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Raphael Lemkin

Raphael Lemkin
Rafał Lemkin
Born(1900-06-24)24 June 1900
Bezwodne, Volkovyssky Uyezd, Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire (now Zelva, Grodno Region, Belarus)
Died28 August 1959(1959-08-28) (aged 59)
New York City, U.S.
Resting placeMount Hebron Cemetery, New York City
CitizenshipUnited States
Alma materUniversity of Lwów
OccupationLawyer
Known forCoining the term "genocide"
Drafting the Genocide Convention
Signature

Raphael Lemkin (Polish: Rafał Lemkin; 24 June 1900 – 28 August 1959) was a Polish lawyer who is known for coining the term "genocide" and for campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention, which legally defines the act. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he fled the country and sought asylum in the United States, where he became an academic at Duke University and campaigned vigorously to raise international awareness of the atrocities that were being committed by the Axis powers across occupied Europe.[1] It was amidst this environment of World War II that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policy.[2]

As a young Jewish law student who was deeply conscious of antisemitism and the persecution of Jews, Lemkin learned about the Ottoman genocide of the Armenian people during World War I and was deeply disturbed by the absence of international provisions to charge and punish those who were responsible for organizing and executing it.[1] In his view, the suffering of the Jewish people was part of a larger pattern of like-minded atrocities occurring around the world and throughout history, such as the Holodomor.

In either 1943 or 1944, Lemkin coined the term "genocide" from two words: genos (Greek: γένος, 'family, clan, tribe, race, stock, kin')[3] and -cide (Latin: -cidium, 'killing').[4][5][6] It was included in the 1944 work of research Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, wherein he documented the mass killings of the peoples that had been deemed "sub-human" (German: Untermenschen) by the Nazi Party.[7] The concept of genocide was defined by Lemkin to refer to the various extermination campaigns that Nazi Germany conducted in an attempt to wipe out entire ethnic groups, including the Holocaust, in which he personally lost 49 family members.[8][9]

After World War II, Lemkin worked on the legal team of American jurist Robert H. Jackson, who served as the chief U.S. prosecutor among the Allied powers at the Nuremberg trials. The now-defined concept of genocide was non-existent in any form of international laws at the time, and this became one of the reasons for Lemkin's view that the trials did not serve complete justice on prosecuting Nazi atrocities against racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Lemkin committed the rest of his life to preventing the rise of "future Hitlers" by pushing for an appropriate international convention. On 9 December 1948, the United Nations approved the Genocide Convention, with many of its clauses based on Lemkin's proposals.[10][11]

  1. ^ a b "Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 23 June 2023. Retrieved 23 September 2021.
  2. ^ "Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention | Facing History & Ourselves". www.facinghistory.org. 12 May 2020. Archived from the original on 20 July 2023.
  3. ^ γένος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, on Perseus
  4. ^ Ishay 2008.
  5. ^ Jenkins 2008, p. 140.
  6. ^ Hyde, Jennifer (2 December 2008), Polish Jew gave his life defining, fighting genocide, CNN, retrieved 2 December 2008
  7. ^ "Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 23 June 2023. Retrieved 23 September 2021. He moved to Washington, DC, in the summer of 1942, to join the War Department as an analyst and went on to document Nazi atrocities in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In this text, he introduced the word "genocide."
  8. ^ "What is Genocide?". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 30 June 2023. Retrieved 7 February 2017. In 1944, Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" in a book documenting Nazi policies of systematically destroying national and ethnic groups, including the mass murder of European Jews
  9. ^ "Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention | Facing History & Ourselves". www.facinghistory.org. 12 May 2020. Archived from the original on 20 July 2023. Lemkin himself had fled to the United States, where he struggled to draw attention to what Nazi Germany was doing to European Jews—massacres that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called "a crime without a name." In 1944, Lemkin made up a new word to describe these crimes: genocide. Lemkin defined genocide as "the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group."
  10. ^ "Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 23 June 2023. Retrieved 23 September 2021.
  11. ^ "Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention | Facing History & Ourselves". www.facinghistory.org. 12 May 2020. Archived from the original on 20 July 2023.

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