Genocides

Genocide is a global phenomenon. The efforts to exterminate a whole people and their cultures have appeared around the world, from ancient times to the present. It is a crime that has shaped like no other crime the history of the 20th century, from Turkey, to Russia, to Namibia. Millions and millions of people fell victim to the Nazi's massive project of social engineering, which changed the composition of the German society. Auschwitz became the symbol for the worst of what humans can do to each other. However, the optimistic slogan of “Never Again” that was raised after World War II failed, and there is every indication that genocide will be with humankind also in the 21st century.

“Genocide” as a legal concept dates back to World War II; as a social practice, it is much older. The crimes of the German occupation force in Eastern Europe made contemporaries believe they were witnesses to something new in world history. Famous are the words of the British prime minister Winston Churchill, who felt he was in the presence of a “crime without a name.” It remained without a name for not too long. By 1944, the Polish-Jewish lawyer and activist Raphael Lemkin, who had to flee his native country after the German invasion, had developed his concept of a new “crime.” Based on the experience and the study of the German occupation force in Poland and the Soviet Union, he concluded that those crimes were not covered by international law. He therefore defined a new crime: genocide, from the classical Greek “genos” (people, tribe) and the Latin “caedere” (killing). He described it this way (Lemkin, 1944, chap. IX):

Not every act of destruction or every massacre was therefore genocide. For Lemkin, it depended on the intention of the perpetrator to undermine and destroy a certain group, such as was the case with the Holocaust. However, it is worth noting that it was not only the German state-sponsored attempt to annihilate the European Jewry or the policies against the Slavs that shaped his definition. It was also the study of human history, which convinced him that a certain type of collective crime was not adequately dealt with in international law. Lemkin himself later tried to broaden the empirical basis by authoring a three-volume History of Genocide, which examined the phenomenon in global perspective and across time. Unfortunately, this remained unpublished. He was more successful, however, as a campaigner, and in 1948 the United Nations recognized genocide as crime under international law. Its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined

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