A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

When Eisenhower succeeded Truman in 1953, Lemkin viewed the former U.S. general as a natural ally. After his troops had liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, Eisenhower had fired off a cable to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall denouncing the Nazi savagery: “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for,” Eisenhower said, reflecting on the piles of corpses. “Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.” But generals are taught to choose their battles, and Eisenhower quickly dropped the fight for the genocide convention. In 1953, in the hopes of appeasing Bricker’s supporters, the president disavowed this and all human rights treaties.

(#litres_trial_promo) Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pledged that the administration would never “become a party to any covenant [on human rights] for consideration by the Senate.” He also flatly abrogated the Nuremberg precedent, charging that the genocide convention exceeded the “traditional limits” of treaties by attempting to generate “internal social changes” in other countries. The United States would advance human rights through education, Dulles declared, not through law.

The genocide convention was far from perfect. But whatever its ambiguities, its ratification in the U.S. Senate would have signaled to the world and the American people that the United States believed genocide was an international crime that should be prevented and punished, wherever it occurred. It would have required the United States to prosecute genocide suspects who wandered onto American shores. And it would have empowered and obligated American policymakers “to undertake” to stop future genocide.

The Home Front

Just as he had earlier tried to drum up international support, Lemkin here tried to create a U.S. constituency for ratification with speaking tours, op-eds, and mass mailings. Hoping to get Eisenhower to reverse his position, Lemkin borrowed stationery from supportive community organizations, applied for grants to pay for postage, and sent thousands of letters to absolutely anybody whose moral heartstrings he felt he might tug or on whose connections he might prey to get the ear of a U.S. senator. Although most of his letters contained a mix of flattery and moral prodding, he sometimes slipped into bluntly bullying his contacts and demanding that they acquire a conscience. Thelma Stevens, a volunteer at the Methodist Women’s Council, was probably startled one summer to read this portion of an otherwise grateful letter from Lemkin urging her to coordinate a campaign on behalf of Senate passage:

This Convention is a matter of our conscience and is a test of our personal relationship to evil. I know it is very hot in July and August for work and planning, but without becoming sentimental or trying to use colorful speech, let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat in the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915.

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Humorless though he was, Lemkin knew it was essential for him to win over elite opinion. He struck up his most fruitful correspondence with Gertrude Samuels of the New York Times editorial board. Samuels’s editorials, which appeared in the paper throughout the ratification fight, often seemed to flow right from Lemkin’s pen. At first they echoed his conviction; later they reflected his frustration. One editorial termed the criminalization of genocide “one of the greatest civilizing ideas of our century” and lambasted the Senate for its “indifference and delay.” Another used the same words that Lemkin had penned to Samuels in a letter dated June 6, 1950: “Humanity is our client,” the editorial proclaimed. “Every day of delay is concession to crime.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Lemkin was eager to be plagiarized.

Lemkin also attempted to mobilize American grassroots groups. The international human rights organizations familiar to us today did not yet exist. Amnesty International was not founded until 1961, and Helsinki Watch, which later grew into Human Rights Watch, was set up only in 1978. But four decades ahead of the dramatic power shift toward nongovernmental organizations that occurred in the 1990s, Lemkin enlisted a panoply of American civic organizations, churches, and synagogues.

(#litres_trial_promo) The U.S. Committee for a United Nations Genocide Convention was formed, made up of representatives and leaders from a wide range of organizations, from the Federal Council of Churches of Christ and the American Association for the UN to the National Council of Women and the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

(#litres_trial_promo) The American Jewish Committee, the American Zionist Council, and B’nai B’rith gave some financial support to Lemkin as he tried to chip away at U.S. opposition.

Lemkin was at a disadvantage in the immediate postwar period because the singular genocide so well known today was barely discussed.

(#litres_trial_promo) American Jews who would later became a potent force in promoting Holocaust commemoration and education were reticent, eager to assimilate, leery of fueling further anti-Semitism, and determined not to be depicted as victims. Other Americans were uncomfortable with the topic of extermination.

In the rare instances when Hitler’s genocide was mentioned, American television and film revealed a desire to inform viewers without alienating them. In one example, a May 1953 episode of This Is Your Life introduced many American television viewers to a Holocaust survivor for the first time. Host Ralph Edwards profiled Hanna Bloch Kohner, a woman in her thirties who had survived Auschwitz. “Looking at you it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still short life, you lived a life-time of fear, terror and tragedy,” Edwards declared, telling her she looked “like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.” Never mentioning that 6 million Jews had been murdered, Edwards adopted a tone of renewal that characterized the optimistic age: “This is your life, Hanna Bloch Kohner. To you in your darkest hour, America held out a friendly hand.Your gratitude is reflected in your unwavering devotion and loyalty to the land of your adoption.”

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The dramatization of the Diary of Anne Frank, which began running in 1955, garnered huge crowds, rave reviews, a Pulitzer Prize, and a Tony Award for best play, but as both critics and fans of the play have noted, young Anne embodied the American mood by refusing to lose her faith in humanity.

(#litres_trial_promo) The film version of the Diary, which premiered in 1959 and won three Academy Awards, largely omitted the Holocaust from the narrative. Director George Stevens, who had served in the U.S. Army and entered Dachau with the American liberators, screened an early version of the film in San Francisco. The last shot depicted Anne in a concentration camp uniform swaying in the fog, but after the preview he cut the scene because he thought it was “too tough in audience impact.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Instead, the film adopted the hopeful ending of the play, in which Anne declares, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Anne actually went on to write in her diary: “I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.” But this was omitted, as it was far too somber a tone for Stevens or play director Garson Kanin, who said that he did not consider the infliction of depression on an audience “a legitimate theatrical end.”

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Hollywood eased into more realistic accounts of the horrors. The 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Judy Garland and Spencer Tracy, jarred millions of viewers by including actual graphic footage from the camps, but the film contained few references to the specific victim groups.

(#litres_trial_promo) When a major network sponsor, the American Gas Association, objected to the mention of gas chambers in the 1959 teleplay version of the film, CBS caved in to pressure and blanked out the references.

(#litres_trial_promo) The word “holocaust” did not appear in the New York Times until 1959.

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Only in the late 1960s did people who had spoken of a holocaust and then the holocaust begin to use the capital letter to specify the German destruction of Europe’s Jews. The references to the Holocaust had become sufficiently widespread that by 1968 the Library of Congress had to create a class of work called “Holocaust: Jewish 1939–1945.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The Readers’Guide to Periodical Literature did not include the subject heading until 1971. American memorials to Hitler’s crimes against the Jews did not exist. Even such celebrated works as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz had trouble finding publishers.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was not really until the 1970s that Americans became prepared to discuss the horrors.

With America unwilling in the 1950s to confront Hitler’s Final Solution, it is not surprising that Lemkin, with his briefcase bulging with gruesome parables and his indefatigable, in-your-face manner, earned few friends on Capitol Hill.

Picking Fights

Lemkin took out much of his mounting frustration on an unlikely target: spokespersons for the cause of human rights. At the 1945 conference in San Francisco where the UN charter was drafted, smaller nations of the United Nations, as well as American church, Jewish, labor, and women’s groups, had helped secure seven references to human rights in the UN founding charter. Because the content of these rights and the enforcement mechanisms were left open, a Human Rights Commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt was formed to draw up an “international bill of rights” that would consist of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as well as a pair of binding legal conventions.

Lemkin initially fumed less over the substance of the human rights agenda than over its timing. He had worked since 1944 to get his word embraced in official circles and since 1933 to get the crime banned. Lemkin was upset that the General Assembly had passed its historic universal declaration on December 10, 1948, the day after the genocide convention’s passage. He felt the association of national celebrities like Eleanor Roosevelt with the UDHR had overshadowed the vote on the genocide convention.

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The UDHR was a nonbinding, thirty-article declaration of principles of civil, political, economic, and social justice.

(#litres_trial_promo)This aspirational set of principles was only a “date,” Lemkin said, whereas the convention, which required states to behave a certain way, was more like a “marriage.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He naively believed that unanimous passage of the convention meant that states intended to live up to their legal commitments. Thus, he feared respect for “his” law would be lessened by association with “her” declaration.

Yet it was when the human rights movement attempted to legalize this initial declaration of principles and turn it into a legal convention modeled on the genocide ban that Lemkin erupted.

(#litres_trial_promo) He simply could not believe that diplomats, drafters, and concerned citizens would attempt to make low-level rights abuses the subject of international law, which he was convinced should be reserved for the most extreme crimes, which were most likely to elude national prosecution. Slavery and genocide were appropriate international crimes; abridgement of speech and press, which were patently unenforceable, were not. His more justified and far more urgent ends had to be distinguished from the human rights crowd’s largely prosaic concerns.

In an unpublished op-ed entitled “The U.N. Is Killing Its Own Child,” Lemkin warned against those articles in the proposed human rights covenant that “encroached” upon his convention: “The same provisions apply to mass beatings in a concentration camp and to the spanking of a child by its parents. In brief, the dividing line between the crime of Genocide, which changes the course of civilization on one hand, and uncivilized behavior of individuals on the other hand, disappears.”

(#litres_trial_promo) If every abuse were to become a subject of international concern, Lemkin worried, states would recoil against international law and would not respond to the greatest crime of all.

Lemkin also predicted (quite accurately) that some critics of the genocide convention would use the human rights law to kill his law in a different way, arguing that there was no need for a genocide pact because the human rights law was so expansive that it covered the crime of genocide.

(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, some began to claim that genocide simply constituted an egregious form of discrimination. Lemkin was understandably adamant that the destruction of groups not be absorbed under the heading of prejudice. In a 1953 memo he snapped: “Genocide implies destruction, death, annihilation, while discrimination is a regrettable denial of certain opportunities of life. To be unequal is not the same as to be dead.”

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Foreshadowing some of the turf warfare that has plagued nongovern-mental organizations since their formation, Lemkin began lobbying for the excision from the human rights law of those provisions that overlapped with his. Two clauses in particular gnawed at him: “Nobody shall be deprived of the right to life” and “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” If these were included in the human rights law, genocide convention critics would claim that genocide had already been “covered.” Lemkin urged dumbfounded U.S. officials to insist that the human rights law omit references to the right to life and the right to be free of inhuman treatment. He received a gracious letter back from Assistant Secretary of State John D. Hickerson, who observed, “Certainly it would be difficult to deny that these two rights are among the most basic of human rights generally recognized throughout the world.”

(#litres_trial_promo)Yet Lemkin thought international law should reserve itself for the base and not busy itself with the “basic.”

As he attacked the human rights treaty and its sponsors, Lemkin found himself mouthing the same arguments as notorious human rights abusers.

(#litres_trial_promo) In his fury, he ignored all he had in common with his human rights rivals. René Cassin, a French Jewish lawyer who took the lead on the Human Rights Commission in drafting the Universal Declaration and who in 1968 was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts, had lost twenty-nine members of his family, including his sister, in Nazi concentration camps. Cassin’s response to Soviet critics who bristled at outside interference might well have been written by Lemkin. “The right of interference is here; it is here,” Cassin noted. “Why? Because we do not want a repetition of what happened in 1933, where Germany began to massacre its own nationals, and everybody…bowed, saying ‘Thou art sovereign and master in thine own house.’”

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Lemkin, Cassin, and Roosevelt also squared off against the same opponents. Senator Bricker teamed with Senator McCarthy to deride all UN instruments as vehicles of world government and socialism that would swallow U.S. sovereignty and aid in a Communist plot to rule (and internationalize) the world. The bedfellows who united in opposition to the genocide ban and the human rights law were not only fierce anti-Communists like Bricker but also devoted Communists from the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc representing their countries at the United Nations.

But instead of seeing or seeking common ground, Lemkin chided human rights advocates for the very utopianism that his opponents ascribed to him. The draft human rights covenant naturally included a demand that signatories respect rights “without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” Lemkin found this laughably unrealistic: “History has tried to achieve this task through a combined travail of revolution and evolution, but never before has a philosopher or lawyer dreamed of this unique opportunity of replacing a historical process by fiat of law. In short, it is merely a description of Utopia, but Utopia belongs to fiction and poetry and not to law.”

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