Samantha Power - A Problem from Hell

Lemkin made little secret of his desire to see "genocide" gain international fame. As he proselytized on behalf of the new concept, he studied the lingual inventions of science and literary greats. 48But fame for the word was just the beginning. The world had embraced the term “genocide.” Lemkin assumed this meant the major powers were ready both to apply the word and oppose the deed.

“Only man has law…You must build the law!”

—Raphael Lemkin

The Nuremberg Beginning

With the end of war in Europe on May 8, 1945, and the Allied liberation of the Nazi death camps, the scale of Hitler’s madness had been revealed. Practically all that had sounded far-fetched proved real. Some 6 million Jews and 5 million Poles, Roma, Communists, and other “undesirables” had been exterminated. American and European leaders saw that a state’s treatment of its own citizens could be indicative of how it would behave toward its neighbors. And though sovereignty was still thought to be sacrosanct, a few scholars had begun gently urging that it not be defined so as to permit slaughter. 1

Raphael Lemkin had never needed much encouragement, but Allied rhetoric made him believe that the world might be ready to listen. If genocide were to be prevented or punished, “genocide” would need more than a place in Webster’s. Naming the crime was just a first step along the road to banning it. That road would prove a long one. Law had of course been one tool among many used and abused to facilitate the destruction of the Jews. Hans Frank, former German minister of justice, had summed up a core Nazi premise when he said, “Law is that which is useful and necessary for the German nation.” 2Nobody knew better than Lemkin the legal minutiae deployed by Germany to achieve its eliminationist ends. Yet for Lemkin this recent soiling of law only highlighted the need to restore its integrity through humane invention. A set of universal, higher norms, was needed as a backstop to national law. The “theory of master race had to be replaced,” he said, by a “theory of master morality.” 3

It would be the new United Nations that would decide whether to criminalize genocide as states had already done with piracy; forgery; trade in women, slaves, and drugs; and as they would later do with terrorism. In a letter to the New York Times, Lemkin wrote:

It seems inconsistent with our concepts of civilization that selling a drug to an individual is a matter of worldly concern, while gassing millions of human beings might be a problem of internal concern. It seems also inconsistent with our philosophy of life that abduction of one woman for prostitution is an international crime while sterilization of millions of women remains an internal affair of the state in question. 4

If piracy was an international crime, he could not understand why genocide was not. “Certainly human beings and their cultures are more important than a ship and its cargo,” he exclaimed at a postwar international law conference in Cambridge. “Surely Shakespeare is more precious than cotton.” 5

Lemkin was initially quite well received in the United States. After years of getting jeered or yawned out of international law conferences, he suddenly found himself with a measure of cachet in the U.S. capital and with a standing invitation to contribute to the country’s major publications.

In Nuremberg, Germany, the three victors (and France) had set up an international military tribunal to try the leading Nazi perpetrators. The Nuremberg court was placing important dents in state armor. Indeed, it was amid considerable controversy that the Nuremberg charter prosecuted “crimes against humanity,” the concept the Allies had introduced during World War I to condemn the Turks for their atrocities against the Armenians. With Nuremberg going so far as to try European officials for crimes committed against their own citizens, future perpetrators of atrocities—even those acting under explicit state authority—could no longer be confident that their governments or their borders would shelter them from trial.

Since Nuremberg was making this inroad into state sovereignty, one might have expected Lemkin to cheer from the sidelines. In fact, he was a fierce critic of the court. Nuremberg was prosecuting “crimes against humanity,” but the Allies were not punishing slaughter whenever and wherever it occurred, as Lemkin would have wished. The court treated aggressive war ( “crimes against peace” ), or the violation of another state’s sovereignty, as the cardinal sin and prosecuted only those crimes against humanity and war crimes committed after Hitler crossed an internationally recognized border. 6Nazi defendants were thus tried for atrocities they committed during but not before World War II. By inference, if the Nazis had exterminated the entire German Jewish population but never invaded Poland, they would not have been liable at Nuremberg. States and individuals who did not cross an international frontier were still free under international law to commit genocide. Thus, although the court did a fine job building a case against Hitler and his associates, Lemkin felt it would do little to deter future Hitlers.

In May 1946 Lemkin turned up in the rubble of Nuremberg as a kind of semiofficial adviser (or lobbyist) so that he could proselytize in person. He knew the charter’s terms were fixed, but he hoped to get “genocide” incorporated into the prosecutors’ parlance and spotlighted on the Nuremberg stage. Even if genocide were not punished, at least the court could help popularize the new term. Lemkin had been teaching part time at Yale Law School. He convinced the dean, Wesley Sturges, to grant him leave on the grounds that it was better to develop international law than to teach it.

Lemkin had spent most of his time since the war’s end tracking down his missing family members. In Nuremberg he met up with his older brother, Elias; Elias’s wife; and their two sons. They told him that they were the family’s sole survivors. At least forty-nine others, including his parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, had perished in the Warsaw ghetto, in concentration camps, or on Nazi death marches. 7In the words of one lawyer who remembers Lemkin roaming around the corridors at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, he was “obviously a man in pain.”

If Lemkin was relentless before, the loss of his parents pressed him into overdrive. He spent his days buttonholing lawyers in the halls of the Palace of Justice. Some were sympathetic to his graphic war stories. Others were irritated. Benjamin Ferencz was a young lawyer on Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor’s staff, which was building a case against the Einsatzgruppen , the mobile killing units that butchered Jews in Eastern Europe. He remembers Lemkin as a disheveled, disoriented refugee less concerned with hanging the Nazi war criminals than with getting genocide included in the tribunal’s list of punishable crimes. Most of the prosecutors tried to avoid him, seeing him as a nag or, in Yiddish, a nudnik. “We were all extremely busy. This new idea of his was not something we had time to think about,” Ferencz recalls. “We wanted him to just leave us alone so we could convict these guys of mass murder.”

Lemkin did score an occasional victory. Because of his prior lobbying efforts, the third count of the October 1945 Nuremberg indictment had stated that all twenty-four defendants “conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories.” This was the first official mention of genocide in an international legal setting. On June 26, 1946, British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe cheered Lemkin by telling Nazi suspect Constantin von Neurath, “Now, defendant, you know that in the indictment in this trial we are charging you and your fellow defendants, among other things, with genocide.” 8Lemkin wrote Fyfe that summer to thank him “for your great and so effective support which you lent to the concept of Genocide.” He also urged Fyfe to get “genocide” included in the Nuremberg judgment. 9