Genesis of the concept of genocide according to its author from the original sources

Abstract

As is becoming increasingly well-known, the late Raphael Lemkin (19001959), Jewish refugee Polish and American jurist and professor, was both the author of our term genocide and the"driving" force behind the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide (1948), ratified by the United States four decades later (1988). The story of what led him to coin the term and devote his considerable energies and talents to its concretization in the United Nations Convention has yet to be fully told. As the International Editor of his collective papers--more than 20,000 pages of letters, documents, interviews, newspaper clippings, and unpublished manuscripts--I welcome this long overdue tribute to Lemkin, one which deserves the widest possible audience on this fiftieth anniversary of the Convention and almost forty years after his death. This paper is primarily an examination of four primary sources, two published and two unpublished, as well as some ancillary literature: his wellpublicized (1944) work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 674 pp.); my own publication of his otherwise unknown and untitled manuscript (1992) Raphael Lemkin's Thoughts on Nazi Genocide: Not Guilty? (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 375 pp.); his unpublished autobiography, Totally Unofficial; and his unpublished and somewhat incomplete and unknown manuscript Introduction to the Study of Genocide. The true genesis of Lemkin's concept of genocide, as well as his own comments about the origins of his own thinking, may prove somewhat surprising and not at all what has been heretofore believe.