Winston Churchill called it in 1944 “the crime without a name”.
And the fact is that there was no term, no word, to express the gigantic and enormous barbarism that the Nazis committed against the Jewish people, which, according to estimates, resulted in the murder of six million men, women and children.
Two out of every three Jews counted in Europe before World War II were exterminated.
In August, September and October 1942 alone, the Nazis perpetrated around half a million murders of Jews each month, that is, 15,000 Jews were killed every day, according to a published study led by Lewi Stone, a professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University.
However, there was no word to describe this systematic and industrial massacre of a collective, which had been unknown until then.
“Something unprecedented, terrifying happened,” in the words of Israeli historian and Holocaust studies expert Yehuda Bauer.
“For the first time in the bloody history of mankind, in a modern state, in the center of a civilized continent, a decision was set in motion whose aim was to locate, search, mark, isolate from their environment, dispossess, humiliate, concentrate, transport and murder every single member of an ethnic group.”
This “crime without a name” finally got one thanks to the determination and tenacity of a Polish Jew.
His name was Raphael Lemkin and it was he who coined the term “genocide”, a word he created from the Greek noun “genos” (race, people) and the Latin suffix “cide” (to kill).
Thanks to his efforts, genocide, defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” was recognized by international law.
The day it all changed
There is a date in the biography of Lemkin, born in 1900 in Bezwodne (then belonging to the Russian Empire, from 1919 to Poland and from 1945 to Belarus), that marked his life: March 15, 1921.
On that day, in Berlin, a young Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian murdered Talat Pasha, who until three years earlier had been Minister of the Interior of the Ottoman Empire, in the middle of the street.
He did it out of revenge, as he held Pasha responsible for the massacre of his village, having been the main orchestrator of the persecution of Armenians domiciled in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.
According to several sources, between 1915 and 1923, about 1.5 million of them were exterminated.
Lemkin was 20 years old at the time, living 885 kilometers from Berlin and studying linguistics.
But when the murder trial against the young Armenian (who, by the way, was acquitted) began and details of the extermination of his people at the hands of the Turks came to light, he was deeply shocked.
So much so that he decided to put linguistics aside and devote himself to law.
“I realized that the world should adopt a law against this type of racial or religious murder,” Lemkin wrote in his autobiography, “Totally Off the Record.
And that is what he dedicated his life to from that moment on: to ensure that, in the name of universal justice, international law would establish a law condemning this type of mass murder.
Even before, when he was only 12 years old, he had come face to face with the concept of genocide when he read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel “Quo Vadis”, especially when he came across the passage in which Christians were thrown to the lions.
At first, and not having a specific word to name these massacres, Lemkin designated them as “crimes of barbarism”, understanding as such those “exterminating actions” carried out for “political and religious” motives.
“When a nation is destroyed, it is not the cargo of a ship that is destroyed, but a substantial part of humanity, with a whole spiritual heritage that all mankind shares,” he said in the paper he prepared to present at the 1933 conference on criminal law held in Madrid.
But in the end he was unable to attend: the Polish authorities did not want to antagonize Hitler -who already in 1919 had written that the “Jewish question” should be solved by the total elimination of the Jews from Europe through efficient planning- and denied him a visa to travel to Spain.
And by then Lemkin was already a jurist of great prestige.
Flight from Poland
As a Jew, things became increasingly difficult for him in Poland, especially after the Nazis occupied it in 1939.
Fortunately, that same year he managed to escape his country and the atrocious fate that awaited him there.
His parents did not manage to flee and were murdered in the Auschwitz extermination camp.
In all, Lemkin lost 49 family members in the Holocaust.
Lemkin set sail for the United States, where he devoted himself to speaking out loudly and clearly against the brutalities of the Nazis while teaching at Duke University in North Carolina.
In 1944 he published the book “The Power of the Axis in Occupied Europe”, in which he recounted all the atrocities committed by the Nazis with the aim of exterminating the Jewish people and where the word “genocide” appears for the first time.
But “genocide” was only a way of giving a name to what until then had no name.
Lemkin’s great struggle focused on getting international law to recognize the crime of genocide.
In search of a law
In the Nuremberg trials (the trials that began in November 1945 in that German city and in which leaders and collaborators of the Nazi regime were seated in the dock), the prosecutors used the word “genocide”.
But it was not written on any of the 190 pages of the verdict.
All 18 of those convicted at Nuremberg were convicted of crimes against humanity, not genocide.
“The blackest day of my life,” Lemkin lamented.
However, a year later, in December 1946, the General Assembly of the newly created UN passed Resolution 96, which for the first time in international law referred to the “crime of genocide”, meaning “a denial of the right of existence to entire human groups, just as murder is the denial to a human individual of the right to live”.
And it concludes: “The General Assembly affirms that genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns and for which the perpetrators and their accomplices must be punished”.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN in 1948 and subsequently ratified by each member state.
The International Court of Justice (the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, established in 1945 and based in The Hague) would henceforth be responsible for trying crimes of genocide.
Lemkin invested his entire life and all his savings in achieving this.
In fact, when he died of a heart attack at the age of 59, he was absolutely destitute.