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9 Free World 39 (1945)
Genocide - A Modern Crime

handle is hein.journals/freewrld9 and id is 341 raw text is: Genocide- A Modern Crime By RAPHAEL LEMKIN 4t NE of the great mistakes of 1918 was to spare the civil life of the enemy countries, for it is neces- sary for us Germans to be always at least double the numbers of the peoples of the contiguous countries. We are there- fore obliged to destroy at least a third of their inhabitants. The only means is or- ganized underfeeding which in this case is better than machine guns. The speaker was Marshal von Rundstedt addressing the Reich War Academy in Ber- lin in 1943. He was only aping the Fuehrer, who had said, Natural instincts bid all living human beings not merely conquer their enemies but also destroy them. In for- mer days it was the victor's prerogative to destroy tribes, entire peoples. Hitler was right. The crime of the Reich in wantonly and deliberately wiping out whole peoples is not utterly new in the world. It is only new in the civilized world as we have come to think of it. It is so new in the traditions of civilized man that he has no name for it. It is for this reason that I took the lib- erty of inventing the word, genocide. The term is from the Greek word genos meaning tribe or race and the Latin cide meaning killing. Genocide tragically enough must take its place in the diction- ary of the future beside other tragic words like homicide and infanticide. As Von Rundstedt has suggested the term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that. More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of na- International premeditated murder, as planned and.practiced against the peoples of Europe by Hitler, must be brought within the scope and ju- risdiction of future international law. This is a major problem facing the coming world. tional groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feelings and their religion. It may be ac- complished by wiping out all basis of per- sonal security, liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the machine gun can always be utilized as a last resort. Geno- cide is directed against a national group as an entity and the attack on individuals is only secondary to the annihilation of the national group to which they belong. Such terms as denationalization or Germanization which have been used till now do not adequately convey the full force of the new phenomenon of genocide. They signify only the substitution of the national pattern of the oppressor for the original national pattern but not the de- struction of the biological and physical structure of the oppressed group. Philosophy of Genocide GERMANY has transformed an ancient barbarity into a principle of government by dignifying genocide as a sacred purpose of the German people. National Socialism is the doctrine of the biological superiority of the German people. Long before the war nazi leaders were unblushingly announc- 39

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