Raphael Lemkin Research Articles

Forcible Transfer Amounting to Genocide

Genocide is described as brutal, genocidal or ethnic group intended to destroy whole or in part. The term genocide was first developed in 1944, when Raphael Lemkin in his book termed genocide as the act of killing a race or ethnic group of people. One of the most recognized instances of Genocide occurred during the World War when Nazi Germany set out to mass-kill Jews. Today, genocide has a lot of relevance and requires careful analysis to understand which actions can be classified under it.

Review: The Destruction of Memory, directed by Tim Slade

Tim Slade, director The Destruction of Memory Icarus Films, New York, 2017, 85 min., http://icarusfilms.com/if-destr The 2017 documentary The Destruction of Memory , based on a book of the same title by architecture critic Robert Bevan, traces the history of the purposeful destruction of architecture, urban infrastructure, and monuments over the course of the twentieth century and into the early 2000s, through conflicts primarily in the Middle East and Europe.1 The film is a feat of archival research, pulling together footage from a number of events from the late nineteenth century forward. Its agenda is simple: to reveal that architecture and other cultural artifacts are frequently strategic targets of war and that their destruction is often more than mere collateral damage. Through interviews with a wide-ranging group of experts in the international arena—lawyers, preservation officers, historians, politicians, and architects—supported by archival photographs and footage, Tim Slade, the film's writer and director, tells a vivid and absorbing story of the deliberate destruction of cultural monuments and the emergence of legal frameworks and institutions designed to protect them. The creation and enforcement of those laws has been and remains the responsibility of a host of largely anonymous bureaucrats. To lay the groundwork, the film opens with perhaps the best known of these, Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a Polish lawyer who is widely credited with coining the term genocide . The film's argument takes as its starting point Lemkin's assertion of a distinction between two forms of genocide: physical and cultural. After experiencing the atrocities of World War I as a child in his native Poland, Lemkin conceived and advocated for legislation and policy to recognize and deal with the perpetrators of mass destruction. Following the war, the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties was created by the Allies to enumerate a list of war crimes, determine breaches of …

Genocide: A World History

Genocide is “ubiquitous in the history of mankind” (3). That was the conclusion advanced by Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term; drew modern attention to the religious, racial, and political extermination or attempted extermination of a people or a group on those or any other grounds; and zealously promoted what became the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Unfortunately, Lemkin had to compromise on the final central wording of the Convention. Its definition was watered down merely (but still importantly) to single out acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such (3).”1This book is a deft, accessible, survey of humankind’s assault on groups out of favor with rulers and hegemonic imperial or national powers. Beginning with a quick glance at the Old Testament (“Thou shall smite them, and utterly destroy them”); the Trojan War; Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War; and Rome’s antipathy toward Carthage, Naimark chronicles ruthless episodes of genocide almost from the beginning of recorded time. “The character of genocide,” he rightly writes, “has many similarities across [the centuries].” At the command of political rulers invoking ideology, gods, and so on, “the killing is intentional, total, and eliminationist” (14).What is unusual in a recounting of genocide, Naimark then discusses the extirpation of whole peoples by the Mongols in what is now Uzbekistan, Iran, and Hungary. Each event was killing by intent (Lemkin’s language). Even before the Mongols, Crusaders “cleansed” the Holy Land of Muslims, Pope Urban II specifically exhorted his “heralds of Christ” to “exterminate” the “vile race” who stood in their way (25).The conquests of New Spain, of the Caribbean island peoples, of North America, of southern Africa, and of Australasia were all in this same tradition of elimination of “the other”—the people in the way, the people whose lands or riches were coveted by the invaders and occupiers. Hardly any incomers are spared, or should be spared—the Whiggish scrutiny of the present.Naimark’s brisk account is on less contestable and less conceivably anachronistic ground, however, when he discusses German genocides against the Herero and Nama in what is now Namibia, the Ottoman Turkish elimination of Armenians in Anatolia, the contemporaneous Ottoman Turkish assaults on the Assyrian Orthodox and Pontic Greek populations in what is now Turkey, the enormity of the Holocaust, the Soviet mass killings of Ukranians and others of their own “peoples”; the Chinese victims of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward (or Backward); and the much more recent targeting of innocent fellow Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge. A penultimate chapter brings this horrific story relatively up to date with a recounting of the genocidal actions of despots and their acolytes in the Sudan and the South Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Serbia.This sober survey of what historians should not neglect is a welcome overview of, and a guide to, events that need much more retrospective investigation and explication. There is nothing interdisciplinary about this book except for its subject matter. But that subject matter does help to remind us of aspects of the past that we may have overlooked, given short shrift, or simply avoided exploring. Now is a time to begin engaging in such a re-examination.

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

ABSTRACTThe biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.

Israel, Palestine, and the Language of Genocide

Israel, Palestine, and the Language of Genocide

A Library Matter of Genocide: The Library of Congress and the Historiography of the Native American Holocaust

For decades, Indigenous experiences of mass killings, atrocities, ethnic cleansing, and assimilation have been marginalized from genocide studies due to the ways in which knowledge is constructed in the field, specifically in terms of its focus on definitions and prototype-based conceptions. This article argues that these exclusions are not merely owed to discourses internal to genocide studies, but are affirmed by conventional library terminologies for the purposes of knowledge organization and information retrieval in the form of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and classification, as applied to books regarding genocidal colonial encounters with Indigenous Peoples. These headings largely exhibit euphemistic tendencies and omissions that often fail to reflect the contents of the materials they seek to describe, not only impeding retrieval of books on this subject, but also their incorporation into current scholarship. To determine the extent to which the assignment of LCSH and call numbers corresponded reasonably to the stated intent of the authors, searches in OCLC’s global WorldCat catalogue were conducted for books related to the Library of Congress subject “Indians of North America” and some variation of the keywords genocide, holocaust, or extermination, yielding a list of 34 titles. The subject headings and classification designations assigned to these books were then analyzed, with particular attention paid to euphemisms for genocide, colonial narratives, the exercise of double standards when compared to non-Indigenous genocides, or outright erasure of genocide-related content. The article argues that Western epistemologies in both genocide studies and library science have marginalized Indigenous genocides, reproducing barriers to discovery and scholarship, and contributing to a social discourse of Native American Holocaust denial. Instead a pragmatic view in library science is proposed, in which claims of genocide on the part of authors are taken as given and which would recognize the legitimacy of Indigenous perspectives concerning their relationship to land and how processes of assimilation (such as Canada’s residential school system) were consistent with Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide. It argues that enabling our ability to name and discuss genocide in North America can contribute to a more honest reckoning with our history and hence the basis for reconciliation and social justice.

East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” by Philippe Sands

Reviewed by: East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” by Philippe Sands David Hawk (bio) Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) ISBN 978-0385350716, 425 pages. Philippe Sands may not be the first person to look at the lives and teachings of Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, examine their seminal contributions to international human rights law, or note that they both attended the same (to North Americans, unfamiliar) law school in East Galicia.1 But a confluence of several coincidences led Sands, a law professor and practicing human rights attorney, to see the promise of an extraordinary story. Or rather, the promise of East West Street’s several intersecting extraordinary stories. The chain of coincidences began with an invitation for Sands to lecture at Jan Kazimierz University Law School in the city now known as Lviv, in the Ukraine where Lauterpacht and Lemkin first studied law. Sands claims, not without reason, that the university marks the origin of the modern system of international justice. Lviv, with its neoclassical architecture and art neuveau trim, was once dubbed the “Paris of the East.” The city has quite a history. At the beginning of Sands’ story, Lviv was called Lemberg. The historic city is also identified on maps as Lvov, Lwow, or Lviv when the city was under alternating German, Polish, Russian, or Ukrainian control. Located at what Sands calls the very fault lines between North and South and East and West Europe, this medium sized city changes sovereign ownership [End Page 246] and control eight times in the course of Sands’ narrative. Lemberg/Lvov/Lwow/Lviv, is located at the Eastern most reaches of what was once the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. It lies at the Western lip of what was then called the Pale of Settlement, the heartland of Eastern European Jewry. This area of South-Central Europe, more aptly termed the The Bloodlands, is where Stalin and Hitler murdered masses of individuals and where armed bands of Poles and Ukrainians fought, when they could, for their bit of turf. This region is where, as Sands puts it, “Jews were targeted or caught in the middle.”2 The second, quite remarkable, coincidence that led to East West Street emerged from Sands’ deep, fascinating, and sometimes investigator-assisted research into his own complicated family history. The recognition that his mother’s parents lived in this same town where Lemkin and Lauterpacht first studied law contributed to his interest in pursuing the narrative. In addition, the author’s great-grandmother was even born on the same street as Lauterpacht: East West Street in Lviv’s next-door village of Zolkiew. (In case readers wonder, the village of Zolkiew also featured a perpendicularly intersecting main-street named North South.) In East West Street, Sands produces a 1911 map of Lwow showing the location of the law faculty, the home of his mother’s family, the home of Lauterpacht, and Lemkin’s three successive residencies while attending university. He adds a wonderful 1854 map of Zolkiew showing the family homes of Lauterpacht and his great-grandmother’s family, and scores of period photographs of the persons and places that figure in the narrative of East West Street, creating even more sense of place and time. As Sands discovered in the course of his research, the coincidences tragically continue. His grandmother perished at the same extermination camp as Lauterpacht’s parents: Treblinka. In Sands’ great-grandmother’s case, she was transported there, he relates, on the same cattle-car train as three of Freud’s sisters. Much of East West Street’s narrative is driven by Sands’ personal search for family history. His mother was one of the “hidden children” of the Holocaust, saved by an evangelical British missionary devoted to protecting Jewish children. Sands’ infant mother knew next to nothing about her rescue. Sands tracks down information about her rescue, uncovering this once hidden story. His mother’s father, Leon Buchholz, was born and raised in Lemberg/Lviv; although he is one of the central characters of East West Street, he would not speak about his life...

1947

Elisabeth Åsbrink. 1947. Stockholm. Natur & Kultur. 2016. 296 pages. This fascinating, episodic study of the year 1947 is a microhistory of events, often meaningful for social rather than political reasons, that includes close-ups of the author’s family background. Elisabeth Åsbrink focuses on events in Europe with excursions to the Middle East and the United States. By 1947 the post–World War II chaos had settled a little; people had begun to deal with the ruins of social systems and political creeds as well as of buildings and to get a grip on what could be done next. The Nuremberg trials were underway, Marshall Aid was up and running , the UN just set up, and a united Europe at least under discussion. We learn about the British efforts, alternately ruthless and grimly funny, to back out fast from their imperial obligations in India and the Middle East; the machinations of other shattered empires, once run by the French, the Dutch, and the Japanese, are ignored— as are many other developments—because, to Åsbrink, they do not fit her story. Her beliefs are those of a liberal, warm-hearted intellectual with strong loyalties to a central European Jewish family. She refuses to keep individual lives separate from “history” and places the Jewish question at the center of both her personal and political discourse. While the concept of crimes against humanity is subjected to legal scrutiny by Raphael Lemkin and transformed into literature by Primo Levi, an upsurge at solidarity is bringing old and new Nazis together; as the old guard goes underground in Latin America, new centers emerge in Europe. And, while the British just about give up on their intractable Palestine mandate, anti-semitism finds a new home in a Middle East where the Muslim Brotherhood and its jihadist version of Islam are growing seriously popular. So many snapshots: Simone de Beauvoir goes to the US and falls in love; Dior follows, but his New Look is vilified. America tempts exiles, but a toxic mixture of racism and persecution of “un-American activities” is already claiming victims. US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is busy creating a new computer language; George Orwell is sick and mostly alone on an Hebridean island, but happy (we hope) in his work on his last book: 1984. 1947 is based on very wide reading but, unlike other such “year-centered” works, seems deliberately unacademic: not just because the selection of events is eclectic but also because there is no index or systematic notes; the set of cryptic, informal comments is maddening. But it is a wonderful example of a current semifictionalized approach to nonfiction: a readable, polemic, insightful, and oftenmoving inquiry into the past. The book is forthcoming in English from Scribe (UK) in 2017. Anna Paterson House of Glack, UK First Hand: Graphic Non-Fiction from India. Ed. Orijit Sen & Vidyun Sabhaney. New Delhi. Yoda Press. 2016. 386 pages. India’s socioeconomic gap is not so much widening as deepening, in the sense that the haves (the ebullient middle and upper class) are becoming increasingly “global” in their makeup, behaviors, and tastes, while the have-nots (the dispossessed, displaced, and perpetually exploited underclass) are being left behind, in a backward limbo stifled by subjection, tradition, and its trappings . Yet the two halves need each other, perhaps now more than ever before. The haves (English-speaking, highly educated, and smartly connected) possess the tools and the knowledge to represent the dire conditions of the have-nots in more effective ways than they could do themselves; Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 93 Tommy Wieringa These Are the Names Trans. Sam Garrett Melville House This probing novel from one of the Netherlands’best-selling authors tackles head-on the knotted complex of issues surrounding the resettlement of refugees through his protagonist, the police chief of a small border town on the Eurasian steppes who discovers his own buried Jewish identity. Tommy Wieringa’s prose is lyrical and, when needed, biting, but he executes his story with great poise and, above all, an unmistakable sense of humanity. Farid Tali Prosopopoeia Trans. Aditi Machado Action Books Moroccan writer Farid Tali astounds with this meditation on the narrator’s...

First Hand: Graphic Non-Fiction from India by Orijit Sen & Vidyun Sabhaney

Elisabeth Åsbrink. 1947. Stockholm. Natur & Kultur. 2016. 296 pages. This fascinating, episodic study of the year 1947 is a microhistory of events, often meaningful for social rather than political reasons, that includes close-ups of the author’s family background. Elisabeth Åsbrink focuses on events in Europe with excursions to the Middle East and the United States. By 1947 the post–World War II chaos had settled a little; people had begun to deal with the ruins of social systems and political creeds as well as of buildings and to get a grip on what could be done next. The Nuremberg trials were underway, Marshall Aid was up and running , the UN just set up, and a united Europe at least under discussion. We learn about the British efforts, alternately ruthless and grimly funny, to back out fast from their imperial obligations in India and the Middle East; the machinations of other shattered empires, once run by the French, the Dutch, and the Japanese, are ignored— as are many other developments—because, to Åsbrink, they do not fit her story. Her beliefs are those of a liberal, warm-hearted intellectual with strong loyalties to a central European Jewish family. She refuses to keep individual lives separate from “history” and places the Jewish question at the center of both her personal and political discourse. While the concept of crimes against humanity is subjected to legal scrutiny by Raphael Lemkin and transformed into literature by Primo Levi, an upsurge at solidarity is bringing old and new Nazis together; as the old guard goes underground in Latin America, new centers emerge in Europe. And, while the British just about give up on their intractable Palestine mandate, anti-semitism finds a new home in a Middle East where the Muslim Brotherhood and its jihadist version of Islam are growing seriously popular. So many snapshots: Simone de Beauvoir goes to the US and falls in love; Dior follows, but his New Look is vilified. America tempts exiles, but a toxic mixture of racism and persecution of “un-American activities” is already claiming victims. US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is busy creating a new computer language; George Orwell is sick and mostly alone on an Hebridean island, but happy (we hope) in his work on his last book: 1984. 1947 is based on very wide reading but, unlike other such “year-centered” works, seems deliberately unacademic: not just because the selection of events is eclectic but also because there is no index or systematic notes; the set of cryptic, informal comments is maddening. But it is a wonderful example of a current semifictionalized approach to nonfiction: a readable, polemic, insightful, and oftenmoving inquiry into the past. The book is forthcoming in English from Scribe (UK) in 2017. Anna Paterson House of Glack, UK First Hand: Graphic Non-Fiction from India. Ed. Orijit Sen & Vidyun Sabhaney. New Delhi. Yoda Press. 2016. 386 pages. India’s socioeconomic gap is not so much widening as deepening, in the sense that the haves (the ebullient middle and upper class) are becoming increasingly “global” in their makeup, behaviors, and tastes, while the have-nots (the dispossessed, displaced, and perpetually exploited underclass) are being left behind, in a backward limbo stifled by subjection, tradition, and its trappings . Yet the two halves need each other, perhaps now more than ever before. The haves (English-speaking, highly educated, and smartly connected) possess the tools and the knowledge to represent the dire conditions of the have-nots in more effective ways than they could do themselves; Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 93 Tommy Wieringa These Are the Names Trans. Sam Garrett Melville House This probing novel from one of the Netherlands’best-selling authors tackles head-on the knotted complex of issues surrounding the resettlement of refugees through his protagonist, the police chief of a small border town on the Eurasian steppes who discovers his own buried Jewish identity. Tommy Wieringa’s prose is lyrical and, when needed, biting, but he executes his story with great poise and, above all, an unmistakable sense of humanity. Farid Tali Prosopopoeia Trans. Aditi Machado Action Books Moroccan writer Farid Tali astounds with this meditation on the narrator’s...

Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide ConventionJohn Cooper

Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide ConventionJohn Cooper

Cento anni di Metz Yeghern , tra silenzio e speranza. A proposito del volume di Yeghiayan Vartkes, Pro Armenia. Voci ebraiche sul genocidio armeno , a cura di Fulvio Cortese e Francesco Berti (2015)

This article starts from the analysis of the volume Pro Armenia in order to discuss the lack of recognition of the Armenian Genocide by sectors of the international community. Following the protagonists of this book we retake a painful historical and geographical journey beginning with the eye witness accounts by Metz Yeghern and continuing to today’s artists and intellectuals living inside the Diaspora and out of it. These independent voices tell us how, despite its unique evolution, the Armenian Holocaust is emblematic of other genocides of the 20th century, as shown by the very genesis of the word “genocide”, created by Raphael Lemkin not by chance after his personal experience dating from 1915 in the Ottoman Empire.

Lemkin's Greek Friends: Abusing History, Constructing Genocide—and Vice Versa

In his autobiography, Raphael Lemkin recounts how the crime of “withdrawing children from an ethnic group” came to be included in the Genocide Convention. In his advocacy of this point, Lemkin had been influenced by unnamed friends who spoke on behalf of the rightist government during the Greek Civil War. Lemkin’s readiness to accept at face value their statements about that civil war and about Greece’s history within the Ottoman Empire reflected pragmatic, as much as historical or moral, considerations. Defining genocide by universal legal notions may obscure the fact that the history of each genocide or purported genocide reflects contingent factors—and that the historical memory of each reflects particular interests. Moreover, criminalizing the systematic effort of a state or political movement to exterminate a people entails the thorny issue of what constitutes “a people.” The following considers specific examples of the corresponding pitfalls that attended formulation of the Genocide Convention.

Raphaal Lemkin in Stockholm Significance for His Work on 'Axis Rule in Occupied Europe'

Raphael Lemkin coined in 1944 the term “genocide” when he published his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. A significant part of the material was collected when Raphael Lemkin lived in Stockholm 1940-1941. This study introduces new information on how Lemkin was allowed to enter Sweden, his time as a lecturer at Stockholm university college and the persons who helped him in Sweden, most notably the prominent lawyer and politician Karl Schlyter. The study also raises the question whether the Swedish businessmen who travelled to Warsaw and helped Lemkin with acquiring documents about the Nazi occupation are the same Swedish businessmen who helped the Polish resistance to smuggle key documents about the holocaust to London via Stockholm.

Understanding Genocide in California under United States Rule, 1846–1873

Between 1846 and 1870, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000.1 Diseases, dislocation, and starvation caused many of these deaths. However, abduction, unfree labor, mass death on reservations, individual homicides, battles, and massacres also took thousands of lives and hindered reproduction. Historian Gary Clayton Anderson claims that what happened in California during these years should primarily be defined as ethnic cleansing, or forced removal, and not genocide.2 Forced removals did occur, but ultimately this was a case of genocide, sanctioned and facilitated by state and federal officials. The organized destruction of California Indians under United States rule was not a closely guarded secret. Mid-nineteenth-century California newspapers and private individuals, as well as state and federal officials, frequently addressed and often encouraged what we now call genocide. As early as 1890, historian Hubert Howe Bancroft called the killing “one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.”3 Fifty-three years later, historical demographer Sherburne F. Cook wrote the first major study of the topic. Using varied sources, he quantified the violent killing of 4,556 California Indians between 1847 and 1865, concluding, “since the quickest and easiest way to get rid of [the Northern California Indian] was to kill him off, this procedure was adopted as standard for some years.”4 In the same year that Cook published his groundbreaking article, legal scholar Raphael Lemkin coined a new word for an ancient crime. Defining the concept in 1944, he combined “the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide ,” or killing, to describe …

JAK LUDOBÓJSTWO ZOSTAŁO UZNANE ZA ZBRODNIĘ – DZIEDZICTWO RAFAŁA LEMKINA

Raphael Lemkin is hardly known to a Polish audiences. One of the most honored Poles of theXX century, forever revered in the history of human rights, nominated six times for the Nobel PeacePrize, Lemkin sacrificed his entire life to make a real change in the world: the creation of the term“genocide” and making it a crime under international law. How long was his struggle to establishwhat we now take as obvious, what we now take for granted?This paper offers his short biography, showing his long road from realizing that the killing oneperson was considered a murder but that under international law in 1930s the killing a million wasnot. Through coining the term “genocide” in 1944, he helped make genocide a criminal charge atthe Nuremburg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders in late 1945, although there the crime of genocidedid not cover killing whole tribes when committed on inhabitants of the same country nor when notduring war. He next lobbied the new United Nations to adopt a resolution that genocide is a crimeunder international law, which it adopted on 11 December, 1946. Although not a U.N. delegate – hewas “Totally Unofficial,” the title of his autobiography – Lemkin then led the U.N. in creating theConvention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 9 December, 1948.Until his death in 1958, Lemkin lobbied tirelessly to get other U.N. states to ratify the Convention.His legacy is that, as of 2015, 147 U.N. states have done so, 46 still on hold. His tomb inscriptionreads simply, “Dr. Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), Father of the Genocide Convention”. Without himthe world as we know it, would not be possible.

Czy polityka okupacyjna Niemiec wobec Polaków w czasie II wojny światowej była ludobójstwem?

Due to the very limited use of the term ‘genocide’ in scientific discourse, researchers did not carry out broad methodological considerations on the legitimacy of its use in relation to the occupation policy of the Third Reich against the Poles during World War II. Historians often conducted their research based on other theoretical models (often those that were popular at that time). For example, they studied the policy of the Third Reich in terms of the racial theory, social engineering, ethnic cleansing, total war or in a classical way, i.e. they examined various aspects of the Nazi occupation without referring to models and theories. Interestingly, many authors presented the problem in a manner similar to that resulting from Lemkin’s definition of genocide. In other words, they described the phenomenon, but without using the term ‘genocide’. They used it, however, in reference to the Holocaust. Perhaps, they did not apply it in reference to other nations due to the fact that almost the entire Jewish population was annihilated in the areas occupied by the German Third Reich. The term ‘genocide’ appeared with regard to the German policy against the Poles mainly in the colloquial sense, thereby reducing its conceptual content to mass murder. The discussions on genocide have entered a new phase in Poland. The aim of this article is to reflect on the possibility of using the term ‘genocide’ to describe the German policy against the Poles in the context of the definition created by Raphael Lemkin and the UN Convention of 1948.

“Don’t Think But Look:” Using Wittgenstein’s Notion of Family Resemblances to Look at Genocide

This article contributes to the ongoing and growing scholarly conversation concerning how best to define the term following Raphael Lemkin's coining of the term in 1944. The article first shows that the Convention definition ratified in Paris in 1948 was intended solely for juridical purposes and does not reflect Lemkin's deeper understanding of genocide. It then surveys a range of scholarship after Lemkin that argues for alternative definitions of term or even calls for jettisoning the term altogether. While it is acknowledged that a clear definition is imperative in a juridical context, it is argued that there are problems and even dangers in demanding definitional precision. For purposes of coming to terms with the multi- dimensionality and complexities of genocidal events or the genocidal process, Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance provides an alternative way of seeing genocide that avoids the dangers of definition.

Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas by Daniel Feierstein, translated by Douglas Andrew Town

History is sadly rife with examples of persecution and violence. From ancient times to the present, many (perhaps most) states have engaged in acts ranging from the aggressive assertions of power to the annihilation not just of individuals, but of groups of people defined as enemies and national, religious, or ethnic Bothers^. That modernity has only intensified state violence was not lost on Raphael Lemkin, who in 1944 considered first the destruction of Armenians and then the later destruction of European Jewry as processes so distinct in history that he coined a new word for the mass slaughters: genocide. Just four years later, in 1948, genocide became a narrowly-defined legal category – so narrow that few genocidaires have ever been held to legal account. No less problematic, claims Daniel Feierstein in his thoughtful, challenging study of comparative genocide, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas, is that few have challenged the definition of genocide or have examined it as a social process inherent to modernity. Feierstein, who first published this sociological work in Spanish in 2007, did not write an archival-based study of genocides and adds little new information about the Nazi or Argentinian juntas, but this does not lessen the importance of the optic through which he views genocide. Indeed, Feierstein carefully analyses the dominant historiographic arguments on the Nazi and Argentinian genocides and then, building off of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, he makes a fresh argument that genocide as a social process is a specific Btechnology of power that is intended to destroy social relations based on autonomy and cooperation... that then attempts to create new social relations and identity models through terror^ (36). Hum Rights Rev (2016) 17:121–123 DOI 10.1007/s12142-016-0393-7

Towards a biography of Toma Zivanovic

Toma Živanović (Thomas Givanovitch, 1884-1971) taught criminal law at Belgrade University (1909-1945). He obtained his LL.D. from the Sorbonne (1908) and did postdoctoral work in the Berlin Criminalistics Institute under Franz von Liszt (1908/9). In 1916-1918 he taught two courses at the Sorbonne, in which he developed two theoretical insights which were well received in the academia of the time. The first concerned a tripartite division of the fundamental notions in criminal law and the second a 'synthetic' philosophy of law. The paper contributes new data on Živanović's personality, life and work. Although recognized in Serbia as a leading international scholar and a victim of Communism, Živanović is also the subject of an oral tradition, initially developed by his colleagues and students, which remembers him as a selfish, stingy and rancorous individual, willing to do for money things that people with a more developed moral sense would not, and unwilling to help his students. The paper critically assesses this tradition and finds it to be true in some, but invented in other parts. Born to a family of an uneducated provincial artisan and burdened by a speech impediment, Živanović suffered from an inferiority complex, which thwarted his social integration. Eventually he entered the high society of the then Yugoslavia, partly because his marriage to an influential socialite. He was a noted member of the leading international associations in criminal law and philosophy and, together with Vespasiano Pella, Raphael Lemkin and several others, belonged to a 'select group' of European lawyers who dealt with issues of international criminal law and terrorism. After the Communist takeover in 1945, much of Živanović's family property was nationalized and he was forced to retire from the University. He did remain a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, through which he continued his research and writing, often travelling abroad to work in libraries and participate in international congresses. He published his three-volume Synthetic Philosophy of Law in Yugoslavia, but foreign publishers had lost interest in his work. In the last two decades of his life, Živanović became obsessed by what he perceived as the seminal importance of his earlier contributions. He regarded tripartition as a universally applicable 'discovery' (rather than an insight or a theoretical construct), to be used in all legal and many 'extra-legal' sciences (such as zoology and pedagogy). He believed that nearly all modern criminal codes were based on his tripartite theory and suspected a conspiracy of legal scholars to minimize or deny his authorship. Živanović's obsession gradually made him lose contact with reality. Twice, in 1960 and 1961, he nominated himself for the Nobel Prize in literature (it not being awarded for legal scholarship). Although Živanović was indeed an internationally recognized and prominent legal scholar before the Second World War, assessment of his significance prevailing in the Serbian literature is overstated, closer to his own delusional self-image than to reality.

Introduction: Australian Perspectives: Genocide, the Health Professions, and an Inglorious Past

Health & History, 2016. 18/2 1 Introduction Australian Perspectives: Genocide, the Health Professions, and an Inglorious Past Michael Robertson, Kirril Shields, and Linda Shields This special edition of Health and History falls on the seventieth anniversary of the verdicts of the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal war crimes trials, and the commencement of proceedings in United States-v-Karl Brandt et al. (the so-called ‘Doctors Trial’).1 It is therefore timely to reflect upon current historiographical and sociocultural engagements in relation to health and health practice that are legacies of the Holocaust. The aim of this special edition of Health and History is to provide an Australian scholarly voice to that history and historiography; to examine the role of health professionals within genocidal events that are not solely the Holocaust, but extend, in this case, to Armenia, Bosnia, and Australia. The term ‘genocide’ was coined in 1944 by Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who defined the act as ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’.2 Yet the definition is problematic and the discipline of ‘genocide studies’ has come to integrate multiple discourses that reflect this divergence in opinions over what exactly constitutes genocide.3 Here, in this edition of Health and History, the nature of these killings and their location extends beyond Auschwitz, to other European locations, and to Australia itself. What is not included are the plethora of other genocides that erupted in Cambodia, Rwanda, and South Sudan; much of the ethnic cleansing of the colonial era both in and outside Australia; the program of state sponsored mass murder under Stalin’s rule; and recent events in Syria and Iraq. While genocide is not a criminal act particular to the Holocaust, the Holocaust is often considered the most bureaucratic of genocides given its reliance on the apparatus of the modern industrialised state. This apparatus included the government’s need for efficient transport infrastructure, the use of police and security services, certain functions of governmental hierarchies, the compliance of professions, a culture of scientism, and a willing 2 MICHAEL ROBERTSON, KIRRIL SHIELDS, LINDA SHIELDS or tightly controlled press.4 The uniqueness or distinctness of the Holocaust has been subject to considerable debate, often polemic and intensely political.5 Discourses surrounding the Holocaust are multi-faceted, shifting from suggestions that the Holocaust was a unique German act built from a particular meld of anti-Semitism and fascist politics, to the idea that this murderous episode was one of numerous killings carried out in the so-called ‘bloodlands’ of Eastern Europe.6 Included in this shifting focalisation are politicised debates over the use of the term ‘Holocaust’ to denote any victim of the National Socialist regime. Regardless of semantics or what might be considered the appropriation of blame, included in this bureaucratic system were health professionals such as nurses, physicians, paediatricians, and psychiatrists. This edition of Health and History examines the role of these health professionals as participants in this particular killing apparatus, but also as the victims of these measures, including Jewish health professionals denied the right to practice due to Nazi regulations. Garry Walter provides a biographical overview of his grandfather, the Austrian-Jewish doctor Otto Walter. The paper traces Otto’s early days as a reputable clinician inVienna prior to the Anschluss, and the subsequent repercussions National Socialism had on his life, family, and medical career. The narrative of Otto Walter’s life as an émigré European Jew in Australia demonstrates how institutionalised racism in the Australian academy, such as Sydney University’s Faculty of Medicine in the 1950s and 60s, was redolent of the racism he encountered in nazified Europe. Garry Walter’s personal homage to his grandfather bears witness to an individual and family tragedy against the backdrop of Mitteleuropa, drawing an arc of racist exclusion from Vienna to the xenophobic angst of the mid-century Sydney medical profession. Such observations intersect with Colin Tatz’s contribution, in which he considers more generally Australian attitudes to the genocide of the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population. Here Tatz outlines why he believes this killing and subjugation of indigenous Australians is a genocide. Tatz’s paper “Australia: The ‘Good’ Genocide Perpetrator?” seeks to define...