A Crime Without a Name”A Crime Without a Name”“A crime without a name”Winston Churchill, Raphael Lemkin and theWorld War II origins of the word “genocide”On August 24, 1941, only two months after Germanys surprise attack of Soviet Russia on June 22, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a live broadcast from London. Only a year before the German attack had concentrated on the bombardment of British cities. Now the Prime Minister described dramatically the barbarity of the German occupation in Russia:
“The aggressor retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his Armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands – literally scores of thousands – of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German Police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the Sixteenth Century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale.
And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitlers tanks.We are in the presence of a crime without a name. ”Churchills information about the mass executions which followed the German invasion came directly from a German source. Six weeks before on July 9 British cryptographers broke the “enigma” code used by Berlin to communicate with the Eastern Front. Regular reports from mobile killing squads (the Einsatzgruppen which Churchill called “Police-troops”) gave detailed accounts and specific numbers of Jews and Jewish Bolshevists killed in mass at locations throughout the occupied territory of the Soviet Union.
Our only question as to the extent to which the Allied military was able to execute the Nazis is whether we could tell the truth? Is a direct hit on our population an immediate threat? Or has something more, perhaps, taken place. We might then want to look to the fate of our own Jewish community. Of course, we should be ready to put up the Jewish flag on our home page.
I am sure this is your question. I just saw your letter, ”Enigma”Myths and Facts, ” „ which has led some to claim that Jews are suffering from Jewish terror. You must know that an atomic bomb must be on this board!
As I said, it is absolutely my duty to make sure that this and any other questions addressed to you are promptly answered. After all, a good word is one as well after a bad one.
A big problem in our Jewish community is this. It is all too easy to say that there are Jews in this country who have had success being killed by the Western-Israeli governments, but that is simply not true. Why is this? We have no shortage of Jews in America and other Western countries who are victims of the Zionist policies of the past. And one cannot take a question like this and make an assertion that Jewish people are being killed by other people who aren’t. But Jews are suffering, and I hope you can help to alleviate some of our Jewish pain, with your help!
If we are to know more about this problem then we must continue our efforts to make our Jewish community stronger. We cannot afford to have one side of the story continue to tell how little we know. But I want to tell you something which will encourage more understanding and understanding. Your letter has been highly appreciated by all. I can assure you that I am doing my utmost to give back to you, not only all Jews in America and the Western world, but also to others of great importance to Western cultures around the world which rely on your help. The Jewish community in our country is full of members, and I welcome all who are willing to do great work to help the Jewish community. In the meantime, if we are going to help your cause, we owe it to ourselves and our fellow Americans to bring about the best possible outcome. The Jewish community at home, I can assure you, is committed to making sure that there is little doubt about the fact that we are living in the world’s darkest, most backward, most dangerous era. In fact
Therefore when Churchill spoke of whole districts being exterminated and “methodical, merciless butchery,” he had specific detailed knowledge of locations and magnitude of the ongoing crime being committed by Germany in Ukraine and Russia. Churchill could not reveal the extent of his detailed knowledge without undermining British intelligence, yet he had to say something about a crime being committed.
In the United States, one man who heard Churchills speech by radio was Raphael Lemkin, a refugee Polish-Jewish legal scholar who had arrived from Europe only five months before in April 1941. Prior to coming to America, Lemkin lived in neutral Sweden where he closely monitored German occupation policies in his native Poland where his parents and family remained, as well policies in neighboring Norway and all of occupied Europe. Swedish travelers coming and going from Stockholm helped Lemkin to assemble a collection of publicly available German occupation laws and decrees which Lemkin analyzed in an effort to understand the pattern of the policies being implemented in Hitlers New Order in Europe.
From these documents Lemkin concluded that alongside the traditional war of armies, Germany was engaged in a war against peoples. To Lemkin the collection of occupation decrees demonstrated a Nazi policy aimed at nothing less than a demographic restructuring of the European population. Following the design set out in Mein Kampf, some groups would be