Principal investigators: Prof. Dr. Stephan Lehnstaedt (Touro University, Berlin), Dr. Daniel Brewing (RWTH Aachen)

Project funded by Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur Runs 2022/2023

Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) was born in Bezwodne in Russian Poland (today Belarus) to Jewish parents. He studied law, literature and philosophy in Lviv from 1920 and briefly in Heidelberg, earning his doctorate in 1926. In addition to his work as a public prosecutor in Warsaw from 1929, he became involved with ethnic violence. Because he was familiar with pogroms and discrimination against Polish Jews from his own experience, he called for an international convention for the protection of all minorities in 1933.

At the beginning of the war in 1939, Lemkin fled from German territory via Lviv and Vilnius. At first he finds asylum in Sweden and teaches at Stockholm University. At the same time, he collects documents on the persecution of Jews in German-occupied Europe. From 1941 he teaches in the USA. There, in 1944, he publishes the groundbreaking book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” which is the first systematic analysis of the Holocaust. In it, he develops for
the first time the term genocide: “…a coordinated plan of diverse actions directed toward the destruction of essential foundations of the life of a population group with the aim of annihilating the group.”

After 1945, Lemkin initially works for Robert Jackson, the U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial. In 1948, the United Nations adopts the Genocide Convention, long prepared by Lemkin, for which “Axis Rule” is the basic rationale – the Genocide Convention is intended to make a second Holocaust impossible. “Axis Rule” therefore systematically examines the various elements as well as the course of the persecution of the Jews by Germany and its allies and then presents the historical events in the individual countries of occupied Europe. In this way, the causes and conditions of genocides are revealed using the example of the Shoah. The book is thus of outstanding importance for genocide prevention and has received much attention abroad. 

Moreover, it is an impressively incisive analysis of the Nazi occupation of Europe that goes far beyond the concept of genocide. In this respect, the book can be seen on a par with Franz Neumann’s “Behemoth,” for example, even if the focus is different; nonetheless, it is one of the pioneering projects of a state-science-inspired investigation of Nazi domination practices, which is impressive not least because Lemkin quite actually only had official printed materials available as sources in the process.

Despite this historical significance for historiography and international law – especially in Germany – the work still exists only in English. The aim of this project is therefore to translate the work into German and thus make it accessible to a wider readership in this country. The target audience is not only academic research and teaching in the aforementioned fields, but also practitioners of international law and, in particular, political education in the areas of National Socialism/Holocaust, genocide, and international law/human rights. The publication should also help to create attention for the person Raphael Lemkin as well as his concerns. We expect a broad civil society and scholarly reception.

Lemkin’s book consists of 266 pages of analysis and another 370 pages of historical source material in various European languages. While the first part is translated from English, the sources have to be identified in the original languages and then translated into German; about two thirds of this material is originally German. The work, which is now 75 years old, is still impressive in the lucid clarity and systematic nature of its analysis, but it still requires
classification and contextualization, which will be provided by a comprehensive introduction written by the two project leaders.