2. Because several countries had ratified the convention nearly simultaneously, there were actually twenty-one “ratifications without reservation”: Australia, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Israel, Jordan, Liberia, Monaco, Norway, Panama, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. Bulgaria and the Philippines also ratified the Genocide Convention by mid-October 1950, but with reservations. The genocide convention formally entered into force on January 12, 1951. “Pact on Genocide Effected by U.N.,” New York Times, October 15, 1950, p. 23.
3. Steven Schnur, “Unofficial Man: The Rise and Fall of Raphael Lemkin,” Reform Judaism, Fall 1982, p. 11. In the New York Times the day after the convention was ratified, Lemkin was pictured in a photo beside a short story from UN headquarters at Lake Success. The grainy photo, which was captioned “UN Representatives Ratify Pact Against Genocide,” depicts Lemkin in a conspicuous light-colored suit in the back row. In front of him are the dark-suited representatives of the latest four ratifiers, Korea, Haiti, France, and Costa Rica, as well as the president of the General Assembly, Nasrollah Entezam of Iran. Alongside him are Ivan Kerno, the assistant secretary-general for legal affairs; Trygve Lie, the secretary-general; and Fernando Fournier of Costa Rica. Others in the photo are identified by their titles; Lemkin, staring at the camera blankly, is described simply as “chief proponent of the pact.” “U.N. Representatives Ratifying Pact Against Genocide,” New York Times, October 17, 1950, p. 18.
4. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, The Genocide Convention: Hearings Before the Senate Subcommittee on the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., 1950, p. 15.
5. Ibid., pp. 204–205.
6. Lemkin, “The Truth About the Genocide Convention,” p. 2, reel 3, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
7. A pair of UN studies of the convention later attempted to clarify the meaning of its text. In 1978 N. Ruhashyankiko’s Study on the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/416 (1978), pp. 14–15, reflected on the Sixth Committee debate and found it “sufficient that an act of genocide should have as its purpose the partial destruction of a group. . . . It was not necessary to kill all the members of a group in order to commit genocide.” The UN Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Revised and Updated Report on the Question of Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Whitaker Report), UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1985/6 (1985), p. 18, found that the phrase “in part” “would seem to imply a reasonably significant number, relative to the total of the group as a whole, or else a significant section of a group such as its leadership.” Concerned that too broad an interpretation might de-value the “gravity of the concept of genocide,” the special rapporteur recommended consideration of proportionate scale and total numbers. “Other attacks and killings do, of course, remain heinous crimes,” he noted, “even if they fall outside the definition of genocide.”
8. See Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1997).
9. In fact, the Chinese representative had intended the “mental harm” provision to cover “genocide by narcotics,” which the Japanese occupiers had used as a weapon against the Chinese in World War II, permanently impairing their mental facilities and destroying their will to resist. UN, Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Genocide, Economic, and Social Council, Official Records: third year, seventh sess., suppl. no. 6, April 5–May 10, 1948, p. 15; Sixth Committee, pp. 177, 179. As Adrian Fisher, the State Department legal adviser, testified in 1950, the mental harm provision would apply to violent acts aimed at doing permanent injury to a victim’s mental faculties. It would not apply to “embarrassment or hurt feelings, or even the sense of outrage that comes from such action as racial discrimination or segregation, however horrible those may be.” Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, The Genocide Convention, pp. 263–264.
10. Raphael Lemkin to Gertrude Samuels, June 6, 1950, reel 1, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
11. Hearings on the Genocide Convention, p. 132.
12. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 20. The transcripts of the executive sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are not made available to the public for twenty-five years. See Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Historical Series, 1976, p. 645.
13. Those who opposed including political groups also claimed that unlike ethnic or national groups, political groups were not sufficiently “cohesive” or recognizable. Of course religious groups, which were covered, also lacked ready identifiers. In addition, religious preference was as mutable as political affiliation.
14. Lemkin had hoped to ban cultural genocide, as he had long been convinced that the destruction of language, libraries, churches, and traditions was both a savage wrong in its own right and often a prelude to murder. He liked to say, “First they burn books and then they start burning bodies.” But he gave up the battle to punish the destruction of language, monuments, archives, and other cultural foundations when he realized that time was running out in the General Assembly session. The Legal Committee was not supportive, and he could not afford to see the vote postponed until the following year because there was no guarantee the next president of the General Assembly (after Evatt) would support the law. He consoled himself that he could try to get the UN to adopt an additional protocol later. In the words of Joel Wolfsohn of the American Jewish Committee, Lemkin was “willing to throw anything and everything overboard in order to save a ship.” William Korey, An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin (New York: Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, 2001), p. 39, quoting a letter given to him by James Fussell.
15. Duane Tananbaum, The Bricker Amendment Controversy: A Test of Eisenhower’s Political Leadership (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 31, citing John Bricker Papers at the Ohio Historical Society.
16. Eisenhower was frustrated at having to fight off the isolationists within his own party, and he blamed Bricker. He told his press secretary, James Hagerty, that “if it’s true that when you die the things that bothered you most are engraved on your skull, I am sure I’ll have there the mud and dirt of France during [the] invasion and the name of Senator Bricker.” Ibid., p. 151, citing Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 1, pp. 1843–1846. In the face of sustained pressure by the administration, Eisenhower Republicans defected to join liberal Democrats in handily defeating Bricker’s version of the measure 50-42 (two-thirds being required in this case). But a watered-down Democratic alternative (the George resolution) lost by just one vote (60-31) in February 1954. Ibid., pp. 167–180.
17. Letter to Thelma Stevens, reel 1, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
18. Reel 1, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
19. See Jessica Tuchman Mathews, “Power Shift,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 1997, pp. 50–66.
20. Other organizations included the World Alliance for International Friendship Through Religion, the International League for the Rights of Man, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the National Conference for Christians and Jews, the American Friends’ Service Committee, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.
21. Even during World War II, when one might have expected attention to be drawn to Hitler’s Final Solution, Hollywood had avoided the subject. Of the more than 500 narrative films made on war-related themes between 1940 and 1945, for instance, virtually none focused upon the persecution or extermination of Jews. The dearth of coverage is all the more striking when we note that American Jews played major roles in writing, directing, financing, and acting in Hollywood. Yet at the time the power
of Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer, and others did not incline them to emphasize Jewish themes. Many famous Jewish actors, including Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, John Garfield, and Edward G. Robinson changed their names so as not to sound Jewish. See Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 96–97. Avisar notes that Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator (1940) was an exception for its attention to the plight of Jews. Avisar cites Lewis Jacobs, “World War II and the American Film,” Cinema Journal 1 (Winter 1967–1968): 21.
22. Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 30, 34. See also David Margolick, “Television and the Holocaust: An Odd Couple,” New York Times, January 31, 1999, pp. A31–A32.
23. Lawrence Langer wrote, “There is little horror in the stage version; there is very little in the Diary itself. . . . They permit the imagination to cope with the idea of the Holocaust without forcing a confrontation with its grim details.” See Lawrence Langer, “The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen,” in Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
24. “How ‘Cheerful’ Is ‘Anne Frank’?” Variety, April 1, 1959, p. 2, quoted in Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 34.
25. Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?” New Yorker, October 6, 1997, pp. 76–87.
26. Judgment at Nuremberg included edited footage taken by Allied forces entering Germany and liberating concentration camps. The Allies’ documentary, Nazi Concentration Camps, was first presented as evidence by the prosecution during the Nuremberg trials. See Lawrence Douglas, “Film as Witness: Screening ‘Nazi Concentration Camps’ Before the Nuremberg Tribunal,” Yale Law Journal, November 1995, pp. 449–481. Americans first saw images of the camps and their survivors in the spring of 1945, when motion picture companies, with General Eisenhower’s encouragement, produced newsreels using similar documentary footage. Shandler, While America Watches, p. 10.
27. Shandler, While America Watches, pp. 77–78. Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews, rejected by successive publishers, was published in 1961 after being subsidized by a survivor family. See Leon A Jick, “The Holocaust: Its Use–Abuse Within the American Public,” Yad Vashem Studies 14 (1981): 307.
28. Irving Spiegel, “Shrine Honors Hitler’s Victims,” New York Times, May 30, 1959, p. A5. The article quotes an inscription on a newly dedicated shrine in Jerusalem, in memory of those who died in the “Nazi holocaust in the years from 1933–1945” (“Holocaust” was not yet capitalized). The word “Holocaust” derives from the Greek holokauston; it is a translation of the Hebrew churban, which means a burnt offering to God and appears in the Old Testament (1 Sam. 7:9). Scholars disagree as to how and when the word first crept into the American lexicon. Some scholars credit Elie Wiesel’s Night (1959) with popularizing “Holocaust” as a proper noun. Hilberg did not use the term in The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). Jick, “The Holocaust,” p. 309.
29. Gerd Korman, “The Holocaust in American Historical Writing,” Societas, Summer 1972, p. 261; Jick, “The Holocaust,” p. 314. Notably, it was not until 1979 that the U.S. Department of Justice formed its Office of Special Investigations to detect, denaturalize, and deport Nazi war crimes suspects living in the United States.
30. As Wiesel himself remembered, “The big publishers hesitated, debated, and ultimately sent their regrets.” One reason they gave was that American readers “seemed to prefer optimistic books”; Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 325. Primo Levi recalled that several big publishing houses refused his manuscript, and the small house that accepted it published a mere 2,500 copies and went bankrupt soon thereafter. In Levi’s notes to the Italian edition of Survival in Auschwitz, he described the book’s falling into oblivion. “In that harsh period after the war,” Levi wrote, “people had little desire to be reminded of the painful times that were hardly over.” Ruth K. Angress, “Primo Levi in English,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, vol. 3 (Chappaqua, N.Y.: Rossel Books, 1986), p. 319.
31. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed 48–0 with 8 abstentions, from Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, the USSR, Yugoslavia, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia. Lemkin was wrong in believing the coverage overwhelmingly favored the declaration. In 1948, for instance, the New York Times published eighty-seven articles on the declaration and fifty-eight on the genocide convention. But Lemkin resented articles on the convention that appeared under headings such as “Two U.N. Achievements.”
32. For a detailed account of the drafting of the declaration, see Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).
33. See Josef L. Kunz, “The United Nations Convention on Genocide,” American Journal of International Law 43, 4 (October 1949): 738–746.
34. This campaign to create binding human rights conventions was eventually caught up in Cold War politics. Two separate covenants were introduced—one on civil and political rights and one on economic and social—but neither was opened for signature until 1966 and neither went into effect until 1976. The nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has probably been more influential than either of these two international laws.
35. Lemkin, “The U.N. Is Killing Its Own Child,” pp. 1–2, reel 2, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
36. Lemkin also lobbied forcefully against a proposal put forth by Francis Biddle to draft a code of international criminal law, or a “Code of Offenses Against the Peace and Security of Mankind,” which deemed aggressive war the “supreme crime.” Lemkin was afraid this emphasis on aggression would replicate Nuremberg’s mistaken neglect of genocide, which for him was the only “supreme crime.” See “Text of Biddle’s Report on Nuremberg and Truman’s Reply,” New York Times, November 13, 1946, p. 14. Although the draft code of offenses included the definition of “genocide,” it omitted the term itself.
37. Lemkin, “Memo on Genocide Convention” (1953), reel 2, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library. Lemkin appears to have drafted the memo on somebody else’s behalf.
38. Raphael Lemkin to Senator H. Alexander Smith, June 12, 1952, forwarded to Assistant Secretary of State John D. Hickerson; Assistant Secretary of State John D. Hickerson to Raphael Lemkin, June 26, 1952; reel 2, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
39. Eleanor Roosevelt became a favorite target. In December 1951 she forever earned Lemkin’s disdain when a reporter asked her to comment on the charges lodged by East European expatriate and exile groups in the United States that the Soviet Union was committing genocide. Roosevelt replied casually: “How could you prove it? I’m not sure you can prove that. Unless you can prove it, there’s no use bringing it up.” Lemkin had worked closely with nongovernmental groups derived from the formerly independent Soviet states and hoped to develop an indictment against the Soviet Union. It was difficult to gather evidence of atrocities carried out behind the iron curtain, but he was sure he had mustered enough proof to bring the weight of public opinion down upon the Soviets. Although Roosevelt had been a frequent critic of Soviet human rights abuses, Lemkin heard her skepticism as a familiar form of denial. The former first lady might as well have been dismissing his cause in Madrid in 1933. “The U.N. Review: U.N. Keeps Hope Alive for Missing Korea P.O.W.s; Trygve Lie Urges Effort to Bar New War,” New York Herald Tribune, December 30, 1951, p. 12.
40. Glendon, A World Made New, p. 60, citing “Verbatim Record,” June 12, 1947, Drafting Committee Meeting, Charles Malik Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
41. Lemkin, “The Truth About the Genocide Convention,” p. 13.
42. “The Crime of Genocide,” New York Times, October 20, 1957, sec. 4, p. 10.
43. Steven Schnur, “Unofficial Man: The Rise and Fall of Raphael Lemkin,” Reform Judaism, Fall 1982, p. 45. One l
etter from an unidentified Clara Hoover does appear in his correspondence. She wrote that she was shattered by Lemkin’s “indifference” to her, his long disappearances, and his short-tempered returns. “You say that you are an unhappy man,” Hoover wrote to him in 1959. “I am, also. The best way to overcome unhappiness is to make someone else happy. You can do this very easily. . . . Don’t add me to your list of hates and enemies. Is there no room in your heart for forgiveness?” Clara Hoover to Raphael Lemkin, reel 1, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
44. “28 Are Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize, Including Truman, Churchill and Marshall,” New York Times, February 28, 1950, p. 21; “Nobel Peace Group Lists 9 Americans,” New York Times, February 24, 1951, p. 15; and Steven Jacobs, “The Papers of Raphael Lemkin: A First Look,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, 1 (1999): 108. Lemkin appears to have been actively involved in the nomination drive in 1958 and 1959, urging various acquaintances around the world to send letters to the Nobel committee on his behalf and even personally drafting their nomination letters.
45. Richard J. Walsh to Raphael Lemkin, February 16, 1955, reel 1, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library. Walsh did suggest that Lemkin contact John Hersey to see if he might be interested in writing a biography of Lemkin, an idea Lemkin himself had apparently earlier proposed. Walsh wrote that although he did not know Hersey personally, “I am certain that it will be much better to have you approach him directly, using your well-known ability to impress your point of view upon various persons.”
46. Letters from publishers, reel 1, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
47. Schnur, “Unofficial Man,” p. 45.
48. A. M. Rosenthal, “A Man Called Lemkin,” New York Times, October 18, 1988, p. A31. Lemkin is buried at Mt. Hebron Cemetery in Queens, New York. His tombstone reads: “Dr. Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) Father of the Genocide Convention.”
49. By 1967, fifty-one countries had adopted the convention outright and seventeen more had adopted it with reservations.
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