ABSTRACT
The concept of genocide, introduced in 1944 by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, is most commonly associated with the Holocaust. Yet, Lemkin derived it from a detailed analysis of legal documents from Nazi-occupied Europe that he had collected in previous years. He defined genocide much more broadly than as mass murder of an ethnic or national group. In his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), he argued that the Nazi occupation destroyed practically all subjected national or ethnic groups by attacking their culture, impoverishing them, lowering their birth rate, and physically destroying their members. He highlighted, among other aspects, language and school policies, currency exchange rules, the reduction of birth rates in occupied countries through the mass deportation of laborers to Germany, and the imposition of German laws that favored the integration of foreign citizens into the German people’s community on the basis of race. Lemkin went so far as to argue that the German occupation policies were designed to strengthen Germany by decimating its neighbors to such a degree that even a defeat in the Second World War would leave Germany predominant in postwar Europe. Lemkin highlighted the imposition of German law in the occupied territories as the lynchpin of genocidal policies. The arbitrariness and destructivity of the Nazi occupation inspired his concept of genocide and motivated his call for an international convention on military occupations and genocide after the war, comparable to the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War (1929).
