“A Problem from Hell”
America and the Age of Genocide
Samantha Power

Awards and Accolades

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction 2003

Winner of Robert F. Kennedy Book Award 2003

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-fiction

Winner of the National Magazine Award for her Atlantic Monthly article “Bystanders to Genocide”

Winner of the Raphael Lemkin Award (Institute for the Study of Genocide)

Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for the Best Book on American Political or Social Concern That Exemplifies Literary Grace and Commitment to Serious Research

Short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Book in Current Interest

Short-listed for the Arthur Ross Book Award for the Best Book in International Affairs (Council on Foreign Relations)

Short-listed for the Lionel Gelber Prize for the Best Book in International Relations (Munk Center for International Studies, Canada)

Winner of the National Magazine Award for her New Yorker article “Dying in Darfur”

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Awards and Accolades

Chapter 1 “Race Murder”

Chapter 2 “A Crime Without a Name”

Chapter 3 The Crime With a Name

Chapter 4 Lemkin’s Law

Chapter 5 “A Most Lethal Pair of Foes”

Chapter 6 Cambodia: “Helpless Giant”

Chapter 7 Speaking Loudly and Looking for a Stick

Chapter 8 Iraq: “Human Rights and Chemical Weapons Use Aside”

Chapter 9 Bosnia: “No More than Witnesses at a Funeral”

Chapter 10 Rwanda: “Mostly in a Listening Mode”

Chapter 11 Srebrenica:“Getting Creamed”

Chapter 12 Kosovo: A Dog and a Fight

Chapter 13 Lemkin’s Courtroom Legacy

Chapter 14 Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

P.S.

About the author

Author Biography

About the book

A Conversation with Samantha Power

Read on

The Void: Why the Movement Needs Help

“Why Can’t We?” – A Commencement Address

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1 “Race Murder”

Trial by Fire

On March 14, 1921, on a damp day in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, a twenty-four-year-old Armenian crept up behind a man in a heavy gray overcoat swinging his cane. The Armenian, Soghomon Tehlirian, placed a revolver at the back of the man’s head and pulled the trigger, shouting, “This is to avenge the death of my family!” The burly target crumpled. If you had heard the shot and spotted the rage distorting the face of the young offender, you might have suspected that you were witnessing a murder to avenge a very different kind of crime. But back then you would not have known to call the crime in question “genocide.” The word did not yet exist.

Tehlirian, the Armenian assassin, was quickly tackled. As pedestrians beat him with their fists and house keys,he shouted in broken German, “I foreigner, he foreigner, this not hurt Germany…It’s nothing to do with you.”¹ It was national justice carried out in an international setting. Tehlirian had just murdered Mehmed Talaat, the former Turkish interior minister who had set out to rid Turkey of its Armenian “problem.” In 1915 Talaat had presided over the killing by firing squad, bayoneting, bludgeoning, and starvation of nearly 1 million Armenians.²

The outside world had known that the Armenians were at grave risk well before Talaat and the Young Turk leadership ordered their deportation. When Turkey entered World War I on the side of Germany against Britain, France, and Russia, Talaat made it clear that the empire would target its Christian subjects. In January 1915, in remarks reported by the New York Times, Talaat said that there was no room for Christians in Turkey and that their supporters should advise them to clear out.³ By late March Turkey had begun disarming Armenian men serving in the Ottoman army. On April 25, 1915, the day the Allies invaded Turkey, Talaat ordered the roundup and execution of some 250 leading Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople. In each of Turkey’s six eastern provinces, local Armenian notables met roughly the same fate. Armenian men in rural areas were initially enlisted as pack animals to transport Turkish supplies to the front, but soon even this was deemed too dignified an existence for the traitorous Christians. Churches were desecrated. Armenian schools were closed, and those teachers who refused to convert to Islam were killed. All over Anatolia the authorities posted deportation orders requiring the Armenians to relocate to camps prepared in the deserts of Syria. In fact, the Turkish authorities knew that no facilities had been prepared, and more than half of the deported Armenians died on the way. “By continuing the deportation of the orphans to their destinations during the intense cold,” Talaat wrote, “we are ensuring their eternal rest.”⁴

“Official proclamations,” like this one from June 1915, cropped up around town:

Our Armenian fellow countrymen,…because…they have…attempted to destroy the peace and security of the Ottoman state,…have to be sent away to places which have been prepared in the interior…and a literal obedience to the following orders, in a categorical manner, is accordingly enjoined upon all Ottomans:

1 With the exception of the sick, all Armenians are obliged to leave within five days from the date of this proclamation…

2 Although they are free to carry with them on their journey the articles of their movable property which they desire, they are forbidden to sell their land and their extra effects, or to leave them here and there with other people…⁵

The Young Turks—Talaat; Enver Pasha, the minister of war; and Djemal Pasha, the minister of public works—justified the wholesale deportation of the Armenians by claiming that it was necessary to suppress Armenian revolts.⁶ When Russia had declared war on Turkey the previous year, it had invited Armenians living within Turkey to rise up against Ottoman rule, which a small minority did. Although two prominent Ottoman Armenians led a pair of czarist volunteer corps to fight Turkey, most expressed loyalty to Constantinople. But this did not stop the Turkish leadership from using the pretext of an Armenian “revolutionary uprising” and the cover of war to eradicate the Armenian presence in Turkey. Very few of those killed were plotting anything other than survival. The atrocities were carried out against women, children, and unarmed men. They were not incidental “by-products” of war but in fact resulted from carefully crafted decisions made by Turkey’s leaders.

In June 1915 Erzindjan, the hometown of Talaat’s eventual assassin, was emptied. Soghomon Tehlirian, then nineteen, marched in a column of some 20,000 people, with his mother and siblings—two sisters of fifteen and sixteen, another of twenty-six who carried a two-and-a-half-year-old child, and two brothers of twenty-two and twenty-six. The journey was harrowing. The gendarmes said to be protecting the convoy first dragged Tehlirian’s sisters off behind the bushes to rape them. Next he watched a man split his twenty-two-year-old brother’s head open with an ax. Finally, the soldiers shot his mother and struck Tehlirian unconscious with a blow to the head. He was left for dead and awoke hours later in a field of corpses. He spotted the mangled body of a sister and the shattered skull of his brother. His other relatives had disappeared. He guessed he was the sole survivor of the caravan.⁷

Recognition

The “international community,” such as it was, did little to contest the Turkish horrors,which began nine months into World War I. Germany was aligned with the brutal regime and thus was best positioned to influence it. Instead, German officials generally covered up Talaat’s campaign, ridiculing the Allied accounts of the terror as “pure inventions” and “gross exaggerations.” The Germans echoed the Turks’ claims that any harsh policies were a measured response to Armenian treason during wartime.⁸ The German chancellor met in person with German Christian missionaries who presented eyewitness testimony about the slaughter. But he rejected their appeals. Berlin would not offend its Turkish ally.

Britain and France were at war with the Ottoman Empire and publicized the atrocities. The British Foreign Office dug up photographs of the massacre victims and the Armenian refugees in flight. An aggressive, London-based, pro-Armenian lobby helped spur the British press to cover the savagery.⁹ But some had trouble believing the tales. British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, for one, cautioned that Britain lacked “direct knowledge” of massacres. He urged that “the massacres were not all on one side” and warned that denunciation would likely be futile. Indeed, when Russia’s foreign minister drafted a public threat that he hoped the Allies could issue jointly, Grey said he doubted that the message would influence Turkish behavior and might even cause Turkey to adopt more serious measures against the Armenians.¹⁰ Since Britain was already at war with Turkey, other British officials argued that the most expedient way to end the killings would be to defeat the German-Austrian-Turkish alliance. On May 24, 1915, the Allied governments did deliver a joint declaration that took the unprecedented step of condemning “crimes against humanity and civilization.” The declaration warned the members of the Turkish government that they and their “agents” would be held “personally responsible” for the massacres.¹¹ Generally, though, the Allies were busy trying to win the war. At the same time the Turks were waging their campaign against the Armenian minority, the German army was using poison gas against the Allies in Belgium. In May 1915 the German army had torpedoed the Lusitania passenger liner, killing 1,200 (including 190 Americans). The Germans had also just begun zeppelin attacks against London.¹²

The United States, determined to maintain its neutrality in the war, refused to join the Allied declaration. President Woodrow Wilson chose not to pressure either the Turks or their German backers. It was better not to draw attention to the atrocities, lest U.S. public opinion get stirred up and begin demanding U.S. involvement. Because the Turks had not violated the rights of Americans,Wilson did not formally protest.

But in Turkey itself America’s role as bystander was contested. Henry Morgenthau Sr., a German-born Jew who had come to the United States as a ten-year-old boy and had been appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire by President Wilson in 1913, agitated for U.S. diplomatic intervention. In January and February 1915, Morgenthau had begun receiving graphic but fragmentary intelligence from his ten American consuls posted throughout the Ottoman Empire. At first he did not recognize that the atrocities against the Armenians were of a different nature than the wartime violence. He was taken in by Talaat’s assurances that uncontrolled elements had simply embarked upon “mob violence” that would soon be contained.¹³ In April, when the massacres began in earnest, the Turkish authorities severed Morgenthau’s communication with his consuls and censored their letters. Morgenthau was reluctant to file reports back to Washington based on rumors, and the Turks were making it impossible for him to fact-check.

Although he was initially incredulous, by July 1915 the ambassador had come around. He had received too many visits from desperate Armenians and trusted missionary sources to remain skeptical. They had sat in his office with tears streaming down their faces, regaling him with terrifying tales. When he compared this testimony to the strikingly similar horrors relayed in the rerouted consular cables, Morgenthau came to an astonishing conclusion. What he called “race murder” was under way. On July 10, 1915, he cabled Washington with a description of the Turkish campaign:

Persecution of Armenians assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, whole-sale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place.

Response

Morgenthau was constrained by two background conditions that seemed immutable. First, the Wilson administration was resolved to stay out of World War I. Picking fights with Turkey did not seem a good way to advance that objective. And second,diplomatic protocol demanded that ambassadors act respectfully toward their host governments. U.S. diplomats were expected to stay out of business that did not concern U.S. national interests. “Turkish authorities have definitely informed me that I have no right to inter-fere with their internal affairs,” Morgenthau wrote. Still, he warned Washington, “there seems to be a systematic plan to crush the Armenian race.”¹⁴

Local witnesses urged him to invoke the moral power of the United States. Otherwise, he was told, “the whole Armenian nation would disappear.”¹⁵ The ambassador did what he could, continuing to send blistering cables back to Washington and raising the matter at virtually every meeting he held with Talaat. He found his exchanges with the interior minister infuriating. Once, when the ambassador introduced eyewitness reports of slaughter, Talaat snapped back: “Why are you so interested in the Armenians anyway? You are a Jew, these people are Christians…What have you to complain of? Why can’t you let us do with these Christians as we please?” Morgenthau replied, “You don’t seem to realize that I am not here as a Jew but as the American Ambassador…I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or religion but merely as a human being.” Talaat looked confused. “We treat the Americans all right, too,” he said. “I don’t see why you should complain.”¹⁶

But Morgenthau continued to complain, warning that Talaat and other senior officials would eventually be held responsible before the court of public opinion, particularly in the United States. Talaat had a ready response: “We don’t give a rap for the future!” he exclaimed. “We live only in the present!” Talaat believed in collective guilt. It was legitimate to punish all Armenians even if only a few refused to disarm or harbored seditious thoughts. “We have been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty,” Talaat told a German reporter. “But that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow.”¹⁷

Instead of hiding his achievements, as later perpetrators would do, Talaat boasted of them. According to Morgenthau,he liked to tell friends, “I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years!”¹⁸ (The Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid had killed some 200,000 Armenians in 1895–1896.) Talaat once asked Morgenthau whether the United States could get the New York Life Insurance Company and Equitable Life of New York,which for years had done business with the Armenians, to send a complete list of the Armenian policyholders to the Turkish authorities. “They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs,” Talaat said. “The Government is the beneficiary now.”¹⁹

Morgenthau was incensed at the request and stormed out of Talaat’s office. He again cabled back to Washington, imploring his higher-ups to take heed:

I earnestly beg the Department to give this matter urgent and exhaustive consideration with a view to reaching a conclusion which may possibly have the effect of checking [Turkey’s] Government and certainly provide opportunity for efficient relief which now is not permitted. It is difficult for me to restrain myself from doing something to stop this attempt to exterminate a race, but I realize that I am here as Ambassador and must abide by the principles of non-interference with the internal affairs of another country.²⁰

Morgenthau had to remind himself that one of the prerogatives of sovereignty was that states and statesmen could do as they pleased within their own borders. “Technically,” he noted to himself, “I had no right to interfere. According to the cold-blooded legalities of the situation, the treatment of Turkish subjects by the Turkish Government was purely a domestic affair; unless it directly affected American lives and American interests, it was outside the concern of the American Government.”²¹ The ambassador found this maddening.

The New York Times gave the Turkish horrors steady coverage, publishing 145 stories in 1915. It helped that Morgenthau and Times publisher Adolph Ochs were old friends. Beginning in March 1915, the paper spoke of Turkish “massacres,” “slaughter,” and “atrocities” against the Armenians, relaying accounts by missionaries, Red Cross officials, local religious authorities, and survivors of mass executions. “It is safe to say,” a correspondent noted in July, “that unless Turkey is beaten to its knees very speedily there will soon be no more Christians in the Ottoman Empire.”²² By July 1915 the paper’s headlines had begun crying out about the danger of the Armenians’ “extinction.” Viscount Bryce,former British ambassador to the United States, pleaded that the United States use its influence with Germany. “If anything can stop the destroying hand of the Turkish Government,” Bryce argued, as did the missionaries who had appealed to Morgenthau, “it will be an expression of the opinion of neutral nations, chiefly the judgment of humane America.”²³ On October 7, 1915, a Times headline blared, “800,000 ARMENIANS COUNTED DESTROYED.” The article reported Bryce’s testimony before the House of Lords in which he urged the United States to demonstrate that there were “some crimes which, even now in the convulsion of a great war, the public opinion of the world will not tolerate.”²⁴ By December the paper’s headline read, “MILLION ARMENIANS KILLED OR IN EXILE.”²⁵ The number of victims were estimates, as the bodies were impossible to count. Nevertheless, governmental and nongovernmental officials were sure that the atrocities were “unparalleled in modern times” and that the Turks had set out to achieve “nothing more or less than the annihilation of a whole people.”²⁶

Witnesses to the terror knew that American readers would have difficulty processing such gruesome horrors, so they scoured history for parallels to events that they believed had already been processed in the public mind. One report said, “The nature and scale of the atrocities dwarf anything perpetrated…under Abdul Hamid, whose exploits in this direction now assume an aspect of moderation compared with those of the present Governors of Turkey.” Before Adolf Hitler, the standard for European brutality had been set by Abdul Hamid and the Belgian king Leopold, who pillaged the Congo for rubber in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁷

Because the Turks continued to block access to the caravans, reporters often speculated on whether their sources were reliable. “The Turkish Government has succeeded in throwing an impenetrable veil over its actions toward all Armenians,” a frustrated Associated Press correspondent noted. “Constantinople has for weeks had its daily crop of Armenian rumors…What has happened…is still an unwritten chapter. No newspapermen are allowed to visit the affected districts and reports from these are altogether unreliable. The reticence of the Turkish Government cannot be looked upon as a good sign, however.”²⁸Turkish representatives in the United States predictably blurred the picture with denials and defenses. The Turkish consul,Djelal Munif Bey, told the New York Times, “All those who have been killed were of that rebellious element who were caught red-handed or while otherwise committing traitorous acts against the Turkish Government, and not women and children, as some of these fabricated reports would have the Americans believe.” But the same representative added that if innocent lives had in fact been lost, that was because in wartime “discrimination is utterly impossible, and it is not alone the offender who suffers the penalty of his act, but also the innocent whom he drags with him…The Armenians have only themselves to blame.”²⁹

The Turks, who had attempted to conduct the massacres secretly, were unhappy about the attention they were getting. In November 1915 Talaat advised the authorities in Aleppo that Morgenthau knew far too much. “It is important that foreigners who are in those parts shall be persuaded that the expulsion of the Armenians is in truth only deportation,” Talaat wrote. “It is important that, to save appearances, a show of gentle dealing shall be made for a time, and the usual measures be taken in suitable places.” A month later, angry that foreigners had obtained photographs of corpses along the road, Talaat recommended that these corpses be “buried at once,” or at least hidden from view.³⁰

Sensing Turkish sensitivity to the outside world’s opinion, Morgenthau pleaded with his superiors to throw protocol and neutrality aside and to issue a direct government-to-government appeal “on behalf of humanity” to stop the killings. He also urged the United States to convince the German kaiser to stop the Turks’ “annihilation of a Christian race.” And he called on Washington to press the Turks to allow humanitarian aid deliveries to those Armenians already deported and in danger of starving to death in the desert.³¹ But because Americans were not endangered by the Turkish horrors and because American neutrality in World War I remained fixed, Washington did not act on Morgenthau’s recommendations. Officials urged him instead to seek aid from private sources.

Morgenthau did get help from outside the U.S. government. The Congregationalist, Baptist, and Roman Catholic churches made donations. The Rockefeller foundation gave $290,000 in 1915 alone. And most notable, a number of distinguished Americans, none of Armenian descent, set up a new Committee on Armenian Atrocities.³² The committee raised $100,000 for Armenian relief and staged high-profile rallies, gathering delegations from more than 1,000 churches and religious organizations in New York City to join in denouncing the Turkish crimes.

But in calling for “action,” the committee was not urging U.S. military intervention. It was worried about the impact of an American declaration of war on American schools and churches in Turkey. In addition, the sentiment that made committee members empathize with their fellow Christians in Armenia also made some pacifists. In decrying the atrocities but opposing the war against Turkey, the committee earned the scorn of former president Theodore Roosevelt. In a letter to Samuel Dutton, the Armenia committee secretary, Roosevelt slammed the hypocrisy of the “peace-at-any-price type” who acted on the motto of “safety first,” which, he wrote, “could be appropriately used by the men on a sinking steamer who jump into boats ahead of the women and children.” He continued:

Mass meetings on behalf of the Armenians amount to nothing whatever if they are mere methods of giving a sentimental but ineffective and safe outlet to the emotion of those engaged in them. Indeed they amount to less than nothing…Until we put honor and duty first, and are willing to risk something in order to achieve righteousness both for ourselves and for others, we shall accomplish nothing; and we shall earn and deserve the contempt of the strong nations of mankind.³³

Roosevelt wondered how anyone could possibly advise neutrality “between despairing and hunted people, people whose little children are murdered and their women raped, and the victorious and evil wrongdoers.” He observed that such a position put “safety in the present above both duty in the present and safety in the future.”³⁴ Roosevelt would grow even angrier later in the war, when the very relief campaign initiated to aid the Armenians would be invoked as reason not to make war on Turkey. In 1918 he wrote to Cleveland Dodge, the most influential member of the Armenia committee: “To allow the Turks to massacre the Armenians and then solicit permission to help the survivors and then to allege the fact that we are helping the survivors as a reason why we should not follow the only policy that will permanently put a stop to such massacres is both foolish and odious.”³⁵

Morgenthau tried to work around America’s determined neutrality. In September 1915 he offered to raise $1 million to transport to the United States the Armenians who had escaped the massacres. “Since May,” Morgenthau said, “350,000 Armenians have been slaughtered or have died of starvation. There are 550,000 Armenians who could now be sent to America, and we need help to save them.” Turkey accepted the proposal, and Morgenthau called upon each of the states in the western United States to raise funds to equip a ship to transport and care for Armenian refugees. He appealed to American self-interest, arguing, “The Armenians are a moral, hard working race, and would make good citizens to settle the less thickly populated parts of the Western States.”³⁶ He knew he had to preemptively rebut those who expected Armenian freeloaders. But the Turks, insincere even about helping Armenians leave, blocked the exit of refugees. Morgenthau’s plan went nowhere.³⁷

As American missionaries were driven out of Turkey, they returned to the United States with stories to tell. William A. Shedd, a Presbyterian missionary, chose to write directly to the new U.S. secretary of state, Robert Lansing:

I am sure there are a great many thoughtful Americans who, like myself, feel that silence on the part of our Government is perilous and that for our Government to make no public protest against a crime of such magnitude perpetrated by a Government on noncombatants, the great majority of them helpless women and children, is to miss an unusual opportunity to serve humanity, if not to risk grave danger of dishonor on the name of America and of lessening our right to speak for humanity and justice. I am aware, of course, that it may seem presumptuous to suggest procedure in matters of diplomacy; but the need of these multitudes of people suffering in Turkey is desperate, and the only hope of influence is the Government of the United States.³⁸

But Lansing had been advised by the Division of Near East Affairs at the State Department that “however much we may deplore the suffering of the Armenians, we cannot take any active steps to come to their assistance at the present time.”³⁹ Lansing instructed Morgenthau to continue telling the Turkish authorities that the atrocities would “jeopardize the good feeling of the people of the United States toward the people of Turkey.”⁴⁰ Lansing also eventually asked Germany to try to restrain Turkey. But he expressed understanding for Turkey’s security concerns. “I could see that [the Armenians’] well-known disloyalty to the Ottoman Government and the fact that the territory which they inhabited was within the zone of military operations constituted grounds more or less justifiable for compelling them to depart their homes,” Secretary Lansing wrote in November 1916.⁴¹ Morgenthau examined the facts and saw a cold-blooded campaign of annihilation; Lansing processed many of those same facts and saw an unfortunate but understandable effort to quell an internal security threat.

After twenty-six months in Constantinople, Morgenthau left in early 1916. He could no longer stand his impotence. “My failure to stop the destruction of the Armenians,” he recalled, “had made Turkey for me a place of horror—I had reached the end of my resources.”⁴² More than 1 million Armenians had been killed on his watch. Morgenthau, who had earned a reputation as a loose cannon, did not receive another appointment in the Wilson administration. President Wilson, reflecting the overwhelming view of the American people, stayed on the sidelines of World War I as long as he could. And when the United States finally entered the conflict against Germany in April 1917, he refused to declare war on or even break off relations with the Ottoman Empire. “We shall go wherever the necessities of this war carry us,” Wilson told Congress, “but it seems to me that we should go only where immediate and practical considerations lead us and not heed any others.”⁴³ In the end it was Turkey that broke off ties with the United States.

America’s nonresponse to the Turkish horrors established patterns that would be repeated. Time and again the U.S. government would be reluctant to cast aside its neutrality and formally denounce a fellow state for its atrocities. Time and again though U.S. officials would learn that huge numbers of civilians were being slaughtered, the impact of this knowledge would be blunted by their uncertainty about the facts and their rationalization that a firmer U.S. stand would make little difference. Time and again American assumptions and policies would be contested by Americans in the field closest to the slaughter, who would try to stir the imaginations of their political superiors. And time and again these advocates would fail to sway Washington. The United States would offer humanitarian aid to the survivors of “race murder” but would leave those committing it alone.

Aftermath

When the war ended in 1918, the question of war guilt loomed large at the Paris peace conference. Britain, France, and Russia urged that state authorities in Germany, Austria, and Turkey be held responsible for violations of the laws of war and the “laws of humanity.” They began planning the century’s first international war crimes tribunal, hoping to try the kaiser and his German underlings, as well as Talaat, Enver Pasha, and the other leading Turkish perpetrators. But Lansing dissented on behalf of the United States. In general the Wilson administration opposed the Allies’ proposals to emasculate Germany. But it also rejected the notion that some allegedly “universal” principle of justice should allow punishment. The laws of humanity, Lansing argued, “vary with the individual.” Reflecting the widespread view of the time, Lansing said that sovereign leaders should be immune from prosecution. “The essence of sovereignty,” he said, was “the absence of responsibility.”⁴⁴ The United States could judge only those violations that were committed upon American persons or American property.⁴⁵

If such a tribunal were set up, then, the United States would not participate. In American thinking at that time, there was little question that the state’s right to be left alone automatically trumped any individual right to justice. A growing postwar isolationism made the United States reluctant to entangle itself in affairs so clearly removed from America’s narrow national interests.

Even without official U.S. support, it initially seemed that Britain’s wartime pledge to try the Turkish leaders would be realized. In early 1919 the British, who still occupied Turkey with some 320,000 soldiers, pressured the cooperative sultan to arrest a number of Turkish executioners. Of the eight Ottoman leaders who led Turkey to war against the Allies, five were apprehended. In April 1919 the Turks set up a tribunal in Constantinople that convicted two senior district officials for deporting Armenians and acting “against humanity and civilization.” The Turkish court found that women and children had been brutally forced into deportation caravans and the men murdered: “They were premeditatedly,with intent, murdered, after the men had had their hands tied behind their backs.” The police commander Tevfik Bey was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor, and Lieutenant Governor Kemal Bey was hanged. The court also convicted Talaat and his partners in crime in absentia for their command responsibility in the slaughter, finding a top-down, carefully executed plan: “The disaster visiting the Armenians was not a local or isolated event. It was the result of a premeditated decision taken by a central body;…and the immolations and excesses which took place were based on oral and written orders issued by that central body.”⁴⁶

Talaat, who was sentenced to death, was living peacefully as a private citizen in Germany, which rejected Allied demands for extradition. Conscious of his place in history, Talaat had begun writing his memoirs. In them he downplayed the scale of the violence and argued that any abuses (referred to mainly in the passive voice) were fairly typical if “regrettable” features of war, carried out by “uncontrolled elements.” “I confess,” he wrote, “that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere…Some of the officials abused their authority, and in many places people took the preventive measures into their own hands and innocent people were molested.”Acknowledging it was the government’s duty to prevent and punish “these abuses and atrocities,” he explained that doing so would have aroused great popular “discontent,” and Turkey could not afford to be divided during war. “We did all we could,” he claimed, “but we preferred to postpone the solution of our internal difficulties until after the defeat of our external enemies.” Although other countries at war also enacted harsh “preventive measures,” he wrote, “the regrettable results were passed over in silence,”whereas “the echo of our acts was heard the world over, because everybody’s eyes were upon us.” Even as Talaat attempted to burnish his image, he could not help but blame the Armenians for their own fate. “I admit that we deported many Armenians from our eastern provinces,” he wrote, but “the responsibility for these acts falls first of all upon the deported people themselves.”⁴⁷

After a promising start, enthusiasm for trying Talaat and his henchmen faded and politics quickly intervened. With the Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) rapidly gaining popularity at home, the Ottoman regime began to fear a backlash if it was seen to be succumbing to British designs. In addition, the execution of Kemal Bey had made him a martyr to nationalists around the empire. To avoid further unrest, the Turkish authorities began releasing low-level suspects. The British had grown frustrated by the incompetence and politicization of what they called the “farcical”Turkish judicial system. Fearing none of the suspects in Turkish custody would ever be tried, the British occupation forces shipped many of the arrested war crimes suspects from Turkey to Malta and Mudros, a port on the Aegean island of Lemnos, for eventual international trials. But support for this, too, evaporated. By 1920 the condemnations and promises of 1915 were five years old. Kemal, who was rapidly consolidating his control over Turkey, had denounced as treasonous the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which committed the Ottomans to surrender war crimes suspects to an international tribunal. The British clung for a time to the idea that they might at least prosecute the eight Turks in custody who had committed crimes against Britons. But Winston Churchill gave up even this hope in 1920 when Kemal seized twenty-nine British soldiers whose immediate fates Britain privileged above all else.⁴⁸

In November 1921 Kemal put an end to the promise of an international tribunal by negotiating a prisoner swap. The incarcerated Britons were traded for all the Turkish suspects in British custody. In 1923 the European powers replaced the Treaty of Sèvres with the Treaty of Lausanne, which dropped all mention of prosecution. Former British prime minister David Lloyd George called the treaty an “abject, cowardly, and infamous surrender.”⁴⁹

Chapter 2 “A Crime Without a Name”

Soghomon Tehlirian, the young Armenian survivor, knew little of international treaties or geopolitics. He knew only that his life had been empty since the war, that Talaat was responsible, and that the former minister of the interior would never stand trial. Since the massacre of his family and injury to his head, Tehlirian had been unable to sleep and had been overcome by frequent epileptic seizures. In 1920 he had found a cause, enlisting in Operation Nemesis, a Boston-based Armenian plot to assassinate the Turkish leaders involved in targeting the Armenians. He was assigned to murder Talaat, a crime that earned him everlasting glory in the Armenian community and brief global notoriety.

While Tehlirian awaited trial in Berlin, Raphael Lemkin, a twenty-one-year-old Polish Jew studying linguistics at the University of Lvov, came upon a short news item on Talaat’s assassination in the local paper. Lemkin was intrigued and brought the case to the attention of one of his professors. Lemkin asked why the Armenians did not have Talaat arrested for the massacre. The professor said there was no law under which he could be arrested. “Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens,” he said. “He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing.”

“It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?” Lemkin asked. “This is most inconsistent.”¹

Lemkin was appalled that the banner of “state sovereignty” could shield men who tried to wipe out an entire minority. “Sovereignty,” Lemkin argued to the professor, “implies conducting an independent foreign and internal policy, building of schools, construction of roads…all types of activity directed towards the welfare of people. Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people.”² But it was states, and particularly strong states, that made the rules.

Lemkin read about the abortive British effort to try the Turkish perpetrators and saw that states would rarely pursue justice out of a commitment to justice alone. They would do so only if they came under political pressure, if the trials served strategic interests, or if the crimes affected their citizens.

Lemkin was torn about how to judge Tehlirian’s act. On the one hand, Lemkin credited the Armenian with upholding the “moral order of mankind” and drawing the world’s attention to the Turkish slaughter. Tehlirian’s case had quickly turned into an informal trial of the deceased Talaat for his crimes against the Armenians; the witnesses and written evidence introduced in Tehlirian’s defense brought the Ottoman horrors to their fullest light to date. The New York Times wrote that the documents introduced in the trial “established once and for all the fact that the purpose of the Turkish authorities was not deportation but annihilation.”³ But Lemkin was uncomfortable that Tehlirian, who had been acquitted on the grounds of what today would be called “temporary insanity,” had acted as the “self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind.”⁴ Passion, he knew,would often make a travesty of justice. Impunity for mass murderers like Talaat had to end; retribution had to be legalized.

A decade later, in 1933, Lemkin, then a lawyer, made plans to speak before an international criminal law conference in Madrid before a distinguished gathering of elder colleagues.⁵ Lemkin drafted a paper that drew attention both to Hitler’s ascent and to the Ottoman slaughter of the Armenians, a crime that most Europeans either had ignored or had filed away as an “Eastern” phenomenon. If it happened once, the young lawyer urged, it would happen again. If it happened there, he argued, it could happen here. Lemkin offered up a radical proposal. If the international community ever hoped to prevent mass slaughter of the kind the Armenians had suffered, he insisted, the world’s states would have to unite in a campaign to ban the practice. With that end in mind,Lemkin had prepared a law that would prohibit the destruction of nations, races, and religious groups. The law hinged on what he called “universal repression,” a precursor to what today is called “universal jurisdiction”:The instigators and perpetrators of these acts should be punished wherever they were caught, regardless of where the crime was committed, or the criminals’ nationality or official status.⁶ The attempt to wipe out national, ethnic, or religious groups like the Armenians would become an international crime that could be punished anywhere, like slavery and piracy. The threat of punishment, Lemkin argued, would yield a change in practice.

“Barbarity”

Raphael Lemkin had been oddly consumed by the subject of atrocity even before he heard Tehlirian’s story. In 1913, when he was twelve, Lemkin had read Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? which recounts the Roman emperor Nero’s massacres of Christian converts in the first century. Lemkin grew up on a sprawling farm in eastern Poland near the town of Wolkowysk, some 50 miles from the city of Bialystok, which was then part of czarist Russia. Although Lemkin was Jewish, many of his neighbors were Christian. He was aghast that Nero could feed Christians to the lions and asked his mother, Bella, how the emperor could have elicited cheers from a mob of spectators. Bella, a painter, linguist, and student of philosophy who home-schooled her three sons, explained that once the state became determined to wipe out an ethnic or religious group, the police and the citizenry became the accomplices and not the guardians of human life.

As a boy, Lemkin often grilled his mother for details on historical cases of mass slaughter, learning about the sacking of Carthage, the Mongol invasions, and the targeting of the French Huguenots. A bibliophile, he raced through an unusually grim reading list and set out to play a role in ending the destruction of ethnic groups. “I was an impressionable youngster, leaning to sentimentality,” he wrote years later. “I was appalled by the frequency of the evil…and, above all, by the impunity coldly relied upon by the guilty.”

The subject of slaughter had an unfortunate personal relevance for him growing up in the Bialystok region of Poland: In 1906 some seventy Jews were murdered and ninety gravely injured in local pogroms. Lemkin had heard that mobs opened the stomachs of their victims and stuffed them with feathers from pillows and comforters in grotesque mutilation rituals. He feared that the myth that Jews liked to grind young Christian boys into matzoh would lead to more killings. Lemkin saw what he later described as “a line of blood” leading from the massacre of the Christians in Rome to the massacre of Jews nearby.⁷

During World War I, while the Armenians were suffering under Talaat’s menacing rule, the battle between the Russians and the Germans descended upon the doorstep of the Lemkin family farm.⁸ His mother and father buried the family’s books and their few valuables and took the boys to hide out in the forest that enveloped their land. In the course of the fighting, artillery fire ripped their farmhouse apart. The Germans seized their crops, cattle, and horses. Samuel, one of Lemkin’s two brothers, died in the woods of pneumonia and malnourishment.

The interwar period brought a brief respite for Lemkin and his fellow Poles. After the Russian-Polish war resulted in a rare Polish victory, Lemkin enrolled in the University of Lvov in 1920. His childhood Torah study had sparked a curiosity in the power of naming, and he had long been interested in the insight words supplied into culture. He had a knack for languages, and having already mastered Polish, German, Russian, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, he began to study philology, the evolution of language. He planned next to learn Arabic and Sanskrit.

But in 1921, when Lemkin read the article about the assassination of Talaat, he veered away from philology and back toward his dark, childhood preoccupation. He transferred to the Lvov law school, where he scoured ancient and modern legal codes for laws prohibiting slaughter. He kept his eye trained on the local press, and his inquiry gained urgency as he got wind of pogroms being committed in the new Soviet state. He went to work as a local prosecutor and in 1929 began moonlighting on drafting an international law that would commit his government and others to stopping the targeted destruction of ethnic, national, and religious groups. It was this law that the cocksure Lemkin presented to his European legal colleagues in Madrid in 1933.

Lemkin felt that both the physical and the cultural existence of groups had to be preserved. And so he submitted to the Madrid conference a draft law banning two linked practices—“barbarity” and “vandalism.” “Barbarity” he defined as “the premeditated destruction of national, racial, religious and social collectivities.” “Vandalism” he classified as the “destruction of works of art and culture, being the expression of the particular genius of these collectivities.” ⁹ Punishing these two practices—the destruction of groups and the demolition of their cultural and intellectual life—would occupy him fully for the next three decades.

Lemkin met with two disappointments. First, the Polish foreign minister Joseph Beck, who was attempting to endear himself to Hitler, refused to permit Lemkin to travel to Madrid to present his ideas in person.¹⁰ Lemkin’s draft had to be read out loud in his absence. Second, Lemkin found few allies for his proposal. In an interwar Europe composed of isolationist, nationalistic, economically ailing nations, European jurists and litigators were unmoved by Lemkin’s talk of crimes that “shock the conscience.” The League of Nations was too divided to make joint law—never mind joint law on behalf of imperiled minorities. The delegates talked at length about “collective security,” but they did not mean for the phrase to include the security of collectives within states. Besides, in the words of one delegate, this crime of barbarity took place “too seldom to legislate.” Most of the lawyers present (representing thirty-seven countries) wondered how crimes committed a generation ago in the Ottoman Empire concerned lawyers on the civilized Continent. Although the German delegation had just walked out of the League of Nations and thousands of Jewish families had already begun fleeing Nazi Germany, they were also skeptical about apocalyptic references to Hitler. When Lemkin’s plan was presented, the president of the supreme court of Germany and the president of Berlin University left the room in protest.¹¹ As Lemkin put it later in his characteristically stiff style, “Cold water was poured on me.” ¹²

Lemkin had issued a moral challenge, and the lawyers at the conference did not reject his proposal outright. They tabled it. Lemkin noted, “They would not say ‘yes,’ and they could not say ‘no.’” They were not prepared to agree to intervene, even diplomatically, across borders. But neither were they prepared to admit that they would stand by and allow innocent people to die.

Back in Poland, Lemkin was accused of trying to advance the status of Jews with his proposal. Foreign minister Beck slammed him for “insulting our German friends.” ¹³ Soon after the conference, the anti-Semitic Warsaw government fired him as deputy public prosecutor for refusing to curb his criticisms of Hitler.¹⁴

Jobless and chastened by the reception of his draft law, Lemkin still did not question the soundness of his strategy. History, he liked to say, was “much wiser than lawyers and statesmen.” The crime of barbarity repeated itself with near “biological regularity.” ¹⁵ But Lemkin saw that people living in peacetime were clearly going to have difficulty hearing, never mind heeding, warning pleas for early action. The prospect of atrocity seemed too remote, the notion of a plot to destroy a collective too inhuman, and the fate of vulnerable groups too removed from the core interests of outsiders. Yet by the time the crimes had been committed, it would be too late for concerned states to deter them. States would forever be stuck dealing with the consequences of genocide, unable to see or unwilling to act ahead of time to prevent it. But Lemkin did not give up. Over the next few years, at law conferences in Budapest, Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, and Cairo, Lemkin rose in his crisply pressed suit and spoke in commanding French about the urgency of the proposal.

Lemkin was not the only European who had learned from the past. So, too, had Hitler. Six years after the Madrid conference, in August 1939, Hitler met with his military chiefs and delivered a notorious tutorial on a central lesson of the recent past: Victors write the history books. He declared:

It was knowingly and lightheartedly that Genghis Khan sent thousands of women and children to their deaths. History sees in him only the founder of a state…The aim of war is not to reach definite lines but to annihilate the enemy physically. It is by this means that we shall obtain the vital living space that we need. Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?¹⁶

A week later, on September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. In 1942 Hitler restored Talaat’s ashes to Turkey, where the Turkish government enshrined the fallen hero’s remains in a mausoleum on the Hill of Liberty in Istanbul.¹⁷

Flight

If Lemkin had been in a position to utter a public “I told you so” in September 1939, he would have done so. But like all Jews scrambling to flee or to fight, Lemkin had only survival on his mind. Six days after the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, he heard a radio broadcast instructing able-bodied men to leave the capital. Lemkin rushed to the train station, carrying only a shaving kit and a summer coat. When the train was bombed and set aflame by the German Luftwaffe, Lemkin hid and hiked for days in the woods nearby, joining what he called a “community of nomads.” He saw German bombers hit a train crammed with refugees and then a group of children huddling by the tracks. Three of his traveling companions were killed in an air raid. Hundreds of Poles marching with him collapsed of fatigue, starvation, and disease.

Under the terms of the secret Soviet-German deal known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Soviets invaded Poland just after the Germans, and the country was divided into a Soviet and a German zone. Lemkin kept on the move until November 1939, when he wound up in a small town in Poland’s Soviet-occupied half and persuaded a devout Jewish family to shelter him for a few days. There, despite the warmth and generosity of his hosts, Lemkin was frustrated by their passivity and wishful thinking in the face of Hitler’s brutality.

“There is nothing new in the suffering of Jews, especially in time of war,” the man of the house, a baker, insisted. “The main thing for a Jew is not to get excited and to outlast the enemies. A Jew must wait and pray. The Almighty will help. He always helps.”

Lemkin asked the man if he had heard of Mein Kampf. The man said he had heard of it but that he did not believe Hitler would follow through on his threats.

“How can Hitler destroy the Jews, if he must trade with them?” the baker asked Lemkin. “I grant you some Jews will suffer under Hitler, but this is the lot of the Jews, to suffer and to wait.”

Lemkin argued that this was not like other wars. The Germans were not interested only in grabbing territory. Hitler wanted to destroy the Jews completely.

“In the last war, 1915–1918, we lived three years under the Germans,” the baker said. “It was never good, but somehow we survived. I sold bread to the Germans; we baked for them their flour. We Jews are an eternal people, we cannot be destroyed. We can only suffer.” ¹⁸

This disbelief, this faith in reason, in human contact, in commerce, convinced millions to remain in place and risk their fates. Only a small number of Jews had Lemkin’s foresight. The vast majority expected persecution and maybe even the occasional pogrom, but not extermination.

Lemkin studied the man carefully and reflected:

Many generations spoke through this man. He could not believe the reality of [Hitler’s intent], because it was so much against nature, against logic, against life itself, and against the warm smell of bread in his house, against his poor but comfortable bed…There was not much sense in disturbing or confusing him with facts. He had already made up his mind.¹⁹

Lemkin took a train to eastern Poland, where his brother and parents lived. He begged them to join him in flight. “I have been living in retirement for more than ten years because of my sickness,” his father said. “I am not a capitalist. The Russians will not bother me.” His brother chimed in, “I gave up my store and registered as an employee before it was taken over by the new government. They will not touch me either.” Lemkin later remembered: “I read in the eyes of all of them one plea: do not talk of our leaving this warm home, our beds, our stores of food, the security of our customs…We will have to suffer, but we will survive somehow.” He spent the next day feeling as if he was living their funerals while they were still alive. “The best of me was dying with the full cruelty of consciousness,” he noted.²⁰

Before Lemkin left Wolkowysk, his mother lectured him on the importance of rounding out his life. She reminded him that his goal of writing a book a year was not as important as developing “the life of the heart.” Lemkin, who had not dated, joked that maybe he would have more luck in his new capacity as a nomad than he had had “as a member of a sedentary society.” He told his parents that he planned to travel first to Sweden and then, he hoped, to the United States, because that was where decisions were made.

After waving goodbye to his parents with a determined casualness, Lemkin headed towardVilnius, Lithuania, a town bustling with refugees. He spent what was left of his money on two telegrams. The first the fastidious scholar sent to Paris to inquire whether his publisher had received a manuscript that he had mailed a week before the war’s outbreak. The second, a plea for refuge, he dispatched to a friend, the minister of justice in Sweden.²¹ As he awaited notification from the Swedish consulate, he visited with various Jewish intellectuals around town. None planned to leave.

The life of the vagrant was not agreeing with Lemkin. Although his acquaintances were generous, he felt his personality “disintegrate” as apathy set in. “There were three things I wanted to avoid in my life:to wear eyeglasses, to lose my hair, and to become a refugee,” he wrote. “Now all these three things have come to me in implacable succession.” ²² He busied himself by buying a dictionary and learning Lithuanian from the daily newspaper. But only the arrival of a package from his publisher in France cheered him up. The publisher enclosed galleys of his latest book on international finance regulations, as well as copies of Lemkin’s 1933 draft law banning acts of barbarity and vandalism. In his newfound free time, the lawyer immediately set out to improve them.

Lemkin’s request for refuge was granted, and he traveled to neutral Sweden by ship in February 1940. He was able to lecture in Swedish after just five months, an achievement he credited with enabling him to “rise spiritually from the ‘refugee’ fall of modern man.” ²³ While lecturing on international law at the University of Stockholm, he began assembling the legal decrees the Nazis had issued in each of the countries they occupied. He relied upon a corporation whose legal affairs he had once managed from Warsaw—as well as Swedish embassies around Europe, Red Cross delegations, and German occupation radio—to gather the official gazettes from any branches that remained open in the occupied countries. In compiling these laws, Lemkin hoped he would be able to demonstrate the sinister ways in which law could be used to propagate hate and incite murder. He also hoped decrees and ordinances in the Nazis’ own words would serve as “objective and irrefutable evidence” for the legions of disbelievers in what he called the “blind world.” ²⁴

Lemkin was desperate to leave the libraries of neutral Stockholm and get to the United States, which he had idealized. Thanks to a professor at Duke University with whom he had once translated the Polish criminal code into English, Lemkin secured an appointment to the Duke faculty to teach international law. He flew to Moscow, took the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, and then picked up a small boat, which he and the other refugees called the “floating coffin,” to the Japanese port of Tsuruga. He then took a bigger boat from Yokohama to Vancouver and on to Seattle, the U.S. port of entry, where he landed on April 18, 1941.

A New Beginning, an Old Crusade

Lemkin traveled by train to North Carolina, marking the end of what had been a 14,000-mile journey. The evening he arrived, he was asked to deliver a speech at a dinner with the university president. Without preparation or a full command of English, Lemkin urged Americans to do as Ambassador Morgenthau had done for the Armenians. “If women, children, and old people would be murdered a hundred miles from here,” Lemkin asked, “wouldn’t you run to help? Then why do you stop this decision of your heart when the distance is 3,000 miles instead of a hundred?” ²⁵ This was the first of hundreds of speeches Lemkin gave around the state. He bought himself a white suit, white shoes, white socks, and a dark silk tie for his appearances before chambers of commerce, women’s groups, and colleges. Members of the audiences approached Lemkin after his talks and apologized for America’s reluctance to join the fight against Hitler.

While at Duke, Lemkin received a letter from his parents on a scrap of paper a quarter the size of a regular sheet. “We are well,” the letter read. “We hope you are happy. We are thinking of you.” Several days later, on June 24, 1941, he heard a radio broadcaster announce that the German army had declared war on the Soviet Union, abrogating the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that had divided the country into a German and a Soviet zone. Hitler’s forces were now storming into eastern Poland. Colleagues on campus asked, “Have you heard the news about the Nazis?” Lemkin, dazed and sullen, looked down. “Sorry,” they said, pulling away.²⁶

Although Lemkin was panicked about the fate of his missing family, he busied himself by proselytizing about Hitler’s crimes. The prevailing wisdom in the United States, as it had been in Lithuania, was that the Nazis were waging a war against Europe’s armies. When Lemkin told U.S. government officials that Germany was also wiping out the Jews, he was greeted either with indifference or incredulity. But with Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States, Lemkin, then fluent in nine languages, thought he might acquire more cachet. In June 1942 the Board of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Economic Administration in Washington, D.C., hired him as chief consultant, and in 1944 the U.S. War Department brought him on board as an international law expert. But his horror stories were not a U.S. governmental concern. “My companions were mildly and only politely interested,” he remembered. “Their attention was rather absorbed by their own assignments…They were masters in switching the discussion in their direction.” ²⁷

Lemkin reached out to those at the top. He met with Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s vice president, and attempted to personalize his message. Ahead of the meeting, he had studied up on the Tennessee Valley Authority project on irrigation, which he knew would interest Wallace. Because the vice president had been raised in the cornfields of Iowa, Lemkin also slipped in references to his farm upbringing Lemkin met with Wallace on several occasions and introduced his proposals to ban the destruction of peoples. “I looked hopefully for a reaction,” Lemkin remembered. “There was none.” ²⁸

Lemkin next tried to approach President Roosevelt directly. An aide urged him to summarize his proposal in a one-page memo. Lemkin was aghast that he had to “compress the pain of millions, the fear of nations, the hopes for salvation from death” in one page. But he managed, suggesting that the United States adopt a treaty banning barbarity and urging that the Allies declare the protection of Europe’s minorities a central war aim. Several weeks later a courier relayed a message from the president. Roosevelt said he recognized the danger to groups but saw difficulties adopting such a law at the present. He assured Lemkin that the United States would issue a warning to the Nazis and urged patience. Lemkin was livid. “‘Patience’is a good word to be used when one expects an appointment, a budgetary allocation or the building of a road,” he noted. “But when the rope is already around the neck of the victim and strangulation is imminent, isn’t the word ‘patience’ an insult to reason and nature?” ²⁹ He believed a “double murder” was being committed—one by the Nazis against the Jews and the second by the Allies, who knew about Hitler’s extermination campaign but refused to publicize or denounce it. After he received word of Roosevelt’s brush-off, Lemkin left the department and walked slowly down Constitution Avenue, trying not to think about what it meant for his parents.

He was sure politicians would always put their own interests above the interests of others. To stand any chance of influencing U.S. policy, he would have to take his message to the general public, who in turn would pressure their leaders. “I realized that I was following the wrong path,” he later wrote. “Statesmen are messing up the world, and [only] when it seems to them that they are drowning in the mud of their own making, [do] they rush to extricate themselves.” ³⁰ Those Americans who had been so responsive to Lemkin in person were not making their voices heard. And most Americans were uninterested. Lemkin told himself:

All over Europe the Nazis were writing the book of death with the blood of my brethren. Let me now tell this story to the American people, to the man in the street, in church, on the porches of their houses and in their kitchens and drawing rooms. I was sure they would understand me…I will publish the decrees spreading death over Europe…They will have no other choice but to believe. The recognition of truth will cease to be a personal favor to me, but a log ical necessity.³¹

As he lobbied for action in Washington and around the country in 1942 and 1943, he flashed back to a speech delivered by British prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1941, broadcast on the BBC, which had urged Allied resolve. “The whole of Europe has been wrecked and trampled down by the mechanical weapons and barbaric fury of the Nazis…As his armies advance, whole districts are exterminated,” Churchill had thundered. “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” ³²

Suddenly Lemkin’s crusade took on a specific objective: the search for a new word. He replayed in his mind the Churchill speech and the response of the lawyers in Madrid to his proposal. Perhaps he had not adequately distinguished the crime he was campaigning against from typical, wartime violence. Maybe if he could capture the crime in a word that connoted something truly unique and evil, people and politicians alike might get more exercised about stopping it. Lemkin began to think about ways he might combine his knowledge of international law, his aim of preventing atrocity, and his long-standing interest in language. Convinced that it was only the packaging of his legal and moral cause that needed refining, he began to hunt for a term commensurate with the truth of his experience and the experience of millions. He would be the one to give the ultimate crime a name.

Chapter 3 The Crime With a Name

“Believe the Unbelievable”

Although he did not realize it at the time, Lemkin belonged to a kind of virtual community of frustrated, grief-stricken witnesses. A continent away, Szmul Zygielbojm, a fellow Polish Jew, was making arguments similar to those Lemkin registered in the U.S. War Department. In late May 1942, when reports of Nazi terror were still branded “rumors,” Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish National Council in London, released and publicized a report prepared by the underground Jewish Socialist Bund in Poland. For the previous two years, Zygielbojm had been traveling around Europe and the United States describing ghastly conditions in occupied Poland, but the Bund report offered the most complete, precise, and chilling picture of Hitler’s extermination plot. The Nazis had dispatched Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units, to conquered territory in eastern Europe. In Lithuania and Poland in the summer of 1941, the Bund reported,

men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place, a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered or shot by machine guns or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, the sick in hospital were shot, women were killed in the streets. In many towns the Jews were carried off to “an unknown destination” and killed in adja cent woods.¹

The Bund report introduced readers to the gas vans that roamed around the Polish town of Chelmno, gassing an average of 1,000 people every day (ninety per van) from the winter of 1941 to March 1942. The report revealed that Germany had set out to “exterminate all the Jews of Europe.” More than 700,000 Jews had already been killed; millions more were endangered. Its authors called upon the Polish government-in-exile to press the Allies to retaliate against German citizens in their countries.² Others urged the Allies publicly to link their bombing of Germany to Nazi atrocities and to drop leaflets over German territory informing German citizens of the atrocities. Zygielbojm appeared on the BBC on June 26, 1942, to deliver the same message. Speaking in Yiddish, he read aloud a letter from a Jewish woman in one ghetto to her sister in another: “My hands are shaking. I cannot write. Our minutes are numbered. The Lord knows whether we shall see one another again. I write and weep. My children are whimpering. They want to live. We bless you. If you get no more letters from me you will know that we are no longer alive.” The Bund report and the woman’s letter, Zygielbojm said, were “a cry to the whole world.” ³

Earlier that year Jan Karski, a twenty-eight-year-old Polish diplomat and a Roman Catholic, had disguised himself as a Jew, donning an armband with the Star of David, and smuggled himself through a tunnel into the Warsaw ghetto. Posing as a Ukrainian militiaman, he also infiltrated Belzec, a Nazi death camp near the border between Poland and Ukraine. In late 1942 Karski escaped carrying hundreds of documents on miniature microfilm contained in the shaft of a key. He arranged to meet in London with Zygielbojm and his colleague, Ignacy Schwarzbart. On the eve of the meeting, Schwarzbart examined Karski’s documents, and, aghast, cabled the World Jewish Congress in New York, describing the suffering of the Jews in Poland:

JEWS IN POLAND ALMOST COMPLETELY ANNIHILATED STOP READ REPORTS DEPORTATION TEN THOUSAND JEWS FOR DEATH STOP IN BELZEC FORCED TO DIG THEIR OWN GRAVE MASS SUICIDE HUNDREDS CHILDREN THROWN ALIVE INTO GUTTERS DEATH CAMPS IN BELZEC TREBLINKA DISTRICT MALKINIA THOUSANDS DEAD NOT BURIED IN SOBIBOR DISTRICT WLODAWSKI MASS GRAVES MURDER PREGNANT WOMEN STOP JEWS NAKED DRAGGED INTO DEATH CHAMBERS GESTAPO MEN ASKED PAYMENT FOR QUICKER KILLING HUNTING FUGITIVES STOP THOUSANDS DAILY VICTIMS THROUGHOUT POLAND STOP BELIEVE THE UNBELIEVABLE STOP⁴

Karski met with Schwarzbart and Zygielbojm the next day in their office near Piccadilly Circus. He told them of naked corpses in the Warsaw ghetto, yellow stars, starving children, Jew hunts, and the smell of burning flesh. Karski relayed a personal message to Zygielbojm from Leon Feiner, the leader of the Bund trapped in Warsaw. Feiner had instructed Zygielbojm to stop with the empty protests and urge retaliatory bombing, leafleting, and the execution of Germans in Allied hands.⁵ Karski said that when he had cautioned that the proposals were “bitter and unrealistic,” Feiner had countered with: “We don’t know what is realistic, or not realistic. We are dying here! Say it!” ⁶ Karski, who had a photographic memory, recited Feiner’s parting appeal to Jewish leaders to do something dramatic to force people to believe the reports:

We are all dying here; let [the Jews in Allied countries] die too. Let them crowd the offices of Churchill, of all the important English and American leaders and agencies. Let them proclaim a fast before the doors of the mightiest, not retreating until they will believe us, until they will undertake some action to rescue those of our people who are still alive. Let them die a slow death while the world is looking on. This may shake the conscience of the world.

Upon hearing Feiner’s message, Zygielbojm leaped from his seat and began pacing back and forth across the room. “It is impossible,” he said, “utterly impossible. You know what would happen. They would simply bring in two policemen and have me dragged away to an institution…Do you think they will let me die a slow lingering death? Never…They would never let me die.” ⁷ As he continued questioning Karski, an agitated Zygielbojm pleaded with his messenger to believe he had done all he could. Two weeks later in a BBC broadcast Zygielbojm declared, “It will actually be a shame to go on living, to belong to the human race, if steps are not taken to halt the greatest crime in history.” ⁸

Karski traveled to the United States and met with Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who graciously heard him out and then responded, “I don’t believe you.” When a stunned Karski protested, Frankfurter interrupted him and explained, “I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.” ⁹ Frankfurter literally could not conceive of the atrocities Karski was describing. He was not alone. Isaiah Berlin, who worked at the British embassy in Washington from 1942, saw only a massive pogrom. So, too, did Nahum Goldman, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and other leading Zionists.¹⁰

The Germans did their part, issuing ritual denials and cloaking the Final Solution in the euphemisms of “resettlement.” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda and national enlightenment, met atrocity reports by pointing to British abuses carried out in India and elsewhere, a tactic he deemed “our best chance of getting away from the embarrassing subject of the Jews.” ¹¹ The Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which documented the deportations, did not publicly protest because, it concluded, “public protests are not only ineffectual but are apt to produce a stiffening of the indicted country’s attitude with regard to Committee, even the rupture of relations with it.” ¹² Intervention would be futile and would jeopardize the organization’s ability to conduct prison inspections, deliver humanitarian parcels, and transmit messages among family members. Neutrality was paramount.

The Allies’ suppression of the truth about Hitler’s Final Solution has been the subject of a great deal of historical scholarship.¹³ Intelligence on Hitler’s extermination was plentiful in both classified and open sources. The United States maintained embassies in Berlin until December 1941, in Budapest and Bucharest until January 1942, and in Vichy France until late 1942.¹⁴ The British used sophisticated decryption technology to intercept German communications. The major Jewish organizations had representatives in Geneva who relayed vivid and numerous refugee reports through Stephen Wise, the president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and others. In July 1942, Gerhard Riegner, the WJC Geneva representative, informed the State Department of a well-placed German industrialist’s report that Hitler had ordered the extermination of European Jewry by gassing. In November 1942, Rabbi Wise, who knew President Roosevelt personally, told a Washington press conference that he and the State Department had reliable information that some 2 million Jews had already been murdered. The Polish government-in-exile was a goldmine of information. Already by the fall of 1942, for instance, Zygielbojm had begun meeting regularly with Arthur J. Goldberg, General Bill Donovan’s special assistant at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to discuss the death camps.

But the intelligence was often played down. In June 1942, for instance, the London Daily Telegraph published the Bund report’s claim that 700,000 Polish Jews and more than 1 million Jews throughout Europe had been killed. The New York Times picked up the Telegraph’s reports but buried them deep inside the paper.¹⁵When Riegner cabled word of Hitler’s plot the following month, British and U.S. officials and journalists were skeptical about the veracity of “unsubstantiated information.” In the words of one Swiss foreign editor, “We received no picture of photographic exactitude, only silhouettes.” ¹⁶ In 1944, when John Pehle, the director of Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board, wanted to publish the report of two Auschwitz escapees, Elmer Davis, the head of the U.S. Office of War Information, turned down his request. The American public would not believe such wild stories, he said, and Europeans would be so demoralized by them that their resistance would crumble. The U.S. ambassador to Sweden, Hershel Johnson, sent a cable in April 1943 detailing the extermination of Jews in Warsaw, but he ended his message by noting: “So fantastic is the story…that I hesitate to make it the subject of an official report.” ¹⁷ In the November 1943 Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill declaration, reference to the gas chambers was deleted because the evidence was deemed untrustworthy. To paraphrase Walter Laqueur, a pioneer in the study of the Allies’ response to the Holocaust, although many people thought that the Jews were no longer alive, they did not necessarily believe they were dead.¹⁸

Why and how did people live in “a twilight between knowing and not knowing” ?¹⁹ For starters, the threat Hitler posed to all of civilization helped overshadow his specific targeting of the Jews. Widespread anti-Semitism also contributed. It was not that readers’ prejudice against Jews necessarily made them happy to hear reports of Hitler’s monstrosity. Rather, their indifference to the fate of Jews likely caused them to skim the stories and to focus on other aspects of the war. Others did not take the time to process the reports because they believed the Allies were doing all they could; there was no point in getting depressed about something they could not control. Such knowledge was inconvenient. Karski later recalled that Allied leaders “discarded their conscience” with the rationale that “the Jews were totally helpless. The war strategy was the military defeat of Germany.” ²⁰ Winning the war was the most efficient way to stop Hitler’s murder of civilians. The Allied governments worked indirectly to help Jewish victims by attempting to defeat him, but they rejected the Jewish leaders’ request to declare as a war aim the rescue of Europe’s Jews.

The vast majority of people simply did not believe what they read; the notion of getting attacked for being (rather than for doing) was too discomfiting and too foreign to process readily. A plot for outright annihilation had never been seen and therefore could not be imagined. The tales of German cremation factories and gas chambers sounded far-fetched. The deportations could be explained: Hitler needed Jewish slave labor for the war effort. During the Turkish campaign against the Armenians, this same propensity for incredulity was evident, but it was even more pronounced in the 1940s because of a backlash against the hyped-up “Belgian atrocities” of World War I.²¹ During that war, journalists had faithfully relayed tales of bloodthirsty “Huns” mutilating and raping nuns and dismembering Belgian babies. Indeed, they reported claims that the Germans had erected a “corpse-conversion factory” where they boiled human fat and bones into lubricants and glycerine.²² In the 1920s and 1930s, the press had debunked many of the Allies’ wartime reports of German savagery, yielding a “hangover of skepticism.” Although many of these stories were confirmed years later, they were still being discredited at the outbreak of World War II.²³When tales of Nazi gas vans and extermination plots emerged, many people believed that such stories were being manufactured or embellished as part of an Allied propaganda effort. Just as military strategists are apt to “fight the last war”—to employ tactics tailored for prior battlefield foes—political leaders and ordinary citizens tend to overapply the “lessons of history” to new and distinct challenges.

In his campaign to convey the horror of Nazi atrocities, Zygielbojm tried to overcome people’s instinctive mistrust of accounts of gratuitous violence. But he began to despair of doing so. In 1943 he learned that his wife and child had died in the Warsaw ghetto. In April 1943, at the Bermuda conference, after twelve days of secretive and ineffectual meetings, the Allies rejected most of the modest proposals to expand refugee admissions, continuing to severely limit the number of Jews who would be granted temporary refuge in the United States and unoccupied Europe.²⁴ On May 10, over dinner in London, Arthur Goldberg of the OSS informed Zygielbojm that the United States had rejected his requests to bomb Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto. “With understandable pain and anguish,” Goldberg remembered later, “I told him that our government was not prepared to do what he requested because in the view of our high command, aircraft were not available for this purpose.” ²⁵

Zygielbojm could take it no more. He typed up a letter, addressed it to the president and prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, and explained his imminent act:

The responsibility for this crime of murdering the entire Jewish population of Poland falls in the first instance on the perpetrators, but indirectly also it weighs on the whole of humanity, the peoples and governments of the Allied States, which so far have made no effort toward a concrete action for the purpose of curtailing this crime.

By passive observation of this murder of defenseless millions and of the maltreatment of children, women, and old men, these countries have become the criminals’ accomplices…

I can not be silent and I can not live while the remnants of the Jewish people of Poland, of whom I am a representative, are perishing…

By my death I wish to express my strongest protest against the inactivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of Jewish people. I know how little human life is worth, especially today. But as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to destroying the indifference of those who are able and should act.²⁶

Szmul Zygielbojm took an overdose of sleeping pills in his Paddington flat on May 12, 1943. News that the Nazis had crushed the Warsaw ghetto uprising and liquidated its inhabitants reached London and Washington the day of his memorial service.²⁷

The New York Times published Zygielbojm’s suicide letter on June 4, 1943, under the headline “Pole’s Suicide Note Pleads for Jews” with the further headline “He Denounced Apathy.” The last line of the Times piece suggested that Zygielbojm “may have achieved more in his death than in his life.” In fact, he failed to alter Allied policy in either state.²⁸

In Their Own Words

Back in Washington, Raphael Lemkin, too, thought of taking his own life but concluded he was too “peculiarly placed” to bow out. After all, while others were mulling atrocity prevention for the first time, he had been thinking about it for more than a decade. He identified himself with the cause and quickly began to personify it. When he read the chilling reports from his homeland, he did what Zyegielbojm had done initially—he placed faith in information. Lemkin also played to his strengths: law and language.

In November 1944 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, by then a 712-page book of the rules and decrees imposed by the Axis powers and their client states in nineteen Nazioccupied countries and territories in Europe. Having begun gathering these laws while in Sweden, Lemkin had continued the compilation as part of his service to the U.S. government. Whatever Lemkin’s stated aspirations to appeal to a popular audience, Axis Rule was a dry and staunchly legalistic reference book.²⁹ It included proposals for postwar restitution of property to the dispossessed and for the reimbursement of millions to foreign workers who had been forced into labor in Germany. It also restated his 1933 Madrid proposal to outlaw the targeted destruction of groups and urged the creation of an international treaty that could be used as a basis for trying and punishing perpetrators.

However useful the book’s recommendations, Lemkin believed his real contribution lay in reproducing the stark collection of decrees (which accounted for some 360 of the book’s pages). These, he was certain, would do wonders to combat widespread disbelief and despondency, especially in the Anglo-American reader, who, he wrote, “with his innate respect for human rights and human personality may be inclined to believe that the Axis regime could not possibly have been as cruel and ruthless as it has been hitherto described.” By presenting documents authored by Hitler and his advisers, he was ensuring that nobody in the United States could say he was exaggerating or propagandizing.

A few scholars still rejected atrocity reports and tried to relativize German responsibility. The harshest review of Axis Rule appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in 1946. The reviewer, Melchior Palyi, blamed Lemkin for his failure to explore the “extenuating circumstances” for Nazi behavior. According to Palyi, Lemkin had written a “prosecutor’s brief” rather than an “impartial” inquiry. The reviewer claimed that almost every one of the nine charges Lemkin made against the Nazis could be made against the Allies. “Of course,” the reviewer wrote, “there is this substantial difference: that the Nazis shamelessly displayed their intentionally planned misdeeds, while the western Allies stumble into illegal practices and cover them with humanitarian or other formulas.” ³⁰

But most reviews were favorable and did not dabble in such false equivalency. The American Journal of International Law described Lemkin’s collection of Nazi legislation as a “tour de force.” ³¹ Another reviewer wrote, “The terrorism of the German police is well enough known, but to see matters described in cold legal terminology creates in one perhaps an even greater sense of indignation.” ³² At this time Lemkin was somewhat conflicted about the roots of responsibility and the relative role of individual and collective guilt, theories of accountability that continue to compete today. On the one hand, Lemkin urged the punishment of those individuals responsible for Nazi horrors. On the other, he espoused an early version of the theory, put forth again recently by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, that ascribed guilt not only to the perpetrators of the crimes but to their fellow citizens who failed to stop them and often appeared actively supportive.³³ In Axis Rule Lemkin wrote, “The present destruction of Europe would not be complete and thorough had the German people not accepted freely [the Nazi] plan, participated voluntarily in its execution, and up to this point profited greatly therefrom.” He refused to accept the line that all but the most senior German authorities were just “obeying orders,” insisting that “all important classes and groups of the population have voluntarily assisted Hitler in the scheme of world domination.” ³⁴

In January 1945 the New York Times Book Review devoted its cover to Axis Rule. “Out of its dry legalism,” the reviewer wrote, “there emerge the contours of the monster that now bestrides the earth.” This monster “gorges itself on blood, bestializes its servants and perverts some of the noblest human emotions to base ends, all with the semblance of authority and spurious legality which leave the individual helpless.” The reviewer credited Lemkin with capturing “what Axis rule in occupied Europe means and what it would have meant to us had it ever spread to our shores.” But he faulted Lemkin’s sweeping ascription of blame. By finding “innate viciousness” in the German people, Lemkin was feeding “nazism-in-reverse.” “Surely,” the reviewer wrote, “just because he is a Pole Dr. Lemkin would not want to be held personally responsible for all the acts of the Pilsudski regime.” ³⁵

A Word Is a Word Is a Word

Axis Rule is not remembered for stirring this once and future debate about the nature of individual and collective guilt. Instead, it is known because it was in this rather arcane, legalistic tome that Lemkin followed through on his pledge to himself and to his imagined co-conspirator, Winston Churchill. Ever since Lemkin had heard Churchill’s 1941 radio address, he had been determined to find a new word to replace “barbarity” and “vandalism,” which had failed him at the 1933 Madrid conference. Lemkin had hunted for a term that would describe assaults on all aspects of nation-hood—physical, biological, political, social, cultural, economic, and religious. He wanted to connote not only full-scale extermination but also Hitler’s other means of destruction: mass deportation, the lowering of the birthrate by separating men from women, economic exploitation, progressive starvation, and the suppression of the intelligentsia who served as national leaders.

Lemkin, the former philology student, knew that his word choice mattered a great deal. He weighed a number of candidates. “Mass murder” was inadequate because it failed to incorporate the singular motive behind the perpetration of the crime he had in mind. “Denationalization,” a word that had been used to describe attempts to destroy a nation and wipe out its cultural personality, failed because it had come to mean depriving citizens of citizenship. And “Germanization,” “Magyarization,” and other specified words connoting forced assimilation of culture came up short because they could not be applied universally and because they did not convey biological destruction.³⁶

Lemkin read widely in linguistic and semantic theory, modeling his own process on that of individuals responsible for coinages he admired. Of particular interest to Lemkin were the reflections of George Eastman, who said he had settled upon “Kodak” as the name for his new camera because: “First. It is short. Second. It is not capable of mispronunciation. Third. It does not resemble anything in the art and cannot be associated with anything in the art except the Kodak.”

Lemkin saw he needed a word that could not be used in other contexts (as “barbarity” and “vandalism” could). He self-consciously sought one that would bring with it “a color of freshness and novelty” while describing something “as shortly and as poignantly as possible.” ³⁷

But Lemkin’s coinage had to achieve something Eastman’s did not. Somehow it had to chill listeners and invite immediate condemnation. On an otherwise undecipherable page of one of his surviving notebooks, Lemkin scribbled and circled “THE WORD” and drew a line connecting the circle to the phrase, penned firmly, “MORAL JUDGEMENT.” His word would do it all. It would be the rare term that carried in it society’s revulsion and indignation. It would be what he called an “index of civilization.” ³⁸

The word that Lemkin settled upon was a hybrid that combined the Greek derivative geno, meaning “race” or “tribe,” together with the Latin derivative cide, from caedere, meaning “killing.” “Genocide” was short, it was novel, and it was not likely to be mispronounced. Because of the word’s lasting association with Hitler’s horrors, it would also send shudders down the spines of those who heard it.

Lemkin was unusual in the trust he placed in language. Many of his Jewish contemporaries despaired of it, deeming silence preferable to the necessarily inadequate verbal and written attempts to approximate the Holocaust. Austrian writer and philosopher Jean Améry was one of many Holocaust survivors estranged from words:

Was it “like a red-hot iron in my shoulders” and was this “like a blunt wooden stake driven into the base of my head?”—a simile would only stand for something else, and in the end we would be led around by the nose in a hopeless carousel of comparisons. Pain was what it was. There’s nothing further to say about it. Qualities of feeling are as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limits of language’s ability to communicate.³⁹

The suffering inflicted by Hitler fell outside the realm of expression.

But Lemkin was prepared to reinvest in language. New to the United States and wracked by anxiety about his family, he viewed the preparation of Axis Rule and the coinage of a new word as a constructive distraction. At the same time, he did not intend for “genocide” to capture or communicate Hitler’s Final Solution. The word derived from Lemkin’s original interpretations of barbarity and vandalism. In Axis Rule he wrote that “genocide” meant “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.” ⁴⁰The perpetrators of genocide would attempt to destroy the political and social institutions, the culture, language, national feelings, religion, and economic existence of national groups. They would hope to eradicate the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and lives of individual members of the targeted group. He continued:

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.⁴¹

A group did not have to be physically exterminated to suffer genocide. They could be stripped of all cultural traces of their identity. “It takes centuries and sometimes thousands of years to create a natural culture,” Lemkin wrote, “but Genocide can destroy a culture instantly, like fire can destroy a building in an hour.” ⁴²

From the start, the meaning of “genocide” was controversial. Many people were receptive to the idea of coining a word that would connote a practice so horrid and so irreparable that the very utterance of the word would galvanize all who heard it. They also recognized that it would be unwise and undesirable to make Hitler’s crimes the future standard for moving outsiders to act. Statesmen and citizens needed to learn from the past without letting it paralyze them. They had to respond to mass atrocity long before the carnage had reached the scale of the Holocaust. But the link between Hitler’s Final Solution and Lemkin’s hybrid term would cause endless confusion for policymakers and ordinary people who assumed that genocide occurred only where the perpetrator of atrocity could be shown, like Hitler, to possess an intent to exterminate every last member of an ethnic, national, or religious group.

Others were critical not so much of Lemkin’s definition as his apparent naivete. His innovation was interesting, they said, but a word is a word is a word. Merely affixing the genocide label would not necessarily cause statesmen to put aside their other interests, fears, or constraints. Even if lawyers in Madrid had adopted Lemkin’s proposal, they noted, neither the existence of the label nor the application of it would have affected Hitler’s decisionmaking, his ideology, or the outside world’s lethargic response to his crimes. Lemkin met these criticisms with defensive bombast. He told a North Carolina audience that the rejection of his Madrid proposal was “one of the thousand reasons why…your boys are fighting and dying in different parts of the world at this very moment.” ⁴³

Yet for all of the criticisms, the word took hold. Lemkin proudly bran-dished the letter from the Webster’s New International Dictionary that informed him that “genocide” had been admitted. Other lexicographers followed suit.⁴⁴ In the book he began writing immediately after Axis Rule, Lemkin noted that the “individual creator” of a word would see his word absorbed only “if, and in so far as, it meets popular needs and tastes.” He insisted that the rapid acceptance of “genocide” by lexicographers and humanity served as “social testimony” to the world’s readiness to confront the crime.⁴⁵

Certainly, current events seemed to ratify Lemkin’s assumption. The very week the Carnegie Endowment published his book, the Roosevelt administration’s War Refugee Board for the first time officially backed up European charges of mass executions by the Germans.⁴⁶ “So revolting and diabolical are the German atrocities that the minds of civilized people find it difficult to believe that they have actually taken place,” the board stated. “But the governments of the United States and other countries have evidence which clearly substantiates the facts.” Many newspapers linked their coverage of the board report with Lemkin’s term. On December 3, 1944, for instance, after Lemkin persuaded Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the Washington Post, the paper’s editorial board hailed “genocide” as the only word befitting the revelation that between April 1942 and April 1944 some 1,765,000 Jews had been gassed and cremated at Auschwitz-Birkenau. “It is a mistake, perhaps, to call these killings ‘atrocities, ’” the editorial entitled “Genocide” read. “An atrocity is a wanton brutality…But the point about these killings is that they were systematic and purposeful. The gas chambers and furnaces were not improvisations; they were scientifically designed instruments for the extermination of an entire ethnic group.” ⁴⁷

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.⁴⁸ But 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.

Chapter 4 Lemkin’s Law

“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.” ² Nobody 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.⁶ Nazi 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.⁷ In 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.” ⁸ Lemkin 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

In late 1946 a weary Lemkin flew from Germany to a pair of peace conferences in England and France. His proposal was again rejected, here on the grounds that he was “trying to push international law into a field where it did not belong.” “Afterward he was admitted to an American military hospital in Paris with high blood pressure.¹⁰ No sooner did he land in the hospital ward than he caught two stories on the radio that convinced him he had to return to the United States immediately. First, on what he would later call the “the blackest day” of his life, he heard the pronouncement of the Nuremberg tribunal. Nineteen Nazi defendants were convicted of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. No mention was made of genocide. But Lemkin heard a second item: The new UN General Assembly had begun deliberating the contents of its autumn agenda. Lemkin checked himself out of the hospital and flew to New York. On the plane he drafted a sample General Assembly resolution condemning genocide.

Closing the Loophole: Moving from Word to Declaration

Lemkin’s aim in New York was to establish an international law that did not link the destruction of groups to cross-border aggression, which accompanied genocide in the Nazi case but often would not. Nuremberg, he noted, had made “an advance of 10 or 20 percent” toward outlawing genocide.¹² It had left far too many loopholes through which killers could squirm. Statesmen were interested in preventing war, but they had less interest in genocide. “Genocide is not war!” he wrote, “It is more dangerous than war!”¹³ War, of course, has killed more individuals in history than has genocide, and it too leaves its survivors permanently scarred. But Lemkin argued that when a group was targeted with genocide—and was effectively destroyed physically or culturally—the loss was permanent. Even those individuals who survived genocide would be forever shorn of an invaluable part of their identity.

On October 31, 1946, Lemkin arrived at the newly improvised UN headquarters, located in an abandoned Sperry Gyroscope war plant on Long Island.¹⁴ The entrenched and somewhat impenetrable UN of today was then unimaginable. Security guards were willing to look the other way when the unaccredited, somewhat fanatical lawyer would turn any empty UN office into his home for the day—“like a hermit crab,” a Hungarian friend said.¹⁵ Lemkin spent endless hours haunting the drafty halls.

Kathleen Teltsch and A. M. Rosenthal were then cub reporters with the New York Times. Both were fond of Lemkin but recall the horror of many a correspondent and diplomat when the wildeyed professor with steelrimmed glasses and a relentless appetite for rejection began sprinting after them in the corridors, saying, “You and I, we must change the world.” Teltsch remembers:

He was always there like a shadow, a presence, floating through the halls and constantly pulling scraps of paper out of his pockets. He was not loved because he was known as a time consumer. If he managed to nab you, you were trapped. Correspondents on deadline used to run from him like mad. But he would run after them, tie flopping in the air, genocide story at the ready.

Rosenthal occupied the desk nearest the door of the New York Times office, where Lemkin popped his head in several times a day offering a new angle on the genocide story. “I don’t remember how I met him,” Rosenthal says, “but I remember I was always meeting him.” Carrying his black briefcase, he would say, “Here is that pest, that Lemkin…I have a genocide story for you.”¹⁶

Most of the correspondents who bothered to notice Lemkin wondered how he made ends meet. He was learned enough to maintain a quiet dignity about him, but his collar and cuffs were frayed at the edges, his black shoes scuffed. The journalists frequently spotted him in the UN cafeteria cornering delegates, but they never saw him eat. In his rush to persuade delegates to support him, he frequently fainted from hunger. Completely alone in the world and perennially sleepless, he often wandered the streets at night.¹⁷ A New York Post reporter described him as growing “paler, thinner and shabbier” as the months passed. He seemed determined to stay in perpetual motion.

However irritating the correspondents and delegates found Lemkin, his efforts in New York were well timed. The images of Allied camp liberations remained fresh in people’s minds; the Nuremberg proceedings had fueled interest in international law; the United Nations had high hopes for itself as a collective security body; and powerful member states seemed prepared to invest clout and resources toward ensuring its success. Around the world, even in the United States, people believed in the UN’s promise. The organization carried with it a grand air of possibility. When UN planners had met in San Francisco in 1945 to complete the UN charter, E. B. White summed up the hopes of many. “The delegates to San Francisco have the most astonishing job that has ever been dumped into the laps of a few individuals,” White wrote. “On what sort of rabbit they pull from the hat hang the lives of most of us, and of our sons and daughters.”¹⁸

The United Nations was new; it was newsworthy; and if you wanted something done, it was the place to bring your proposal.¹⁹ Many advocates peddled schemes to the new body. But diplomats quietly learned to distinguish Lemkin (thanks to hefty packages that he thrust upon them containing his memos, letters, and his 712-page Axis Rule). He was the one who had foreseen the need to ban genocide ahead of World War II. Indeed, when the UN delegates in the new General Assembly began debating whether to pass a resolution on genocide, Lemkin beamed as Britain’s UN delegate pointed out that the League of Nation’s failure to accept Lemkin’s Madrid proposal had allowed the Nazis to escape punishment at Nuremberg for the atrocities they committed before the war.

Ten years of lobbying had taught Lemkin to play up both the values at stake and the interests. He stressed the costs of genocide not only to victims, with whom few in New York would identify, but also to bystanders. The destruction of foreign national or ethnic identities would bring huge losses to the world’s cultural heritage. All of humankind, even those who did not feel vulnerable to genocide, would suffer:

We can best understand this when we realize how impoverished our culture would be if the peoples doomed by Germany, such as the Jews, had not been permitted to create the Bible, or to give birth to an Einstein, a Spinoza; if the Poles had not had the opportunity to give to the world a Copernicus, a Chopin, a Curie; the Czechs, a Huss, a DvoYík; the Greeks, a Plato and a Socrates;the Russians, a Tolstoy and a Shostakovich.²⁰

With time running out in the General Assembly session, Lemkin homed in on the ambassadors from several developing countries and urged them to introduce a resolution on genocide. His logic—“large countries can defend themselves by arms; small countries need the protection of the law”—proved persuasive. After convincing the Panamanian, Cuban, and Indian representatives to sign a draft resolution, he rushed “like an intoxicated man” to the office of the secretary-general, where he deposited the proposed text.²¹ Lemkin also got essential support from Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. representative on the UN Steering Committee. Hoping to neutralize anticipated Soviet opposition, he called upon Jan Masaryk of Czechoslovakia. Ahead of the meeting, Lemkin had hurriedly reviewed the works of Masaryk’s father, Thomas Gatfigue Masaryk, who had written extensively on the cultural personality of nations. Lemkin told Masaryk that if his father were alive, he would be lobbying for the passage of the genocide convention. Lemkin urged him to win over the Russian foreign minister, Andrei Vishinsky, saying that the Soviet Union had nothing to fear from the law, as “penicillin is not an intrigue against the Soviet Union.” Masaryk pulled out his appointment calendar for the next day and jotted: “Vishinsky. Genocide. Penicillin.” He called Lemkin within twenty-four hours to inform him that he had persuaded Vishinsky to support the measure.²²

As the language for the genocide resolution was batted around the special committee, some proposed using the word “extermination” instead of “genocide.” But Judge Abdul Monim Bey Riad of Saudi Arabia, whom Lemkin considered the most sophisticated of all representatives, pleaded that “extermination” was a term that could also apply to insects and animals. He also warned that the word would limit the prohibited crime to circumstances where every member of the group was killed. Lemkin’s broader concept, “genocide,” was important because it signaled destruction apart from physical destruction and because it would require states to respond before all the damage had been done. The more expansive term “genocide” was preserved.

On December 11, 1946, one year after the final armistice, the General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution that condemned genocide as “the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups,” which “shocks the conscience of mankind” and is “contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations.” More gratifying to Lemkin, who was no fan of declarations, the resolution tasked a UN committee with drafting a full-fledged UN treaty banning the crime. If that measure passed the General Assembly and was ratified by two-thirds of the UN member states, it would become international law.

A New York Times editorial proclaimed that the resolution and the ensuing law would mark a “revolutionary development” in international law. The editors wrote, “The right to exterminate entire groups which prevailed before the resolution was adopted is gone. From now on no government may kill off a large block of its own subjects or citizens of any country with impunity.”²³ Lemkin returned to his rundown one-room apartment in Manhattan, pulled down the shades, and slept for two days.²⁴

Closing the Loophole: Moving from Resolution to Law

At the behest of UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie, Lemkin helped prepare the first draft of the UN genocide convention.²⁵ When the official UN process kicked in, however, the Polish lawyer bowed out, knowing he could be more valuable on the outside. In 1947 Lemkin began work on a history of genocide and carried a thick file folder bulging with gruesome details on various cases. He took his cause and himself exceptionally seriously. Later, with full sincerity, he wrote that “of particular interest” to UN delegates were his “files on the destruction of the Maronites, the Herreros in Africa, the Huguenots in France, the Protestants in Bohemia after the Battle of White Mountain, the Hottentots, the Armenians in 1915 and the Jews, gypsies and Slavs by the Nazis.”²⁶ Many stuffy UN delegates would eventually agree to vote for the proposed convention simply in order to bring the daily litany of carnage to as rapid an end as possible.

This was a crucial phase. If he kept up the pressure, Lemkin believed the law would at last be born. Rosenthal often challenged Lemkin with the realist reproach: “Lemkin, what good will it do to write mass murder down as a crime; will a piece of paper stop a new Hitler or Stalin?” Lemkin, the believer, would stiffen and snap: “Only man has law. Law must be built, do you understand me? You must build the law!” As Rosenthal notes, “He was not naive. He didn’t expect criminals to lay down and stop committing crimes. He simply believed that if the law was in place it would have an effect—sooner or later.”²⁷

For a legal dreamer, a man with no experience in Polish politics, and a newcomer to the American and UN political processes, Lemkin had surprisingly sharp political instincts. He had learned one lesson during the Holocaust, which was that if a UN genocide convention were ever to come to pass, he would have to appeal to the domestic political interests of UN delegates. He obtained lists of the most important organizations in each of the UN member states and assembled a committee that spoke for groups in twenty-eight countries and claimed a remarkable joint membership of more than 240 million people. The committee, which was more of a front for Lemkin, compiled and sent petitions to each UN delegate urging passage of the convention. UN diplomats who hesitated received telegrams—usually drafted by Lemkin—from organizations at home. He used the letters to make delegates feel as if “by working for the Genocide Convention,” they were “representing the wishes of their own people.”²⁸ Lemkin wrote personally to UN delegates and foreign ministers from most countries. In Catholic countries he preached to bishops and archbishops. In Scandinavia, where organized labor was active, he penned notes to the large labor groups. He cornered intellectuals like Pearl Buck, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Gabriela Mistral, who published an appeal in the New York Times on November 11, 1947. A Times editorial branded Lemkin “the man who speaks through sixty nations.”

Although Lemkin was determined to see genocidal perpetrators prosecuted, he did not believe the genocide convention should itself create a permanent international criminal court. The world was “not ready,” he said, as the court would mark too great an affront to state sovereignty. Instead, under the “universal repression” principle, genocidists should be treated as pirates had been in the past: Any country could try a genocide suspect, regardless of where the atrocities were committed.

In August 1948 Lemkin cobbled together the funds to fly to Geneva to lobby the UN subcommittee that was overseeing the drafting of the actual text of the genocide convention.²⁹ No longer working at the State Department or teaching, he lived off donations from religious groups and borrowed from a cousin who lived on Long Island. He found his stay in Geneva eerie, as it was the first visit he had paid to the former home of the League of Nations since 1938, when he had lobbied “paralyzed minds” to prohibit barbarity. With “the blood…not yet dried” in Europe, he hoped his plea would be heard differently this time. He also knew that he had a distinct advantage operating in Geneva rather than New York because the UN delegates, away from their headquarters, were likely to be lonelier and more prepared to endure him. Lemkin knew he grated on people’s nerves. Often, before entering a room, he would pause outside and make a pledge to himself not to bring up genocide and instead allow the conversation to drift from art to philosophy to literature, subjects in which he was fluent. If he could bring himself to hold his tongue, he told himself, eventually his companion would be better disposed to his campaign. When he delivered formal lectures on genocide in Geneva, he was less shy. “I did not refrain from reading aloud from my historical files in considerable detail,” he wrote.³⁰ Indeed, he rarely censored his graphic tales of torture and butchery.

Wherever the law went, Lemkin followed. He decided to prepare for the September 1948 General Assembly session with a short rest near Montreux, France. Lemkin recovered some of the strength sapped by years of unceasing commotion. While visiting a local casino, he even invited a young lady to dance a tango. He was captivated by her beauty and recalled, “Every word the girl said was intelligent and meaningful.” She told him she was of Indian descent, born in Chile. Lemkin saw his opening: He informed her that his work on mass slaughter would be of particular interest to her because of the destruction of the Incas and the Aztecs.³¹ This was one pickup line the young woman had probably never heard before. She soon departed.

When he returned to Geneva, Lemkin attended every single session of the Legal Committee. In between sessions he prepared memos for the delegates.³² He felt it essential that they draw upon historic cases of mass atrocity so the law would capture a variety of techniques of destruction. He ritually reminded the representatives of the old maxim that the “legislator’s imagination must be superior to the imagination of the criminal.”³³ The convention’s chief opponent in Britain was Hartley Shawcross, who had prosecuted the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg and considered the genocide law a waste of time. Shawcross ran into Lemkin in the hall in the fall of 1948 and remarked, “The Committee is becoming emotional, this is a bad sign.” Lemkin, who was so tired that he could hardly stand up, was heartened.³⁴ The Legal Committee approved the draft and submitted it to the General Assembly, which scheduled a vote on the measure for December 9, 1948.

After a bruising year of drafting battles, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide settled on a definition of 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:

1 Killing members of the group;

2 Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3 Deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4 Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5 Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

For a party to be found guilty of perpetrating this new crime of genocide, it had to (1) carry out one of the aforementioned acts, (2) with the intent to destroy all or part of (3) one of the groups protected. The law did not require the extermination of an entire group, only acts committed with the intent to destroy a substantial part. If the perpetrator did not target a national, ethnic, or religious group as such, then killings would constitute mass homicide, not genocide.

Lemkin of course opposed all forms of state-sponsored murder, but his legal efforts were focused on the subset of state terror that he believed caused the largest number of deaths, was the most common, and did the most severe long-term damage—to the targeted groups themselves and to the rest of society. The perpetrator’s particular motives for wanting to destroy the group were irrelevant. Thus, when Iraq sought in 1987–1988 to purge its Kurdish minority on the grounds that it inhabited a vital border area, it was still genocide. When the Rwandan government tried to exterminate the country’s Tutsi minority in 1994, claiming that armed Tutsi rebels posed a military threat, it was still genocide. And when the Bosnian Serbs tried to wipe out the non-Serb presence in Bosnia after the Muslims and Croats had declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992, it was still genocide. What mattered was that one set of individuals intended to destroy the members of a group not because of anything they did but because of who they were. If the General Assembly passed the convention, nobody would be immune from punishment—not leaders, public officials, nor private citizens. The treaty would enshrine a new reality: States would no longer have the legal right to be left alone. Interfering in a genocidal state’s internal affairs as Morgenthau had tried to do was not only authorized but required by the convention. If a government committed or permitted genocide, signatories would have to take steps to prevent, suppress, and punish the crime, which no instrument had ever required before. States had considerable autonomy in deciding what steps to take, but they were expected to act. The convention could be read to permit military intervention. The law even implied its necessity by enshrining a legal duty to “suppress” the crime, but neither the law nor the law’s drafters discussed the use of force. It was a large enough leap to convince a state’s leaders to denounce or punish the crimes of a fellow state.

The genocide convention boldly closed many of Nuremberg’s loopholes. It made states (and rebels) liable for genocide regardless of whether they committed aggression against another country or attacked only their internal “enemies.” Peacetime or wartime, inside a country or outside, the 1948 treaty made no distinction.

The convention’s enforcement mechanisms were more explicit about punishment than prevention. A state signatory would be bound to pass a domestic genocide law and to try any private citizen or public official for genocide committed on or outside its territory. Countries would try their own genocide suspects as well as those who wandered inside their borders. This left gaps. In the case of postwar Germany, for instance, it would have meant relying principally on former members of the Nazi Party to try Nazi criminals. Still, even if those responsible for genocide continued to hold power, they would be reluctant to leave their country and risk arrest. The basic idea, as the Washington Post noted in one editorial endorsing the criminalization of genocide, was that the law “would throw a sort of cordon sanitaire around the guilty nation.” Genocide perpetrators would be trapped at home, and “the sort of persecution of helpless minorities which has hitherto gone unrebuked” would be stigmatized. “Genocide can never be the exclusive internal concern of any country,” the editorial concluded. “Wherever it occurs, it must concern the entire civilized world.”³⁵ If the convention were passed, genocide would become everybody’s business.

Lemkin thought December 9, 1948, would never arrive. When it did, he stood in the press galley of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris and kept his eyes trained on the General Assembly debate, restraining himself from interjecting. Finally, the vote arrived. Fifty-five delegates voted yes to the pact. None voted no. Just four years after Lemkin had introduced “genocide” to the world, the General Assembly had unanimously passed a law banning it.³⁶ Lemkin remembered:

There were many lights in the large hall. The galleries were full and the delegates appeared to have a solemn radiating look. Most of them had a good smile for me. John Foster Dulles told me in a somewhat businesslike manner that I had made a great contribution to international law. The Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, [Robert] Schumann, thanked me for my work and said he was glad that this great event took place in France. Sir Zafrullah Khan said this new law should be called the “Lemkin Convention.” Then Dr. Evatt put the resolution on the Genocide Convention to a vote. Somebody requested a roll call. The first to vote was India. After her “yes” there was an endless number of “yeses.” A storm of applause followed. I felt on my face the flashlight of cameras…The world was smiling and approving and I had only one word in answer to all that, “thanks.”³⁷

The world’s states committed themselves, in the words of the convention preamble, “to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge.” After announcing the result of the roll call, General Assembly president Herbert V. Evatt of Australia, whom Lemkin had befriended in Geneva, proclaimed the passage “an epochmaking event in the development of international law.” He urged that the convention be signed by all states and ratified by all parliaments at the earliest date. In a sweeping ode to the promise of the United Nations and international law, Evatt declared that the days of political intervention dressed up as humanitarianism were past:

Today we are establishing international collective safeguards for the very existence of such human groups…Whoever will act in the name of the United Nations will do it on behalf of universal conscience as embodied in this great organization. Intervention of the United Nations and other organs which will have to supervise application of the convention will be made according to international law and not according to unilateral political considerations. In this field relating to the sacred right of existence of human groups we are proclaiming today the supremacy of international law once and forever.³⁸

It marked the first time the United Nations had adopted a human rights treaty.

Nobody who was familiar with the genocide convention was unfamiliar with the man behind it. The New York Times praised the success of Lemkin’s “15 year fight.” When reporters looked for Lemkin after the vote to share his triumph, they could not find him. “Had he been in character,” remembered John Hohenberg of the New York Post, “he should have been strutting proudly in the corridors, proclaiming his own merit and the virtues of the protocol that had been his dream.”³⁹ But he had gone missing. That evening journalists finally tracked him down, alone in the darkened assembly hall, weeping, in Rosenthal’s words, “as if his heart would break.”⁴⁰The man who for so long had insisted on imposing himself upon journalists now waved them off, pleading, “Let me sit here alone.”⁴¹ He had been victorious at last, and the relief and grief overwhelmed him. He described the pact as an “epitaph on his mother’s grave” and as a recognition that “she and many millions did not die in vain.”⁴²

Lemkin was struck that night with a vicious fever. Two days later he was again admitted to a Paris hospital, where he remained confined for three weeks. Although the doctors thought he was suffering complications stemming from his high blood pressure, they struggled to make a firm diagnosis. Lemkin offered his own account of his ailment: “Genociditis,” he said, or “exhaustion from work on the Genocide Convention.”⁴³

Unfortunately, though Lemkin could not know it, the most difficult struggles lay ahead. Nearly four decades would pass before the United States would ratify the treaty, and fifty years would elapse before the international community would convict anyone for genocide.

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