Raphael Lemkin

Raphael Lemkin (Rafał Lemkin; 24 June 1900 – 28 August 1959) was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who is known for coining the term genocide and campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention.

During the Second World War, he campaigned vigorously to raise international outrage against atrocities in Axis-occupied Europe.

It was during this time that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policies against Jews and Poles.

As a young law student deeply conscious of antisemitic persecution, Lemkin learned about the Ottoman empire's massacres of Armenians during World War I and was deeply disturbed by the absence of international provisions to charge Ottoman officials who carried out war crimes.

Following the German invasion of Poland, Lemkin fled Europe and sought asylum in United States, where he became an academic at Duke University.

Lemkin was born Rafał Lemkin on 24 June 1900 in Bezwodne, a village in the Volkovyssky Uyezd of the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus).

He grew up in a Polish Jewish family on a large farm near Wolkowysk and was one of three children born to Józef Lemkin and Bella née Pomeranz.

His father was a farmer and his mother an intellectual, painter, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books on literature and history.

Lemkin and his two brothers (Eliasz and Samuel) were homeschooled by their mother.

As a youth, Lemkin was fascinated by the subject of atrocities and would often question his mother about such events as the Sack of Carthage, Mongol invasions and conquests and the persecution of Huguenots.

Lemkin apparently came across the concept of mass atrocities while, at the age of 12, reading Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz, in particular the passage where Nero threw Christians to the lions.

About these stories, Lemkin wrote, "a line of blood led from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to the Białystok pogrom."

In his writings, Lemkin demonstrated a belief central to his thinking throughout his life: the suffering of Jews in eastern Poland was part of a larger pattern of injustice and violence that stretched back through history and around the world.

The Lemkin family farm was located in an area in which fighting between Russian and German troops occurred during World War I.

The family buried their books and valuables before taking shelter in a nearby forest.

During the fighting, artillery fire destroyed their home and German troops seized their crops, horses and livestock.

Lemkin's brother Samuel eventually died of pneumonia and malnutrition while the family remained in the forest.

After graduating from a local trade school in Białystok Lemkin began the study of linguistics at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine).

He was a polyglot, fluent in nine languages and reading fourteen.

He became interested in war crimes upon learning about the 1921 trial of Soghomon Tehlirian for the assassination of Talaat Pasha.

After reading about the 1921 assassination of Talat Pasha, the main perpetrator of the Armenian genocide, in Berlin by Soghomon Tehlirian, Lemkin asked Professor Juliusz Makarewicz why Talat Pasha could not have been tried for his crimes in a German court.

Makarewicz, a national-conservative who believed that Jews and Ukrainians should be expelled from Poland if they refused to assimilate, answered that the doctrine of state sovereignty gave governments the right to conduct internal affairs as they saw fit: "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them, and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing."

Lemkin replied, "But the Armenians are not chickens".

His eventual conclusion was that "Sovereignty, I argued, cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people".

His first published book was a 1926 translation of the Hayim Nahman Bialik novella Noah and Marinka from Hebrew into Polish.

Lemkin then moved on to Heidelberg University in Germany to study philosophy, returning to Lwów to study law in 1926.

From 1929 to 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 also secretary of the Committee on Codification of the Laws of the Republic of Poland, which codified the penal codes of Poland, and taught law at Tachkemoni College in Warsaw.

Lemkin, working with Duke University law professor Malcolm McDermott, translated The Polish Penal Code of 1932 from Polish to English.

It was in Białystok that Lemkin became interested in laws against mass atrocities after learning about the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, then later the experience of Assyrians massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre.

In 1933 Lemkin made a presentation to 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.

Lemkin coined genocide in 1943 or 1944 from two words: genos (γένος, 'family, clan, tribe, race, stock, kin') and -cide (-cīdium, 'killing').

The term was included in the 1944 research-work "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe", wherein Lemkin documented mass-killings of ethnic groups deemed "untermenschen" by Nazi Germany.

In particular, the concept of "genocide" was defined by Lemkin to refer to the vicious extermination campaign launched by Nazi Germany to wipe out Jews in the Holocaust.

After the Second World War, Lemkin worked on the legal team of Robert H. Jackson, Chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal.

The concept of "genocide" was non-existent in any international laws at the time, and this became one of the reasons for Lemkin's view that the trial did not serve complete justice on prosecuting Nazi atrocities targeting ethnic and religious groups.

Lemkin committed the rest of his life to push for an international convention, which in his view, was essential to prevent the rise of "future Hitlers".

Lemkin worked as an Assistant Prosecutor in the District Court of Brzeżany (since 1945 Berezhany, Ukraine) and Warsaw, followed by a private legal practice in Warsaw.

On 9 December 1948, the United Nations approved the Genocide Convention, with many of its clauses based on Lemkin's proposals.