A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (86 page)

3. Gilbert, Auschwitz and theAllies, p. 44.

4. E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (New York: John Wiley, 994), p. 150; emphasis added.

5. Ibid., pp. 150-151.

6. Ibid., p. 119. See also Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 167-175; Michael T. Kaufman, "Jan Karski Dies at 86; Warned West About Holocaust," New York Times, July 15, 2000, p. C15.

7. Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), p. 336.

8. Wood and Jankowski, Karski, pp. 151-152.

9. Exchange quoted in William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 47.

10. Michael Ignatieff, "Raphael Lemkin and the Moral Imagination," lecture at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., December 13, 2000.

11. German Reich Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda, The Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels (NewYork: E. P. Dutton, 1970), p. 309.

12. International Committee of the Red Cross, Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Its Activities During the Second World War, September 1, 1939-June 30, 1947, vol. I (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 1948), p. 21; Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler's "Final Solution" (New York: Owl Books, 1980), p. 60.

13. See the Bibliography for an extensive list of sources on the subject.

14. Laqueur, Terrible Secret, p. 67.

15. Walter Laqueur has shrewdly noted that the placement of these articles signaled the New York Times' ambivalence about their accuracy. "The editors quite obviously did not know what to make of them," Laqueur wrote. "If it was true that a million people had been killed this clearly should have been front page news.... If it was not true, the story should not have been published at all." They compromised, assuming that the reports contained some truth and some exaggeration and should be relegated to a less than prominent spot. Ibid., p. 74.

16. Albert Muller, Neue Zurcher Zeitun,, May 5, 1979, quoted in ibid., p. 89.

17. Hershel Johnson to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, April 5, 1943, quoted in Laqueur, Terrible Secret, p. 98.

18. Laqueur, Terrible Secret, p. 201.

19. W. A.Visser't Hooft, Protestant theologian and first general secretary of the World Council of Churches, spent the war years in Switzerland and used this phrase in his Alemoirs (London: SCM Press, 1973), p. 166. He wrote that anti-Semitism was less a reason for the world's indifference than "that people could find no place in their consciousness for such an unimaginable horror and that they did not have the imagination, together with the courage, to face it."

20. Karski could rely on nothing but his own words:"I have no proofs, no photographs." he said. "All I can say is that I saw it, and it is the truth"Jan Karski, "Polish Death Camp." Collier's, October 14, 1944, pp. 18-19. Karski's story was accompanied not by a photograph but by a drawing of anonymous, horrified faces. For a discussion of the use of generalized visual images that appeared without captions or specific references, see Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

21. These overstatements came on the heels of exaggerations in the British press of Boer crimes committed against British citizens and of course William Randolph Hearst's inflammatory yellow journalism geared toward securing American entry into war against Spain in 1898. See also Raphael Lemkin, "Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lenikin," ch. 7, p. 2, for Lemkin's description of the reaction of his colleagues in the U.S. government and their tendency to use the Belgian atrocities as a rationale for disbelief.

22. The story of the corpse conversion factory was made up by a British brigadier general. One reporter recalled his hunt for actual proof of atrocities: "I couldn't find any atrocities.... I offered sums of money for photographs of children whose hands had been cut off or who had been wounded or injured in other ways. I never found a first-hand Belgian atrocity story; and when I ran down the second-hand stories, they all petered out" See John Taylor, War Photography: Realism in the British Press (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 79; Philip Knightley, The First Ca sualty: From the Crimea tc Vietnam: Vie Wir Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (NewYork: Harcourt Bra:eJovanovich, 1975) pp. 105-106.

23. Vernon McKenzie,"Atrocities in World War II-What Can We Believe?"Journalism Quarterly, September 1942, p. 268; cited in Deborah L. Lipstadt, Beyond Belie177te American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, :933-1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 9, 27. Only in 2001 did John Horne and Alan Kramer publish German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2(I(-O.They document a brutal German campaign that led to the deaths of some 6,500 Belgian and French civilians and challenge the assumption held for most of the twentieth century that the World War I atrocity reports were hyped.

24. Estimates of the total number of persons who successfully escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to the United States between 1938 and 1945 hover around 250,)110-a number that includes refugees and immigrants who fell under a quota system established in the 1924 Immigration Act that admitted 150,000 immigrants annually (with some 27,000 allocated from Germany and Austria). Remarkably, under 50 percent of the entire annual immigration quota was used in any one year from 1938 to 1940. By the end of the war. the total number of quota immigrants dropped below 10 percent of the maximum limit per year. See U.S. Department of Labor, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Washington, D.C.: GPC, 1943, 1944, and 1945); and David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). Public pressure to do something about the refugee situation in Europe and the United States had led to the 1943 Bermuda conference, which was attended by Allied diplomats and other government officials. But the conference weakly recommended shipping small numbers of refugees to European colonial possessions, requesting cooperation and transportation from neutral countries, and strengthening the impotent Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees created at the Evian conference in 1938. According to Wyman, only one of these plans was actually implemented: A full year after the conference, a camp was finally established near Casablanca to house some 3,01111 of the refugees who had managed to reach Spain. Ultimately, however, the camp became home to just 630 refugees. As Rabbi Israel Goldstein observed, "The job of the Bermuda Conference apparently was not to rescue victim of Nazi terror, but to rescue our State Department and the British Foreign Office" See David S. Wyman, ed., America and the Holocaust, vol. 3: The .Mock Rescue Conference: Bermuda (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. v, vi. One of the three official U.S. representatives at the conference, Senator Scott Lucas (D.-Ill.), warned that attempts by Jewish organizations to save European Jewry would lead to the deaths of 100,0011 U.S. soldiers, which would in turn yield a dangerous anti-Semitic backlash in the United States. See the Simon Wiesenthal Center Web page, available at http://www.niotlc.wiesenthal.com/text/xl5/xml522.litiiil.

25. Laqueur, Terrible Secrat, p. 96, quoting a letter from Goldberg to Laqueur.

26. "Poles Suicide Note Pleads for Jews," Neu'YorkTimes, June 4, 1943, p. 4.A monument to Szmul Zygielbojm, whose pseudonym was Artur, was unveiled in Warsaw on July 22, 1997, on the fifty-fifth anniversary of the start of the deportation of Warsaw Jews. In 1998 the letter was installed in the permanent collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Karski spoke at a ceremony marking the event.

27. "Jews' Last Stand Fe'led 1,000 Nazis," Neu, York Times, May 22, 1943, p. 7. More than 10,000 Jews were killed in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The 56,000 Jews who survived were taken to the Treblinka death camp.

28. The NewYork Times did not again mention Zygielbojm until Jan Karski died in July 2000. Karski's wife, Pola Nirenska, herself a Holocaust survivor whose family had been wiped out in the Holocaust, had thrown herself from the balcony of their Bethesda, Maryland, apartment in 1992 at the age of eighty-one. A dancer, her last piece. presented in Washington in 1990, was inspired by Holocaust victims and called, "In Memory of Those I Loved ... Who Are No More" See Michael T. Kaufman , "Jan Karski Dies at 86: Warned West About Holocaust;' New York Tunes, July 15, 2000, p. C 15.

29. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944). The first part of the book dealt with the different aspects of Nazi rule: the German administration of the occupied lands and their usurpation of sovereignty; the role and function of the German police and the secret police, the Gestapo; the introduction of discriminatory German law into the occupied territories; the organization of the courts; the disposal of property; the administration of finance; the exploitation of labor through slavery and depopulation; the extremely inhumane treatment ofJews; and the destruction of national and ethnic groups.

30. Melchior Palyi, review of Axis Rule over Occupied Europe, by Raphael Lemkin, American Journal of Sociology 51, 5 (March 1946): 496-497. Palyi was a Hungarian-born, laissez-faire, anti-Keynesian economist who taught at a number of universities in Germany and the United States.

31. Arthur K. Kuhn, review of Axis Rule over Occupied Europe, by Raphael Lemkin, American Journal of International Law 39, 2 (April 1945): ix, 360-362.

32. Linden A. Mander, review of Axis Rule over Occupied Europe, by Raphael Lemkin, American Historical Review 51, 1 (October 1945): 117-120.

33. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).

34. Lemkin, Axis Rule, pp. xiv, xxiii.

35. Otto D. Tolischus, "Twentieth-Century Moloch: The Nazi-Inspired Totalitarian State, Devourer of Progress-and of Itself," Neu, York Times Book Review, January 21, 1945, pp. 1, 24.

36. Raphael Lemkin,"Genocide;' American Scholar 15, 2 (1946):227-230. Waldemar Kaempffert, "Genocide Is the New Name for the Crime Fastened on the Nazi Leaders," NewYork Times, October 20, 1946, p. E 13, contains a discussion of the other possible terms that Lemkin might have chosen. Lemkin presumably fed this material to the journalist.

37. "Introduction to Part I, The New Word," in "History of Genocide," ch. 1, sec. 5; reel 3, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.

38. "Introduction to Part I,The New Word," ch. 1, sec. 6 ("Words as Moral judgements"), p. 4. 39. Jean Amery,Jenseits von Schuld and Suhne: Bewaltigungsversuche einer Uberwaltigten (Beyond Guilt and Atonement: Attempts to Overcome by One Who Has Been Overcome) (Munich: Szczesny Verlag, 1996), p. 59, translated and quoted in Lawrence L. Langer, The Age ofAtrocity: Death in Modern Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 51. See also George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

40. Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. 79; emphasis added.

41. Ibid.

42. Raphael Lemkin, "The Importance of the Convention," p. 1, reel 2, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.

43. Proceedings of the Forty fourth Annual Session of the North Carolina Bar Association, p. 112, cited in William Korey, An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin (NewYork:Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, 2001), p. 11.

44. Genocide was incorporated into the French Encyclopedia Larousse in 1953 after approval from the French Academy. The Oxford English Dictionary first listed "genocide" as an entry in the "Addenda and Corrigenda" section of the 1955 update to the third edition. Hebrew, Yiddish, and Serbo-Croatian all borrow "genocide" without much modification. Though the word did gain great fame around the world, many languages translated the term, contrary to Lemkin's designs, as "mass killing." Polish uses ludobojstwo, meaning "people-killing"Armenian uses tseghasbanutiun, or "killing of a race." Khmer uses prolai puch sah, or "to destroy the race" German uses Volker- mord, or "murder of a nation." The Rwandan language, Kinyarwandan, uses n'itsembabumko, or "massacring an ethnic group"

45. "History of Genocide," part 1, p. 7.

46. The Roosevelt administration had been very slow to comment on the fate of the Jews. On March 24, 1944, Roosevelt finally condemned the "systematic murder of the Jews" that went on "unabated every hour" Fie warned that all those in Germany and in satellite countries who knowingly took part in the deportation of Jews were "equally guilty with the executioners" and would share the punishment. On November 8, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, acting on the advice of the War Refugee Board, threatened "heavy punishment." "Germans!" he declared, "Do not obey any orders ... urging you to molest, harm or persecute [those in concentration camps], no matter what their religion or nationality may be""Eisenhower Warns Reich on Prisoners," NewYork Tunes, November 8, 1944, p. 21.

47. "Genocide," Washington Post, December 3, 1944, p. 134.

48. In a book on the history of genocide that was never published, Lemkin rattled off a vast number of factoids concerning those writers he hoped to emulate. He demonstrated a dazzling grasp of literature, science, politics, and the diverse roots and authorship of various terms. I later discovered that Lemkin had lifted verbatim virtually every one of his panoramic literary references, as well as many enrre paragraphs, from Bruno Migliorini, The Contribution of the Individual to Language: Taylorian Le Lure, 1952 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). Lemkin included them without attribution in what he hoped would be his masterpiece. He was not above plagiarizing if it served his cause.

Chapter 4, Lem kin's Law

1. Jurists like Hans Keiser challenged the "theology of the state" and declared the cult of deference to sovereignty a false necessity. Sovereignty could be redefined. "We can derive from the concept of sovereignty," Kelsen wrote in Peace Through Law, "nothing else than what we have purportedly put into its definition." Hans Kelsen, Peace Through Law (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944), pp. 41-42.