Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention by John Cooper (review)

This paper and electronic version updates a hardcover publication of 2008 on the life and work of Raphael Lemkin, a central figure in efforts to expose the atrocities committed in the name of the Third Reich, and in efforts at legal reform to prevent such atrocities in the future. During World War II, Lemkin wrote Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, a weighty tome that documented Nazi atrocities and introduced a term Lemkin devised—“genocide”—to describe acts aimed at the destruction of a people. Lemkin served as a consultant at the 1946 trial of major war criminals in Nuremberg. He lobbied United Nations member states to adopt a resolution declaring genocide a crime, and called for a treaty whereby states would collaborate to prevent and punish it. Lemkin was invited to join a three-member United Nations committee that prepared a draft of what in 1948 became the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

U.S. President Harry Truman was one of the first heads of state to sign the Convention, which he then sent to the U.S. Senate for the consent necessary to allow him to ratify it on behalf of the United States. There the Convention hit a roadblock. As Cooper notes, isolationism was strong in the Senate, where some opposed making any promises at the international level relating to human rights. A federal commitment on rights might jeopardize the primacy of the states on such issues; as Cooper also points out, racism played a role because some senators feared that the Convention’s broad definition of genocide might ensnare segregationists who participated in lynchings, still widespread. Lemkin avidly lobbied the Senate, but consent would not be forthcoming during his lifetime. When the United States finally moved towards ratification in the 1980s, the New York Times noted Lemkin’s central role.

Lemkin’s work has hardly remained unknown. It has engendered a body of literature, but there is certainly room for Cooper’s account, which contains considerable factual context and much important analysis. The strength of Cooper’s book is its detail on Lemkin’s role in fostering an international treaty on genocide. Cooper makes good use of British Foreign Office material and of Lemkin’s autobiographical writings. He juxtaposes material from official proceedings and Lemkin’s own to illustrate the backstory, giving us a vivid picture of the scope and importance of Lemkin’s contributions.

Cooper’s analysis suffers, to some degree, from his over-reliance on secondary sources, which allows some inaccuracies. Cooper takes from a secondary source a statement made on November 22, 1946 by the British representative in the UN’s Sixth (Legal) Committee, which drafted the Genocide Convention. His rendition of the statement inexplicably omits words in a way that makes the statement unintelligible. Cooper cites a statement allegedly from the Einsatzgruppen Trial (a proceeding against Nazi officials by a U.S. court in occupied Germany) in which the presiding judge avers that genocide is “the scientific extermination of a race.” The author cites, however, not the published opinion of the court, but a secondary source. Cooper is thus able to give the name of the judge (who would later testify in Jerusalem against Adolf Eichmann) as “Michael Musman” instead of Michael Musmanno; moreover, while Judge Musmanno did make the statement, he did so at a different trial. The major article in which Lemkin set out his concept of genocide appeared in the periodical American Scholar; Cooper’s citation, however, gives incorrect page numbers. Such want of precision can cause difficulties for readers, though a few inaccuracies can perhaps be overlooked in a book providing such a worthy overall account of Lemkin’s work.

Cooper brings out Lemkin’s enormous role in achieving recognition of genocide as a crime under the law. Lemkin’s recitation of Nazi atrocities in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944 by the Carnegie Endowment...