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"Genocide"

Publication Date
Sunday, December 10, 1944
Historical Event
The Crime Now Has a Name: “Genocide”
This database includes 531 articles about this event
Tags
Gannett full page downloadable
Deportation and Mass Murder
Article Type
Editorial or Opinion Piece
Newspaper
The Greenville News
Location
Greenville, South Carolina
Page Section and Number
4
Author/Byline
The Washington Post
Article Text
No human creature can read the report of the War Refugee Board released last Sunday without a sense of shock and shame. The report presents eyewitness accounts of events which occurred at the German extermination camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. "So revolting and diabolical are the German atrocities," says the WRB, "that the minds of civilized people find it difficult to believe that they have actually taken place. But the governments of the United States and of other countries have evidence which clearly substantiates the facts." The facts are really quite simple, although perhaps somewhat difficult to grasp: in Birkenau, between April, 1942, and April, 1944, approximately 1,765,000 Jews were put to death by poison gas in ingeniously constructed chambers; their bodies were then burned in specially designed furnaces; their ashes were distributed as fertilizer. This process of extermination by gassing was earned on in other camps besides Birkenau; in the main, it was applied only to Jews. "Aryans'' were generally exterminated by shooting or by injections or phenol. After their bodies had been shoveled into the furnaces, however, the "Aryan" and Jewish ashes were probably indistinguishable.

It is a mistake, perhaps, to can these killings "atrocities." An atrocity is a wanton brutality. There were unspeakable atrocities at Auschwitz and Birkenau. But the point about these killings is that they were systematic and purposeful. The gas chambers and furnaces were not improvisations, but were scientifically designed instruments for the extermination of an entire ethnic group. On the scale practiced by the Germans, this is something new. And it is this purpose which human beings find it difficult to believe or understand. Yet it is a purpose which Hitler has openly avowed.

We have never even had a word for it until now. But one has been recently coined by a noted Polish scholar and attorney, Prof. Raphael Lemkin, now on the faculty of Duke University. He has devised the term genocide out of the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing). "Genocide," he says in a volume, "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe," recently published by the Carnegie Endowment lor International Peace, "is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group." Thus Jews were gassed at Birkenau and Aryan Poles and Russians and Slovenes were otherwise butchered, not for any crime or any resistance to Nazi authority but because the Nazis wished to exterminate the ethnic groups to which they belonged.

"Generally speaking," says Professor Lemkin, "genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify 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." In this sense the Germans have committed genocide in virtually all the countries of Europe which tiny occupied. They have struck deliberately at the culture, language, religious and political institutions and at the economic existence of the peoples they conquered—all with a view to undermining their national identity and weakening them, physically and morally, so that they would become subservient to German rule.

As long ago as 1933 Professor Lemkin proposed the recognition of genocide as crime under International law. Had his proposal been adopted, Sir Cecil Hurst and his United Nations War Crimes Commission would not now be so hard put to it to determine the guilt of Nazi oppressors. Furthermore, as Professor Lemkin puts it, "the adoption of the principle of universal repression as adapted to genocide by countries which belong now to the group of non-belligerents or neutrals, respectively, would likewise bind these latter countries to punish the war criminals engaged in genocide or to extradite 'them to the countries in which these crimes were committed." One of the vital steps In the punishment of war guilt, we believe, is to secure international agreement now on the outlawing of genocide. If such an agreement is reached, neutrals will feel no violation of their sovereignty in the demand that perpetrators of this crime be handed over to justice. And the execution of justice will be given a firm legal foundation.
History Unfolded Contributor
Carlos G.
Location of Research
Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)

Learn More about this Historical Event: The Crime Now Has a Name: “Genocide”

Bibliography

Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation—Analysis of Government—Proposals for Redress. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944.

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"Genocide"
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