed on December 31, 2020.
  20. ↑ Office of the Federal President
  21. ↑ Crime and Enlightenment. The first generation of Holocaust research , on the website of the Federal Foreign Office , accessed on January 30, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Lemkin, Raphael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lemkin, Rafał (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish lawyer and peace researcher
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Defeated
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1959
Place of death new York