‘He in Whose Interest It Was, Did It’: Lemkin’s Lost Law of Genocide

Tony Barta is an Honorary Associate in History at La Trobe University. His articles on genocide in Australia and elsewhere are listed at [http://www.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/about/staff/profile?uname=TBarta]. Most are available on the web. His book The Destruction of Peoples will be published by Bloomsbury.

Almost all writings on genocide establish their credentials by citing Raphael Lemkin. Very few go far beyond the justly famous Chapter IX of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he lays out his definition of the word he has invented, or the words of the United Nations Genocide Convention, which he made into international law. Both texts are powerful and appropriate; neither leads us into the considered historical analysis that lies behind Lemkin’s passion—or into the passion that inspired his analysis. His horror at what the German conquerors and their henchmen were doing in Europe does not often enough make it into commentary on his principles, nor does his outrage at those who profit from the cruelties and barbarities being perpetrated. Unnoticed by those who invoke Lemkin’s name in arguments about explicit “intent to destroy” is his insistence on extending responsibility beyond the front-line perpetrators and the back-room policymakers. Having long argued against a narrowly black-letter understanding of intent, I must now also count myself among the insufficiently attentive readers.

 

The reason does not involve a conversion to conventional intent. It does, not, strictly, involve a legalism. It does, however, centre on a maxim extraordinarily apposite to my historical arguments. I returned to Lemkin out of renewed interest in the wartime context of his ideas and his post-war expansion of them. I aimed to follow him through his detailing of the genocidal laws and decrees that makes up the bulk of Axis Rule and to check again whether his later intensive research into colonial genocides is foreshadowed in this documentation of Europe’s suffering under the Nazis. My surprise at something I had not previously cited came long before the documents: some Latin words in the preface—facit cui prodest—are followed by a translation: he in whose interest it was, did it.¹

 

This, as Lemkin most definitely intended, gave me pause. In wartime, in the midst of the atrocities, he wanted to make a point that would have easy assent among his English-speaking readers. He insisted, in five closely argued paragraphs, that the crimes carried out far from hearth and home could not be separated from “important political and moral considerations based upon the responsibility of the German people treated as an entirety”.

 

All important classes and groups of the population have voluntarily assisted Hitler in the scheme of world domination: the military, by training the reserves and working out plans for conquest; the businessmen, by penetrating and disrupting foreign economies through cartels, patent devices, and clearing agreements; the propagandists, by organizing Germans abroad and preparing fifth columns in countries to be occupied; the scientists, by elaborating doctrines for German hegemony; the educators, by arming spiritually the German youth.²

Colonisation and Historical Responsibility

If “all important classes and groups of the population” are crammed into the dock, it cannot be for a criminal indictment for genocide. They are arraigned under the last of the book’s subtitles, “Proposals for Redress”. Though this section immediately follows Lemkin’s renewed appeal that “attacks upon national, religious, and ethnic groups should be made international crimes” for which perpetrators would be tried, it makes the point that such trials are not sufficient redress because of the larger societal involvement. Indeed, the conception of perpetrator, Lemkin suggests, needs to be teased out.

 

The German techniques of exploitation of the subjugated nations are so numerous, thoughtful, and elaborate, and are so greatly dependent upon personal skill and responsibility, that this complex machinery could not have been successful without devotion to the cause of the persons in control.³

 

The next paragraph is the one that links the committing of a crime to having an interest in it. “The practical ancient Roman had a proverb”—the one cited—to make this point. As for the practical contemporary German, Lemkin’s catalogue of examples again deserves to be quoted in full:

 

Indeed, all groups of the German nation had their share in the spoils of occupied Europe. The German Hausfrau used for her family the food of all occupied countries, Polish geese, Yugoslav pigs, French wine, Danish butter, Greek olives, Norwegian fish; the German industrialist used French and Polish coal, Russian lumber; the German employer in agriculture and industry used for his greater profit imported conscript labor; the German business man bought up foreign interests and properties, taking advantage of the debasement of non-German currencies; the importer benefited through low prices and compulsory credits; and by Hitler’s decree of July 28, 1942, the access to women in occupied countries was facilitated for German manhood by fiat of law.⁴ 

 

I should not have forgotten these forthright accusations. In their first essay on genocide, Ann Curthoys and John Docker highlighted the benefits Lemkin listed, and his insistence that all groups who shared the spoils of occupied Europe shared responsibility for the atrocities.⁵ In 1943, the war was drawing to a desperate close, the most horrific of Nazi crimes were being uncovered, and collective punishment was thick in the air. The idea did not survive long. As prosecutions for specific criminal acts got under way (and as former enemies were courted for the new Cold War alliances) collective responsibility went rapidly out of fashion. In America, especially, where it had been almost official doctrine, the turnaround was complete.

 

The renewal of interest in Lemkin’s work many decades later produced a new reason for suppressing his insistence on collective responsibility: the narrowly legalistic conception of “intent”. Thanks to Lemkin’s heroic efforts, genocide became a crime in international law. Intent mattered—and how could a whole people have the intention to commit genocide? They might go along with a general euphoria about victory, they might accept the age-old realities of conquest, and wartime occupation. But genocide? From the moment Lemkin was rediscovered, the focus would be on his separate chapter defining the crime while passing over his powerful remarks on responsibility and redress.

 

Intent is an appropriate criterion in legal proceedings. A purely legal reading is not appropriate for understanding the past. Two examples can help us tease out the interpretive possibilities of Lemkin’s lost law of historical judgement. Where a criminal prosecution should fail, a historical enquiry may reveal the relationships of interest that produced a genocidal outcome. I am confident that Lemkin did not intend otherwise.

 

The first place to look is the place he knew best, Poland. The second is perhaps the place he knew least, Australia. I shall try to test whether two such different cases of colonial genocide bring us closer to something quite basic, more fundamental even than Lemkin’s justly cited “two phases” of genocide: the “destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group” together with “the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor”.⁶ Prior to this conception, as Dirk Moses has recently emphasised, is the proposition that humans find their identity and practical existence, their very humanity, in groups.⁷ Too often overlooked is the reality that all genocidal encounters involve groups larger than the group of victims and the group of perpetrators who might be cited in a court. They are most often historical encounters between much larger conquering and conquered groups, each less than monolithic yet bound together in the concept and carrying out of genocide: the killing of the culture and community within which individuals’ lives are sustained. In this lethal encounter between groups, I propose, lies Lemkin’s lost basic law.

 

Moses addresses the misconception that killing a cultural group means killing or removing all the individuals. Some may be permitted to stay, but only under conditions ensuring that the group from which they derive their identity does not survive. “For this reason,” Moses writes, “Lemkin tended to associate ‘destruction’—a word he preferred to ‘extermination’—with what he called ‘crippling’ a group: genocide, he wrote in 1946, is ‘the criminal intent to destroy or cripple permanently a human group’.”⁸ Moses suggests that Lemkin’s attachment to groups very probably derived from Herder and Mazzini as well as his Polish romantic nationalism and meant that to destroy a distinctive culture meant, in Lemkin’s words, “draining the spiritual resources of mankind”.⁹ The disintegration of a weaker culture in the face of a stronger civilisation need not be genocidal but coercion would make it so. As Moses points out, the very Western civilisation Lemkin saw as the bearer of law might not be a protection against the genocidal destruction of indigenous cultures.

 

Where in all this, I need to ask, is the law that insists on collective responsibility and redress? My long-held view is that colonisation often involved destruction of peoples whom the colonising and civilising authorities had vowed to protect. The religious zeal of the colonisers, of course, ran directly against the protection of “barbarous” or “primitive” cultures, and so did their insistence on declaring their ownership of the land. Some critics have contended that my “relations of genocide” argument, linking land seizures to terrible casualties in dispossessed lives, leaves no one responsible for the destruction. Lemkin clearly disagrees. His very first illustration of what he means by genocide concerns property, and it precedes his famous “two phases” formula. Any confiscations of property that are ordered against individuals “solely because they are Poles, Jews or Czechs” must “tend in effect to weaken the national entities of which those persons are members”.¹⁰ This message in the “Genocide” chapter is followed by forthright commentary on property laws—still under the heading “Genocide”—in the subsequent review of policy decrees in all the occupied countries. To Lemkin, coerced transferring of property between population groups is a potent instrument of genocidal colonisation. Land appropriation with the intended effect of harming a racially or ethnically defined population has been fundamental to settler policies from before Locke to after Hitler. In answering the question “In whose interest was it?” we can see a bridge between Lemkin the lawyer recording the trauma of colonised Europe, and Lemkin the historian who later tried to understand genocides on other continents at other times.

Planning Genocide in Poland

Poland was Raphael Lemkin’s homeland. His knowledge of the people, the country, its language and institutions might lead us to expect a less dispassionate engagement with its fate. In fact, he proceeds with the same careful compilation of measures, assessing each against the criteria for damage he was gathering together. His section on property is no different in tone or content from his reporting on the other occupied nations. Nations, rather than countries, were the units Lemkin considered significant: his purpose was to show how the occupier’s decrees on property were in each case decrees designed to further genocide, to destroy the subject nation. Of Poland, partly incorporated into the Reich, he writes: 

 

The incorporated areas are subject to an especially severe régime, involving genocide for the Polish population. On short notice Poles were removed from their homes and replaced by German settlers. Institutions of Polish administration were abolished and replaced by German institutions. Polish cultural institutions were closed, and the German language was made the language of education in the schools.¹¹ 

 

Lemkin then reviews further measures affecting the judiciary, the currency, and property. He particularly notes an order of 9 December 2024 that introduced a long list of very substantial tax exemptions, “to establish and promote Germanism (Deutschtum) in the incorporated Eastern Territories”. After going through all the incentives offered to Germans acquiring Polish land he does not beat about the bush: “By these tax exemptions and many others, the German settlers were immediately placed in a stronger and more advantageous position than the Poles, who were destined, in accordance with the occupant’s plans, to suffer a general liquidation.”¹²

 

We know from subsequently unearthed documents and the intensive work of historians that such policy was under active discussion long before the war and thus well before Himmler got himself the authority from Hitler to start implementing it with SS ideology and SS methods. With Hitler’s backing (and against the misgivings of Göring and others who prioritised military and economic objectives), he was able to pursue his colonial ambitions for resettled ethnic Germans as soon as most of the Polish population fell into German hands with the partition of 1939. The more than seventeen million Poles, with 675,000 Germans, were quickly divided into regions for direct occupation rule (with Jewish Poles) in the Generalgovernment, or for direct annexation. The part annexed as immediate colonial territory was the “Wartheland”. It had 4,500,000 inhabitants, 85 per cent Polish, 8 per cent classified as Jewish, only 7 per cent German. So what should happen? Enthusiastic researchers into race and settlement offered solutions under a catchy motto: “We need living space but no Polish lice in our fur.”¹³

 

The linking of one people’s interest in the genocide of another was the headline principle of a position paper from the first weeks of the war. “Only land won through settlement remains secure in possession of a people for millennia.” Consequently, 

 

The living space to be won shall exclusively serve German people and the German future; German blood has been spilled for this goal only. The newly acquired land must be made empty of all foreign ethnic elements; all foreign races; foreign peoples are to be resettled. 

 

Although “resettlement” did not yet have the lethal connotations it was to acquire, one wonders what the august academics behind the position paper envisaged at a time when the actual and potential elites of the Polish nation were already being rounded up and shot. There would be no better fate for the Jews living in the conquered lands: 

 

The present inhabitants of the newly ceded areas are racially (and therefore in character, talents and capabilities too) for the most part totally useless. Above all the c. two million Jews and Jewish hybrids must be pushed out as soon as possible.¹⁴ 

 

There is more in this vein, and a confidence that a “powerful Germany with its excellent organisational gifts and its massive resources can resettle without difficulty ten or still more millions in a few years”.¹⁵ Among the “pushed out” Jews would be all of Lemkin’s extended family left behind in Poland, murdered in what he did not hesitate to call the “most radical” genocide. But he also did not hesitate to locate it within the larger genocidal project of the Nazis, aimed at clearing a huge “living space” in eastern Europe for ethnic German settlement. Every farm allocated to a German had a just-dispossessed owner. None of the thousands of Germans engaged in the enterprise—academics, bureaucrats, military and police personnel—could fail to know who was being harmed, or in whose interest harm was being done.

 

Lemkin did not know everything in train; that his scrupulous compilation did not have evidence of the worst Nazi atrocities is a reminder of how different historical memory would be if the Germans had won. They believed they could obliterate the knowledge of their crimes as efficiently as they intended to obliterate whole societies, cultures and even populations. That they could obscure their deeds from someone as determined and skilled as Lemkin shows how close they came. Then redress would not even arise, and two careerist academics who made themselves active ideologues of genocide would continue to bask in influence. Most of us will see them as more blameworthy than the thousands of German settlers herded into the “new” lands, often against their will. Few of these settlers prospered in the short term and all were punished by another ruthless uprooting at the end of the war. But Reche was not punished. As an expert on blood groups, he was called on by a West German court investigating the case of Anna Andersen, who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, youngest daughter of the last tsar and tsarina; Reche wrongly supported her claim and died with various honours in 1966. He could say he suffered. As a Nazi Party member he was detained for sixteen months after the war. Brackmann, not a party member but highly decorated by Hitler personally, suffered an interruption to his pension.¹⁶

 

The trials of the major war criminals at Nuremberg would do better at apportioning legal responsibility but they also distracted from the spread of interests the leaders brought into play. Over almost thirty years I have argued that interests—often manifested in actions and not in words—must be taken into account in questions of genocide. Even though I had overlooked Lemkin’s own Roman maxim, my “relations of genocide” concept pointed to a process of making profits from destroying peoples. But one sentence has troubled me. In my first essay on Australian consciousness of genocide I said that “Germans gained nothing from genocide”.¹⁷ By the end of Hitler’s war that may have been true. The population transfers, in millions, were all the other way, and thousands of families not caught up in his colonising ambitions became casualties. But at the time of conquest, and during thefts of Jewish property or opportunities for advancement opened by the dismissal of Jewish colleagues, a sadly large number of Germans advanced their own interests. In Lemkin’s view, anyone who gained by endangering the existence of another people was guilty of genocide. We have yet to come to terms with that.

Interests and Genocide in Australia

When I asserted that “Germans gained nothing from genocide”, I added two words: “We did.” Australians recoiled from the idea that they should be associated with such a terrible term. The rest of the world, it seems, can cope with the recognition that Australia is a nation founded on genocide. The settlers who began to arrive from Britain in 1788 prospered by the destruction of a larger number of unique indigenous groups than anyone cared to count. They brought diseases, alcohol, firearms and the ruthless assurance that the land belonged to no one—until someone claimed it to run sheep on. The principle that the land had no owners has been overturned by the courts; that it was seized with terrible harm to those owners is acknowledged and suppressed in the same instant. With the complicity of too many Australian historians, Australia remains in denial.

 

When Lemkin finally found time to turn his attention to genocides outside Europe—though in the main instigated by Europeans—Australia was at the end of his list. Nevertheless, he began quite thoroughly to research the most publicised instance, the rapid wiping out of Aboriginal peoples in Tasmania. His sources, some about to be superseded, some from archives, were adequate for his analysis. The typescript, now published as “Tasmania”, a chapter of some twenty-five pages,¹⁸ deserves a reading in the light of his outline for a big historical study of genocide, and the principles he established in the UN Genocide Convention. What shows up if we scrutinise it under the searing light of his basic law precept: in whose interest?

 

The account Lemkin gives is not especially helpful. He reproduces the much-quoted 1803 instructions from the British colonial governor to “live in amity and kindness” with the natives, to punish “any acts of violence against them”, and even to punish those who might “wantonly give them any interruption in the exercise of their several occupations”. Few commentators then or since have found it important to pursue the problems of that carefully placed “wantonly”, and Lemkin also misses the opportunity. After a report of soldiers’ firing on a peaceable gathering—“There were many of the Natives slaughtered and wounded”—Lemkin quotes a long excerpt from a government notice deploring both settler provocations and Aboriginal acts of vengeance which then gives settlers blanket permission to shoot even on the fear that an attack may be made against them.

 

Nowhere, of course, do the British colonial documents hint that the settlement itself might be considered a wanton interruption, occasioning the conflict that followed. And Lemkin himself is not willing to take that line. His account of the Aborigines’ situation is clear and moving. After reviewing the 1828 declaration of martial law in Tasmania and the “terrible mortality” attending the removal of the Aboriginal remnant, he follows the convention of his time and mourns the passing of the last “pure blood” Tasmanian. His well-exercised sense that survival, as well as genocide, was a more complicated matter than killing is evident in the succeeding sections, including “Prostitution and treatment of women”, “The sealers”, “Decline in birth rate and child mortality”, “Stealing of children”, “Legal status”, “Liquor”, “Disease”, and “Natives in captivity”. The last Tasmanian Aboriginal survivors, who might have had a chance of cultural adaptation, were pitiful. “The authorities began the civilising process and then at the end left the aborigines, lifeless and dispirited, without even the solace of civilised ways,” Lemkin writes.¹⁹

 

Lemkin’s sharing out of responsibility is notable for itself falling victim to the solace of civilisation. As Moses points out, he was not averse to colonising European cultures, whether Spanish or British. But he did not follow through the implications. In a section of his “Tasmania” chapter entitled “Intent to destroy—who is guilty, Government or individuals?”, he mainly blames “the riffraff of Britain” (p. 81) and not the British government or the elites who made policy. “The Government policy in Tasmania was one of benevolence toward the aborigines” (p. 81). Even the fact that “Tasmania was a penal colony” escapes his censure; yet it was because “convicted criminals and felons were sent by the thousands to the island” (p. 81)—by whom, one might ask, and why?—that the indigenous population had no chance. The slippage in Lemkin’s moral footing is perhaps most pronounced when he suggests a measure of genocide prevention not so different from the cruel solution adopted. “Had the Government devised some plan at the time of colonisation for establishing the aborigines in one part of Tasmania and protecting them from the attacks of the whites, the race might have been spared” (p. 82). Can one imagine Lemkin’s advocating such a solution for Poland?

 

From Tasmania, then from Sydney, settlers established beachheads on the southern mainland of Australia. Millions of acres were rapidly appropriated by colonists. Only a few years after the last Tasmanians had been rounded up, the peoples in the south-east of the continent felt the ruthless onslaught of European civilisation.²⁰ The government instituted official “Protectors”, led by the man who had “saved” the remnant in Tasmania. They failed with equal pain and pathos. By the time the gold rushes brought hundreds of thousands of new migrants from around the world, another Indigenous remnant (many separate peoples thrown together) survived only because a handful of missionaries were determined to save souls—by destroying ancient cultures.

 

Lemkin knew all this. He knew the catastrophe was recognised at the time. The last section of his chapter on Tasmania is “Reactions of public opinion”. He listed four pages of horror, outrage and grief from journalists, clerics and highly placed officials, among them Sir George Murray, the Colonial Secretary, who confessed “the result of our occupation of the island” was “one very difficult to be reconciled with feelings of humanity” (p. 98). Perhaps for diplomatic reasons, this occupation of a distant imperial outpost in the past did not seem to remind Lemkin of a similarly devastating occupation nearer to the present. In whose interest was Axis rule in occupied Europe? In whose interest was British rule in occupied Australia?

 

Reference to genocide is unpopular not only among the heirs of settler Australians. It is increasingly avoided by Indigenous Australians as well. Many now wish to emphasise a triumphant survival, and unbroken links with ancestral country. Most recently, even after the trauma of child removal, they want other Australians to take note of their educated leadership, and the consequent ability to control their own economic development. So the beneficiaries of European civilisation now include those most traumatised by it in the past. In whose interest was it? Now the tally includes Aboriginal peoples making agreements about mining and other developments. For an accounting of responsibility, and redress over the longer term, that might complicate matters.²¹

 

The destruction of peoples cannot be washed away or written out of Australia’s past. That such destruction was in the interest of the privateers with enough “capital on four feet” to take up a sheep run—and of the policymakers immediately beholden to this new public—is beyond question. There could follow a detailed list equivalent to Lemkin’s catalogue of the benefits genocide brought to Germans under Hitler: sustenance for the newly settled families, salaries and careers for colonial officials, business for city professionals and tradesmen, profits to ship-owners and sailors employed in the booming import and export trade. All Australians living on the benefits of the seized lands are beneficiaries, as are millions of individuals in far-off markets and manufacturing plants in the world economy. The ramifications are impossibly vast and responsibility in any legally useful sense is impossible to assign. Historically, though, we should be able to locate the beneficiaries within developments historians have long been bold enough to expound. Only the connection to genocide has escaped their attention.

 

Lemkin was attempting a pioneering work in his world history, a record rather than an analysis. To reveal the relations of genocide was not what he had in mind. Few historians of genocide do have it in mind but the challenge remains. In every instance of genocide, the interests in play have to be followed through. In every era of genocide, the larger web of interests has to be brought to light. In the modern era, the web is global and the historical processes at work—economic, social, political, ideological and cultural (just for a start)—need to explored in their dialectical complexity. No wonder the brief, until recently, has been so often skimmed and passed up. Yet Lemkin did not let go of the concept. Writing about Spanish colonialism, he made the observation that genocide is “largely a function of interest”.²²

The Challenge

How might retrievals of Lemkin’s lost law change our understanding of genocide? Quite fundamentally. Sociology has been in genocide scholarship since the beginning, yet the sociology of genocidal societies remains the least connected to the scholarly discourse of genocide studies. Tracing the roots of Nazism in German society and culture was a major preoccupation before and during the genocidal regime. Lemkin’s comprehensive bill of indictment, from the plunder of resources to the exploitation of conquered women, attests not only to his direct research but to a lively sense of how a society works. He nevertheless avoids sociological concepts. We should not. The case of Germany, because of an enduring preoccupation with the Holocaust, remains the best served in terms of teasing out the processes behind ideologies and policies of destruction. For the ramifications of ethnic prejudices and the cultures in which they are nurtured, historians in other fields should learn from the scholarship on Germany’s path to Nazism. We are nowhere near as advanced in connecting the huge achievements of British social history with genocide in Britain’s colonies, or in moving the mountain of American historical scholarship towards the complex societal dynamics of catastrophe on the frontier.

 

Lemkin’s law of interest demands that we do not simply offer up examples of individual involvement in genocide, as I have done with two careerist German professors. I may have succeeded in indicating again—as many others have done—how far away from the killing ditches responsibility might lie, but we need to keep working at explicating careerism under a dictatorship, and in the society that continued before and after the dictatorship (flagged here with Reche’s post-war celebrity status). A larger analysis of the German elites and their relationships to class, gender, minority groups, and to one another requires kinds of conceptualisation only being developed when Lemkin was writing.²³ Some were available: the great sociologist Max Weber taught us much about understanding such a society—and himself advocated replacing Polish labourers with Germans on Prussian estates.²⁴ That was not exactly the solution adopted by the Nazis—the Poles and other Slavs would be required for slave labour—and the benefits of their genocide were intended for the whole society, not a class of landowners. National Socialism was a serious programme far more radical than Weber’s conservative nationalism.

 

Celebrity in Australian history is very well insulated against contamination with genocide. The lives of important individuals are rarely discussed in the full context of British colonialism and the society that produced it. John Batman, hunter of Tasmanian Aborigines and founder of Melbourne, is always rated as significant, but significant of what? He would not have been engaged in the Black War and then the extension of European settlement to the south of the mainland had it not been for the booming wool trade. And the Aborigines on both sides of the Bass Strait would not have been so carelessly destroyed had their labour been required. Because the British exported part of their surplus labour to the other side of the world as convicts, the indigenous Australians were surplus to requirements. Displaced by unwilling and willing colonists—convicts, soldiers, and the settlers with capital who gambled on sheep—Aborigines had no alternative to guerrilla resistance. The fearful shepherds on the frontline, isolated and vulnerable, saw no alternative to the permanent solution Batman’s friends were ready to endorse. Even those who raised their voices against the genocide feared that the combined interests of capital, labour and civil society were making it irresistible. Weber’s instrumental rationality, simple business and political imperatives, dictated the outcome.²⁵

 

Weber, famously, spent much of his life wrestling with the ghost of Marx. It is now time that we wrestled more determinedly with the ghost of Lemkin. I’d want both Marx and Weber in my corner, and numerous other heavyweights besides. I would not want to engage Lemkin on questions of historical dynamics without Marx, and in matters of culture I’d be looking to Weber, Geertz and many others for help. Lemkin was an incisive and visionary lawyer, schooled in history, languages and the classics. He was able to distil complex historical concerns into enforceable legal prescriptions. We owe him much more than the word “genocide”. He left us the Genocide Convention and a huge change in historical consciousness. His intellectual and genuinely historic tour de force deserves both respect and a serious critique. We need to uncover and prosecute genocides in the present and recover and explain the genocides of the past.

 

Adam Jones has seen that the ramifications of genocide within perpetrating societies have lessons for the present as well as for understanding the past. He does not shy away from “collective agency”: 

 

Another important aspect of a focus on structural and institutional violence is that it forces us to confront the collective agency often required to inflict it. Each of us is duty-bound to examine institutions and structural arrangements in which we participate, many of which we are born into; to determine the extent to which they are violent, even genocidal; to understand how we act, in concert with others, to buttress and perpetuate them; and to consider how we can and should act, again alongside others, to impede and erode them.²⁶ 

 

With such dialectical engagement the work of genocide studies must now advance. As Lemkin’s concepts are interrogated and his analyses of specific instances are revisited his status will not be diminished. His interpretations of colonial genocides are rightly regarded as suggestive rather than authoritative and they will remain so.²⁷ His lost law remains a good guide: human groups can be destroyed by means that do not always involve directed killing; to understand what happened we must understand the groups in whose interest the destruction was carried through.

Endnotes

 

1. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. xiv. Two excellent newer histories are Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2008), and Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Curiously, Mazower makes no mention of Lemkin, nor, with reference to Nazi policies, does Snyder.

 

2. Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. xiii.

 

3. Ibid., p. xiv.

 

4. Ibid., p. xiv.

 

5. Ann Curthoys and John Docker, “Genocide: Definitions, Questions, Settler-Colonies”, introduction to special section on genocide, Aboriginal History 25 (2001), p. 11. See also their authoritative “Defining Genocide” chapter in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 9–41.

 

6. Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. 79.

 

7. A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide”, in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 19–41.

 

8. Ibid., p. 21.

 

9. Ibid., p. 23.

 

10. Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. 79.

 

11. Ibid., p. 222.

 

12. Ibid., p. 225.

 

13. Professor Otto Reche to Professor Albert Brackmann, 19 September 1939, in Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 166. Brackmann, senior and better connected, suggested Reche write a position paper which he then forwarded to executive authorities. For the context, and the translated memorandum, see Burleigh, pp. 158–86.

 

14. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, pp. 168–9.

 

15. Ibid., p. 170.

 

16. Ibid., pp. 246–9 and Wikipedia. For the Germanisation of the Warthegau see Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, pp. 78–89.

 

17. Tony Barta, “After the Holocaust: Consciousness of Genocide in Australia”, Australian Journal of Politics and History 31, no 1 (1985), pp. 154–61. Compare the damning evidence in Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York: Holt, 2008), and Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin USA, 2008).

 

18. Edited, with an introduction, including Lemkin’s schema for a large historical study, by Ann Curthoys, in Colonialism and Genocide, ed. A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 66–100. Originally published in Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (June 2005). Ann Curthoys reviews contributions before and after Lemkin in “Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea”, in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 229–52.

 

19. Lemkin, “Tasmania”, in Colonialism and Genocide, ed. Moses and Stone, p. 95.

 

20. See Tony Barta, “ ‘They Appear Actually to Vanish from the Face of the Earth.’ Aborigines and the European Project in Australia Felix”, Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 4 (2008), pp. 519–39.

 

21. On the emergence of an Aboriginal middle class in Australia, see Marcia Langton, “The Quiet Revolution: Indigenous People and the Resources Boom”, 2012 ABC Boyer Lectures, University of Melbourne, 18 November–2 December 2012 [http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/boyerlectures/2012-boyer-lectures/4305696].

 

22. It was again John Docker who noticed the reference: John Docker, “Are Settler-Colonies Inherently Genocidal? Re-reading Lemkin”, in Empire, Colony, Genocide, ed. Moses, p. 92, citing Box 8, Folder 12 of the Lemkin Archive of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York.

 

23. Rainer C. Baum, The Holocaust and the German Elite: Genocide and National Suicide in Germany, 1871–1945 (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), deserves more attention than it has received. For a stimulating guide to the range of relevant contexts see Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

 

24. See Martin Shaw, “Sociology and Genocide”, in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Bloxham and Moses, pp. 142–62. See also the references to Weber in Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, and for ways Weber’s ideas can be applied to another genocidal society, Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

 

25. James Boyce, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2011), indicates the breadth of the project, and can usefully be set beside another recent history, Bain Attwood, Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2009).

 

26. Adam Jones, “Genocide and Structural Violence: Charting the Terrain”, in his New Directions in Genocide Research (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 146–7 (italics in original).

 

27. See, for instance, Michael A. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas”, Journal of Genocide Research 7, no 4 (2005), pp. 509–29; John Docker, The Origins of Violence (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008); and Haifa Rashed and Damien Short, “Genocide and Settler Colonialism: Can a Lemkin-Inspired Genocide Perspective Aid Our Understanding of the Palestinian Situation?”, International Journal of Human Rights 16, no. 8 (December 2012), pp. 1142–69.