The History of “Genocide”
By: Jacquie Rose
Tags: Genocide, History, Law, World War II, United Nations

The next chapter of Lemkin’s career began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939.

When German soldiers crossed into Poland, Lemkin fled to Lithuania, making his way to neutral Sweden and eventually the United States. Along the way, he encouraged family members and fellow Jews to flee with him. While many Jews heard the rising Antisemitism in Hitler’s language, large swaths of them were unconvinced that Hitler would follow through on his worst impulses. Lemkin had spent the last decade studying mass atrocities against minority groups. As a result, he was aware that Hitler posed a specific danger to the Jewish people.

A few months after his arrival in the United States, Winston Churchill described Nazi war crimes in a radio address. “Whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands — literally scores of thousands — of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops,” Churchill said. “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”

Before becoming a lawyer, Lemkin had been a linguist. He was aware of the power words had. Therefore, he endeavored to define the “crime without a name.”

One of Lemkin’s greatest legacies was his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The book dryly recounted laws in Nazi Germany, but it also introduced a new word to the world: genocide.

Lemkin wrote:

“By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)…. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify 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 is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.”

Genocide combined the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing). The word could be easily translated into many languages because of its root words and it was simple to pronounce.

Lemkin served with American lawyers in the Nuremberg trials after the war concluded. He was able to insert “genocide” in the indictments against Nazi leadership, although genocide was not yet considered an international crime. Lemkin also learned in Nuremberg that his brother, his brother’s wife, and their children were the only members of Lemkin’s family to survive the war. Forty-nine members of his family, including his parents, perished in the Holocaust.

Lemkin found more career success with the newly created United Nations. The “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

Article 2 of the Convention defined genocide as:

… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

While genocide has not stopped since the Convention, it is now considered an international crime as a result of Lemkin’s lifelong work. He spent the rest of his life lobbying countries — including the United States — to ratify the Convention. Lemkin died in 1959.