March 12, 2022 • 35 mins
This 2019 episode is about the man often described as the person who coined the term genocide. He was also the driving force behind the existence of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. In this week's episode on the Holta More,
we talked about Raphael limpkins nineteen fifty three speech and
article arguing that the Holidamor was one component of a
genocide that targeted the people of Ukraine. We mentioned in
the episode that Limpkin had been the person to coin
the term genocide, but his work on this really went
(00:25):
way beyond that. Our episode on Limpkin came out three
years ago on March eleven, so we're bringing it out
as Today's Saturday Classic to add to the context around
his thoughts on Ukraine. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and
(00:51):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Fry. Today we are going to talk about Dr
Rafael Limpkin, and you'll see his name spelled a number
of different ways because he was originally from Poland. And
you'll see him described as the person who coined the
term genocide. He did do that, but his contributions went
(01:11):
way way beyond just coining a new word. He was
really the driving force behind the existence of the u
N Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the crime
of genocide. This was something that he pursued with a
really single minded determination for years. A lot of the
time he had no official backing, no funding, and not
(01:32):
even enough to eat. He had support from other people
and organizations to get all this done, but he was
the one who did most of the rallying of that
support himself, usually at the expense of his own health
and well being. And Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide
in nineteen forty four, but of course, the practice of
genocide maybe as old as humanity. One possible explanation for
(01:55):
the extinction of the Neanderthals is that they were deliberately
and systematically killed by humans. In terms of what's documented
in the historical record, one of the earliest events that
could be described as genocide took place in four sixteen
BC during the Peloponnesian War. Athens lay siege to the
island of Milos, which was neutral but more sympathetic towards Sparta.
(02:17):
When Milos surrendered, the Athenians killed all of the men
and sold the women and children into slavery. Many many
instances of genocide followed after that all over the world.
Elements of European colonization of the America's starting in the
sixteenth century and Cromwell's conquest of Ireland in the seventeenth century.
(02:37):
The Ching dynasty's extermination of the Zunger people in the
eighteenth century, and the Scramble for Africa and the nineteenth
century have all been described as genocide. The idea that
international law should protect minorities and other vulnerable people is
also much older than the term genocide. In Europe. That
idea goes back at least as far as the Peace
(02:59):
of Westphilia in six Among other provisions, the Piece of
Westphalia formalized the idea of Europe as a collection of
sovereign states and outlined freedoms and protections for religious minorities
in those states. In other words, by the time Raphael
Lemkin was born on June, genocide had existed for millennia,
(03:21):
and the idea that international law should protect minorities that
idea had existed for centuries. The language that we used
to describe it today just didn't exist yet. Lemkin was
born on a farm outside of Volkovisk, which was then
in Poland. Later that became part of Russia, and it
is now in what is Belarus. The farm was about
fourteen miles or twenty three kilometers from town in a
(03:44):
relatively remote area. The farm itself was adjacent to a
forest and a lake. Lemkin was the middle of three brothers.
Although his young brother died in nineteen eighteen during the
flu pandemic, he spent most of his boyhood playing and
doing chores on the farm and being taught by mother Bella,
who was an artist and an intellectual, and he was
aware of the concept of oppression from a really early age.
(04:07):
It was illegal for Jews to own or live on farms,
so in addition to paying the rent on the farm,
Rafael's father Joseph, had to bribe the local police for
them to be allowed to stay there. He was also
aware that the oppression was not just about laws and money.
In nineteen o six, the Russian Imperial Army carried out
a program against the Jewish community of bali Stock, about
(04:30):
fifty five miles or ninety kilometers away, and at least
seventy people were killed and as many as one hundred injured.
This awareness of persecution and of people being harmed by
those who might have been charged with helping them continued
to grow as Rafael got older. When he was eleven,
he read the novel Quo Vadis Narrative in the Time
(04:51):
of Nero, and one of the themes was Nero's persecution
of Christians in ancient Rome. He became really fixated on
this whole idea, and he started learning more and more
about similarly violence and oppressive events in history, and about
the people who were the victims of those events. Eventually,
the Lemkin family moved into vocal Visk to give Rafael
(05:12):
and his brother more educational opportunities. Bella Lemkin was described
as brilliant, but she and her husband wanted their children
to have a broader education than she could give them
on her own. While they were living there, Raphael continued
to have firsthand experience with anti Semitism and oppression, especially
after the German army occupied vocal Visc in nineteen fifteen.
(05:34):
From the time he was young, Limbkin demonstrated an incredible
aptitude for languages. When he entered the University of Heidelberg
and lavov he already knew seven of them. By the
end of his life, he would know twelve different languages.
He decided a major in philology which combines literature, history,
and linguistics. I am very envious of his language skills.
(05:57):
But uh, in one Limbkin changed his major two law,
and to understand why he did that, we actually need
to back up for a moment and talk about the
Armenian genocide. Although the consensus among historians is that what
happened constitutes genocide, the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan disagree.
They don't necessarily deny that there were massacres, but they
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maintained that this was simply the unfortunate consequence of brutal
and bloody war, rather than a planned attempt to exterminate
a people. The Armenian genocide has been on our list
for a full episode for a very long time, but
it is a huge and complex topic. Uh So we
are not sure when exactly that will happen. So uh
this is the very basic version. Armenians are a linguistic
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and ethnic group who lived today primarily in Armenia, but
who historically have lived in a much larger region of
the Caucasus Mountains, including what's now northeastern Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.
In the early twentieth century, all of this is part
of the Ottoman Empire, and in nine five team the
Ottoman Empire massacred and estimated one point five million Armenians.
(07:06):
The Armenians were predominantly Christian and the Ottoman Empire was Muslim,
but this was not only about religion. In the late
nineteenth century, Armenians had started developing a national identity. The
Ottoman Empire viewed this growing sense of an Armenian nation
as a threat. Although several of Europe's great power saw
a need to try to protect the Armenian people, these
(07:28):
efforts had the opposite of the intended effect. The Ottoman
Empire cracked down on Armenians, carrying out a series of
programs between eighteen ninety four and eighteen ninety six, and
at this point it wasn't so much about destroying the
Armenians as it was about re establishing the dominance of
the Ottoman Empire in the area. But in nineteen o eight,
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members of the Young Turk movement came to power in
the Ottoman Empire and made a short lived effort to
modernize and to offer some protections to its minority populations,
but all of that fell away during the Balkan Wars.
And World War One, especially after the Ottoman Empire joined
the war on the side of the Central Powers. In
nineteen fifteen, Russia defeated the Ottoman army at the Battle
(08:11):
of Sarahkamish. Afterward, Armenians became a scapegoat, with Ottoman officials
blaming the loss on Armenians who had joined the Russian side,
and there were Armenians who did side with the Russians,
but this whole thing was used as grounds for violent
suppression of the Armenians as a whole. In April of
nineteen fifteen, Armenian intellectuals and political leaders were rounded up
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and later executed. The next months were marked with a
systematic deportation effort, concentration camps, death marches, massacres, and sexual
violence against women. Many of the people who survived the
direct violence later on died of exhaustion or starved to death.
These events were known to the international community at the time.
(08:57):
On nineteen fifteen, France, Russia, and Great Britain issued a
joint declaration which set in part quote, for about a month,
the kurd and Turkish population of Armenia has been massacring
Armenians with the connivance and often assistance of Ottoman authorities,
and that statement went on to say, quote, in view
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of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization,
the Allied governments announced publicly to the Sublime Port that
they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members
of the Ottoman government and those of their agents who
are implicated in such massacres. Then, after the war was over,
the Central Powers signed the Treaty of Seve, which included
(09:41):
a provision for determining who had been responsible for the
massacre of Armenians and who then bringing those people to justice.
But the new Turkish government that arose after the war
rejected that treaty, and its nineteen three replacement included no
such provision. Raphael Lemkin was about to turn fifteen when
all of this started, but it was six years later
(10:02):
that a connected event really drew his attention to it
and changed the focus of his life. And we're going
to talk about that after we first have a sponsor break.
On March fifteenth, ninety one, while Raphael Limpkin was in college,
(10:24):
an Armenian named Sohoman t Lerian assassinated Mehmed to Lot,
who was also known as Talat Pasha, the Ottoman Minister
of the Interior a Lot was widely recognized as the
architect of the massacres that had taken place in nineteen fifteen,
and to Lerian's family had been killed in those massacres.
When he shot the Ottoman minister, he reportedly said, this
(10:47):
is for my mother. To Larrian was put on trial
the following June, and this trial struck Lemkin as deeply incongruous.
To Lot had not faced trial for the massacres in
any way, you international laws governing the rules of war
and human rights didn't apply because the massacres were committed
by the Ottoman Empire in its own sovereign territory, not
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against another sovereign nations people, but Talirian, whose crime was
on a far smaller scale, was being tried. When discussing
this trial and class, Limkin noted this discrepancy, saying, quote,
it is a crime for Tllrian to kill a man,
but it is not a crime for his oppressor to
kill more than a million men. He also noted that
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the idea of national sovereignty should not give a nation
the right to kill its own people with impunity. This
incident inspired Limkin to change his major to law so
that he could work toward an international law that would
apply to what the Armenians had faced. He graduated with
a doctorate in law in Another similar assassination took place
(11:52):
in Paris that same year, and that reinforced Limpkin's commitment
to advocate for an international law against genocide. This time,
Shalom schwartz Bard assassinated Ukrainian official Simon pet Leura, who
was believed to be responsible for a series of programs
in which Swartspard's parents had been killed. Once again, an
(12:14):
individual person was being tried for a much smaller crime
than the ones committed by the person he had killed,
and the person he had killed was not tried for
those crimes at all. Both to Leirian and schwartz Bard
were ultimately acquitted, with their defenses focusing on the mental
trauma that they had each been through. After graduating, Lemkin
(12:35):
moved to Warsaw and got a position working as a prosecutor.
He started writing books about international law, human rights, and genocide,
although he wasn't yet using that term. He wrote at
a rate of about a book every year, and in
nineteen thirty three he had the opportunity to make his
first real effort at advocating for a law at the
(12:55):
international level. He was invited to make a presentation at
the League of Nations Prints in Madrid. The paper that
he wrote leading up to this conference included his definitions
for two different but related crimes. One he called barbarity,
and this was a crime against people, especially acts of
extermination because of ethnic, religious, or social identity. The other
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crime he called vandalism. Vandalism was a crime against a
people's cultural heritage, and it included things like the destruction
of monuments and the outlawing of native languages. He wanted
to address both the physical presence of a group that
groups very existence and the group's history and spiritual life.
But after he submitted his paper, he got a phone
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call telling him that he was no longer invited to
attend the conference in person. An anti submitting newspaper in
Poland had written a scathing response to Lemkin's paper, criticizing
him for focusing on the protection of Jews and not
of the Polish population as a whole. Afterward, the Minister
of Justice decided that Lemkins should not attend the conference,
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and although his paper was discussed without his personally being there,
it didn't lead to any meaningful action. In the face
of all this criticism, Lemkin also had to resign as
a prosecutor, and he went into private law practice instead.
A few years later, on August nineteen thirty nine, Adolf
Hitler gave a speech to his chief commanders at his
(14:24):
home in ober Salzburg. It said, in part quote, our
strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality. Genghis
Khan has sent millions of women and children into death
knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him
only the great founder of states. As to what week
Western European civilization asserts about me, that is of no account.
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I have given the command, and I shall shoot everyone
who utters one word of criticism. For the goal to
be obtained in the war is not that of reaching
certain lines, but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so
for the present only in the East I have put
my death head formations in place, with the command relentlessly
and without compassion, to send into death many women and
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children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we
gain the living space that we need. Who, after all,
is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians. There
is some debate about whether the speech included that last sentence,
because some of the documents recording the speech do not
include it, and a primary one that does include it
(15:31):
came from an anonymous source. But regardless, less than two
weeks later, on September one, Hitler invaded Poland and started
carrying out the extermination that he had described in the speech.
At that point, Raphael Limpkin was still living in Warsaw,
and on September six, just ahead of German troops arrival there,
he tried to escape the city by train, but the
(15:53):
train that he was on was bombed, leading him and
some of the other survivors to take refuge in the woods.
He and a few other men traveled together and tried
to evade German troops, although some of them were killed
in another bombing not long afterward. Over the next two months,
Lemkin traveled with a continually changing group of refugees. Few
of them had any provisions with them, so they had
(16:15):
to forage for food, sometimes stealing from crops in the
fields or occasionally getting help from sympathetic people that they met.
As often as he could, he encouraged people to escape.
Based on mind comp and other writings, Lemkin knew that
Hitler was planning an extermination campaign much different from the
typical perils of warfare that the people he met often
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thought that they could survive. During these weeks when he
was in flight, Lemkin's ultimate goal was to get to Lithuania,
which was at that moment neutral, and he thought he
could escape from there, but he also wanted to get
to his parents and try to convince them to go
as well. He finally got to Volcovist by train, disguising
himself as a Russian peasant, including trading in his expe
(17:00):
sive eyeglass frames for a cheaper pair so that they
would not raise suspicions. He spent two days with his
parents in late nineteen thirty nine, but he couldn't convince
them to leave. Limken finally got to Lithuania in early
nineteen forty. His week's long flight from the Germans prompted
him to give up the idea of going back to
being a private lawyer and instead to focus on his
(17:21):
work in education and actively trying to get the international
community to stop such abuses. He got in touch with
people he knew in Sweden and the United States, trying
to get a visa so he could get to a
safer location and continue his work. From there, he got
an appointment teaching law at the University of Stockholm, and
while he was there he worked with the Swedish Foreign
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Ministry to gather information about human rights abuses in places
where Sweden had embassies and consulates. One of their findings
was that Germany was distributing rations and occupied territory based
on nationality, so Germans were getting ninety seven percent rations,
Dutch people were getting ninety five percent. The numbers got
continually smaller, down to Greeks who were getting thirty eight
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percent rations and Jews who got twenty percent, which was
not enough to sustain life. By one other parts of
the world were becoming more aware of what the Nazi
regime was doing. On August Winston Churchill gave an address
in which he said, quote as his army's advance, whole
districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of
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thousands of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by
the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend
their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in
the sixteenth century. There has never been methodical, merciless butchery
on such a scale, or approaching such a scale. And
this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet
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to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks. We
are in the presence of a crime without a name.
That same year, Limpkin got an appointment teaching law at
Duke University. Thanks to his colleague Malcolm McDermott, he traveled
to the United States via Russia and Japan, arriving in
Seattle on April eighteenth, nineteen forty one. When he got
(19:10):
to Durham, North Carolina, he was asked to give an
address on his very first evening there, and part of
his topic was Hitler's plan of exterminating entire people's in
the territory that Germany was occupying. This was the first
of many attempts to educate the people around him on
what Hitler was planning and doing. In nineteen forty two,
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Lemkin was appointed Chief Consultant to the Board of Economic
Warfare in Washington, d c. And his first task there
was to educate his colleagues about Hitler's planned exterminations. He
also wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a call
for action. As he threw himself into this work, Limpkin's
health started to suffer. High blood pressure ran in his family,
(19:53):
but stress and exhaustion were really making it worse. And
as we alluded to at the top of the episode,
Lemkins signed only coined the term genocide in nineteen and
we're going to talk about that after we have a
little sponsor break. In nineteen forty four, Raphael Limpkin published
(20:18):
the seven twelve page book Access Rule in Occupied Europe
Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress. This
book documented conditions in Europe and finally named the crime
that Roosevelt had referenced in that nineteen forty one address
we read from earlier. Limpkin wrote, quote, by genocide, we
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mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.
This new word, coined by the author to denote an
old practice in its modern development, is made from the
ancient Greek word genos, race, tribe, and the Latin side killing.
He went on to explain, quote, Generally speaking, genocide does
not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except
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when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation.
It is intended rather to signify 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. Genocide is directed against the national group
as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against
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individuals not in their individual capacity, but as members of
the national group. He also explained how genocide happens this
way quote 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,
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may be made upon the oppressed population, which is allowed
to remain, or upon the territory alone after removal of
the population and the colonization of the area by the
oppressor's own nationals. By this point, Lemkin had started working
as an advisor to U S Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.
After World War Two, Jackson was the US Chief prosecutor
(22:07):
at the Nuremberg Trials, and Lemkin advised him in that
role as well. Genocide was included in the indictments at
Nuremberg but to Lemkin's disappointment, not in the final judgment.
The judgment itself also pertained to only actions that happened
during wartime, not to atrocities that Germany had carried out
before the war officially began. On top of that disappointment,
(22:30):
while he was in Nuremberg for the trials, Limkin learned
that nearly his entire family had been killed by Nazis,
including his parents. At least forty nine of his relatives
were killed, with only his brother and his brother's family surviving.
Not long after the end of the Nuremberg trials, Lemkin
started planning to introduce a resolution on genocide at the
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United Nations. He went to the U n to quote
enter into an international treaty which would formulate genocide as
an international crime, providing for its prevention and punishment in
time of peace and war, and this required multiple steps.
So first, he needed to convince multiple nations to support
a resolution calling for the United Nations to draft a
(23:14):
convention on genocide. He did this in nineteen forty six,
drafting the resolution and personally meeting with delegates to encourage
them to sign. Obviously, through this entire process, his amazing
fluency with languages was extremely helpful. Panama, Cuba, and India
agreed to sponsor this resolution, which the General Assembly adopted
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on December eleventh, ninety six. It read, in part quote,
Genocide is the denial of the right of existence to
entire human groups, as homicide as the denial of the
right to live of individual human beings. Such denial of
the right to existence shocks the conscience of mankind, resulting
great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and
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other contribution represented by those groups, and is contrary to
moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations.
The resolution went on to affirm that genocide is a
crime which the civilized world condemns, and invite the member
states to enact legislation to prevent and punish genocide. It
recommended international cooperation and requested the Economic and Social Council
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to do the necessary research to drop a convention for
the next General Assembly. A u N resolution isn't binding,
so the next step was to draft a convention, which
is a formal agreement among UN member states. In other words,
it's a treaty. The u N Secretary General appointed Limpkin
to draft this Convention. Lemkin had gotten a job teaching
(24:44):
at Yale, and he took a leave of absence to
do it. I'll read Donna Due de Vaubre of France,
the former judge at the International Military Tribunal, and Vespasian
v Pella of Romania, president of the International Association of
Penal Law. We're part of the drafting process as well.
The process of drafting this convention was a long series
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of back and forth and compromises, sometimes because of disagreements
among these three men, and sometimes because of lobbying by
the nations that would ultimately need to ratify it. The
treaty was not retroactive, but a number of UN member
states had ongoing issues that might be described as genocide.
For example, Lemkin thought the convention should apply to political groups,
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but if it did, it would not have the support
of the U s s R, which had been carrying
out systematic political persecution for decades. The United States was
also concerned about the idea of cultural genocide, as it
might relate to black Americans. Even though this was during
the Civil Rights movement and racist violence was ongoing, it
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seemed unlikely potentially that the US would be charged with
trying to exterminate people of African descent, given that their
population was increasing rather than decreasing. But the idea of
cultural genocide was another matter entirely so the United States
was not likely to support the convention if it included
(26:08):
cultural genocide, and as a side note, in nineteen fifty one,
the Civil Rights Congress presented a two hundred plus page
paper titled We Charged Genocide the Crime of Government against
the Negro People, which did argue that the US government
had committed genocide, but that didn't go anywhere. There are
also allegations that Lemkin himself was dismissive of this argument,
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but neither the paper nor the response he purportedly gave
are among his personal documents. The negotiation wasn't just about
removing language that one or more of the nations was
wary of or wouldn't agree to. There were also some
definitions that some nations wanted to have added, but we're
not added into the final document. As one example, Japan
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had distributed opium during its occupation of China, so China
wanted narcotics distribution and to be included as a component
of genocide as this was happening. Support for the convention
was growing outside of the u N. The National Council
of Christians and Jews had established a Committee for an
International Genocide Convention with Lemkin its strategists. In September of
(27:17):
nineteen forty eight, the committee submitted a petition to the
u N which had signatures from one hundred sixty six
non government organizations, which represented about two hundred million people
from twenty eight nations. The end result of all of
this negotiation was the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide, which was unanimously approved on
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December nine. As was the case with the earlier resolution,
Lemkin had individually met with numerous delegates to explain the
need for the convention and to encourage them to approve it.
Article one, the contracting parties confirmed that genocide, whether committed
in time of peace or in time of war, is
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a crime under inter national law which they undertake to
prevent and to punish. Article two and the present Convention,
genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent
to destroy a whole or impart a national, ethnical, racial,
or religious group. As such, a killing members of the
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group be causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group see deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in
whole or in part. D Imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group e. Forcibly transferring children of the
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group to another group. Article three. The following acts shall
be punishable. A genocide B conspiracy to commit genocide see
direct and public incitement to commit genocide, D Attempt to
commit genocide and E complicity in genocide article For Persons
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committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in
Article three shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers,
public officials, or private individuals. From there, the Convention goes
on to call on nations to enact their own legislation
related to genocide. It calls her persons charged with genocide
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to be tried in the territory where the act took
place or by an international tribunal. Later articles include a
number of definitions and procedures. Lemkin described some of these
later articles as trojan horses. These were things that he
thought weakened the overall convention and put it at risk
of total failure. Article fourteen gave it a ten year
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duration followed by five year renewals. Article fifteen rendered the
convention null and void if at any time there were
fewer than sixteen nations that were party to it. An
Article sixteen allowed nations to request revisions at any time,
with the U in General Assembly deciding what to do
about that request. Limpkin later said that he really regretted
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allowing these to be included in the final document, but
that he also was not sure that the Convention could
have made it through another fight about them. Two days
after the unanimous vote on the convention, twenty two nations
signed it, signaling their intent for each of their governments
to ratify the treaty. Not long after that, Lemkin was hospitalized,
(30:27):
Although doctors never gave him a formal diagnosis. He called
it genociditis and attributed it to his exhaustion from having
worked so hard on the convention and on getting it passed.
As soon as he was out of the hospital, though,
he was back at work lobbying nations to ratify the convention,
and this was an ongoing pattern for the rest of
his life, with cycles of work and advocacy followed by
(30:49):
hospitalizations and surgeries. The Genocide Convention came into force on
January twelfth, ninety one, which Lemkin described as quote a
day of triumph for man kind and the most beautiful
day of my life. But even then he still wasn't
done fighting for it. Later on, in the nineteen fifties,
there was a push to create an International Criminal Court,
and part of this discussion involved abolishing the Genocide Convention
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and folding the prosecution of genocide up under the court.
Lempkin once again stopped his other work and lobbied for
the Genocide Convention to remain in place. The Cold War
ultimately derailed this whole plan, and the International Criminal Court
was established much later. For much of the time working
on the Genocide Convention, Lemkin had been acting as a
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private citizen. Once the treaty was drafted, he had no
official backing and he had no funding. He frequently went hungry,
and that continued later in his life. After the Convention
had come into effect. He continued to teach and to
write books, including an autobiography, But if he wasn't teaching,
he was trying to live off a hundred dollars a
(31:53):
month from the Jewish Labor Committee, and a small amount
of money he had been granted by the Conference on
Jewish Material claim Names against Germany. He was nominated for
the Nobel Peace Prize more than once for all of this,
but it was never awarded to him. On August nineteen
fifty nine, Limcoln died of a heart attack. He collapsed
at a bus stop. He was either on the way
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to or from a publisher's office to talk about the
autobiography that he had been writing. The American Jewish Committee
paid for his burial, and only seven people attended his
grave side service. He had spent the last years of
his life living in the US, but he didn't live
long enough to see the US ratify the Genocide Convention.
Although the US was one of the first twenty two signatories,
(32:36):
the ratification didn't happen until November twenty five. And another
thing that Limpcoln did not live to see is that,
in the years after this convention came into effect, it
really hasn't had the impact that he hoped that it would.
He very clearly sincerely believed that an international law was
the only way to both prevent genocide and punish the
(32:57):
people responsible for it, but I don't. If you've listened
to our our podcast a lot, you have heard us
talk about a lot of things that have happened in
the years since then that fit under various definitions that
we read from the treaty earlier in eighteen and recognition
of the seventieth anniversary of the Genocide Convention, u N
Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, quote, since Nuremberg, we have
(33:22):
failed to prevent genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and Strebanitza in
the former Yugoslavia. But in the past two decades we
have at least started to hold perpetrators to account. The
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda, and the Extraordinary Chambers and the Courts
of Cambodia have all convicted perpetrators for the crime of genocide.
(33:45):
The work of these courts reflects a welcome resolve to
punish genocide. He went on to note that as of January,
there were still forty five u N member states that
had not yet become a party to the Genocide Convention
and urged them to do so. To end on a
more hopeful note, like I said earlier, Raphael Limpkin was
(34:06):
just unshakably certain during his lifetime that an international law
was what was needed to address this crime. And so
to end with a quote from the introduction to his autobiography,
which is called totally unofficial quote, I feel grateful to
Providence for having chosen me as a messenger boy for
this life saving idea. Say so much for joining us
(34:32):
on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar over the course of the show,
that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is
History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old
health stuff works email address no longer works, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in History.
(34:55):
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
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else you listen to podcasts. Stuffy miss In History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy Saturday. In this week's episode on the Holta More,
we talked about Raphael limpkins nineteen fifty three speech and
article arguing that the Holidamor was one component of a
genocide that targeted the people of Ukraine. We mentioned in
the episode that Limpkin had been the person to coin
the term genocide, but his work on this really went
(00:25):
way beyond that. Our episode on Limpkin came out three
years ago on March eleven, so we're bringing it out
as Today's Saturday Classic to add to the context around
his thoughts on Ukraine. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and
(00:51):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Fry. Today we are going to talk about Dr
Rafael Limpkin, and you'll see his name spelled a number
of different ways because he was originally from Poland. And
you'll see him described as the person who coined the
term genocide. He did do that, but his contributions went
(01:11):
way way beyond just coining a new word. He was
really the driving force behind the existence of the u
N Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the crime
of genocide. This was something that he pursued with a
really single minded determination for years. A lot of the
time he had no official backing, no funding, and not
(01:32):
even enough to eat. He had support from other people
and organizations to get all this done, but he was
the one who did most of the rallying of that
support himself, usually at the expense of his own health
and well being. And Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide
in nineteen forty four, but of course, the practice of
genocide maybe as old as humanity. One possible explanation for
(01:55):
the extinction of the Neanderthals is that they were deliberately
and systematically killed by humans. In terms of what's documented
in the historical record, one of the earliest events that
could be described as genocide took place in four sixteen
BC during the Peloponnesian War. Athens lay siege to the
island of Milos, which was neutral but more sympathetic towards Sparta.
(02:17):
When Milos surrendered, the Athenians killed all of the men
and sold the women and children into slavery. Many many
instances of genocide followed after that all over the world.
Elements of European colonization of the America's starting in the
sixteenth century and Cromwell's conquest of Ireland in the seventeenth century.
(02:37):
The Ching dynasty's extermination of the Zunger people in the
eighteenth century, and the Scramble for Africa and the nineteenth
century have all been described as genocide. The idea that
international law should protect minorities and other vulnerable people is
also much older than the term genocide. In Europe. That
idea goes back at least as far as the Peace
(02:59):
of Westphilia in six Among other provisions, the Piece of
Westphalia formalized the idea of Europe as a collection of
sovereign states and outlined freedoms and protections for religious minorities
in those states. In other words, by the time Raphael
Lemkin was born on June, genocide had existed for millennia,
(03:21):
and the idea that international law should protect minorities that
idea had existed for centuries. The language that we used
to describe it today just didn't exist yet. Lemkin was
born on a farm outside of Volkovisk, which was then
in Poland. Later that became part of Russia, and it
is now in what is Belarus. The farm was about
fourteen miles or twenty three kilometers from town in a
(03:44):
relatively remote area. The farm itself was adjacent to a
forest and a lake. Lemkin was the middle of three brothers.
Although his young brother died in nineteen eighteen during the
flu pandemic, he spent most of his boyhood playing and
doing chores on the farm and being taught by mother Bella,
who was an artist and an intellectual, and he was
aware of the concept of oppression from a really early age.
(04:07):
It was illegal for Jews to own or live on farms,
so in addition to paying the rent on the farm,
Rafael's father Joseph, had to bribe the local police for
them to be allowed to stay there. He was also
aware that the oppression was not just about laws and money.
In nineteen o six, the Russian Imperial Army carried out
a program against the Jewish community of bali Stock, about
(04:30):
fifty five miles or ninety kilometers away, and at least
seventy people were killed and as many as one hundred injured.
This awareness of persecution and of people being harmed by
those who might have been charged with helping them continued
to grow as Rafael got older. When he was eleven,
he read the novel Quo Vadis Narrative in the Time
(04:51):
of Nero, and one of the themes was Nero's persecution
of Christians in ancient Rome. He became really fixated on
this whole idea, and he started learning more and more
about similarly violence and oppressive events in history, and about
the people who were the victims of those events. Eventually,
the Lemkin family moved into vocal Visk to give Rafael
(05:12):
and his brother more educational opportunities. Bella Lemkin was described
as brilliant, but she and her husband wanted their children
to have a broader education than she could give them
on her own. While they were living there, Raphael continued
to have firsthand experience with anti Semitism and oppression, especially
after the German army occupied vocal Visc in nineteen fifteen.
(05:34):
From the time he was young, Limbkin demonstrated an incredible
aptitude for languages. When he entered the University of Heidelberg
and lavov he already knew seven of them. By the
end of his life, he would know twelve different languages.
He decided a major in philology which combines literature, history,
and linguistics. I am very envious of his language skills.
(05:57):
But uh, in one Limbkin changed his major two law,
and to understand why he did that, we actually need
to back up for a moment and talk about the
Armenian genocide. Although the consensus among historians is that what
happened constitutes genocide, the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan disagree.
They don't necessarily deny that there were massacres, but they
(06:20):
maintained that this was simply the unfortunate consequence of brutal
and bloody war, rather than a planned attempt to exterminate
a people. The Armenian genocide has been on our list
for a full episode for a very long time, but
it is a huge and complex topic. Uh So we
are not sure when exactly that will happen. So uh
this is the very basic version. Armenians are a linguistic
(06:43):
and ethnic group who lived today primarily in Armenia, but
who historically have lived in a much larger region of
the Caucasus Mountains, including what's now northeastern Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.
In the early twentieth century, all of this is part
of the Ottoman Empire, and in nine five team the
Ottoman Empire massacred and estimated one point five million Armenians.
(07:06):
The Armenians were predominantly Christian and the Ottoman Empire was Muslim,
but this was not only about religion. In the late
nineteenth century, Armenians had started developing a national identity. The
Ottoman Empire viewed this growing sense of an Armenian nation
as a threat. Although several of Europe's great power saw
a need to try to protect the Armenian people, these
(07:28):
efforts had the opposite of the intended effect. The Ottoman
Empire cracked down on Armenians, carrying out a series of
programs between eighteen ninety four and eighteen ninety six, and
at this point it wasn't so much about destroying the
Armenians as it was about re establishing the dominance of
the Ottoman Empire in the area. But in nineteen o eight,
(07:48):
members of the Young Turk movement came to power in
the Ottoman Empire and made a short lived effort to
modernize and to offer some protections to its minority populations,
but all of that fell away during the Balkan Wars.
And World War One, especially after the Ottoman Empire joined
the war on the side of the Central Powers. In
nineteen fifteen, Russia defeated the Ottoman army at the Battle
(08:11):
of Sarahkamish. Afterward, Armenians became a scapegoat, with Ottoman officials
blaming the loss on Armenians who had joined the Russian side,
and there were Armenians who did side with the Russians,
but this whole thing was used as grounds for violent
suppression of the Armenians as a whole. In April of
nineteen fifteen, Armenian intellectuals and political leaders were rounded up
(08:34):
and later executed. The next months were marked with a
systematic deportation effort, concentration camps, death marches, massacres, and sexual
violence against women. Many of the people who survived the
direct violence later on died of exhaustion or starved to death.
These events were known to the international community at the time.
(08:57):
On nineteen fifteen, France, Russia, and Great Britain issued a
joint declaration which set in part quote, for about a month,
the kurd and Turkish population of Armenia has been massacring
Armenians with the connivance and often assistance of Ottoman authorities,
and that statement went on to say, quote, in view
(09:18):
of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization,
the Allied governments announced publicly to the Sublime Port that
they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members
of the Ottoman government and those of their agents who
are implicated in such massacres. Then, after the war was over,
the Central Powers signed the Treaty of Seve, which included
(09:41):
a provision for determining who had been responsible for the
massacre of Armenians and who then bringing those people to justice.
But the new Turkish government that arose after the war
rejected that treaty, and its nineteen three replacement included no
such provision. Raphael Lemkin was about to turn fifteen when
all of this started, but it was six years later
(10:02):
that a connected event really drew his attention to it
and changed the focus of his life. And we're going
to talk about that after we first have a sponsor break.
On March fifteenth, ninety one, while Raphael Limpkin was in college,
(10:24):
an Armenian named Sohoman t Lerian assassinated Mehmed to Lot,
who was also known as Talat Pasha, the Ottoman Minister
of the Interior a Lot was widely recognized as the
architect of the massacres that had taken place in nineteen fifteen,
and to Lerian's family had been killed in those massacres.
When he shot the Ottoman minister, he reportedly said, this
(10:47):
is for my mother. To Larrian was put on trial
the following June, and this trial struck Lemkin as deeply incongruous.
To Lot had not faced trial for the massacres in
any way, you international laws governing the rules of war
and human rights didn't apply because the massacres were committed
by the Ottoman Empire in its own sovereign territory, not
(11:10):
against another sovereign nations people, but Talirian, whose crime was
on a far smaller scale, was being tried. When discussing
this trial and class, Limkin noted this discrepancy, saying, quote,
it is a crime for Tllrian to kill a man,
but it is not a crime for his oppressor to
kill more than a million men. He also noted that
(11:31):
the idea of national sovereignty should not give a nation
the right to kill its own people with impunity. This
incident inspired Limkin to change his major to law so
that he could work toward an international law that would
apply to what the Armenians had faced. He graduated with
a doctorate in law in Another similar assassination took place
(11:52):
in Paris that same year, and that reinforced Limpkin's commitment
to advocate for an international law against genocide. This time,
Shalom schwartz Bard assassinated Ukrainian official Simon pet Leura, who
was believed to be responsible for a series of programs
in which Swartspard's parents had been killed. Once again, an
(12:14):
individual person was being tried for a much smaller crime
than the ones committed by the person he had killed,
and the person he had killed was not tried for
those crimes at all. Both to Leirian and schwartz Bard
were ultimately acquitted, with their defenses focusing on the mental
trauma that they had each been through. After graduating, Lemkin
(12:35):
moved to Warsaw and got a position working as a prosecutor.
He started writing books about international law, human rights, and genocide,
although he wasn't yet using that term. He wrote at
a rate of about a book every year, and in
nineteen thirty three he had the opportunity to make his
first real effort at advocating for a law at the
(12:55):
international level. He was invited to make a presentation at
the League of Nations Prints in Madrid. The paper that
he wrote leading up to this conference included his definitions
for two different but related crimes. One he called barbarity,
and this was a crime against people, especially acts of
extermination because of ethnic, religious, or social identity. The other
(13:18):
crime he called vandalism. Vandalism was a crime against a
people's cultural heritage, and it included things like the destruction
of monuments and the outlawing of native languages. He wanted
to address both the physical presence of a group that
groups very existence and the group's history and spiritual life.
But after he submitted his paper, he got a phone
(13:40):
call telling him that he was no longer invited to
attend the conference in person. An anti submitting newspaper in
Poland had written a scathing response to Lemkin's paper, criticizing
him for focusing on the protection of Jews and not
of the Polish population as a whole. Afterward, the Minister
of Justice decided that Lemkins should not attend the conference,
(14:03):
and although his paper was discussed without his personally being there,
it didn't lead to any meaningful action. In the face
of all this criticism, Lemkin also had to resign as
a prosecutor, and he went into private law practice instead.
A few years later, on August nineteen thirty nine, Adolf
Hitler gave a speech to his chief commanders at his
(14:24):
home in ober Salzburg. It said, in part quote, our
strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality. Genghis
Khan has sent millions of women and children into death
knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him
only the great founder of states. As to what week
Western European civilization asserts about me, that is of no account.
(14:47):
I have given the command, and I shall shoot everyone
who utters one word of criticism. For the goal to
be obtained in the war is not that of reaching
certain lines, but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so
for the present only in the East I have put
my death head formations in place, with the command relentlessly
and without compassion, to send into death many women and
(15:10):
children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we
gain the living space that we need. Who, after all,
is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians. There
is some debate about whether the speech included that last sentence,
because some of the documents recording the speech do not
include it, and a primary one that does include it
(15:31):
came from an anonymous source. But regardless, less than two
weeks later, on September one, Hitler invaded Poland and started
carrying out the extermination that he had described in the speech.
At that point, Raphael Limpkin was still living in Warsaw,
and on September six, just ahead of German troops arrival there,
he tried to escape the city by train, but the
(15:53):
train that he was on was bombed, leading him and
some of the other survivors to take refuge in the woods.
He and a few other men traveled together and tried
to evade German troops, although some of them were killed
in another bombing not long afterward. Over the next two months,
Lemkin traveled with a continually changing group of refugees. Few
of them had any provisions with them, so they had
(16:15):
to forage for food, sometimes stealing from crops in the
fields or occasionally getting help from sympathetic people that they met.
As often as he could, he encouraged people to escape.
Based on mind comp and other writings, Lemkin knew that
Hitler was planning an extermination campaign much different from the
typical perils of warfare that the people he met often
(16:37):
thought that they could survive. During these weeks when he
was in flight, Lemkin's ultimate goal was to get to Lithuania,
which was at that moment neutral, and he thought he
could escape from there, but he also wanted to get
to his parents and try to convince them to go
as well. He finally got to Volcovist by train, disguising
himself as a Russian peasant, including trading in his expe
(17:00):
sive eyeglass frames for a cheaper pair so that they
would not raise suspicions. He spent two days with his
parents in late nineteen thirty nine, but he couldn't convince
them to leave. Limken finally got to Lithuania in early
nineteen forty. His week's long flight from the Germans prompted
him to give up the idea of going back to
being a private lawyer and instead to focus on his
(17:21):
work in education and actively trying to get the international
community to stop such abuses. He got in touch with
people he knew in Sweden and the United States, trying
to get a visa so he could get to a
safer location and continue his work. From there, he got
an appointment teaching law at the University of Stockholm, and
while he was there he worked with the Swedish Foreign
(17:42):
Ministry to gather information about human rights abuses in places
where Sweden had embassies and consulates. One of their findings
was that Germany was distributing rations and occupied territory based
on nationality, so Germans were getting ninety seven percent rations,
Dutch people were getting ninety five percent. The numbers got
continually smaller, down to Greeks who were getting thirty eight
(18:05):
percent rations and Jews who got twenty percent, which was
not enough to sustain life. By one other parts of
the world were becoming more aware of what the Nazi
regime was doing. On August Winston Churchill gave an address
in which he said, quote as his army's advance, whole
districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of
(18:27):
thousands of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by
the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend
their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in
the sixteenth century. There has never been methodical, merciless butchery
on such a scale, or approaching such a scale. And
this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet
(18:50):
to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks. We
are in the presence of a crime without a name.
That same year, Limpkin got an appointment teaching law at
Duke University. Thanks to his colleague Malcolm McDermott, he traveled
to the United States via Russia and Japan, arriving in
Seattle on April eighteenth, nineteen forty one. When he got
(19:10):
to Durham, North Carolina, he was asked to give an
address on his very first evening there, and part of
his topic was Hitler's plan of exterminating entire people's in
the territory that Germany was occupying. This was the first
of many attempts to educate the people around him on
what Hitler was planning and doing. In nineteen forty two,
(19:31):
Lemkin was appointed Chief Consultant to the Board of Economic
Warfare in Washington, d c. And his first task there
was to educate his colleagues about Hitler's planned exterminations. He
also wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a call
for action. As he threw himself into this work, Limpkin's
health started to suffer. High blood pressure ran in his family,
(19:53):
but stress and exhaustion were really making it worse. And
as we alluded to at the top of the episode,
Lemkins signed only coined the term genocide in nineteen and
we're going to talk about that after we have a
little sponsor break. In nineteen forty four, Raphael Limpkin published
(20:18):
the seven twelve page book Access Rule in Occupied Europe
Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress. This
book documented conditions in Europe and finally named the crime
that Roosevelt had referenced in that nineteen forty one address
we read from earlier. Limpkin wrote, quote, by genocide, we
(20:38):
mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.
This new word, coined by the author to denote an
old practice in its modern development, is made from the
ancient Greek word genos, race, tribe, and the Latin side killing.
He went on to explain, quote, Generally speaking, genocide does
not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except
(21:02):
when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation.
It is intended rather to signify 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. Genocide is directed against the national group
as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against
(21:26):
individuals not in their individual capacity, but as members of
the national group. He also explained how genocide happens this
way quote 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,
(21:46):
may be made upon the oppressed population, which is allowed
to remain, or upon the territory alone after removal of
the population and the colonization of the area by the
oppressor's own nationals. By this point, Lemkin had started working
as an advisor to U S Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.
After World War Two, Jackson was the US Chief prosecutor
(22:07):
at the Nuremberg Trials, and Lemkin advised him in that
role as well. Genocide was included in the indictments at
Nuremberg but to Lemkin's disappointment, not in the final judgment.
The judgment itself also pertained to only actions that happened
during wartime, not to atrocities that Germany had carried out
before the war officially began. On top of that disappointment,
(22:30):
while he was in Nuremberg for the trials, Limkin learned
that nearly his entire family had been killed by Nazis,
including his parents. At least forty nine of his relatives
were killed, with only his brother and his brother's family surviving.
Not long after the end of the Nuremberg trials, Lemkin
started planning to introduce a resolution on genocide at the
(22:51):
United Nations. He went to the U n to quote
enter into an international treaty which would formulate genocide as
an international crime, providing for its prevention and punishment in
time of peace and war, and this required multiple steps.
So first, he needed to convince multiple nations to support
a resolution calling for the United Nations to draft a
(23:14):
convention on genocide. He did this in nineteen forty six,
drafting the resolution and personally meeting with delegates to encourage
them to sign. Obviously, through this entire process, his amazing
fluency with languages was extremely helpful. Panama, Cuba, and India
agreed to sponsor this resolution, which the General Assembly adopted
(23:36):
on December eleventh, ninety six. It read, in part quote,
Genocide is the denial of the right of existence to
entire human groups, as homicide as the denial of the
right to live of individual human beings. Such denial of
the right to existence shocks the conscience of mankind, resulting
great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and
(23:59):
other contribution represented by those groups, and is contrary to
moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations.
The resolution went on to affirm that genocide is a
crime which the civilized world condemns, and invite the member
states to enact legislation to prevent and punish genocide. It
recommended international cooperation and requested the Economic and Social Council
(24:23):
to do the necessary research to drop a convention for
the next General Assembly. A u N resolution isn't binding,
so the next step was to draft a convention, which
is a formal agreement among UN member states. In other words,
it's a treaty. The u N Secretary General appointed Limpkin
to draft this Convention. Lemkin had gotten a job teaching
(24:44):
at Yale, and he took a leave of absence to
do it. I'll read Donna Due de Vaubre of France,
the former judge at the International Military Tribunal, and Vespasian
v Pella of Romania, president of the International Association of
Penal Law. We're part of the drafting process as well.
The process of drafting this convention was a long series
(25:05):
of back and forth and compromises, sometimes because of disagreements
among these three men, and sometimes because of lobbying by
the nations that would ultimately need to ratify it. The
treaty was not retroactive, but a number of UN member
states had ongoing issues that might be described as genocide.
For example, Lemkin thought the convention should apply to political groups,
(25:27):
but if it did, it would not have the support
of the U s s R, which had been carrying
out systematic political persecution for decades. The United States was
also concerned about the idea of cultural genocide, as it
might relate to black Americans. Even though this was during
the Civil Rights movement and racist violence was ongoing, it
(25:48):
seemed unlikely potentially that the US would be charged with
trying to exterminate people of African descent, given that their
population was increasing rather than decreasing. But the idea of
cultural genocide was another matter entirely so the United States
was not likely to support the convention if it included
(26:08):
cultural genocide, and as a side note, in nineteen fifty one,
the Civil Rights Congress presented a two hundred plus page
paper titled We Charged Genocide the Crime of Government against
the Negro People, which did argue that the US government
had committed genocide, but that didn't go anywhere. There are
also allegations that Lemkin himself was dismissive of this argument,
(26:32):
but neither the paper nor the response he purportedly gave
are among his personal documents. The negotiation wasn't just about
removing language that one or more of the nations was
wary of or wouldn't agree to. There were also some
definitions that some nations wanted to have added, but we're
not added into the final document. As one example, Japan
(26:53):
had distributed opium during its occupation of China, so China
wanted narcotics distribution and to be included as a component
of genocide as this was happening. Support for the convention
was growing outside of the u N. The National Council
of Christians and Jews had established a Committee for an
International Genocide Convention with Lemkin its strategists. In September of
(27:17):
nineteen forty eight, the committee submitted a petition to the
u N which had signatures from one hundred sixty six
non government organizations, which represented about two hundred million people
from twenty eight nations. The end result of all of
this negotiation was the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide, which was unanimously approved on
(27:38):
December nine. As was the case with the earlier resolution,
Lemkin had individually met with numerous delegates to explain the
need for the convention and to encourage them to approve it.
Article one, the contracting parties confirmed that genocide, whether committed
in time of peace or in time of war, is
(27:58):
a crime under inter national law which they undertake to
prevent and to punish. Article two and the present Convention,
genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent
to destroy a whole or impart a national, ethnical, racial,
or religious group. As such, a killing members of the
(28:19):
group be causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group see deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in
whole or in part. D Imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group e. Forcibly transferring children of the
(28:40):
group to another group. Article three. The following acts shall
be punishable. A genocide B conspiracy to commit genocide see
direct and public incitement to commit genocide, D Attempt to
commit genocide and E complicity in genocide article For Persons
(29:02):
committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in
Article three shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers,
public officials, or private individuals. From there, the Convention goes
on to call on nations to enact their own legislation
related to genocide. It calls her persons charged with genocide
(29:22):
to be tried in the territory where the act took
place or by an international tribunal. Later articles include a
number of definitions and procedures. Lemkin described some of these
later articles as trojan horses. These were things that he
thought weakened the overall convention and put it at risk
of total failure. Article fourteen gave it a ten year
(29:44):
duration followed by five year renewals. Article fifteen rendered the
convention null and void if at any time there were
fewer than sixteen nations that were party to it. An
Article sixteen allowed nations to request revisions at any time,
with the U in General Assembly deciding what to do
about that request. Limpkin later said that he really regretted
(30:06):
allowing these to be included in the final document, but
that he also was not sure that the Convention could
have made it through another fight about them. Two days
after the unanimous vote on the convention, twenty two nations
signed it, signaling their intent for each of their governments
to ratify the treaty. Not long after that, Lemkin was hospitalized,
(30:27):
Although doctors never gave him a formal diagnosis. He called
it genociditis and attributed it to his exhaustion from having
worked so hard on the convention and on getting it passed.
As soon as he was out of the hospital, though,
he was back at work lobbying nations to ratify the convention,
and this was an ongoing pattern for the rest of
his life, with cycles of work and advocacy followed by
(30:49):
hospitalizations and surgeries. The Genocide Convention came into force on
January twelfth, ninety one, which Lemkin described as quote a
day of triumph for man kind and the most beautiful
day of my life. But even then he still wasn't
done fighting for it. Later on, in the nineteen fifties,
there was a push to create an International Criminal Court,
and part of this discussion involved abolishing the Genocide Convention
(31:13):
and folding the prosecution of genocide up under the court.
Lempkin once again stopped his other work and lobbied for
the Genocide Convention to remain in place. The Cold War
ultimately derailed this whole plan, and the International Criminal Court
was established much later. For much of the time working
on the Genocide Convention, Lemkin had been acting as a
(31:33):
private citizen. Once the treaty was drafted, he had no
official backing and he had no funding. He frequently went hungry,
and that continued later in his life. After the Convention
had come into effect. He continued to teach and to
write books, including an autobiography, But if he wasn't teaching,
he was trying to live off a hundred dollars a
(31:53):
month from the Jewish Labor Committee, and a small amount
of money he had been granted by the Conference on
Jewish Material claim Names against Germany. He was nominated for
the Nobel Peace Prize more than once for all of this,
but it was never awarded to him. On August nineteen
fifty nine, Limcoln died of a heart attack. He collapsed
at a bus stop. He was either on the way
(32:14):
to or from a publisher's office to talk about the
autobiography that he had been writing. The American Jewish Committee
paid for his burial, and only seven people attended his
grave side service. He had spent the last years of
his life living in the US, but he didn't live
long enough to see the US ratify the Genocide Convention.
Although the US was one of the first twenty two signatories,
(32:36):
the ratification didn't happen until November twenty five. And another
thing that Limpcoln did not live to see is that,
in the years after this convention came into effect, it
really hasn't had the impact that he hoped that it would.
He very clearly sincerely believed that an international law was
the only way to both prevent genocide and punish the
(32:57):
people responsible for it, but I don't. If you've listened
to our our podcast a lot, you have heard us
talk about a lot of things that have happened in
the years since then that fit under various definitions that
we read from the treaty earlier in eighteen and recognition
of the seventieth anniversary of the Genocide Convention, u N
Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, quote, since Nuremberg, we have
(33:22):
failed to prevent genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and Strebanitza in
the former Yugoslavia. But in the past two decades we
have at least started to hold perpetrators to account. The
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda, and the Extraordinary Chambers and the Courts
of Cambodia have all convicted perpetrators for the crime of genocide.
(33:45):
The work of these courts reflects a welcome resolve to
punish genocide. He went on to note that as of January,
there were still forty five u N member states that
had not yet become a party to the Genocide Convention
and urged them to do so. To end on a
more hopeful note, like I said earlier, Raphael Limpkin was
(34:06):
just unshakably certain during his lifetime that an international law
was what was needed to address this crime. And so
to end with a quote from the introduction to his autobiography,
which is called totally unofficial quote, I feel grateful to
Providence for having chosen me as a messenger boy for
this life saving idea. Say so much for joining us
(34:32):
on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar over the course of the show,
that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is
History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old
health stuff works email address no longer works, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in History.
(34:55):
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
Google podcast, the I heart rate Adeo app, and wherever
else you listen to podcasts. Stuffy miss In History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
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