The etymology of genocide and the myth of ‘never again’

Ever since Raphael Lemkin heard Winston Churchill’s August 1941 broadcast on the BBC, in which the prime minister declared, “The whole of Europe has been wrecked and trampled down by the mechanical weapons and barbaric fury of the Nazis … As his armies advance, whole districts are exterminated. We are in the presence of a crime without a name,” the Polish lawyer became transfixed by one singular mission: to find a word that replaced “barbarity” and “vandalism” to describe the actions of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Since 1933, writes Samantha Power in her pioneering book “A Problem From Hell,” Lemkin had sought a term that would describe the assault on all aspects “of nationhood — physical, biological, political, social, cultural, economic and religious.”

Mass murder failed to connote the full scale of Hitler’s Final Solution: mass deportation, starvation, suppression of the intelligentsia, the control of mass media and the singular motive behind the perpetration of the crime.

Coining the word “genocide” from the Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin root of cide (killing), Lemkin ushered in a new era, in which the crimes of the past, present and future finally had a name.

In 1944, writing in response to what was occurring in Europe, the Jewish-born Lemkin wrote in his book, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” that genocide meant “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

The act of genocide, according to Lemkin, deprives a group of people personal security, liberty, health and dignity. He continued:

“Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.”

In sum, Lemkin meant that a group does not have to be physically exterminated to experience genocide. To be stripped of all cultural traces of their identity, in his view, amounted to the act.

For Lemkin, redefining Churchill’s words of “barbarity” and “vandalism” was personal. While he himself was able to escape the horrors of the Holocaust, managing to leave Warsaw, Poland, in September of 1939, he lost 49 family members to the Final Solution, with only his brother, Elias, surviving from Lemkin’s immediate family.

To coin the name only meant so much to the lawyer. The act of criminalizing it was the natural next step.

His indefatigable efforts for making it so has since fundamentally altered international law, geopolitics and the study of history. It has, writes the National World War II Museum, transformed “the way we understand mass violence in the modern world.”

Lemkin’s quest

Since he was a child, Lemkin had been keenly fascinated by the subject of atrocity.

Born on June 24, 1900, on a small farm near the Polish town of Wolkowysk, the Jewish-born Lemkin was very aware of antisemitic pogroms occurring in his home nation, in which 70 Jews were killed and 90 were seriously injured in the massacre in the Bialystok region in 1906.

By the age of 12, Lemkin had read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s “Quo Vadis?” in which the author recounted the Roman emperor Nero throwing Christians to the lions. By his own account, Lemkin would often question his mother surrounding events such as the sack of Carthage, the Mongol invasions and the persecution of Huguenots.

“I was an impressionable youngster, leaning to sentimentality,” Lemkin later wrote of himself. “I was appalled by the frequency of the evil … and, above all, by the impunity coldly relied upon by the guilty.”

While studying linguistics at the University of Lvov in 1921, Lemkin learned about the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, the Armenian survivor who assassinated Mehmed Talaat. Talaat, the former Turkish interior minister, had presided over the killing squads that bayoneted, bludgeoned and starved over one million Armenians.

Talaat had gone unpunished — a fact that Lemkin could not understand. According to Lemkin, one of his professors told him that there was no law under which Talaat could be arrested.

“Is it a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but killing more than a million people for a dictator is not considered to be one?” Lemkin later wrote. “This is a most contradictory thing.”

Appalled, Lemkin soon thereafter switched his degree from philology to law, committing himself to drafting an international law that would commit Poland, as well as other nations, to stopping the targeted destruction of ethnic, national and religious groups.

In an interview with CBS in 1949, Lemkin said: “I became interested in genocide because it has happened so many times; it happened to the Armenians, who were treated very harshly at the Versailles Peace Conference because the criminals guilty of committing their genocide were not punished.

“They [the Armenians] created a terrorist organization that took justice into its own hands. The assassination of Talaat Pasha in Berlin is very instructive. A man [Soghomon Tehlirian], whose mother was killed during the genocide, killed Talaat Pasha. … As a lawyer, I thought that a crime should not be punished by its victims, but by a court under international law.”

Lemkin submitted a proposal to the 5th International Conference on Criminal Law in Madrid in 1933 to create laws defining crimes of “barbarism” and “vandalism.” However, these early attempts at defining mass atrocity went unheeded by the legal community.

A word becomes law

Throughout the interwar, war and post World War II period, Lemkin received pushback from those in government, the legal community and Holocaust survivors themselves.

Survivors of the Nazi regime often conveyed that attempts to put the Holocaust into words failed to encapsulate its horrors.

“Was it ‘like a red-hot iron in my shoulder’” writes Holocaust survivor Jean Améry. “And was this ‘like a blunt wooden stake driven into the base of my head?’ — a simile would not only stand for something else, and in the end we would be led around by the nose in a hopeless carousel of comparisons.

“Pain was what it was,” Améry continued. “There’s nothing further to say about it. Qualities of feeling are incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limits of language’s ability to communicate.”

Yet Lemkin pushed forward, and his tireless efforts paid off.

Participating in the Nuremberg Trials, Lemkin was instrumental in making sure the term genocide was included within as many indictments as possible. While no defendant was tried for genocide — its legal term was still in its infancy — the legal precedent for holding perpetrators of mass violence accountable soon became synonymous with the term of genocide.

In 1948, the lawyer’s nearly two-decade quest to codify the term genocide with international law came to fruition with the passage of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Article 2 of the Convention states:

According to the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a) Killing members of the group;

b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Presently, 153 nations have ratified the convention and agreed “as a matter of law by the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited under international law.”

‘A problem from hell’

Despite this legal precedent, the world has not escaped genocidal violence since the end of the Second World War, with the United Nations and its signatories repeatedly failing to intervene to stop genocides that are in progress.

Loopholes and shortcomings have increasingly plagued the modern world in dealing with nations and groups perpetrating acts of genocide.

“Accusations of genocide have been refuted on the technicalities that targeted groups not named by the Convention, such as groups defined by political leanings, gender, or sexual orientation…” writes the National World War II Museum.

Proving legal intent has been equally difficult.

As the UN website states, “The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

“Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group,” the website reads. “It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. In addition, case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy, even if the definition of genocide in international law does not include that element.”

The convention’s signatories are additionally hamstrung by its inability to persecute genocide.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 1998, operates independently of the UN. At this time, the ICC is the only court that has the authority to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, collectively known as “atrocity crimes.”

However, the court has no police force to make arrests and “cannot retroactively try crimes occurring before its establishment on July 1, 2002, and countries that are not members of the ICC are not subject to its jurisdiction unless they accept it ad hoc or are referred to the ICC by the UN Security Council,” according to the museum.

Since its creation over two decades ago, the court has issued only 60 arrest warrants, tried 32 cases and issued 11 convictions.

Atrocities have and continue to be perpetrated in clear view of the world. The term “never again” writes David Rieff, “might be best defined as ‘Never again would Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.’”

If the term and mechanisms behind “never again” was actually applied, there would be no Cambodia, in which the communist regime known as the Khmer Rouge set in motion a four-year campaign of genocide that would wipe out 2 million people — a quarter of the country’s population.

There would be no Rwanda, in which the Hutus could systematically slaughter 8,000 Tutsi a day for 100 days without any interference.

There would be no Bosnia, in which 100,000 people were killed over the course of three years from 1992 to 1995, including the genocide of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica.

There would be no Darfur, in which the government of Sudan carried out mass atrocities against the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit communities, resulting in the deaths of over 300,000 civilians and the displacement of roughly 2.7 million people.

And finally, while the charge of genocide has not been legally applied to Palestine, a December 2024 report from Amnesty International decried it as such. Since Oct. 7, 2023, more than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed.