Raphael Lemkin

Rafael Lemkin (June 24, 1900 – August 28, 1959) was a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent. Before World War II, Lemkin was interested in the Armenian Genocide and campaigned in the League of Nations to ban what he called "barbarity" and "vandalism". He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words genos (Greek for family, tribe or race) and -cide (Latin for killing). He first used the word in print in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress (1944).

Early life and education

Lemkin was born Rafał Lemkin in the village of Bezwodne in Imperial Russia, now the Vilkaviškis district of Lithuania). Not much is known of Lemkin's early life. He grew up in a Polish-Jewish family and was one of three children born to Joseph and Bella (Pomerantz) Lemkin. His father was a farmer and his mother a highly intellectual woman who was a painter, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books in literature and history. With his mother as an influence, Lemkin mastered nine languages by the age of 14, including French, Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian.

After graduating from a local trade school in Białystok he began the study of linguistics at the John Casimir University in Lwów. It was here Lemkin became interested in the case of Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian who assassinated former Turkish Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha in Berlin,Germany on March 14, 1921 as an act of vengeance for his role in orchestrating the Armenian Genocide. Lemkin thought it inconsistent for it to be a crime to kill a man but not a crime to orchestrate the destruction of an entire people. Lemkin then moved on to the University of Heidelberg in Germany to study philosophy, and returned to Lwow to law in 1926, becoming a prosecutor in Warsaw at graduation.

Working Life

From 1929–1934, Lemkin was the Public Prosecutor for the district court of Warsaw. In 1930 he was promoted to Deputy Prosecutor in a local court in Brzeżany While Public Prosecutor Lemkin was secretary of the Committee on Codification of the Laws of the Polish Republic which codified the penal codes of Poland and taught law at Tachkimoni College in Warsaw. Lemkin, working with Duke University law professor Malcolm McDermott, translated the The Polish Penal Code of 1932 from Polish to English. McDermott would later provide Lemkin with help in leaving Europe.

In 1933 Lemkin presented before the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. The concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, was based mostly on the experience of Arameans massacred in Iraq during the early 1930s and on the Armenian Genocide during World War I.William Korey, "Raphael Lemkin: 'The Unofficial Man'," Midstream, June–July 1989, p. 45–48 In 1934 Lemkin, under pressure from the Polish Foreign Minister for comments made at the Madrid conference, resigned his position and became a private solicitor in Warsaw. While in Warsaw Lemkin attended numerous lectures organized by the Free Polish University, including the classes of Stanisław Rappaport and Wacław Makowski.

In 1937, Lemkin was appointed a member of the Polish mission to the 4th Congress on Criminal Law in Paris, where he also introduced the possibility of defending peace through criminal law. Among the most important of his works of that period are a compendium of Polish criminal and taxation law, (1938) and a French language work, , regarding international trade law (1939).

World War II

During the Polish Defensive War of 1939 Lemkin joined the Polish Army and defended Warsaw during the siege of that city, where he was injured by a bullet to the hip, afterward evading capture by the Germans. In 1940 he traveled through Lithuania to reach Sweden, where he first lectured at the University of Stockholm. With the help of Malcolm McDermott Lemkin received permission to enter the United States, arriving on the East coast of the United States in 1941.

Although he managed to save his life, he lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust; they were among over 3 million Polish Jews who were annihilated during the Nazi occupation. Some members of his family died in Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. The only European members of Lemkin's family who survived the Holocaust were his brother, Elias, and his wife and two sons, who had been sent to a Soviet forced labor camp. Lemkin did however successfully aid his brother and family immigrate to Montreal, Canada in 1948.

After arriving in the United States Lemkin joined the law faculty at Duke University in North Carolina in 1941. During the Summer of 1942 Lemkin lectured at the School of Military Government at the University of Virginia. He also wrote Military Government in Europe, which was a preliminary version of his more fully developed publication Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In 1943 Lemkin was appointed consultant to the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration and later became a special adviser on foreign affairs to the War Department, largely due to his expertise in international law

In 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin's most important work, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in the United States. This book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II, along with the definition of the term genocide. Lemkin's idea of genocide as an offense against international law was widely accepted by the international community and was one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials. In 1945–1946, Lemkin became an advisor to Supreme Court of the United States Justice and Nuremberg Trial chief counsel Robert H. Jackson.

Post-War

After the war, Lemkin remained in exile in the United States. From 1948 onward he gave lectures on criminal law at Yale University. Lemkin also continued his campaign for international laws defining and forbidding genocide, which he had championed ever since the Madrid conference of 1933. He proposed a similar ban on crimes against humanity during the Paris Peace Conference of 1945, but his proposal was turned down.

Lemkin presented a draft resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty to a number of countries in an effort to persuade them to sponsor the resolution. With the support of the United States, the resolution was placed before the General Assembly for consideration. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally presented and adopted on December 9, 1948. In 1951, Lemkin achieved his goal when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into force, after the 20th nation had ratified the treaty. The Convention defines genocide as:

…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:

(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.

Recognition

For his work on international law and the prevention of war crimes, Lemkin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1955, 1956, 1958 and 1959. Although he was never awarded the Nobel Prize, he did receive a number of other awards, including the Cuban Grand Cross of the Order of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes in 1950, the Stephen Wise Award of the American Jewish Congress in 1951, and the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. On the 50th anniversary of the Convention entering into force, Dr. Lemkin was also honored by the UN Secretary-General as "an inspiring example of moral engagement."

Death

Lemkin died of a heart attack at the public relations office of Milton H. Blow in New York City in 1959, at the age of 59. In an ironic final twist for a man whose life was dedicated to the remembrance of millions of victims of genocide, seven people attended his funeral.A. M. Rosenthal, "A Man Called Lemkin," New York Times, October 18, 1988, p.A31

Notes

References

Lemkin, Raphael and Samantha Power. Axis Rule In Occupied Europe: Laws Of Occupation, Analysis Of Government, Proposals For Redress. Lawbook Exchange, 2005. ISBN 1584775769. (Originally published as Lemkin, Raphael. Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944.)
Chapters 2-5 of Power, Samantha. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Basic Books, 2002 (original hardcover). ISBN 0465061508.

External links

Polish lawyers | 1900 births | 1959 deaths | Genocide

Raphael Lemkin | Raphael Lemkin | Raphael Lemkin | Rafał Lemkin

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