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Raphael Lemkin (; 24 June 1900 – 28 August 1959) was a Polish lawyer who is known for coining the term "genocide" and for campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention, which legally defines the act. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he fled the country and sought asylum in the United States, where he became an academic at Duke University and campaigned vigorously to raise international awareness of the atrocities that the Axis powers were committing across occupied Europe. It was amidst this environment of World War II that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policy.
As a young Jewish law student who was deeply conscious of antisemitism and the persecution of Jews, Lemkin learned about the Ottoman genocide of the Armenian people during World War I and was deeply disturbed by the absence of international provisions to charge and punish those who were responsible for organizing and executing it. In his view, the suffering of the Jews was part of a larger pattern of like-minded atrocities occurring around the world and throughout history, such as the Holodomor.
In either 1943 or 1944, Lemkin coined the term "genocide" from two words: genos (, 'family, clan, tribe, race, stock, kin') γένος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, on Perseus and -cide (, 'killing'). It was included in the 1944 work of research Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, wherein he documented the mass killings of the peoples that had been deemed "Untermensch" () by the Nazi Party. The concept of genocide was defined by Lemkin to refer to the various extermination campaigns that Nazi Germany conducted in an attempt to wipe out entire ethnic groups, including the Holocaust, in which he personally lost 49 family members.
After World War II, Lemkin worked on the legal team of American jurist Robert H. Jackson, who served as the chief U.S. prosecutor among the Allied powers at the Nuremberg trials. The now-defined concept of genocide was non-existent in any form of international laws at the time, and this became one of the reasons for Lemkin's view that the trials did not serve complete justice on prosecuting Nazi atrocities against racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Lemkin committed the rest of his life to preventing the rise of "future Adolf Hitler" by pushing for an appropriate international convention. On 9 December 1948, the United Nations approved the Genocide Convention, with many of its clauses based on Lemkin's proposals.
As a youth, Lemkin was fascinated by the subject of atrocities and would often question his mother about such events as the Sack of Carthage, Mongol invasions and conquests and the persecution of . Lemkin apparently came across the concept of mass atrocities while, at the age of 12, reading Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz, in particular the passage where Nero threw Christians to the lions. About these stories, Lemkin wrote, "a line of blood led from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to the Białystok pogrom." In his writings, Lemkin demonstrated a belief central to his thinking throughout his life: the suffering of Jews in eastern Poland was part of a larger pattern of injustice and violence that stretched back through history and around the world.D. Irvin-Erickson, "Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide", University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, p.24
The Lemkin family farm was located in an area in which fighting between Russian and German troops occurred during World War I. The family buried their books and valuables before taking shelter in a nearby forest. During the fighting, artillery fire destroyed their home and German troops seized their crops, horses and livestock. Lemkin's brother Samuel eventually died of pneumonia and malnutrition while the family remained in the forest.
After graduating from a local trade school in Białystok Lemkin began the study of linguistics at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine). He was a polyglot, fluent in nine languages and reading fourteen. His first published book was a 1926 translation of the Hayim Nahman Bialik Hebrew novella "Behind the Fence" into Polish, with the title Noah and Marinka.Fogel, Joshua. "Khayim-Nakhmen Byalik (Chaim Nachman, Hayim Nahman Bialik)". Yiddish Leksikon. Quote: "Noyekh un marinke (Noah and Marinka) (Warsaw, 1921)". Posted 7 January 2015, accessed 10 July 2022. It was in Białystok that Lemkin became interested in laws against mass atrocities after learning about the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire,Yair Auron. The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide. — Transaction Publishers, 2004. — p. 9:
...when Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he cited the 1915 annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide"
William Schabas. Genocide in international law: the crimes of crimes. — Cambridge University Press, 2000. — p. 25: Lemkin's interest in the subject dates to his days as a student at Lvov University, when he intently followed attempts to prosecute the perpetration of the massacres of the Armenians
A. Dirk Moses. Genocide and settler society: frontier violence and stolen indigenous children in Australian history. — Berghahn Books, 2004. — p. 21: "Indignant that the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide had largely escaped prosecution, Lemkin, who was a young state prosecutor in Poland, began lobbying in the early 1930s for international law to criminalize the destruction of such groups." then later the experience of Assyrians Raphael Lemkin – EuropaWorld, 22 June 2001 massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre. He became interested in War crime upon learning about the 1921 trial of Soghomon Tehlirian for the assassination of Talaat Pasha.
After reading about the 1921 assassination of Talat Pasha, the main perpetrator of the Armenian genocide, in Berlin by Soghomon Tehlirian, Lemkin asked Professor why Talat Pasha could not have been tried for his crimes in a German court. Makarewicz, a national-conservative who believed that Jews and Ukrainians should be expelled from Poland if they refused to assimilate, answered that the doctrine of state sovereignty gave governments the right to conduct internal affairs as they saw fit: "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them, and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing." Lemkin replied, "But the Armenians are not chickens". His eventual conclusion was that "Sovereignty, I argued, cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people". (2025). 9780812293418, University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 9780812293418
Lemkin then moved on to Heidelberg University in Germany to study philosophy, returning to Lwów to study law in 1926.
During the 1920s, Lemkin was involved in Zionist activities. He was a columnist in the Warsaw-based Yiddish Zionist newspaper Tsienistishe velt (The Zionist world). Some scholars think that his Zionism had an influence on his conception of the idea of genocide, but there is a debate about the nature of this influence.
In 1933 Lemkin made a presentation to the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. In 1934 Lemkin, under pressure from the Polish Foreign Minister for comments made at the Madrid conference, resigned his position and became a private solicitor in Warsaw. While in Warsaw, Lemkin attended numerous lectures organized by the Free Polish University, including the classes of Emil Stanisław Rappaport and .
In 1937, Lemkin was appointed a member of the Polish mission to the 4th Congress on Criminal Law in Paris, where he also introduced the possibility of defending peace through criminal law. Among the most important of his works of that period are a compendium of Polish criminal fiscal law, Prawo karne skarbowe (1938) and a French-language work, La réglementation des paiements internationaux, regarding international trade law (1939).
Although he managed to save his own life, he lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust; The only members of Lemkin's family in Europe who survived the Holocaust were his brother, Elias, and his brother's wife and two sons, who had been sent to a Soviet Gulag. Lemkin did however successfully help his brother and family to emigrate to Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1948. After arriving in the United States, at the invitation of McDermott, Lemkin joined the law faculty at Duke University in North Carolina in 1941.For more information on this period, see During the Summer of 1942 Lemkin lectured at the School of Military Government at the University of Virginia. He also wrote Military Government in Europe, a preliminary version of what would become, in two years, his magnum opus, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In 1943 Lemkin was appointed consultant to the US Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration and later became a special adviser on foreign affairs to the War Department, largely due to his expertise in international law.
In November 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. This book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II, along with the definition of the term genocide.Raphael Lemkin (2025). 9781584779018, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Division of International Law. . ISBN 9781584779018 Lemkin's idea of genocide as an offence against international law was widely accepted by the international community and was one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials. In 1945 to 1946, Lemkin became an advisor to Supreme Court of the United States Justice and Nuremberg Trial chief counsel Robert H. Jackson. The book became one of the foundational texts in Holocaust studies, and the study of totalitarianism, mass violence, and genocide studies.D. Irvin-Erickson, "Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide", University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, p.112
Lemkin presented a draft resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty to a number of countries, in an effort to persuade them to sponsor the resolution. With the support of the United States, the resolution was placed before the General Assembly for consideration. Among his supporters at the UN there were the delegates of Lebanon, and Lemkin is said to have considered Karim Azkoul in particular as an ally. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally presented and adopted on 9 December 1948. In 1951, Lemkin only partially achieved his goal when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into force, after the 20th nation had ratified the treaty.
Lemkin's broader concerns over genocide, as set out in his Axis Rule, also embraced what may be considered as non-physical, namely, psychological acts of genocide. The book also detailed the various techniques which had been employed to achieve genocide.
Although Lemkin was a Zionist through his entire life, during this period he downplayed his Zionist sympathies in order to convince the Arab and Muslim delegates in the UN to support the UN genocide convention. Between 1953 and 1957, Lemkin worked directly with representatives of several governments, such as Egypt, to outlaw genocide under the domestic penal codes of these countries. Lemkin also worked with a team of lawyers from Arab delegations at the United Nations to build a case to prosecute French officials for genocide in Algeria.D. Irvin-Erickson, "Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide", University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, p.217
Lemkin also applied the term 'genocide' in his 1953 article "Soviet Genocide in Ukraine", which he presented as a speech in New York City. Although the speech itself does not use the word "Holodomor", Lemkin asserts that an intentional program of starvation was the "third prong" of Soviet Russification of Ukraine, and disagrees that the deaths were simply a matter of disastrous economic policy because of the substantially Ukrainian ethnic profile of small farms in Ukraine at the time.Raphael Lemkin, "Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine"
The United States, Lemkin's adopted country, did not ratify the Genocide Convention during his lifetime. He believed that his efforts to prevent genocide had failed. "The fact is that the rain of my work fell on a fallow plain," he wrote, "only this rain was a mixture of the blood and tears of eight million innocent people throughout the world. Included also were the tears of my parents and my friends."D. Irvin-Erickson, "Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide", University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, pp. 1, 229 Lemkin was not widely known until the 1990s, when international prosecutions of genocide began in response to atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and "genocide" began to be understood as the worst crime of all crimes.D. Irvin-Erickson, "Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide", University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, pp. 1, 2
In 1989 he was awarded, posthumously, the Four Freedoms Award for the Freedom of Worship.
Lemkin is the subject of the plays Lemkin's House by Catherine Filloux (2005) and If The Whole Body Dies: Raphael Lemkin and the Treaty Against Genocide by Robert Skloot (2006). He was also profiled in the 2014 American documentary film, Watchers of the Sky.
Every year, The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights ( T’ruah) gives the Raphael Lemkin Human Rights Award to a layperson who draws on his or her Jewish values to be a human rights leader.
On 20 November 2015, Lemkin's article Soviet genocide in Ukraine was added to the Russian index of "extremist publications", whose distribution in Russia is forbidden.
On 15 September 2018 the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation (www.ucclf.ca) and its supporters in the US unveiled the world's first Ukrainian/English/Hebrew/Yiddish plaque honouring Lemkin for his recognition of the tragic famine of 1932–1933 in the Soviet Union, the Holodomor, at the Ukrainian Institute of America, in New York City, marking the 65th anniversary of Lemkin's 1953 address, "Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine".
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