A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  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. Montgomery, “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 of Those in Turkish Hands,” New 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 (New York: 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 Times, September 14, 1915, p. 2.

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

  38. “Appeals for Armenians,” New York Times, February 18, 1916, p. 2.

  39. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, pp. 13–14.

  40. “Government Sends 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 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927), pp. 135–136.

  44. Michael Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, 1945–1946 (New York: Bedford, 1997), pp. 8–10. A few years earlier, 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: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1959), pp. 96–97. Lemkin’s papers and recollections are scattered in a number of institutions. The New York 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 New York 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 of the University of 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 Lemkin’s Thoughts on Genocide: Not Guilty (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). In 1984, James Martin and the Institute of Historical Review (an organization dedicated to Holocaust denial) published a nominal biography of Lemkin, entitled The Man Who Invented Genocide, which was an extended anti-Semitic rant. Jim Fussell, a scholar based in Washington, D.C., is preparing the first full-length biography.

  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. Montgomery, “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 assassin. 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/lemkin/madrid1933-english.htm. 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 Jedwabne, also in the Bialystok region.

  9. Raphael Lemkin, “The Evolution of the Genocide Convention,” p. 1, reel 2, Lemkin Papers, New York 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 (New York: 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-fourth Annual Session of the North Carolina Bar Association (Durham, N.C.: Christian Printing, 19
42), 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, New York 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? (New York: 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, Stalin 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 Turkish 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 Invincible, 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: The 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 the Allies (New York: 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 of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  3. Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, p. 44.

  4. E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (New York: John Wiley, 1994), p. 150; emphasis added.

  5. Ibid., pp. 150–151.

  6. Ibid., p. 119. See also Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 167–175; Michael T. Kaufman, “Jan Karski Dies at 86; Warned West About Holocaust,” New York Times, July 15, 2000, p. C15.

  7. Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), p. 336.

  8. Wood and Jankowski, Karski, pp. 151–152.

  9. Exchange quoted in William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 47.

  10. Michael Ignatieff, “Raphael Lemkin and the Moral Imagination,” lecture at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., December 13, 2000.

  11. German Reich Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda, The Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), p. 309.

  12. International Committee of the Red Cross, Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Its Activities During the Second World War, September 1, 1939–June 30,1947, vol. 1 (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 1948), p. 21; Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s “Final Solution” (New York: Owl Books, 1980), p. 60.

  13. See the Bibliography for an extensive list of sources on the subject.

  14. Laqueur, Terrible Secret, p. 67.

  15. Walter Laqueur has shrewdly noted that the placement of these articles signaled the New York Times’ ambivalence about their accuracy. “The editors quite obviously did not know what to make of them,” Laqueur wrote. “If it was true that a million people had been killed this clearly should have been front page news. . . . If it was not true, the story should not have been published at all.” They compromised, assuming that the reports contained some truth and some exaggeration and should be relegated to a less than prominent spot. Ibid., p. 74.

  16. Albert Müller, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 5, 1979, quoted in ibid., p. 89.

  17. Hershel Johnson to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, April 5, 1943, quoted in Laqueur, Terrible Secret, p. 98.

  18. Laqueur, Terrible Secret, p. 201.

  19. W. A. Visser’t Hooft, Protestant theologian and first general secretary of the World Council of Churches, spent the war years in Switzerland and used this phrase in his Memoirs (London: SCM Press, 1973), p. 166. He wrote that anti-Semitism was less a reason for the world’s indifference than “that people could find no place in their consciousness for such an unimaginable horror and that they did not have the imagination, together with the courage, to face it.”

  20. Karski could rely on nothing but his own words: “I have no proofs, no photographs,” he said. “All I can say is that I saw it, and it is the truth.” Jan Karski, “Polish Death Camp,” Collier’s, October 14, 1944, pp. 18–19. Karski’s story was accompanied not by a photograph but by a drawing of anonymous, horrified faces. For a discussion of the use of generalized visual images that appeared without captions or specific references, see Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

  21. These overstatements came on the heels of exaggerations in the British press of Boer crimes committed against British citizens and of course William Randolph Hearst’s inflammatory yellow journalism geared toward securing American entry into war against Spain in 1898. See also Raphael Lemkin, “Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin,”
ch. 7, p. 2, for Lemkin’s description of the reaction of his colleagues in the U.S. government and their tendency to use the Belgian atrocities as a rationale for disbelief.

  22. The story of the corpse conversion factory was made up by a British brigadier general. One reporter recalled his hunt for actual proof of atrocities: “I couldn’t find any atrocities. . . . I offered sums of money for photographs of children whose hands had been cut off or who had been wounded or injured in other ways. I never found a first-hand Belgian atrocity story; and when I ran down the secondhand stories, they all petered out.” See John Taylor, War Photography: Realism in the British Press (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 79; Philip Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975) pp. 105–106.

  23. Vernon McKenzie, “Atrocities in World War II—What Can We Believe?” Journalism Quarterly, September 1942, p. 268; cited in Deborah L. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 9, 27. Only in 2001 did John Horne and Alan Kramer publish German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). They document a brutal German campaign that led to the deaths of some 6,500 Belgian and French civilians and challenge the assumption held for most of the twentieth century that the World War I atrocity reports were hyped.

  24. Estimates of the total number of persons who successfully escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to the United States between 1938 and 1945 hover around 250,000—a number that includes refugees and immigrants who fell under a quota system established in the 1924 Immigration Act that admitted 150,000 immigrants annually (with some 27,000 allocated from Germany and Austria). Remarkably, under 50 percent of the entire annual immigration quota was used in any one year from 1938 to 1940. By the end of the war, the total number of quota immigrants dropped below 10 percent of the maximum limit per year. See U.S. Department of Labor, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1943, 1944, and 1945); and David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). Public pressure to do something about the refugee situation in Europe and the United States had led to the 1943 Bermuda conference, which was attended by Allied diplomats and other government officials. But the conference weakly recommended shipping small numbers of refugees to European colonial possessions, requesting cooperation and transportation from neutral countries, and strengthening the impotent Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees created at the Evian conference in 1938. According to Wyman, only one of these plans was actually implemented: A full year after the conference, a camp was finally established near Casablanca to house some 3,000 of the refugees who had managed to reach Spain. Ultimately, however, the camp became home to just 630 refugees. As Rabbi Israel Goldstein observed, “The job of the Bermuda Conference apparently was not to rescue victims of Nazi terror, but to rescue our State Department and the British Foreign Office.” See David S. Wyman, ed., America and the Holocaust, vol. 3:The Mock Rescue Conference: Bermuda (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. v, vi. One of the three official U.S. representatives at the conference, Senator Scott Lucas (D.–Ill.), warned that attempts by Jewish organizations to save European Jewry would lead to the deaths of 100,000 U.S. soldiers, which would in turn yield a dangerous anti-Semitic backlash in the United States. See the Simon Wiesenthal Center Web page, available at http://www.motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x15/xm1522.html.