GENOCIDE. — The term is etymologically a neologism, derived from two Latin words (gens and *caedes), and signifies the massacre of a people or ethnic group.
Genocide as a specific crime made its first appearance in the judicial sphere at the Nuremberg trial (14 Nov. 1945–30 Sept. and 1 Oct. 1946). The prosecution then focused on three categories of crimes: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. In an almost contemporaneous document, the Statute of the International Military Tribunal, conventionally established on 8 Aug. 1945 in London by France, England, Russia, and the United States, and specifically in art. 6a, a series of crimes called “crimes against humanity” had been listed: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, inhumane acts against the civilian population, and racial, political, and religious persecutions; while art. 6b listed a series of crimes called war crimes: violations of the laws and customs of war, murder, ill-treatment, deportation (forced labor), the killing or ill-treatment of prisoners, the execution of hostages, the plunder of private and public property, and the destruction of cities and villages without military justification.
Something similar had occurred after the 1914–18 war, when the English and American statesmen had imposed at the Versailles peace conference (sec. VII, art. 227) the adoption of individual criminal sanctions against the Kaiser and the principal German leaders. At that time, however, the sanctions were not put into practice. As Lener observes (Crimini di guerra e delitti contro l'umanità, 3rd ed., Rome 1948, p. 131), war crimes are a subspecies of crimes against humanity; both are included in the crime of genocide, which is therefore de-
fined by H. Donnedieu de Vabres (Le procès de Noremberg devant les principes modernes du droit pénal international, in Recueil des cours, 70 [1947, 1], p. 523 ff.) as the series of crimes committed during wartime and also outside it against individuals or human groups because of their race, nationality, religion, or opinions. Paoli explains that war crimes and crimes against humanity are identical in nature; the difference lies only in the time at which they are committed (Contribution à l'étude des crimes de guerre et des crimes contre l'humanité en droit pénal international, in Revue générale de droit international public, 16 [1941–45, 11], p. 131 ff.).
The legal definition of genocide is found in art. 2 of the Convention on Genocide, approved on 9 Dec. 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations: “Genocide means any of the following acts, committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group: a) killing members of that group; b) causing material or mental harm to members of that group; c) deliberately inflicting upon that group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part; d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) forcibly transferring children of one group to another group.”
This type of crime, now so strongly condemned in international law as well, is unfortunately not new in the history of humanity; what is new, if anything, is the attempt at coercion.
The extermination and destruction of an entire race are reflected in quite a few instances in the Sacred Scripture of the Old Testament, which the hagiographers recall under the term “herem” (v.). These generally concern the destruction of peoples hostile to the Hebrews, especially during the occupation of the Promised Land.
Alongside the massacre of entire peoples, the Bible also records similar events involving individual cities and, at times, entire armies (Deut. 20, 10, 13, 12–17).
But this is not the crime of genocide, except in a purely material sense, because God Himself not infrequently commands such a war of extermination in favor of His people. Yet this must also have been the law of war among the other Semitic peoples, independently of any divine intervention, as is shown by certain passages of the Bible itself (IV Reg. 19, 11; Is. 37, 11) and by other profane sources and inscriptions. In such cases we are confronted with genuine crimes of genocide.
To cite one example, in Egypt, under the Eighteenth Theban Dynasty, and specifically under Thutmose III, the deportations of entire rebellious populations are famous, including the tribes of the Jacobites, Giosettites, and Jehudites.
In the Assyrian Empire, under Tiglath-pileser (745–27 B.C.), the transportation of subject populations from one region to another was adopted as a system. The Bible itself preserves traces of the deportation of the Jews to Babylon at the time of the Second Babylonian Empire (first deportation in 606, last in 586).
Later, in the Hellenic age, Philip of Macedon (349 B.C.), fighting against Athens and Olynthus, destroyed thirty-two cities and dispersed their inhabitants, transporting them to Macedonia. In the destruction of Thebes carried out by Alexander, 30,000 inhabitants were sold in retaliation.
In Roman times, without wandering into legend, it is enough to recall the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus, with the dispersion of the Jews, and the series of persecutions against the Christians.
Concerning the Germans, Tacitus had already written: “bellum Hermundus prosperum, Chattis exiliosus fuit, quia victores diversam aciem Marti ac Mercurio sacravere, quo voto equi, viri, cuncta victa occisioni dantur” (Annali, XIII, 57).
As a partial explanation, if not an excuse, for these events in antiquity, one may invoke the nonexistence of international law. Indeed, it seems that victory itself conferred the right to seize the lands of others and enslave their inhabitants. Other causes may also be invoked, such as famine, caused by the lack of rational agricultural methods; and overpopulation, whereby tribes expelled from one region conquered another land by force of arms.
But one cannot agree with those who say that the recurrence of these events and of wars of extermination is a law of humanity, one that history is compelled to discover on every page without succeeding in explaining it in individual cases.
As Christian civilization progressed, a refinement of customs also occurred in this sphere. And even when apprehensions, justified in a certain sense, seemed to legitimize certain cruel interventions, as in the case of the Saxons, who resisted every contribution of civilization, the voice of the Roman pontiffs (Pope Hadrian and the monk Alcuin) was not absent in defense of the victims, even though they were infidels.
But apart from these protests, which came from the highest spiritual authority, in the field of international law one must reach much more recent times to find coordinated interventions on behalf of oppressed populations.
As a forerunner of what would later become the intervention of the U.N. in the field of international law, mention may be made of the humanitarian interventions by which the European nations coordinated their efforts to suppress the slave trade from the Congress of Vienna (1815) onward, and moved to defend the oppressed populations of the Ottoman Empire in Greece (1827), Syria, and Lebanon (1860). The Treaty of Berlin (1878) provided a genuine protective code for minorities, guaranteeing the enjoyment of civil and political rights and freedom of worship. A further development in this field came with the contractual agreements concluded by the League of Nations with Poland and the other States whose frontiers had been extended, after the war of 1914–18, to include within their territories large minorities of different nationality and religion. Other crimes, however, remained without redress, such as the massacres of the Armenians perpetrated by the Turks (1915–18), not to mention the entire series of persecutions of Catholics from the first centuries of the Church to the present day. Nevertheless, the world was shaken by other events that had occurred during the same wartime period of 1914–18, such as the deportation of entire Belgian populations to concentration camps, and later the slaughter of prisoners, especially Armenians, carried out by the Russians (1927); and it was to be even more deeply shaken by the crimes perpetrated in the wars of 1939–45, whose victim was precisely Poland, the country from which, after its rebirth through the Treaty of Versailles, guarantees had been demanded for foreign minorities; and by the racial struggle unleashed against the Jews by National Socialism, which culminated in mass extermination during the last war; by the whole system, cruelly organized around raids in which men and women were seized, inadmissible reprisals, brutal mistreatment, horrific concentration camps, torture chambers, and gas chambers.
From this arose the concrete formulation of the problem in the international sphere, culminating in the Charter of the United Nations, which, even before sanctioning the recognition of human rights in the international sphere (10 Dec. 1948), formally condemned genocide (9 Dec. 1948), already reviled by the conscience of the civilized world; declared it a crime under international law; and decided that persons accused of genocide should be tried by a competent tribunal. Thus certain objections that could be raised, both in law and in fact, against the Nuremberg trial are removed. The safeguarding of fundamental humanitarian requirements, which previously had its basis in an order of merely human justice, today acquires substance within the positive international legal order.