- Headline
-
GENOCIDE
- Publication Date
- Tuesday, January 2, 1945
- Historical Event
-
The Crime Now Has a Name: “Genocide”
This database includes 531 articles about this event - Article Type
- Newspaper
- Page Section and Number
- 4
- Author/Byline
- The Washington (D. C.) Post
- Article Text
- NO human creature can read the report of the war refugee board without a sense shock and shame. The report presents eye-witness accounts of events which occurred at the German extermination Camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. "So revolting and diabolical are the German atrocities," says the W. R. B. "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 ingenously constructed chambers; their bodies were then burned in specially designed furnaces; their ashes were distributed as fertilizer. This process of extermination by gassing was carried on in other camps besides Birkenau; in the main, it was applied only to Jews, "Aryans" were generally exterminated by shooting or by injections of 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 call 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; they 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 for 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 Axis authority but because the Nazis wished to exterminate the ethnic groups to which they belonged. - History Unfolded Contributor
-
Carlos G.
This article was also found by
- Judy S. (See their contribution)
- Location of Research
- Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)
Learn More about this Historical Event: The Crime Now Has a Name: “Genocide”
- Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin (Encyclopedia Article)
- The Crime of Genocide (Encyclopedia Article)
- Genocide Timeline (Encyclopedia Article)
- What Is Genocide? (Confront 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.
All articles about this event
Download the full newspaper page
See full image on newspapers.com
Newspaper images provided by Newspapers.com
