GENOCIDE. - The term is etymologically a neologism, derived from two Latin words (gens and caedes) and means the slaughter of a people, of an ethnic group.
Genocide as a specific crime makes its first appearance in the judicial field at the Nuremberg trial (14 Nov. 1945 - 30 Sept. and 1 Oct. 1946). The accusation then bore upon three categories of crimes: crimes against peace, against war, and of lese-humanity. In a nearly contemporary document, in the Statute of the International Military Tribunal, conventionally constituted on 8 Aug. 1945 in London by France, England, Russia and the United States, and precisely in art. 6a, a series of crimes called those of "lese-humanity" had been listed: murder, extermination, reduction to slavery, deportation, inhumane acts against the civilian population, racial, political, religious persecutions; and in art. 6b a series of crimes called war crimes had been listed: violations of the laws and customs of war, murder, ill-treatment, deportation (forced labor), killing or maltreatment of prisoners, execution of hostages, plundering of private and public property, destruction of cities and countries without military reason.
Something similar had occurred after the war of 1914-18, when the English and American statesmen had imposed at the peace table of Versailles (sect. VII, art. 227) the adoption of individual penal sanctions against the Kaiser and the principal German leaders. Except that at that time the sanctions had no practical application. 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 the one and the other are comprised in the crime of genocide, which is therefore defined 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 the war and also outside it against individuals or human groups because of their race, nationality, religion and their opinions. Paoli explains that there is equality of nature between war crimes and crimes against humanity; the difference lies only in the time in 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 juridical 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: "By genocide is meant one of the following acts, committed with the intent to destroy entirely or partially a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: a) killing the members of that group; b) causing material or mental harm to members of that group; c) deliberately inflicting on that group conditions of life such as to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) imposing measures aimed at preventing births within the group; e) forcibly transferring children of one group to another group.
This kind of crime, now so condemned also in international law, is unfortunately not new in the history of humanity: new, if anything, is the attempt at coercion.
Extermination, the destruction of an entire race, is matched in not a few cases in Sacred Scripture of the Old Testament, which are recalled by the hagiographers under the heading "herem" (v.). It is a matter of the destruction for the most part of peoples hostile to the Hebrews, especially on the occasion of the occupation of the Promised Land.
Along with the massacre of entire races, similar facts are also recorded in the Bible for individual cities, sometimes for entire armies (Deut. 20, 10, 13, 12-17).
But here there is no crime of genocide, except in a purely material sense, because God himself not rarely commands such an exterminating war in favor of his people. Except that such must also have been the law of war among the other Semitic peoples, apart from any divine intervention, as appears from some passages of the same Bible (IV Reg. 19, 11; Is. 37, 11) and from other profane sources and inscriptions. One is then faced with the configuration of true and proper crimes of genocide.
To cite a few examples, in Egypt, under the XVIII Theban dynasty, and precisely under Thutmosis III, the deportations of entire rebellious populations are famous, among them the tribes of the Giacobites, Giosetti and Jehudites.
In the Assyrian Empire under Teglathphalasar (745-27 B.C.) the transferring of subject populations from one region to another was adopted as a system. There are traces in the Bible itself of the deportation of the Hebrews to Babylon at the time of the Second Babylonian Empire (1st deportation in 606, last in 586).
Later, in the Hellenic age, Philip of Macedonia (349 B.C.), struggling against Athens and Olynthus, destroyed 32 cities and dispersed the inhabitants, transporting them to Macedonia. In the destruction of Thebes, carried out by Alexander, 30,000 inhabitants were sold by way of reprisal.
In the times of Rome, without wandering into legend, it suffices to recall the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus, with the dispersion of the Jews, and the series of persecutions against the Christians.
Of the Germans Tacitus already wrote "bellum Hermundus prosperum, Chattis exiliosus fuit, quia victores diversam aciem Marti ac Mercurio sacravere, quo voto equi, viri, cuncta victa occisioni dantur" (Annals, XIII, 57).
As a partial explanation, if not an excuse, of these facts in antiquity, one may invoke the non-existence of an international law. It even seems that victory itself conferred the right to seize the lands of others and to enslave the inhabitants. Other causes may also be invoked, such as famine, caused by the lack of rationality of agriculture; overpopulation, whereby tribes driven out from one place conquered another land by arms.
But one cannot subscribe to those who say that the recurrence of these facts and of exterminating wars is a law of humanity, which history is constrained to discover on every page, without succeeding in explaining it in individual cases.
With the progress of Christian civilization there came also in this field a refinement of customs. And even when apprehensions, in a certain sense justified, seemed to legitimize certain cruel interventions, as in the case of the Saxons, reluctant toward any contribution of civilization, the voice of the pontiffs of Rome (Pope Adrian and the monk Alcuin) was not lacking in favor of the victims, even though they were unbelievers.
But apart from these protests that came from the highest spiritual authority, in the field of international law one must come to much more recent times to see coordinated interventions in favor of oppressed populations.
As a precursor of what would later be the intervention of the U.N. in the field of international law, one may recall the interventions of humanity by which the European nations coordinated their efforts for the suppression of the slave trade from the Congress of Vienna (1815) onward, and moved to the defense of the oppressed populations of the Ottoman Empire in Greece (1827), in Syria and Lebanon (1860). With the Treaty of Berlin (1878) there came into being a true protective code for minorities regarding the enjoyment of civil and political rights and of freedom of worship. A further development in this field came with the contractual agreements stipulated by the League of Nations with Poland and the other States, which had extended their frontiers by including within their territory large minorities of different nationality and religion after the war of 1914-18. Other crimes, however, remained unpunished, such as the massacres of the Armenians perpetrated by the Turks (1915-18), not to mention the whole series of persecutions of Catholics from the first centuries of the Church to the present day. Nevertheless the world felt shaken by other events that had occurred during the same war period of 1914-18, such as the deportation to concentration camps of entire Belgian populations, and later the massacre of prisoners, especially Armenians, carried out by the Russians (1927), and it was to be shaken still more by the crimes perpetrated in the wars of 1939-45, of which Poland itself was to remain a victim, the very Poland from which, after its rebirth under 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 exterminations during the last war; by the whole of a system cruelly modeled on raids of men and women, on inadmissible reprisals, on brutal mistreatment, on horrid concentration camps, on torture chambers and on gas chambers.
Hence the concrete position of the problem in the international field, culminating in the statute of the United Nations, which even before sanctioning the recognition of human rights in the international field (Dec. 10, 1948) formally condemned genocide (Dec. 9, 1948), already execrated by the conscience of the civilized world, declared it a crime under international law and decided that persons accused of genocide must be judged by a competent tribunal. Thus certain objections that could be raised both in law and in fact against the Nuremberg trial fall away. The safeguarding of fundamental humanitarian needs, which previously had its basis in an order of justice that was merely human, today acquires consistency in the positive international legal order.