Table Of ContentRaphael Lemkin and the
Struggle for the Genocide
Convention
John Cooper
Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the
Genocide Convention
Also by John Cooper
EAT AND BE SATISFIED: A Social History of Jewish Food
PRIDE VERSUS PREJUDICE: Jewish Doctors and Lawyers in England, 1890–1990
Raphael Lemkin and the
Struggle for the Genocide
Convention
John Cooper
© John Cooper 2008
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-51691-5
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Formative Years in Poland 6
2 Escape from Poland 26
3 Early Years in the United States 40
4 The Publication of His Master Work and the
Nuremberg Tribunal 56
5 The United Nations Resolution on Genocide 76
6 1947, The First Draft of the Convention 88
7 Private Life 111
8 Yale and Geneva 119
9 Paris, Preliminary Discussion of the Convention 143
10 The First Reading of the Convention 151
11 The Convention is Adopted 164
12 The International Campaign for Ratification of
the Convention 173
13 The United States Senate and the Convention 189
14 The Genocide Convention: Its Supporters and Enemies 209
15 The History of Genocide 230
16 The History of Genocide: Case Studies 243
17 Closing Years 260
Conclusion 272
Appendix 280
Notes 283
Bibliography 327
Index 331
v
Acknowledgements
After his death, the correspondence and other papers of Raphael Lemkin
were split up and donated to three different organizations: to the American
Jewish Historical Society, where they were deposited at the Center for Jewish
History in New York; to the New York Public Library; and to the Jacob Rader
Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives located at the Hebrew Union
College in Cincinnati, Ohio. Without the sustained help of the librarians
and archivists at these three libraries and elsewhere, this book could not
have been written. In the United States, I was guided through the State
Department Papers by staff in the National Archives in Washington and
assisted by librarians at the United Nations Library in New York; at Columbia
University in connection with the archives of the Carnegie Corporation; at
the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; and at Yivo again based at the
Center for Jewish History, New York. Staff at Yale and Duke University
answered my queries and also furnished me with material.
I could not have made forays into the United States without the support
and hospitality of my brother Rabbi Dr Martin Cooper and his wife Zephyr.
They not only provided me with a loving base away from home, but my
brother tracked down material from newspapers on Lemkin and arranged
for one of his congregants, Jack Braun, to translate some of the family cor-
respondence of Lemkin which was in Yiddish. He also put me in contact
with Maria Kirakova and Dr William Korey, whose help I gratefully
acknowledge.
In London I owe much to the staff, particularly at the Wiener Library, the
National Archives at Kew, the British Library and my local Swiss Cottage
Library. I am also indebted to Professor Michael Alpert and Professor Kenneth
Cmiel for their helpful advice, and to the late Graham Drucker for providing
me with some important journal articles which I might otherwise have
missed.
Carole Malkin read the book in manuscript, and I would like to thank her
for her invaluable suggestions for its improvement, many of which I have
adopted.
I would like to thank Nancy Steiner Ehrlich and the late Ruth Wetter for
their memories of Lemkin and Mrs Ehrlich for sending me photocopies of
pages from a book on Rainer Maria Rilke which Raphael Lemkin had
annotated. To Saul Lemkin, the nephew of Raphael Lemkin and his only
surviving relative, I am indebted for many fascinating conversations
about his uncle and their family.
vi
Acknowledgements vii
My wife Judy has lived with this project as long as I have and kept me
going when I was encountering difficulties with the research, and I much
appreciate her help and never failing optimism. Our son Zaki acted as my
agent and made certain that the results of my research finally reached
publication. I am truly grateful to him for his invaluable support.
I would like to thank my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Michael Strang,
and his assistant Ruth Ireland for supporting this project and for their assist-
ance throughout the development of the book and Vidhya Jayaprakash and
her team in India for the editing of the manuscript. If there are any errors of
fact or judgement in the book, the faults are mine.
JOHN COOPER
London, October 2007
Introduction
The concept of genocide and the United Nations Genocide Convention are
well-known, but the inventor of both the word and the landmark i nstrument
of international law, Raphael Lemkin, is a figure, who has been eclipsed and
over-shadowed by contemporaries. This book is an attempt to correct the
record, by providing the first full biographical account of his life and his
struggle to persuade the United Nations to adopt and ratify the convention.
At the same time, an evaluation is also made of Lemkin’s massive unpublished
history of genocide.
For over two decades after Lemkin’s death, he disappeared from public
memory. The legal machinery he had constructed for the trial of mass
murderers was fast rusting into obsolescence and seemed beyond repair; his
life-work had ended in frustrating failure. Then in December 1983 at the
prompting of Dr William Korey, the research director of an international
organization, the New York Public Library staged a public exhibition of the
voluminous papers which had once belonged to Raphael Lemkin. The
opening of the exhibition was timed to coincide with the thirty-fifth
anniversary of the passing of the Genocide Convention by the UN General
Assembly and staged to revive the flagging campaign in the US Senate for
the ratification of the treaty. Among the papers in this archive were Lemkin’s
unfinished autobiography, provisionally entitled ‘Unofficial Man’, and
correspondence with diplomats about the convention.1 I resolved that when
I had time from my professional career as a lawyer, I would visit the New
York Public Library and examine this material on the one-man campaign
against genocide. But I had to wait a number of years for this opportunity.
Raphael Lemkin died penniless in June 1959, his vast horde of papers
being split up among three different archives; and he had more or less disap-
peared from public view. An early article on his career published in the
autumn of 1982 was entitled ‘Unofficial Man: the Rise and Fall of Raphael
Lemkin’ which seemed to epitomize this. In some ways it was miraculous
that any of his correspondence and memoranda had survived. Lemkin was
perennially in debt because he spent all his limited resources on his
11
2 Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention
campaigning and became as ingenious as Mr Micawber in warding off
pressing creditors. Towards the end of 1948, when Lemkin failed to pay
storage charges for a collection of his documents, the company holding
them put the correspondence up for sale as waste paper. One of the bidders
after paying the sum of $12 for the papers realized that they contained
valuable historical material and tried to restore them to Lemkin.2
Lemkin’s unpublished memoir, ‘Totally Unofficial’, suffers from a number
of omissions which detracts from its value as a source for his life. It is a
curiously impersonal account, rarely conjuring up memorable sketches of
close family members; we know virtually nothing about his father, apart
from the fact that he was a farmer, an unusual occupation for a Jew in
Tsarist Russia; everything is curiously one-dimensional. His close collaborator
in the fight for the convention, James Rosenberg, the distinguished lawyer,
is left out of his account; so too, are his opponents, Roger Nash Baldwin, the
civil liberties reformer and Professor Vespasian Pella. We know next to
nothing about the schools he attended, his higher education in Poland and
abroad, and his mentors in the Polish legal system. He is reticent about his
Jewish and Zionist connections, and says hardly anything about the clash
of nationalities in Poland and the Ukraine after the First World War, in
which Jews were victimized, and which must have influenced his thinking.
Despite the persecution of Jewish lawyers in Poland during the 1930s,
Lemkin developed a thriving practice. How was he able to achieve this? The
questions about the gaps and missing details in his account of his life are
endless. Moreover, he was still working on his autobiography at the time of
his death and the last chapters were never completed.
The first and, for a long time, the only biography of Raphael Lemkin was
by James J. Martin, a Holocaust denier, and was entitled The Man Who
Invented Genocide. The Public Career and Consequences of Raphael Lemkin
(1984). Martin claimed that Lemkin published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe
in 1944 under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, ‘staffed in part with some of the most influential and most implaca-
ble exponents for global war with Germany, well before it took place’. The
volume was destined according to Martin ‘to become one of the most fateful
works in the history of political thought in the 20th century’, although ‘it
was authored by an almost total obscurity, one Raphael Lemkin ... there were
grounds for suspecting that his name was a cover for the work of a high-
powered committee’. Martin further provocatively maintained that Lemkin’s
reprinting of a large number of German wartime occupation decrees turned
his book into ‘a compendium of second-hand and third-hand claims, allega-
tions and insinuations. Lemkin had actually witnessed nothing he reported,
especially that part of his work which pretended to be a reliable testimony
to the extermination of part of Europe’s Jews’. Again, ‘so, a global press
campaign established the reputation for the new word and crime, genocide,
which its author in a book of over 700 pages failed to support with a single
