ABSTRACT
Lemkin was interested in criminal law and believed that its analysis was necessary to understand the mechanisms governing communities of people and political systems, and especially the socio-political systems of a new, totalitarian type, which emerged in the closing stages of World War I. He undoubtedly read some of the classical Western postwar publications, but his way of thinking about totalitarianisms and the Soviet system had been shaped before World War II. Lemkin did not quite offer his own explanations, but rather drew upon the findings of other scholars to demonstrate how the analyzed tendencies were reflected in criminal law. He was especially critical of the Soviet Union as an undemocratic state which ruthlessly dominated the individual, and whose laws were shaped in such way so as to enable indiscriminate punishment of people. His assessment of the Italian fascist system was less conclusive, more ambivalent. The German National Socialism was not a subject of comprehensive analyses by Lemkin, which may have followed from the fact that his practice of law was increasingly time-consuming to him. Lemkin published only a short article in which he described the reforms of the German law as a regression by a couple of centuries and as an action vitiating its previous illustrious achievements. The article belonged to the genre of popular science and its assessment of the reforms in German law lacked analytical depth, but it was a clear manifesto of Lemkin’s attitude toward the changes in Germany after 1933.
