25. Laqueur, Terrible Secret, p. 96, quoting a letter from Goldberg to Laqueur.
26. “Pole’s Suicide Note Pleads for Jews,” New York Times, June 4, 1943, p. 4. A monument to Szmul Zygielbojm, whose pseudonym was Artur, was unveiled in Warsaw on July 22, 1997, on the fifty-fifth anniversary of the start of the deportation of Warsaw Jews. In 1998 the letter was installed in the permanent collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Karski spoke at a ceremony marking the event.
27. “Jews’ Last Stand Felled 1,000 Nazis,” New York Times, May 22, 1943, p. 7. More than 10,000 Jews were killed in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The 56,000 Jews who survived were taken to the Treblinka death camp.
28. The New York Times did not again mention Zygielbojm until Jan Karski died in July 2000. Karski’s wife, Pola Nirenska, herself a Holocaust survivor whose family had been wiped out in the Holocaust, had thrown herself from the balcony of their Bethesda, Maryland, apartment in 1992 at the age of eighty-one. A dancer, her last piece, presented in Washington in 1990, was inspired by Holocaust victims and called, “In Memory of Those I Loved . . . Who Are No More.” See Michael T. Kaufman, “Jan Karski Dies at 86; Warned West About Holocaust,” New York Times, July 15, 2000, p. C15.
29. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944). The first part of the book dealt with the different aspects of Nazi rule: the German administration of the occupied lands and their usurpation of sovereignty; the role and function of the German police and the secret police, the Gestapo; the introduction of discriminatory German law into the occupied territories; the organization of the courts; the disposal of property; the administration of finance; the exploitation of labor through slavery and depopulation; the extremely inhumane treatment of Jews; and the destruction of national and ethnic groups.
30. Melchior Palyi, review of Axis Rule over Occupied Europe, by Raphael Lemkin, American Journal of Sociology 51, 5 (March 1946): 496–497. Palyi was a Hungarian-born, laissez-faire, anti-Keynesian economist who taught at a number of universities in Germany and the United States.
31. Arthur K. Kuhn, review of Axis Rule over Occupied Europe, by Raphael Lemkin, American Journal of International Law 39, 2 (April 1945): ix, 360–362.
32. Linden A. Mander, review of Axis Rule over Occupied Europe, by Raphael Lemkin, American Historical Review 51, 1 (October 1945): 117–120.
33. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).
34. Lemkin, Axis Rule, pp. xiv, xxiii.
35. Otto D. Tolischus, “Twentieth-Century Moloch: The Nazi-Inspired Totalitarian State, Devourer of Progress—and of Itself,” New York Times Book Review, January 21, 1945, pp. 1, 24.
36. Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide,” American Scholar 15, 2 (1946): 227–230. Waldemar Kaempffert, “Genocide Is the New Name for the Crime Fastened on the Nazi Leaders,” New York Times, October 20, 1946, p. E13, contains a discussion of the other possible terms that Lemkin might have chosen. Lemkin presumably fed this material to the journalist.
37. “Introduction to Part I, The New Word,” in “History of Genocide,” ch. 1, sec. 5; reel 3, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
38. “Introduction to Part I, The New Word,” ch. 1, sec. 6 (“Words as Moral Judgements”), p. 4.
39. Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche einer Überwältigten (Beyond Guilt and Atonement: Attempts to Overcome by One Who Has Been Overcome) (Munich: Szczesny Verlag, 1996), p. 59, translated and quoted in Lawrence L. Langer, The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 51. See also George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
40. Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. 79; emphasis added.
41. Ibid.
42. Raphael Lemkin, “The Importance of the Convention,” p. 1, reel 2, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
43. Proceedings of the Forty-fourth Annual Session of the North Carolina Bar Association, p. 112, cited in William Korey, An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin (New York: Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, 2001), p. 11.
44. Genocide was incorporated into the French Encyclopédie Larousse in 1953 after approval from the French Academy. The Oxford English Dictionary first listed “genocide” as an entry in the “Addenda and Corrigenda” section of the 1955 update to the third edition. Hebrew, Yiddish, and Serbo-Croatian all borrow “genocide” without much modification. Though the word did gain great fame around the world, many languages translated the term, contrary to Lemkin’s designs, as “mass killing.” Polish uses ludobójstwo, meaning “people-killing.” Armenian uses tseghasbanutiun, or “killing of a race.” Khmer uses prolai puch sah, or “to destroy the race.” German uses Völkermord, or “murder of a nation.” The Rwandan language, Kinyarwandan, uses n’itsembabwoko, or “massacring an ethnic group.”
45. “History of Genocide,” part 1, p. 7.
46. The Roosevelt administration had been very slow to comment on the fate of the Jews. On March 24, 1944, Roosevelt finally condemned the “systematic murder of the Jews” that went on “unabated every hour.” He warned that all those in Germany and in satellite countries who knowingly took part in the deportation of Jews were “equally guilty with the executioners” and would share the punishment. On November 8, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, acting on the advice of the War Refugee Board, threatened “heavy punishment.” “Germans!” he declared, “Do not obey any orders . . . urging you to molest, harm or persecute [those in concentration camps], no matter what their religion or nationality may be.” “Eisenhower Warns Reich on Prisoners,” New York Times, November 8, 1944, p. 21.
47. “Genocide,” Washington Post, December 3, 1944, p. B4.
48. In a book on the history of genocide that was never published, Lemkin rattled off a vast number of factoids concerning those writers he hoped to emulate. He demonstrated a dazzling grasp of literature, science, politics, and the diverse roots and authorship of various terms. I later discovered that Lemkin had lifted verbatim virtually every one of his panoramic literary references, as well as many entire paragraphs, from Bruno Migliorini, The Contribution of the Individual to Language: Taylorian Lecture, 1952 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). Lemkin included them without attribution in what he hoped would be his masterpiece. He was not above plagiarizing if it served his cause.
Chapter 4, Lemkin’s Law
1. Jurists like Hans Kelsen challenged the “theology of the state” and declared the cult of deference to sovereignty a false necessity. Sovereignty could be redefined. “We can derive from the concept of sovereignty,” Kelsen wrote in Peace Through Law, “nothing else than what we have purportedly put into its definition.” Hans Kelsen, Peace Through Law (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944), pp. 41–42.
2. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944), p. 31, n. 25. See Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, trans. Deborah Schneider (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
3. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 197.
4. Letter to the editor, New York Times, November 8, 1946.
5. Robert Merrill Bartlett, They Stand Invincible: Men Who Are Reshaping Our World (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1959), p. 102.
6. Critics, of course, railed against the Nuremberg court for its ex post facto law-making. They said the ban on crimes against humanity was introduced after the crimes had been committed. Tribunal defenders pointed to customary law and argued that perpetrators of these horrid acts could not have thought they were acting within legal bounds when they extermina
ted unarmed civilians. They also argued that most nations had pledged to outlaw aggression in 1925 in the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Requiring the link to aggression also technically immunized Allied soldiers against prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity, since the Nazis, and not the Allies, were the original invaders. But this was not a motivation for the jurisdictional decision, as the subject of Allied wartime transgressions was rarely raised at the time.
7. Bartlett, They Stand Invincible, p. 102. Lemkin learned that the main part of the town where his parents lived had been burned down, and the population of some 20,000 people had been crowded into a ghetto near the railway station. In his autobiography Lemkin wrote, “This happened more than a year prior to moving my parents, together with others, to ______, to be gassed.” It seems Lemkin never learned where his parents were murdered. Raphael Lemkin, “Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin,” ch. 6, p. 105.
8. British prosecutor Hartley Shawcross also used the term several times in his summation. Waldemar Kaempffert, “Genocide Is the New Name for the Crime Fastened on the Nazi Leaders,” New York Times, October 20, 1946, p. E13.
9. William Korey, An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin (New York: Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, 2001), p. 25.
10. Herbert Yahraes, “He Gave a Name to the World’s Most Horrible Crime,” Collier’s, March 3, 1951, p. 56.
11. Lassa Oppenheim, International Law, 7th ed., vol. 1, ed. Hersch Lauterpacht (London: Longmans, 1948), p. 583, declared that it was “generally recognized that a state is entitled to treat its own citizens at its discretion and that the manner in which it treats them is not a matter in which international law, as such, concerns itself.” When it came to humanitarian intervention, “by virtue of its personal and territorial supremacy, a state can treat its own nationals according to discretion.”
12. “Anti-Genocide Gains Termed Significant,” New York Times, December 20, 1947, p. 8.
13. Raphael Lemkin, “The Importance of the Convention,” p. 2, reel 2, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
14. The organization used a converted indoor skating rink at Flushing Meadow (twenty minutes away) for General Assembly sessions. This was the UN’s last stop before moving into permanent headquarters at Turtle Bay.
15. Kathleen Teltsch, “The Early Years,” in A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, ed. Amy Janello and Brennon Jones, p. 12.
16. A. M. Rosenthal, “A Man Called Lemkin,” New York Times, October 18, 1988, p. A31.
17. Bartlett, They Stand Invincible, p. 103. One night his insomnia paid off. In August 1948, as he strolled around Lake Leman in Geneva in the early hours of the morning, Lemkin bumped into the Canadian ambassador, David Wilgress, who also could not sleep. Lemkin seized his chance, charming the Canadian, a history buff, with stories about the Athenians’ atrocities in Mytilene, the Mongols’ genocide, and the slaughter of the Armenians. Lemkin’s new friend introduced him to Herbert Evatt, who was the president of the General Assembly. With Evatt’s support, Lemkin said he no longer felt like a “petitioner” but more like a “full-fledged partner.” Lemkin, “Autobiography,” ch. 10, pp. 13, 15.
18. White proceeded: “If [the UN planners] put on their spectacles and look down their noses and come up with the same old bunny, we shall very likely all hang separately—nation against nation, power against power, defense against defense, people (reluctantly) against people (reluctantly). If they manage to bring the United Nations out of the bag, full blown, with constitutional authority and a federal structure having popular meaning, popular backing, and an over-all authority greater than the authority of any one member or any combination of members, we might well be started on a new road.” E. B. White, “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, February 24, 1945, p. 17.
19. In the early years of the UN, all of the major newspapers and wire services posted between a half dozen and a dozen correspondents at UN headquarters. This is a far cry from today, when many media do not staff the UN and when those that do post only one or, in the case of the wires, two reporters.
20. Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide,” American Scholar 15, 2 (1946): 228.
21. Lemkin, “Autobiography,” ch. 9, p. 8.
22. Ibid., p. 14.
23. “Genocide Under the Law of Nations,” New York Times, January 5, 1947, p. E11.
24. Korey, An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin, p. 29.
25. This draft called for the establishment of an “International Office for the administration of all matters” related to the genocide convention, which would gather data on the causes of genocide and make recommendations for alleviating the crime. Each contracting office would also set up national offices linked to the head office in order to gather the names of the perpetrators, details on their genocidal techniques, and recommendations for punishment and prevention. These offices were far more threatening to state sovereignty than a mere law and were thus dropped from later drafts. Ibid., pp. 30–31.
26. Raphael Lemkin, “The Evolution of the Genocide Convention,” p. 7, reel 2, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
27. Rosenthal, “A Man Called Lemkin.”
28. Lemkin, “The Evolution of the Genocide Convention,” p. 5.
29. In 1948 the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations appointed an Ad Hoc Committee on Genocide composed of representatives from China, France, Lebanon, Poland, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Venezuela. This committee unanimously adopted a draft, which the council transmitted to the General Assembly in August 1948. The General Assembly in turn referred the report to the assembly’s Sixth Committee, which devoted fifty-one meetings in two months to discussing and amending the convention.
30. See Lemkin, “Autobiography,” ch. 10, pp. 5–8.
31. Ibid., p. 22.
32. General Assembly president Evatt, Lemkin’s friend, allowed him to handpick the chairman of the Legal Committee. In order to avoid delay, Lemkin also rallied a number of delegations to support the idea of avoiding the standard UN practice of requiring passage first in a subcommittee. In this instance the Legal Committee alone would prepare the final draft. It had two early drafts to work from—one that had been prepared by the Secretariat with Lemkin’s participation in 1947 and the other prepared by the Special Committee of ECOSOC in May 1948 with Lemkin’s behind-the-scenes influence.
33. Lemkin, “Autobiography,” ch. 11, p. 27.
34. Although the law moved ahead, Lemkin was dismayed to learn that a pair of clauses were being inserted that limited the initial duration of the law to ten years if sixteen states stepped forward to denounce it and allowed for revisions to the text after a certain number of years. Lemkin was too exhausted and too desperate to fight these additions but later said that he “felt like a babysitter who takes a nap at the wrong time.” Opponents had put “blows and knives” into the newborn baby so that it would later die. As it happened, these provisions were never invoked, but Lemkin could not know that at the time. His fear that the convention would perish heightened his paranoia in the years ahead. Lemkin, “Autobiography,” ch. 11, p. 58; ch. 13, p. 36.
35. “Genocide and the UN,” Washington Post, November 9, 1946, p. 8.
36. The United Nations was then composed of fifty-eight member states (twenty-one from the Americas, sixteen from Europe, fourteen from Asia, four from Africa, three from Oceania).
37. Lemkin, “Autobiography,” ch. 12, p. 59.
38. “U.N. Votes Accord Banning Genocide,” New York Times, December 10, 1948, p. 12.
39. John Hohenberg, “The Crusade That Changed the UN,” Saturday Review, November 9, 1968, p. 87.
40. Rosenthal, “A Man Called Lemkin.”
41. Teltsch, “Library Show Recalls Man Behind Treaty on Genocide.”
42. Lemkin, “Autobiography,” ch. 1.
43. Ibid., ch. 12, p. 61.
Chapter 5, “A Most Lethal Pair of Foes”
1. Reel 4, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
A Problem From Hell Page 68
