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DOCUMENTS FROM STOCKHOLM, the Library of Congress, and friends across Europe continued to arrive in North Carolina. On German actions, they offered detail (food rations and the number of calories allocated to individuals depending on the group of which they were a member) and rumor, of mass executions and deportations. The gathering decrees were part of a larger framework, a system for killing. He used the materials to teach a course at the University of Virginia’s School of Military Government in Charlottesville. Students were impressed.
The idea for a book was intended to make such materials more widely available. “I am from Missouri, show it to me” was the reaction he hoped for, ever optimistic. He wanted to persuade the people of America, by advocacy and evidence, in a tone that was objective and scholarly. He sent a proposal to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, where it ended up on the desk of George Finch, who gave a green light. Finish the manuscript, Lemkin was told, and Carnegie would put the material into a publishable form. They agreed on a length of two hundred pages, an honorarium (five hundred dollars), and modest expenses. The timing was perfect, with war crimes on the international agenda, following the Declaration of St. James’s Palace. In October 1942, President Roosevelt spoke about “barbaric crimes” committed in occupied countries, calling for perpetrators to answer “before courts of law.” He declared that “war criminals” would be made to surrender, that individual responsibility would be established by means of “all available evidence,” and that a United Nations commission for the investigation of war crimes was being created.
Lemkin had valuable raw materials to support these efforts. He agreed to make the decrees available to the board but insisted on a condition: the provenance of each document must be acknowledged. The first page of each document carried a brief note to the effect that the collection had been compiled by Rafael Lemkin when serving on the faculties at Stockholm and Duke Universities and while serving as consultant with the Board of Economic Warfare.
If Lemkin’s mood lifted, he nevertheless remained anxious about the family and was troubled by health problems. Forty-two years old, with dangerously high blood pressure, he ignored medical advice to slow down and rest as ever more information arrived in Washington about mass killings in Europe. In December, the Polish foreign minister in exile published a pamphlet titled “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland.” This was based on material provided by Jan Karski (another graduate of Lwów’s law faculty), who worked with the Polish resistance in Warsaw.
A full year was devoted to the manuscript, although Lemkin allowed himself some breaks. In April 1943, he attended the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington with the Littells, where they chatted with the actors Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni. President Roosevelt arrived, to a cheering crowd, and stood in a black cape just a few paces from Lemkin, Eleanor Roosevelt close by. “Ralph’s impressions were the best,” Littell noted in his diary, “as he had not seen the President before.” Lemkin was struck by the Roosevelts’ “rare spiritual quality.” “How lucky you are,” he told the Littells, “to have two people of such unmistakable capacity for spiritual leadership in the nation.”
Lemkin completed the manuscript in November. Even with material omitted, it ran to more than seven hundred pages, well beyond the length agreed on with Carnegie, which irritated Finch. They agreed on a title—Axis Rule in Occupied Europe—that was unlikely to produce a best seller in Missouri or anywhere else. Lemkin’s preface explained that he wanted decent men and women across the Anglo-Saxon world to know about the ruthless cruelty of the Germans against certain groups, based on “objective information and evidence.” His focus was mainly on the treatment of “Jews, Poles, Slovenes and Russians,” but of at least one group—homosexuals—Lemkin made no mention. He wrote of the misdemeanors of the “Germans,” rather than the Nazis, making but one reference to the “National Socialists,” and argued that “the German people” had “accepted freely” what was planned, participating voluntarily in the measures and profiting greatly from their implementation. The desire to protect groups did not prevent him from singling out the Germans as a group. Lemkin acknowledged the help of a small coterie of friends, offered no dedication, and signed off on November 15, 1943.
Axis Rule was not a light read. Organized to cover “each phase of life” under occupation, the book was divided into three sections. The first eight chapters dealt with “German techniques of occupation,” addressing administrative matters, the role of law and the courts, and diverse matters such as finance, labor, and property. A short chapter addressed “the legal status of the Jews.”
Chapter 9 followed. Lemkin had discarded “barbarity” and “vandalism” and created a new word, an amalgam of the Greek word genos (tribe or race) and the Latin word cide (killing).
To this chapter he gave the title “Genocide.”
In the archives at Columbia University, I found a few remnants of his papers. Among them was a single sheet of lined yellow paper, with Lemkin’s scribblings in pencil. On it, he wrote the word “genocide” more than twenty-five times, before crossing them out and interspersing a few other words. “Extermination.” “Cultural.” “Physical.” He was toying with other possibilities, like “met-enocide.”
In the middle of the page, hidden among the thicket, was another word, crossed out, with a line pointing away from it, like an arrow. The word appears to be “Frank.”
Genocide concerned acts “directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of national groups,” Lemkin wrote in chapter 9. “New conceptions require new terms.” The evolution that led to his choice is unclear. A year earlier, he’d made a proposal to the Polish government in exile in London, using the Polish word ludobójstwo, a literal translation of the German word Völkermord (murder of the peoples), a formulation used by the poet August Graf von Platen (in 1831), then by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). He dropped the word for “genocide,” without offering an explanation. The chosen word offered a reaction against Germany’s “gigantic scheme” of effecting a permanent change to the biology of the occupied territories. The “extermination of nations and ethnic groups” required the intelligentsia to be killed off, culture to be destroyed, wealth transferred. Entire territories would be depopulated, by starvation or other forms of mass killing. Lemkin described the stages of destruction, with examples, like a prosecutor who sets out his case.
The second part of the book set out the measures taken in seventeen occupied countries, from A (Albania) to Y (Yugoslavia). For each territory, the book detailed the stages in which groups were oppressed, including Jews, Poles, and gypsies. Disabled people got a passing mention. His earlier analysis was refined. Once the country was occupied, the targeted group was given a defined status, and then each member of the group was to define himself, in the case of Jews by an armband with a Star of David “at least ten centimetres wide.” A ban on activities followed, then sequestration of property, then a prohibition on free movement and the use of public transport. Then ghettos were created into which the groups were moved, threatened with death if they left. Then came mass transportation from the occupied territories into a central, designated area—the General Government of Hans Frank. That was a liquidation area, initially achieved by reducing food rations to starvation levels, then by gunshot in the ghetto, then by other means. Lemkin knew of the transports, of the use of “special trains” headed to destinations “unknown.” He estimated that nearly two million people had already been murdered.
Lemkin scribbles, undated, ca. 1945
The analysis was detailed and original, supported by evidence set out in the final section of the book, four hundred pages of decrees translated into English. Here were the minutiae, instruments of death recorded, accessible, irrefutable. Many of the documents originated in Poland, signed by Frank, including his first proclamation. “With the establishment of the General Government,” Frank decreed, “the Polish territories have been brought safely within the German sphere of interest.” Lemkin seemed to have Frank in his sights, a lawyer whose views were the antithesis of everything he believed in.
Physically and emotionally exhausted, Lemkin retained a practical perspective. The existing rules were inadequate; something new was needed. A new word was accompanied by a new idea, a global treaty to protect against the extermination of groups, to punish perpetrators before any court in the world. Countries would no longer be free to treat citizens as they wished.