As a result of the efforts of Raphael Lemkin, the term #genocide was included in the Indictment for the #Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 under the category of War Crimes.
British deputy chief prosecutor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe used the term in June 1946 #Nuremberg during his cross-examination of Konstantin von Neurath, former Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
Maxwell Fyfe reminded Neurath that the prosecution was charging him and many of his fellow defendants with genocide, “which we say is the extermination of racial or national groups.”
He then cited Lemkin’s definition of genocide as “a coordinated plan” aimed at destroying the “essential foundations of the life of national groups” with the intention of “annihilating the groups themselves.”
Lemkin had argued in his 1944 work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe that #genocide entailed a wide range of techniques for group destruction, including attacking the intelligentsia, banning the use of native language in education, and siphoning off a group’s economic resources.
Maxwell Fyfe, during his cross-examination of Neurath, brought forward damning excerpts from a memorandum that Neurath had sent to Hitler in 1940, outlining the policies that he had introduced to suppress the Czech population.
In this memorandum, Neurath had advised the expulsion of all Czechs from Bohemia and Moravia who were not “suitable for Germanization,” including the entire educated class.
Neurath had also proposed measures such as “the extermination of the Czech historical myth” and a campaign against the use of the Czech language in order to erase Czech culture.
“You meant to destroy the Czech people as a national entity with their own language, history, and traditions, and assimilate them into the Greater German Reich,” Maxwell Fyfe charged.
For Maxwell Fyfe and for Lemkin the effort to destroy the Czech people as a national entity--the effort to destroy any people as a national entity--was an act of #genocide.
The "plan" put forward in the RIA-Novosti article is a plan for #genocide. Calls for the "deukrainization" of Ukraine are calls for #genocide.
Genocide can be prosecuted as a war crime (as it was at Nuremberg) or as a crime against humanity. Or it can be prosecuted on its own.
Plans for genocide, calls for genocide, acts of genocide all demand an immediate and robust response.
Plans for genocide, calls for genocide, acts of genocide all demand an immediate and robust response.
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