Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention

Dr. Raphael Lemkin is often described as the person who coined the term “genocide.” And he did do that – but 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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
are going to talk about Dr Raphael Limpken and you'll
see his name spelled a number of different ways because

(00:22):
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 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

(00:45):
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 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

(01:05):
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 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

(01:28):
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. When Milos surrendered, the
Athenians killed all of the men and sold the women
and children into slavery. Many many instances of genocide followed

(01:48):
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, the Ching dynasty's
determination 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

(02:10):
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 of Westphalia in
sixty eight. Among other provisions, the peace of Westphalia formalized
the idea of Europe as a collection of sovereign states
and outlined freedoms and protections for religious minorities in those states.

(02:34):
In other words, by the time Raphael Lemkin was born
on June dred, genocide had existed for millennia, 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 Volcovisk, which was then in Poland.

(02:57):
Later that became part of Russia and it is now
in what is Bela Rus. The farm was about fourteen
miles or twenty three kilometers from town in a 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

(03:18):
doing chores on the farm and being taught by his mother, Bella,
who was an artist and an intellectual, and he was
aware of the concept of oppression from a really early age.
It was illegal for Jews to own or live on farms,
so in addition to paying the rent on the farm,
Raphael's father Joseph, had to bribe the local police for
them to be allowed to stay there. He was also

(03:39):
aware that this 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
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

(04:02):
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
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

(04:25):
the people who were the victims of those events. Eventually,
the Lemkin family moved into vocal Visk to give Rafael
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, Rafael continued

(04:47):
to have firsthand experience with anti Semitism and oppression, especially
after the German army occupied vocal Visc in nineteen fifteen.
From the time he was young, Limkin demonstrated an incredible
aptitude for languages. When he entered the University of Heidelberg
and lavov he already knew seven of them. By the

(05:07):
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,
but uh in one Lemkin 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

(05:27):
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
maintained that this was simply the unfortunate consequence of brutal
and bloody war rather than a planned attempt to exterminate

(05:49):
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 this
is the very basic version. Armenians are a linguistic and
ethnic group who lived today primarily in Armenia, but who
historically have lived in a much larger region of the

(06:10):
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 nineteen fifteen, the Ottoman
Empire massacred an estimated one point five million Armenians. The
Armenians were predominantly Christian and the Ottoman Empire was Muslim,

(06:31):
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
efforts had the opposite of the intended effect. The Ottoman

(06:52):
Empire cracked down on Armenians, carrying out a series of
pograms 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,
members of the Young Turk movement came to power in
the Ottoman Empire and made a short lived effort to

(07:15):
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
of Sarahkamish. Afterward, Armenians became a scapegoat, with Ottoman officials

(07:37):
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
and later executed. The next months were marked with a

(07:59):
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.
On May nineteen fifteen, France, Russia, and Great Britain issued

(08:22):
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 of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity
and civilization, the Allied governments announced publicly to the Sublime

(08:46):
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 Treaty of Seve
which included a provision for determining who had been responsible
for the massacre of Armenians and who then bringing those

(09:08):
people to justice, but the new Turkish government that arose
after the war rejected that treaty, and it's nineteen replacement
included no such provision. Rafael Lemkin was about to turn
fifteen when all of this started, but it was six
years later that a connected event really drew his attention
to it and changed the focus of his life. And

(09:28):
we're going to talk about that after we first have
a sponsor break. On March fifteenth, ninete, while Rafael Limpkin
was in college, an Armenian named Sohoman Tolerian assassinated Memed
to Lot, who was also known as Talat Pasha, the

(09:51):
Ottoman Minister of the Interior. A Lot was widely recognized
as the architect of the massacres that had taken place
in nineteen fifteen, and Hilarian's family had been killed in
those massacres. When he shot the Ottoman minister, he reportedly said,
this is for my mother. To Larrian was put on
trial the following June, and this trial struck Lemkin as

(10:12):
deeply incongruous. To a Lot had not face trial for
the massacres in any way. 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 against another sovereign nations people, but Tillian, whose crime

(10:33):
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 Tollirian to kill a man,
but it is not a crime for his oppressor to
kill more than a million men. He also noted that
the idea of national sovereignty should not give a nation

(10:54):
the right to kill its own people with impunity. This
incident inspired Lemkin to change his major to 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 in
Paris that same year, and that reinforced Limpkin's commitment to

(11:15):
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 swarts Bard's parents had been killed. Once again, an
individual person was being tried for a much smaller crime

(11:37):
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
moved to Warsaw and got a position working as a prosecutor.

(11:58):
He started writing books about national law, human rights, and genocide,
although he wasn't yet using that term. He wrote at
a rate of about a book every year. In in in
nineteen thirty three, he had the opportunity to make his
first real effort at advocating for a law at the
international level. He was invited to make a presentation at
the League of Nations conference in Madrid. The paper that

(12:21):
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
crime he called vandalism. Vandalism was a crime against a
people's cultural heritage, and it included things like the destruction

(12:44):
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
call telling him that he was no longer invited to
attend the conference in person. An anti Semitic newspaper in

(13:06):
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,
and although his paper was discussed without his personally being there,
it didn't lead to any meaningful action. In the face

(13:29):
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 nine, Adolf Hitler gave
a speech to his chief commanders at his home in
ober Salzburg. It said, in part quote, our strength lies
in our quickness and in our brutality. Genghis Khan has

(13:52):
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. 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,

(14:15):
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 children of Polish
origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living
space that we need. Who, after all, is today speaking

(14:38):
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 came from
an anonymous source. But regardless, less than two weeks later,
on September one, Hitler invaded Poland and started carrying out

(14:59):
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
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

(15:20):
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
to forage for food, sometimes stealing from crops in the
fields or occasionally getting help from sympathetic people that they met.

(15:42):
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
thought that they could survive. During these weeks when he
was in flight, Lemkin's ultimate goal was to get to Lithuania,

(16:03):
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 expensive
eyeglass frames for a cheaper pair so that they would
not raise suspicions. He spent two days with his parents

(16:25):
in late nineteen thirty nine, but he couldn't convince them
to leave. Limkin 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 work in
education and actively trying to get the international community to
stop such abuses. He got in touch with people he

(16:48):
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 Ministry to
gather information about human rights abuses in places where Sweden
had embassies and consulates. One of their findings was that

(17:09):
Germany was distributing rations and occupied territory based on nationality,
so Germans were getting ninety seven percent rations, Dutch people
were getting ninety The numbers got continually smaller, down to
Greeks who were getting thirty eight percent rations and Jews
who got twenty percent, which was not enough to sustain
life by one. Other parts of the world were becoming

(17:32):
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 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

(17:56):
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 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

(18:17):
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 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

(18:37):
have been 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, 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

(18:58):
about Hitler's plan to 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, but stress and
exhaustion were really making it worse. And as we alluded
to at the top of the episode, Lemkin finally coined

(19:19):
the term genocide in nine and we're going to talk
about that after we have a little sponsor break. In
nineteen forty four, Raphael Limpkin published the seven d twelve
page book Access Rule in Occupied Europe Laws of Occupation,

(19:42):
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 mean the destruction of
a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word,
coined by the author to denote an old practice in

(20:04):
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 when accomplished by mass killings of
all members of a nation. It is intended rather to

(20:26):
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 individuals not in their individual capacity,

(20:47):
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, may be made upon the oppressed population,
which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone

(21:10):
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 at the Nuremberg Trials, and Limkin
advised him in that role as well. Genocide was included

(21:31):
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, while he was in Nuremberg for
the trials, Limkin learned that nearly his entire family had

(21:54):
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 United Nations. He went to
the U n to quote enter into an international treaty

(22:15):
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 convention on genocide. He did
this in nineteen forty six, drafting the resolution and personally

(22:39):
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 on December eleventh, ninety six. It read, in
part quote, genocide the denial of the right of existence

(23:02):
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 other contributions represented by those groups, and as contrary
to moral law and the spirit and aims of the

(23:24):
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
Counsel to do the necessary research to drop a convention

(23:45):
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 Limbkin
to draft this convention. Lemkin had gotten a job teaching
at Yale and he took a leave of absence to

(24:05):
do it. I'll read Donna Due de Vaub of France,
the former judge at the International Military Tribunal, and Vespasian
v Pella of Romania, president of the International Association of
Penal Law, were part of the drafting process as well.
The process of drafting this convention was a long series
of back and forth and compromises, sometimes because of disagreements

(24:27):
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,
but if it did, it would not have the support

(24:48):
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 amor amikins. Even though this was
during the Civil Rights movement and racist violence was ongoing,
it seemed unlikely potentially that the US would be charged

(25:10):
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 cultural genocide, and as a side note, in nineteen
fifty one, the Civil Rights Congress presented a two hundred

(25:33):
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, but neither the paper nor the response he
purportedly gave are among his personal documents. The negotiation wasn't

(25:57):
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 had distributed opium during its occupation of China, so
China wanted narcotics distribution to be included as a component

(26:20):
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 strategist. In September of
nineteen forty eight, the committee submitted a petition to the
u N which had signatures from one hundred sixty six

(26:41):
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
December nine. As was the case with the earlier resolution.

(27:01):
Limcoln 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 confirm that genocide, whether committed
in time of peace or in time of war, is
a crime under international law, which they undertake to prevent
and to punish. Article two and the present Convention. Genocide

(27:25):
means any of the following acts committed with intent to
destroy and whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial,
or religious group. As such, a killing members of the 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

(27:49):
or in part. D Imposing measures intended to prevent births
within the group e. Forcibly transferring children of the group
to another group. Article three. The following acts shall be
punishable A genocide B Conspiracy to commit genocide see direct

(28:10):
and public incitement to commit genocide, D Attempt to commit
genocide and E complicity in genocide. Article For persons 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

(28:34):
call on nations to enact their own legislation related to genocide.
It calls her persons charged with genocide 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

(28:56):
overall convention and put it at risk of total failure.
Or Article fourteen gave it a ten year 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

(29:18):
u n General Assembly deciding what to do about that request.
Limpkin later said that he really regretted 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

(29:39):
their intent for each of their governments to ratify the treaty.
Not long after that, Lemkin was hospitalized, 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

(30:02):
this was an ongoing pattern for the rest of his life,
with cycles of work and advocacy followed by hospitalizations and surgeries.
The Genocide Convention came into force on January twelfth, nineteen
fifty one, which Limpkin described as quote a day of
triumph for mankind and the most beautiful day of my life.
But even then he still wasn't done fighting for it.

(30:23):
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 and folding the prosecution
of genocide up under the court. Limpkin 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

(30:46):
much of the time working on the Genocide Convention, Lemkin
had been acting as a 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,

(31:08):
but if he wasn't teaching, he was trying to live
off a hundred dollars a month from the Jewish Labor
Committee and a small amount of money he had been
granted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims 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 nine, fifty nine, Lincoln died of
a heart attack. He collapsed at a bus stop. He

(31:31):
was either on the way 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

(31:52):
the first twenty two signatories, the ratification didn't happen until
November twenty five. And another thing that limpcoln Have 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 is the only way

(32:13):
to both prevent genocide and punish the people responsible for it.
But I don't know 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

(32:37):
Guterres said, quote, since Nuremberg, we have 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,

(32:57):
and the Extraordinary Chambers and the Courts of Cambodia have
all convicted perpetrators for the crime of genocide. 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

(33:18):
urged them to do so. To end on a more
hopeful note, like I said earlier, Raphael Limpkin was 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

(33:41):
this life saving idea. Do you have some listener mail
as well? I do, and it is a lot more
um uplifting than what we have just talked about. This
is from Mark. Mark says, good afternoon, ladies. My name
is Mark. I don't usually read people's surnames on the
podcast because of privacy, but it becomes obvious. His name

(34:02):
is Mark Dumas the A and his name, his middle name,
stands for Alexander. I'm a direct descendant of General Duma.
Thank you for the awesome podcast. I'm a longtime listener,
but a first time writer about my family. Two things
I don't know if you have seen the YouTube video
of the French government moving the body of Alexander Dumat
pair to the Pantheon. It's pretty amazing. Second, from General

(34:26):
Dumont to my generation, there has been a Duma in
uniform in every generation, either for France or for the US.
All of us have been black. We have served in
every major campaign from the Civil War to the War
on Terror. And then he goes on to list how
he served. His father served in World War two, grandfather
World War One, ticking back all the way to the

(34:51):
fifty fourth Massachusetts Regiment, which we have a previous podcast on,
and then that particular member of his family, Mark goes
on to say, quote, his father was Alexandra Duma feasts
and here we are. Keep up the good work, Mark.
Thank you so much, Mark for this awesome letter. We
don't often get uh letters from people who are directly
descended from the people that we talk about on the podcast.

(35:14):
He sent this after the episode came out on Tilma
Alexandre Duma, which he had not yet had the opportunity
to hear us talk about that footage of moving Alexander
dumat Pair's body. So thank you again, Mark for sending
us this awesome email. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, were History
podcast at how stuff works dot com and we're also

(35:36):
all over social media Missed in History and that is
where you will find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter.
You can come to our website, which is missing History
dot com to find show notes for all the episodes
Holly and I have worked on together, and a searchable
archive of all of our episodes. And you can subscribe
to our show on Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app,
and where a rayls you get your podcasts. For more

(36:02):
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
works dot com