Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide by Douglas Irvin-Erickson (review)

Douglas Irvin-Erickson's book develops both the heroic and tragic aspects of Raphaël Lemkin's life. Born in 1900 in the Russian Empire, Lemkin was exposed to the worst of human history. Early in his life he learned about pogroms that shattered the lives of Jews in Eastern Europe. As a young adult he learned about the murder of Muslims in the newly formed Christian states in the Balkans, the murder of Armenians and Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire, the murder of the Herero in German Southwest Africa. Irvin-Erickson points out that this was supplemented by rather unusual teachings from Lemkin's mother, who encouraged him to read histories of French Huguenots, Japanese torture victims, and African slaves. It is not surprising, as Irvin-Erickson notes, that Lemkin wrote that "a line of blood led from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to the pogrom of Bialystok" (p. 24).

During the Holocaust almost all of Lemkin's immediate and extended family were murdered. After fleeing the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 and eventually finding temporary safety in Sweden, Lemkin finally arrived in the United States in 1941. There he took teaching positions at Duke University, Yale, and Rutgers. It was during the Second World War while at Duke that he wrote his seminal work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Published in 1944, the volume presented the term "genocide," which, in Lemkin's conceptualization combined barbarism and vandalism, reified as mass murder and destruction of culture.

The heroic component of Lemkin's story was his lifelong dedication to gaining worldwide acceptance of the concept of genocide. His campaign began immediately after the war, when Lemkin mingled with prosecutors at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. He worked behind the scenes to secure the United Nations' enactment of a Genocide Convention (1948), and in his few remaining years lobbied diplomats to persuade their governments to implement that convention. Still, Lemkin felt the Convention inadequate: it merely signified the intention to get countries to ratify the treaty in their respective legislative bodies. It was, as Lemkin said, in the hands of politicians and statesmen "who lived in perpetual sin with history" and who should not be trusted with "the lives of entire nations" (p. 195). Perhaps one of those politicians was Senator Alexander Smith, a New Jersey Republican who described Lemkin as "a man who comes from a foreign country … spoke with broken English [and represented] a people [Jews] who ought not to be propagandizing for a genocide convention because they were supposedly guilty of some of the first genocides in history" (pp. 208–209).

Irvin-Erickson shows how Lemkin navigated the complicated geopolitical dynamics. He would be unable to obtain Soviet endorsement if the law included political groups. If lynchings were included, the U.S would likely not sign, and surely would not if Lemkin conceded that the genocide law could be applied against it. According to Irvin-Erickson, this troubled him greatly.¹

Irvin-Erickson's book is not simply a biography of Lemkin, but also focuses on the concept of genocide and its saga. It will challenge persons not well versed in political science and legal theory. Repeated references to natural law, legal positivism, positivist theory, and thinkers in these fields call for more explanation, but can be left to the side without losing the thread of the book. The core deals with Lemkin and Nuremberg. Lemkin came to Nuremberg to push for inclusion of the genocide concept in the charges, succeeding to the degree that the third count in the case before the International Military Tribunal (war crimes) included the word.

The Einsatzgruppen trial perhaps deserved more sustained treatment since the murder of 1,250,000 Jews, obliterating the Jewish population of a vast region in Eastern Europe, comes as close to genocide as possible. Had the defendants been charged with genocide, the end result likely would have been...