A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (85 page)

17. [bid., pp. 220, 223.

18. Ibid., p. 227.

19. Ibid., p. 225.

20. Henry Morgenthau to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, August 11, 1915, cited in Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, p. 346.

21. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, p. 218.

22. "Turks Are Evicting Native Christians," New York Times, July 12, 1915, p. 4.

23. "Bryce Asks US to Aid Armenia. Says That All Christians in Trebizond, Numbering 10,000, Were Drowned," New York Times, September 21, 1915, p. 3.

24. "800,000 Armenians Counted Destroyed," New York Times, October 7, 1915, p. 3.

25. "Million Armenians Killed or in Exile," New YorkTirnes, December 15, 1915, p. 3.

26. "500,000 Armenians Said to Have Perished. Washington Asked to Stop Slaughter of Christians by Turks and Kurds," New York Times, September 24, 1915, p. 2; "Says Extinction Menaces Armenia; Dr. Gabriel Tells of More Than 450,000 Killed in Recent Massacres," New York Tines, September 25, 1915, p. 3.

27. "Armenian Officials Murdered by Turks. Confirmation from Cairo of the Wholesale Atrocities That von Bernstorff Belittles," New York Times, September 30, 1915, p. 2. Leopold's crimes were mammoth, but unlike Abdul Hamid's, they were not aimed at wiping out one particular ethnic group. Any and every African slave was vulnerable. When a village failed to meet its rubber quota, Belgian soldiers or rubber company "sentries" often murdered whole communities or chopped the hands off the slaves, leaving them powerless to care for themselves or their families. Piles of severed hands and full skeletons littered Leopold's vast empire. The local people who fled ahead of the Europeans' arrival found their villages burned down when they returned. Exhausted, malnourished laborers were vulnerable to disease, which spread rapidly. All told, according to Jan Vansina, a historian and anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, the Congo population was cut "by at least half" between 1880 and 1920. Some 10 million people died as a result of Leopold's presence. Cited in Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 225-234.

28. "Pleas for Armenia by Germany Futile," New York Times, October 10, 1915, sec. 2, p. 19.

29. "Turkish Official Denies Atrocities;' New York Times, October 15, 1915, p. 4.

30. George R. Montgomnery, "Why Talaat Pasha's Assassin Was Acquitted," Current History, July 1921,p.554.

31. Henry Morgenthau III, Mostly Morgenthaus:A Family History (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991), p. 170.

32. "Armenian Women Put up at Auction; Refugee Tells of the Fate ofThose in Turkish Hands;' Neu, York Times, September 29, 1915, p. 3. The Committee on Armenian Atrocities later became the Near East Relief Committee and subsequently the Near East Foundation.

33. Theodore Roosevelt to Samuel Dutton, November 24, 1915, in Theodore Roosevelt, Fear God and Take Your Own Part (NewYork: George H. Doran, 1916), p. 377. Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir (New York: Basic Books, 1997), steered me to Roosevelt's writings on the atrocities with his paper "From Ezra Pound to Theodore Roosevelt: An American Intellectual and Cultural Response to the Armenian Genocide," essay presented at the National Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C., September 28, 2000.

34. Roosevelt, Fear God, pp. 381-382.

35. Balakian, "From Ezra Pound," citing Theodore Roosevelt, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 8: The Days of Armageddon, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), pp. 1316-1318.

36. "Would Send Here 550,000 Armenians; Morgenthau Urges Scheme to Save Them from the Turks-Offers to Raise $1,000,000," New York Tithes, September 14, 1915, p. 2.

37. "Turkey Bars Red Cross," New York Times, October 19, 1915, p. 4.

38. "Appeals for Armenians," NewY7rk Times, February 18, 1916, p. 2.

39. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, pp. 13-14.

40. "Government Send, Plea for Armenia," New York Times, October 5, 1915.

41. Lansing was aware of the savagery of that deportation, as he added," It was not to my mind the deportation which was objectionable but the horrible brutality which attended its execution." Secretary of State Robert Lansing to President Woodrow Wilson, November 21, 1916, in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Lansing Papers, 1914-1920, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1939), p. 42.

42. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, p. 385.

43. Woodrow Wilson, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, ed. Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd (NewYork: Harper and Brothers, 1927), pp. 135-136.

44. Michael Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, 1945-1946 (NewYork: Bedford, 1997), pp. 8-10. A few years earlie r, President Wilson's adviser Edward House had noted that Lansing was inclined to allow sovereignty to shield all forms of state behavior. "He believes that almost any form of atrocity is permissible provided a nation's safety is involved," House wrote. Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: Grove, 1993), p. 23.

45. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, p. 103.

46. Ibid., pp. 125-129.

47. Talaat Pasha, "Posthumous Memoirs of Talaat Pasha," trans. M. Zekeria, Current History, November 1921, pp. 287-295.

48. Near the close of the twentieth century, the Serb perpetrators of genocide in Bosnia would also evade international sanction by seizing European peacekeepers as hostages in order to stave off NATO air strikes.

49. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, p. 144.

Chapter 2, "A Crime Without a Name"

1. Robert Merrill Bartlett, They Stand Invincible: Men Who Are Reshaping Our World (New York: ThomasY. Crowell, 1959), pp. 96-97. Lenkin's papers and recollections are scattered in a number of institutions. The NewwYork Public Library has screened four boxes onto microfilm. Larger collections of Lemkin's personal papers are housed at the American Jewish Historical Society at the Center for Jewish History in NewYork City and the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives located at the Cincinnati, Ohio, campus of Hebrew Union Campus Jewish Institute of Religion. Rabbi Steven L. Jacobs ofTemple B'nai Sholona in Huntsville, Alabama, has the most complete collection of Lemkin's files and correspondence and is currently organizing the material for publication. Jacobs has edited a previously unpublished manuscript by Lemkin: Steven L. Jacobs, ed., Raphael L.emkin's Thoughts on Genocide: Not Guilty (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). The only full-length biography of Lemkin is a book by James Martin, The Man Who Invented Genocide, published in Torrance, California, in 1984 by the so-called Institute of Historical Review, an organization dedicated to Holocaust denial. Martin rails against Lemkin in an extended anti-Semitic rant.

2. Raphael Lemkin,"Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin;' ch. 1. Lemkin's unpublished and incomplete autobiography, which was found among his papers after his death and is now in Jacobs's collection, is haphazardly paginated.

3. George R. Montgon eery, "Why Talaat's Assassin Was Acquitted," Current History, July 1921, pp. 551-555.Tehlirian lived out his days in California.

4. Several years later, in 1926, Lemkin learned that Scholom Schwarzbart, a Jewish tailor orphaned in a pogrom in Ukraine in 1918, shot the Ukrainian minister of war Semion Petliure in Paris. As in the Tehlirian case, the jury found it difficult to acquit or condemn the bereaved assas- sin.They declared him "insane" and then freed him. After the Schwarzbart trial, Lemkin wrote an article describing the man's act as a "beautiful crime" and deploring the absence of a law banning the destruction of national, racial, and religious groups.

5. Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library, reel 2.

6. "Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offences Against the Law of Nations;' fifth conference of the International Bureau for Unification of Criminal Law, under the auspices of the Fifth Committee of the League of Nations, October 14, 1933, trans. James T. Fussell. Available at http://www.preventgenocide.org/lenikin/madridl933-english.htni. He formulated his proposal as follows: Whosoever, out of hatred towards a racial, religious or social collectivity, or with a view to the extermination thereof, undertakes a punishable action against the life, bodily integrity, liberty, dignity or economic existence of a person belonging to such a collectivity, is liable, for the crime of barbarity, to a penalty of... unless his deed falls within a more severe provision of the given code.Whosoever, either out of hatred towards a racial, religious or social collectivity, or with a view to the extermination thereof, destroys its cultural or artistic works will be liable for the crime of vandalism, to a penalty of ... unless his deed falls within a more severe provision of the given code.The above crimes will be prosecuted and punished irrespective of the place where the crime was committed and of the nationality of the offender, according to the law of the country where the offender was apprehended.

7. Lemkin, "Autobiography," ch. 1.

8. Eastern Poland had been the scene of fighting among armies and nationalities for centuries. The Swedish and Napoleonic armies, the Russians, the Lithuanians, the Ukrainians, and, earlier, the Mongols and the Tartars had contested the hills and rivers. In Neighbors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Polish historian Jan Gross gives a wrenching account of the massacre by Poles of some 1,600 Jewish men, women, and children in July 1941 in the small town of Jed- wabne, also in the Bialystok region.

9. Raphael Lemkin, "The Evolution of the Genocide Convention;' p. 1, reel 2, Lemkin Papers, NewYork Public Library.

10. In subsequent speaking engagements and lobbying, Lemkin claimed explicitly that he had presented his paper in person at the Madrid conference. William Korey's Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin (NewYork: Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, 2001) corrected the record, showing that Lemkin had not in fact traveled to Madrid.

11. Korey cites Proceedings of the Forty_f urth Annual Session of the North Carolina Bar Association (Durham, N.C.: Christian Printing, 1942), pp. 107-116, made available to him by James Fussell, who is working on a biography of Lemkin.

12. Lemkin, "Autobiography," ch. 1.

13. Korey, Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin, p. 12.

14."The Evolution of the Genocide Convention," reel 2, Lemkin Papers, NewYork Public Library.

15. Lemkin, "Autobiography," ch. 1.

16. August 22, 1939, meeting with military chiefs in Obersalzburg; emphasis added. In a confidential June 1931 interview with Richard Breitling, editor of the right-wing German daily newspaper Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, Hitler spoke of the "great resettlement policy" he had planned and offered a litany of historical models. "Think of the biblical deportations and the massacres of the Middle Ages and remember the extermination of the Armenians. One eventually reaches the conclusion that masses of men are mere biological plasticine." Quoted in Louis Paul Lochner, What About Germany? (NewYork: Dodd, Mead, 1942), pp. 1-4. See also Kevork B. Bardakjian, Hitler and the Armenian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoryan Institute, 1985), p. 28. The historic "forgetting" of atrocities was a phenomenon noted by many a brutal regime. While signing death warrants, Stilin remarked: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years' time? No one. Who remembers now the names of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one" Quoted in Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2000).

17. Jacques Derogy, Resistance and Revenge:The Armenian Assassination of the 7iokish Leaders Responsible for the 1915 Massacres and Deportations, trans. A. M. Berrett (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1990), p. 195.

18. Lemkin, "Autobiography," ch. 3, p. 39. Lemkin clearly falls into the "intentionalist" camp in thinking Hitler planned the Holocaust well ahead of its execution. "Functionalist" historians believe that Hitler did not decide upon the Final Solution until the war, in response to a variety of wartime stimuli.

19. Ibid., ch. 3, pp. 39-40.

20. Ibid., p. 44.

21. Bartlett, They Stand Ini'inrihle, p. 100; Lemkin,"Autobiography," ch. 4, p. 50.

22. Lemkin, "Autobiography," ch. 4, p. 57.

23. Ibid., p. 65. As Lemkin piled up languages, he liked to quote Victor Hugo, who said, "As many languages as you know, as many times you are a human being."

24. Ibid., pp. 66, 69.

25. Ibid., ch. 6, p. 96.

26. Ibid., p. 105.

27. Ibid., ch. 7, p. 2.

28. Ibid., p. 3.

29. Ibid., p. 5.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., ch. 7, p. 7.

32. In Winston S. Churchill, The Churchill War Papers:'17te Ever-Widening War, vol. 3: 1941, ed. Martin Gilbert (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), pp. 1099-1106. Churchill delivered the speech live on August 24, 1941, soon after meeting with President Roosevelt to discuss the Atlantic Charter. Although the United States had not yet entered the war, Churchill said the meeting symbolized "the marshalling of the good forces of the world against the evil forces." He appealed to conquered European peoples to hang on in resistance. "Have faith, have hope;' Churchill said, "deliverance is sure" Predicting that Hitler would eventually turn on the United States, he assured listeners that the United States "still retains the power to marshal her gigantic strength and, in saving herself, render an incomparable service to mankind" The line that Lemkin found so memorable was not meant to refer to the extermination of Europe's Jewry (which Churchill did not mention) but to the ( Germans"'methodical, merciless butchery" of the Russians.

Chapter 3, The Crime With a Name

1. Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and theAllies (NewYork: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p. 40.

2. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: New Press, 1998), p. 21.The ascription of collective guilt was common in those days. Earl Warren, later chief justice of the Supreme Court and then California attorney general, testified at a congressional hearing after Pearl Harbor that "every Japanese should be considered in the light of a potential fifth columnist." Some 150,000 Japanese Americans were "relocated," or interned in detention camps during the war. See Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment ofJapaneseAmericans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).