EUGENICS PROGRAMME

Why The Eugenics Programme Was Not Considered Genocide at the Doctor's Trial: Revisiting the Correctness of It

Why The Eugenics Programme Was Not Considered Genocide at the Doctor's Trial: Revisiting the Correctness of It

Lemkin's loby for doctor's trial as genocide

Raphael Lemkin we know very little at the bottom: Polish jurist, father of the UN Convention on Genocide, word he coined in his important work Axis rule in occupied Europe published in the U.S. in 1944. Instead, he is a singular figure, a great human and intellectual, whose life, by various paths, personal and historical, was devoted to the study of the theme of mass murder and fined a way for the legal punishment. Muovendomi among the unpublished writings and those published Lemkin, beyond the history that in the last twenty years has rediscovered Lemkin - and not by chance, unfortunately I would like to give an idea of ??this tormented, but basically linear path.

Why, one may ask?

Certainly the fact that he has lost almost all his family, in a broad sense, the Holocaust is the main reason of this effort, but on closer inspection it goes back in time, as if it were a constitutive element of its growth. Now that you read his unpublished papers you see that his reflection on genocide was 360 ° and did not stop to ideological considerations quotas. How surprising that, from this point of departure, it is impossible to effectively prosecute the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide - first genocide of the "modern" - young Lemkin induced in a deep crisis, which is not foreign to his turn to the law, as a field study and work? Recently, Samantha Power has found evidence that the starting point for reflection of Lemkin on Genocide Armenian was really the case, brought to his attention by the killing in Berlin in 1921 by Mehmed Talaat, former Ottoman Minister of the Interior, by Soghomon Tehlirian, a young Armenian which had killed the family. Lemkin, who then followed courses in linguistics at the University of Lviv (remember who spoke nine languages), discussed it with one of his professors, asking why Talaat had not been arrested for the slaughter, clashing with the fact that there was no law higher than the sovereignty of a state that perpetrated criminal acts (Allen, 1997, p. 77-88).

Rebuilding, this time at the official level, its path Lemkin remembers the battle he started in 1933, in Madrid, the International Conference for the Unification of the Criminal Code to introduce two new international crimes, punishable by then any country he could be arrested the culprit, regardless of their nationality or the place where the crime was committed: the crime of "barbarism" and that of "vandalism": the first - and I use the words of Lemkin - "consisting in the extermination of community racial, religious or social". It should be noted - and will return to this point - the formula larger than that then entered the Genocide Convention, the second "consisting in the destruction of ...