A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power
can not live while the remnants of the Jewish people of Poland, of whom I am a representative, are perishing…
By my death I wish to express my strongest protest against the inactivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of Jewish people. I know how little human life is worth, especially today. But as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to destroying the indifference of those who are able and should act.26
Szmul Zygielbojm took an overdose of sleeping pills in his Paddington flat on May 12, 1943. News that the Nazis had crushed the Warsaw ghetto uprising and liquidated its inhabitants reached London and Washington the day of his memorial service.27
The New York Times published Zygielbojm’s suicide letter on June 4, 1943, under the headline “Pole’s Suicide Note Pleads for Jews” with the further headline “He Denounced Apathy.” The last line of the Times piece suggested that Zygielbojm “may have achieved more in his death than in his life.” In fact, he failed to alter Allied policy in either state.28
In Their Own Words
Back in Washington, Raphael Lemkin, too, thought of taking his own life but concluded he was too “peculiarly placed” to bow out. After all, while others were mulling atrocity prevention for the first time, he had been thinking about it for more than a decade. He identified himself with the cause and quickly began to personify it. When he read the chilling reports from his homeland, he did what Zyegielbojm had done initially—he placed faith in information. Lemkin also played to his strengths: law and language.
In November 1944 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, by then a 712-page book of the rules and decrees imposed by the Axis powers and their client states in nineteen Nazioccupied countries and territories in Europe. Having begun gathering these laws while in Sweden, Lemkin had continued the compilation as part of his service to the U.S. government. Whatever Lemkin’s stated aspirations to appeal to a popular audience, Axis Rule was a dry and staunchly legalistic reference book.29 It included proposals for postwar restitution of property to the dispossessed and for the reimbursement of millions to foreign workers who had been forced into labor in Germany. It also restated his 1933 Madrid proposal to outlaw the targeted destruction of groups and urged the creation of an international treaty that could be used as a basis for trying and punishing perpetrators.
However useful the book’s recommendations, Lemkin believed his real contribution lay in reproducing the stark collection of decrees (which accounted for some 360 of the book’s pages). These, he was certain, would do wonders to combat widespread disbelief and despondency, especially in the Anglo-American reader, who, he wrote, “with his innate respect for human rights and human personality may be inclined to believe that the Axis regime could not possibly have been as cruel and ruthless as it has been hitherto described.” By presenting documents authored by Hitler and his advisers, he was ensuring that nobody in the United States could say he was exaggerating or propagandizing.
A few scholars still rejected atrocity reports and tried to relativize German responsibility. The harshest review of Axis Rule appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in 1946. The reviewer, Melchior Palyi, blamed Lemkin for his failure to explore the “extenuating circumstances” for Nazi behavior. According to Palyi, Lemkin had written a “prosecutor’s brief” rather than an “impartial” inquiry. The reviewer claimed that almost every one of the nine charges Lemkin made against the Nazis could be made against the Allies. “Of course,” the reviewer wrote, “there is this substantial difference: that the Nazis shamelessly displayed their intentionally planned misdeeds, while the western Allies stumble into illegal practices and cover them with humanitarian or other formulas.” 30
But most reviews were favorable and did not dabble in such false equivalency. The American Journal of International Law described Lemkin’s collection of Nazi legislation as a “tour de force.” 31 Another reviewer wrote, “The terrorism of the German police is well enough known, but to see matters described in cold legal terminology creates in one perhaps an even greater sense of indignation.” 32 At this time Lemkin was somewhat conflicted about the roots of responsibility and the relative role of individual and collective guilt, theories of accountability that continue to compete today. On the one hand, Lemkin urged the punishment of those individuals responsible for Nazi horrors. On the other, he espoused an early version of the theory, put forth again recently by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, that ascribed guilt not only to the perpetrators of the crimes but to their fellow citizens who failed to stop them and often appeared actively supportive.33 In Axis Rule Lemkin wrote, “The present destruction of Europe would not be complete and thorough had the German people not accepted freely [the Nazi] plan, participated voluntarily in its execution, and up to this point profited greatly therefrom.” He refused to accept the line that all but the most senior German authorities were just “obeying orders,” insisting that “all important classes and groups of the population have voluntarily assisted Hitler in the scheme of world domination.” 34
In January 1945 the New York Times Book Review devoted its cover to Axis Rule. “Out of its dry legalism,” the reviewer wrote, “there emerge the contours of the monster that now bestrides the earth.” This monster “gorges itself on blood, bestializes its servants and perverts some of the noblest human emotions to base ends, all with the semblance of authority and spurious legality which leave the individual helpless.” The reviewer credited Lemkin with capturing “what Axis rule in occupied Europe means and what it would have meant to us had it ever spread to our shores.” But he faulted Lemkin’s sweeping ascription of blame. By finding “innate viciousness” in the German people, Lemkin was feeding “nazism-in-reverse.” “Surely,” the reviewer wrote, “just because he is a Pole Dr. Lemkin would not want to be held personally responsible for all the acts of the Pilsudski regime.” 35
A Word Is a Word Is a Word
Axis Rule is not remembered for stirring this once and future debate about the nature of individual and collective guilt. Instead, it is known because it was in this rather arcane, legalistic tome that Lemkin followed through on his pledge to himself and to his imagined co-conspirator, Winston Churchill. Ever since Lemkin had heard Churchill’s 1941 radio address, he had been determined to find a new word to replace “barbarity” and “vandalism,” which had failed him at the 1933 Madrid conference. Lemkin had hunted for a term that would describe assaults on all aspects of nation-hood—physical, biological, political, social, cultural, economic, and religious. He wanted to connote not only full-scale extermination but also Hitler’s other means of destruction: mass deportation, the lowering of the birthrate by separating men from women, economic exploitation, progressive starvation, and the suppression of the intelligentsia who served as national leaders.
Lemkin, the former philology student, knew that his word choice mattered a great deal. He weighed a number of candidates. “Mass murder” was inadequate because it failed to incorporate the singular motive behind the perpetration of the crime he had in mind. “Denationalization,” a word that had been used to describe attempts to destroy a nation and wipe out its cultural personality, failed because it had come to mean depriving citizens of citizenship. And “Germanization,” “Magyarization,” and other specified words connoting forced assimilation of culture came up short because they could not be applied universally and because they did not convey biological destruction.36
Lemkin read widely in linguistic and semantic