Raphael Lemkin et le concept de génocide

Abstract

Raphael Lemkin and the concept of genocide“Genocide” is a word coined in 1943 to describe what Winston Churchill famously called a “crime without a name”. Its emergence and reception is historically specific to the last years of the World War. The often contested term “genocide” was created by Raphael Lemkin on the basis of his personal and intellectual experiences in the Holocaust and his flight from Warsaw where he served as State Prosecutor until 1939. Consequently he meant the term to bridge both the murder of European Jewry and the destruction of the Polish nation. His influential book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), where the word first appeared, describes the events of 1933-1943, and reveals how Lemkin’s attempt to find “one generic concept” to legally criminalize mass murder derived from the events of those years proved difficult to generalize later. This article also explains why the United States government feared ratifying the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Crime of Genocide because of its use in American racial politics during the Cold War.