Raphael Lemkin - World War II

World War II

During the Polish Defensive War of 1939 Lemkin joined the Polish Army and defended Warsaw during the siege of that city, where he was injured by a bullet to the hip, afterward evading capture by the Germans. In 1940 he traveled through Lithuania to reach Sweden, where he first lectured at the University of Stockholm. With the help of Malcolm McDermott, Lemkin received permission to enter the United States, arriving in 1941.

Although he managed to save his life, he lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust; they were among over 3 million Polish Jews and Lithuanian Jews who were murdered during the German occupation. Some members of his family died in areas annexed by the Soviet Union. The only European members of Lemkin's family who survived the Holocaust were his brother, Elias, and his wife and two sons, who had been sent to a Soviet forced labor camp. Lemkin did however successfully aid his brother and family in emigrating to Montreal, Canada in 1948.

After arriving in the United States Lemkin joined the law faculty at Duke University in North Carolina in 1941. During the Summer of 1942 Lemkin lectured at the School of Military Government at the University of Virginia. He also wrote Military Government in Europe, which was a preliminary version of his more fully developed publication Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In 1943 Lemkin was appointed consultant to the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration and later became a special adviser on foreign affairs to the War Department, largely due to his expertise in international law.

In 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin's most important work, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in the United States. This book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II, along with the definition of the term genocide. Lemkin's idea of genocide as an offense against international law was widely accepted by the international community and was one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials. In 1945 to 1946, Lemkin became an advisor to Supreme Court of the United States Justice and Nuremberg Trial chief counsel Robert H. Jackson.