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Shaping the holocaust: the finalsolution in us political discourses onthe genocide convention, 1948–1956Binoy KampmarkPublished online: 22 Jan 2007.

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Shaping the Holocaust: the FinalSolution in US political discourses onthe Genocide Convention, 1948–1956

BINOY KAMPMARK

The spectacle of modern man explaining his right to existence is an odd one.(Richard H. Rovere, New Yorker, February 11, 1950)

There has been a growing comparative literature in recent times on the use of theHolocaust in contemporary events. The atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovohave resulted in comparative works which suggest strong parallels with theHolocaust.1 One author has gone so far as to suggest that the influence of theHolocaust in the political discourses of the 1990s was influential in framing poli-tics with such events as the Kosovo conflict, drawing out the metaphors ofAuschwitz in endorsing and critiquing NATO intervention.2 This paper examinesthe interrogation of the Holocaust in US political debates behind the ratification ofUnited Nations Convention the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (theConvention).3 The Convention, which was only ratified by the United States in1988, was significant for criminalizing the international atrocity of genocide, aGreek–Latin neologism that had been coined by the Polish jurist RaphaelLemkin during his examination of Nazi rule.4 This clear reluctance to ratify theConvention, even after 40 years of its inception, remains a subject of interest.5

But the object of this study examines how the field of Holocaust contention wasframed in the ratification debates in the years following the Second World War,providing context for how American political discourses approached the FinalSolution in the early years of the Cold War.6

There were two dominant trends in the discourse behind the ratification ofthe Convention in the early years of the Cold War. The concentration camp andthe atrocities committed against Jews figured as dominant tropes in the publicdebate as to whether the United States should participate in an international effortto punish genocide.7 The counter-response was evidenced by such organizationsas the American Bar Association (ABA), where the argument against ratificationwas advanced along the lines of diminished sovereignty, violation of state rightsand how genocide could operate against American citizens within the borders ofthe United States. What emerged in these debates (both for and against ratification)

Journal of Genocide Research (2005), 7(1),March, 85–100

ISSN 1462-3528 print; ISSN 1469-9494 online=05=010085-15 # 2005 Research Network in Genocide StudiesDOI: 10.1080=14623520500045062

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was a specific reading of the Holocaust, where genocide was co-opted into a fightagainst the Soviet Union, thereby extending the original significance of the Final Sol-ution beyond its ethnic dimensions to include “political” and “economic” groups.8

One could go further: the Convention was de-racialized in debates that wentagainst it; despite the confidence that genocide could never “happen” in theUnited States, Convention opponents revealed a race consciousness in theirfears as to how genocide would affect US domestic law. This sensitivity to racein representing the Holocaust may have deeper implications in American viewsof the event. Omer Bartov, for instance, has noted that American Holocaustmuseums “shy away from presenting racism as a crucial component of the Holo-caust, as well as of the civilization that produced it.” The US remains, so the argu-ment goes, “a race-based, rather than class-based society.”9 Yet it was preciselythis fundamental singling out of the Jewish people that renders the Holocaust inmodern historiography singular.10 As Michael A. Marrus has written, “unlikethe massacres before or since, every single one of the millions of targeted Jewswas to be murdered. Eradication was to be total.”11 The scholarship of MichaelBurleigh has been important in focusing on the racialism of the Third Reich, a“racial state” which historicized its anti-Semitic obsession within a clear frame-work of pre-existing pathologies in Europe.12

To a certain extent, the exceptional brutality towards Jews was acknowledgedin the debates encouraging ratification. But in the main these arguments find in theFinal Solution a legacy that is beyond the specificity of the racial, a political crimetypical of the totalitarian apparatus, and hence transferable to other political con-texts. As the keen student of totalitarianism Claude Lefort has noted, “communism[during the Cold War] was defined as a totalitarian system, the most highly devel-oped and perfected example of that system, one which had withstood the destruc-tion of fascism and national socialism, but which proceeded from the same causesand pursued similar ends.” Communism was invested with “features which hadonce been imputed to fascism.”13 The narrative of victimization was therebyaltered to include a broader reference to the victims of Nazi terror, a referencethat made Jewish referents non-exclusive.14 The Soviet Union and the EasternBloc countries, for that very reason, became the target of political groups andlobbies who had aligned themselves against the Convention. The Holocaust layin the past; after 1945 in Eastern Europe and the USSR, it was portrayed as a con-tinuing crime against political and economic groups.

Invoking the Final Solution

When the United Nations General Assembly passed the Genocide resolution unan-imously, commentators saw the Final Solution as the defining catalyst urgingnations to ratify the Genocide Convention. Lemkin expressed joy that his legalexaminations of this specific type of atrocity had paid off. A US delegatebehind the drafting process of the Convention—Ernest A. Gross—told the UNin an address in 1949 that “in a world beset by many problems and great difficul-ties, we should proceed with this convention before the memory of the recent

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horrifying genocidal acts has faded from the minds and conscience of man.”15

Such a resolution, we find the liberal Nation opining, “is certain to prove a formid-able deterrent to the kind of systematized persecution of a racial or religiousminority which the Nazis instituted in Germany in the thirties.”16

Support for the Convention came from the highest political figures in the land.The Truman Administration made its intentions clear by putting the Convention tothe Senate in the first place. In his letter from Washington in the New Yorker,Richard H. Rovere called on numerous supporters for ratification. “It [the Conven-tion] will probably be brought up in this session, and if it is, it will almost certainlybe carried, since few senators in an election year would risk being charged withfavouring mass murder.” Rovere observed “passionate support of a great manyuseful and benevolent organizations and the opposition of only the AmericanBar Association—which says that the Convention is, like almost everythingelse—unconstitutional—and a few individuals who oppose any proposition thatwould entangle the government in affairs outside the three-mile limit.”17

The State Department predicted an alteration in norms of international relationswith the advent of the new covenant. The Deputy Under-Secretary of State DeanRusk explained this effect on the US in the international comity of nations beforethe Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on in January 1950.There were overt references to the extermination programme of the Third Reichagainst the Jews, placed in the historical context of genocide. “No one can yethave forgotten the organized butchery of racial groups by the Nazis, ourenemies in World War II, which has resulted in the extermination of some 6million Jews.”18 The result of the Final Solution “could no longer be toleratedin civilized society and that [genocide] should be prohibited by the internationalcommunity.” Rusk could confidently assert that the United States had no recordof genocide to contend with, at least within the Convention’s definition, leavingthe way open for a safe ratification into US law. If the United States couldcooperate with other nations “in the suppression of such lesser offenses as thekilling of fur seals” then surely “other nations [could] look to the United Statesfor cooperation in the suppression of the most heinous offense of all—the destruc-tion of human groups.”19

Rusk gives us one of the first explicit references to a strategic use of the Holo-caust in US foreign policy, where ratification becomes an ideological weapon tomount against totalitarianism. The Final Solution enables a discourse to beshaped where the Convention can be aimed at punishing the crimes of totalitarianregimes; the victims of Nazism are metaphorically related as victims of EasternBloc oppression. “We all know too well that millions of human beings are stillsubjected to the domination of ruthless totalitarian regimes and that the spectreof genocide still haunts man.” Internationalizing the regime of genocide punish-ment and prevention would place the United States in a position of “moral leader-ship in international affairs and to participate in the development of internationallaw on the basis of human justice.”20 The Convention is thus fashioned as aweapon, offering, in the words of the Solicitor-General, “a measure of protectionfor the unfortunates who still live in fear of torture and death at the hands of the

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cruel, ruthless rulers or dictators who are or many become obsessed by a masterrace or that they are apostles of a master ideology, dedicated to the exterminationof other races or creeds.”21

The rights of ethnic groups became the seminal focus in the political debate forratification, albeit conflated into a broader issue of protecting human rights. In thesame human rights vein, the Duty Legal Adviser to the Truman Administrationtold a gathering of the Law Society of Massachusetts that same month thatthere was “no question so far as the United States is concerned of its promotinghuman rights.” Such a historical position was evident from “the adoption of theBill of Rights and of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments to the Consti-tution.”22 The Genocide Convention, argued Tate, was to be read in conjunctionwith an entire raft of other human rights instruments that had come out of the draft-ing organs of the United Nations: the Declaration of Human Rights and the work-ings of the Human Rights Commission on a Covenant of Human Rights.

The writings of some prominent officials behind the Nuremberg trials showed aclear interest in evoking references to the fate of Jews during World War II in con-vincing the US Senate to ratify the Convention. One of the most prominent prose-cutors at Nuremberg, Telford Taylor, was trying to win over the public with thelesson of the Final Solution. Now practising at a New York law firm, Taylorargued that non-ratification on the part of the United States could have serious stra-tegic consequences. This was made clear in a speech to an audience of over a thou-sand at the Waldorf-Astoria for the National Conference of Christians and Jews inJune of 1950. “Our failure to ratify the treaty on such grounds as that [violating USsovereignty] would be a devastating blow to our foreign policy and undermine ourprestige abroad.” The victims of the Final Solution are mentioned for their politi-cal and moral force. The Final Solution was in effect nudged into the limelight as amoral lesson, conveyed through the Genocide Convention. Not heeding it woulddint the credibility of US occupation forces. To this end, Taylor recalled an embit-tered German official at the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, who opined thatthe “trials simply proved that there was one law for Germans and another law foreveryone else.” The failure to ratify would simply “confirm” these words.23

Much in line with Taylor’s use of the victims of the Third Reich was SenatorHenry Cabot Lodge, Jr of Massachusetts, who warned of the consequences of aUS refusal to ratify the instrument in the Senate. The effect of non-ratificationwould not merely ignore the victims of Nazi genocide; it would spell a blow tothe US in the Cold War. In the subcommittee hearings, Lodge noted how“having gotten this far, if we do not go through to complete the rest of thecourse, it will do a serious damage to the position of the United States in thecurrent Cold War.”24 The victims of the Final Solution come with a historicalfreight that is impossible to ignore.

A. C. Ivy, Vice President of the University of Illinois in Chicago and formerlyan advisor to the Secretary of War on the special issue of war crimes, providedanother example. He, somewhat misguidedly, argued that Nuremberg hadbeen an open display of how to counter genocide (in actual fact, these werecounts of crimes against humanity). “After this war, the Government of the

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United States gave leadership to all allies in fighting genocide through theNuremberg trials.” One image haunted Ivy, those symbols of the Final Solution:“Skeletons of human bodies, lampshades made of human skin, hands and legscut off for the pleasure of torture, and babies torn apart like chickens at a dinnertable—who can ever forget it?” The Convention was the response “of a consciencestricken and revolted world against barbarity and moral nihilism.”25

Another review encouraging ratification through evoking scenes of Holocaustmemory was provided in the liberal Nation by the Washington journalist AlanBarth. Barth’s commentary urged readers to consider the scene that greeted Alliedsoldiers on liberating the occupied territories of Europe. “Group killing is not an ima-ginary or theoretical crime. But the human mind finds it difficult to remember, as itfound it difficult to grasp, that in a single concentration camp, Birkenau, approxi-mately 1,765,000 Jews were put to death by poison gas between April, 1942 andApril, 1944, their bodies burned in specially designed furnaces and their ashes dis-tributed as fertilizer.”26 What was unusual about the events of Birkenau was that itwas neither typical homicide nor typical atrocity—it was “impersonal—motivated,that is to say, only by the identification of the individual victims with a group.”Barth’s analysis paves the way for a reading of the Holocaust as state-centralizedmurder. In contrast to critics of the Convention, Barth noted that this type of totali-tarianism was racial. “The gas chambers and furnaces were scientifically contrivedinstruments for the extermination of an entire group.” In writing approvingly ofthe UN resolution on genocide, Barth urged for a US policy of “prodding” the Econ-omic and Social Council of the UN “to act on genocide at once.”27

Some legal commentators went so far as to suggest that the Convention shouldnot be seen as a human rights instrument, but more a defence against social chaos,security against the disorder that state totalitarianism suggested. Jurist ArthurH. Kuhn chose the American Journal of International Law to express his viewthat the Convention was not, as critics and admirers of it alike had thought, a crea-ture of human rights, so much as a buttress against global instability. Kuhndescribed the Final Solution as the odious offspring of instability, a threat toworld peace that such a convention sought to deter. The definition of genocide,first, was hardly exceptional, being the progeny of the International MilitaryTribunal’s own Charter: “The crime of genocide comes within the category ofoffences described in Article 6(c) of the Charter of the International MilitaryTribunal as ‘crimes against humanity’, or, to use the more precise phraseologyemployed by the General Assembly, ‘offences against the peace and security ofmankind.’”28 It was inaccurate to regard the Convention as one “for the protectionof human rights” when it actually sought “the preservation of international peace.”The atrocities of the Third Reich in their sheer enormity were exceptional, andKuhn’s piece described the world’s reaction to the singularity of the massacresin the camps, and the legal response in coping with it. “It became necessary togive a name to and define this abominable crime and to make it punishablewhether committed in peace or in war.”29

It was unsurprising to find Jewish groups vocal in their encouragement ofratification, though they had to compete with other ethnic groups were seeking

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to secure their own stake in the genocide debate. The Serbian National DefenseCouncil of America took the opportunity to stake their claim in the ratificationdebate by publishing a detailed account of Ustashi atrocities against Serb nationalsduring World War II. The sanguinary collection included images of decapitatedpriests and babies perforated by Croatian blades.30 The introductory pageboasted a photo of emaciated children, ribs protruding through flesh with thecaption “This must not happen Again!” The account also had a strong anti-Soviet bias; the authors were suspicious that Moscow was subsuming theconcept of genocide under a more generalized concept of crimes against humanityto justify its own persecutions.31

In the main, Jewish groups were the dominant ethnic group in promoting thelegitimacy of the Convention, though the language of suffering proved inclusive:there was no attempt to infer a Judaeocide as such. On January 20, 1950,Mrs Samuel W. Halprin, head of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organizationof America, telegrammed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support ofthe Convention arguing that “The heinous crime genocide which destroyedmany millions of human lives, both Christian and Jewish, is a blot on our civiliza-tion.”32 At the Thirtieth Annual Convention of the Federation of Jewish Women’sOrganizations, held in the surroundings of the plush Waldorf-Astoria Hotel inNew York, it was resolved that the United States had to ratify the Conventionto give global leadership against genocide for “the world is awaiting our endorse-ment.”33 The statements to the subcommittee were equally passionate. JacobBlaustein, President of the American Jewish Committee, argued that the worldawaited US ratification of the Convention as a move to build “the Temple ofPeace.”34 Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress recalled the experienceof burying his dead brethren under Nazism. “I cannot forget that I served for 4years as the Rabbi for the city of Berlin under the Nazi regime, and duringthose 4 years I have buried the victims of genocide.”35

Against ratification

While one particular line of argument in favour of the Convention and its ratifica-tion stressed the spectre of the concentration camp and its victims while still notingthe value such a Convention might have against communist governments, theemphasis from opponents highlighted a different aspect of the same problem.While the symbolic value of the camps stood in the background, with theirlegacy of victims, their historical value was assessed differently by policy-makers and political groups who had decided that ratification was not in the inter-est of the United States. Their arguments formed a politico-legal analysis that con-stituted, in the words of one observer, “the most elaborate pettifogging that wehave been subjected to since Dickens recorded the history of Allerdyce againstAllerdyce.”36 Such a Convention, argued some members of the American BarAssociation, was irrelevant if it did not target the regimes that had set up campsof political prisoners across the Iron Curtain. Others saw the Convention as aninternational calumny on the American judicial system, whose introduction into

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the local law would spell administrative chaos. The argument on the Convention’svalue as a covenant of security was reversed by emphasizing a different problem:that it would threaten US security and thereby weaken resolve in combating gen-ocide altogether.

The American Bar Association was the key opponent of the Convention untilthe 1980s, and provided the standard arguments against ratification. The resolutionof the Bar Association’s 72nd meeting in St. Louis on September 5–9, 1949 wasparticularly enthusiastic in excoriating the Convention, though taking care inpaying lip service to shocked consciences. While the members noted theirdisgust at genocide (“that the conscience of America, like that of the civilizedworld, revolts against Genocide”), its punishment was not above American juridi-cal quibbles. Its second paragraph noted “that the suppression and punishment ofGenocide under the international convention to which it is proposed the UnitedStates shall be a party involves important constitutional questions.” In itscurrent state, the Convention was a legal intrusion, an anomaly inconsistent“with our form of government.”37

The most striking example of this opposition was provided by George A. Finch,Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law, and member of theSpecial Committee on Peace and Law through the United Nations of the AmericanBar Association. Before the Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Com-mittee in early 1950, Finch argued that his organization was not an opponent ofinternational moves to punish genocide. “I wish to assure this Sub-committeethat I am not only not allergical to international cooperation for this purpose,but have spent substantially all of my life in seeking to promote [world peaceand cooperation] by practical and rational means.”38 The public, he assured com-mittee members, had been “misinformed” about the Convention’s true effect.Finch proposed a different reading of the Holocaust legacy, one which he feltwas inadequately embodied in the Convention.

He duly provided, in a lengthy paragraph, an explanation as to what he believedto be the true implications of the Convention: its role in placating Eastern Bloccountries, and sanctioning the murder of political enemies by communist regimes:

As genocide is defined in the Convention it does not apply to the mass killing and destructionof peoples by totalitarian governments, but appeases such governments by making it possiblefor them to continue, as they are doing today behind the Iron Curtain, without the possibilityof bringing legal or moral charges against them for violating this convention even if they hadratified it, the monstrous treatment of thousands of human beings whom those governmentsregard as enemies of the Communist states, the same as Hitler and his conspirators treatedcertain groups in Germany and in occupied countries as the enemies of Nazism.

Notably, Finch draws no distinction between the political atrocities committedunder either Nazism or communism. On the surface, he expressed a view in linewith his opponents who favoured ratification, defining the Final Solution as theoffspring of a totalitarian system. The race-motivated Final Solution ceases tobecome a higher principle in encouraging ratification; it is the outcome ofoverly bureaucratic entities dedicated to liquidating enemies of the state. The

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bureaucracy implies central mechanisms at work, government complicity. “Thereis not a word in the Convention which denounces as genocide the mass killing anddestruction of peoples by governments.”39 By virtue of the exclusive definition ofgenocide within the Convention, the political debate becomes one between capit-alism and communism, one which ironically undermines the policy of ratification.

Finch’s Cold War mentality not only found fault with the ideology of theConvention, but with the possibilities that the Convention threatened various con-stitutional safeguards within the United States. The image of the Final Solution,far from proving evocative of a US commitment to halting or preventing arecurrence of genocide, was overshadowed not merely by Soviet crimes, but bythe Convention’s potential to “weaken” the United States and destabilise globalsecurity. The Convention “would cause more friction between peoples and gov-ernments that the evil itself now does and would tend to promote war ratherthan to preserve peace between nations.”40 On the subject of trying nationalsubjects, citizens would have to front up before an international tribunal. In com-plete dissent to the message that had come out of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials,Finch argued that such a body would be unconstitutional. “Any proposal to sendfor trial without the limits of the United States any person charged with a crimecommitted within the United States would be clearly unconstitutional.” It cut tothe core of America’s evolution as a constitutional republic, for, argued Finch,it was this “method of punishing the colonists” used by George III which led tothe passage of Article VI of the Bill of Rights giving American citizens theright of trial for crimes in a “speedy” fashion in either state or district withinthe United States.41

Finch had a ground for rehearsing his views: the American Journal of Inter-national Law. In the autumn of 1949, before addressing the Subcommittee ofthe Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he argued that the Convention “approachis that of individual crime and not of persecutions instigated by governments.”There was no established court, leaving the national court with the burdensometask of administering a convention with toothless machinery. “How is an inter-national tribunal or foreign national court to obtain custody in time of peace ofan accused genocidist?”42 Even more revealing was an expanded discussionabout classes excluded from the definition of genocide, again a theme he wouldbring home to the Senators in the fall of 1950.

In effect Finch saw a different Final Solution, not exclusively the ethno-religious form that Lemkin had advanced, but a definitive political form thatsuch an international crime had to take. Why stop at punishing crimes of racewhen communism was advancing across the Eastern Bloc and in other parts ofthe globe? Evidently, reproached Finch, the UN committees behind the variousdrafting procedures felt that “political and economic groups were apparently notconsidered as needing or worthy of protection.”43 Genocide had to adapt toAmerican temperaments, encompassing a definition which would protect enter-prising money making citizens from envious communist plutocrats. “The Sovietgovernment and its communist satellites accept the convention, which they havenot done up till now, may liquidate property owners and others who believe in

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private enterprise on the ground that they are political enemies of the state andtherefore not covered by the convention.”44

Finch was in good company, being one of several ABA advocates militantlyagainst ratification. Past president of the American Bar Association Carl B. Rixwarned against the “new doctrine” of internationalizing criminal law at theexpense of the municipal system of governance.45 Alfred J. Schweppe, who in1949 was the Chairman of the American Bar Association, matched Finch wordfor word in his fears that the Convention was inadequate, though he denied thatthe Final Solution was neglected in his calculations. In fact, in his presentationto the subcommittee, he acknowledged the crimes that had been committedagainst Jews and other minorities during the war, parading the fact that one ofhis Semitic colleagues at the Bar was an exceptional advocate. “For my part, Iyield to no one in my opposition to genocide or in my desire to have Jews,persons of color, and other minority groups receive fair treatment throughoutthe world—I have a law partner who is a Jew and he is my partner by my ownchoice, one of the finest men at the bar.” Before the committee, he urgedwhether “the instrument before you . . . the one by which we shall accomplishthe prevention of genocide, and whether we render a service to the Americanpeople and to the world by ratifying the convention as submitted.”46 No serviceto the American people or the world could be gleamed from an instrumentSchweppe saw as deformed in the UN drafting process, one in which the Americandelegation had been curbed in its authority by Soviet prevarication.

The Final Solution was then interpreted in such a manner to justify why theUnited States should not become party to a convention that had been drafted topunish its recurrence. Like Finch, Schweppe envisaged the Final Solution as aproduct of government, genocide a result of centralized government instigation.Genocide needed the trigger of state complicity. Without the agents of govern-ment, an operation to carry out orders to exterminate a race could only be a“domestic crime.”47 The refusal by various UN members to countenance thisAmerican suggestion proved fatal. The elaborate network of camps behind theIron Curtain choked with political dissidents would remain out of reach, and thestruggle against the Soviet Union would suffer a blow, with the Convention a“meaningless” document.48

In the familiar pattern, Schweppe also argued that the Convention’s ratificationwould in effect be an attempt to “impose domestic law on the United States bythe treaty method and takes away from the individual states in the United Statesthe jurisdiction under which they have always had.” His reasoning on this scorewas legally simple: that the US approach to ratification was somewhat unique,given that other countries might append their signature to a treaty withoutnecessarily making it part of their domestic law. Further legislation in mostcountries, argued Schweppe, was necessary to make a foreign instrument a trulylocal law, but in the case of the United States, this extra step was needless. Heforesaw nightmares if the United States was to embrace the institutional structuresuggested by human rights treaties, of which the Genocide Convention was oneexample. Previous submissions to the subcommittee had failed to take into

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account the fact that criminal and civil liability was possible under the act, that theUS legal system would be “unbalanced” as a result.49

Many of the themes covered by the various members of the ABA also surfacedin the opinions of various publicists and committees concerned at the impact theConvention might have on Americans. Senator McMahon complained that“there is no thing in this treaty that makes it possible to punish them [the Sovietsfor the genocidal policy in the Ukraine].”50 They again revealed the juridicalconcern of state immunity from federal government intervention, or the right ofthe US citizen to trial, and even the superstitious fears of “mental harm” leadingto genocide, thereby rereading the Final Solution in a surprising light. LeanderH. Perez of Louisiana, Chairman of the States Rights Committee, called theConvention a “monstrosity” born from “a dishonest subterfuge” in its violationof constitutional rights of the states.51

The Final Solution, in this interpretation endemic of the totalitarian state, wasperversely revised in anti-Convention arguments to suggest that ratification, farfrom deterring genocide, would encourage it. The American Mercury featured apessimistic contributor called Claude Bunzel who saw the Convention as thepathway to a world government, administered by foreign functionaries in an “arbi-trary manner in which [treaties] override the domestic law of nations.”52 Therewas, in fact, no distinction drawn in the analysis between the UN, totalitarianideologies and the notion of world government. The UN, with its associatedbodies, become sinister bureaucrats with more connections with a Politburothan Congress, armed with a treaty that was “a political shillelagh for the policestate,” with the implementing legislation “the ‘arm’ that swings it upon thehead of hapless victims.” The International Law Commission had “created a pol-itical monopoly for communist totalitarianism.”53 Any suspect charged for viola-tions under the Convention, implied the piece, would have as many rights as theaccused in a Stalinist show trial.54

The perversion of the Convention as an instrument of the very philosophies thatproduced the Final Solution was evident in the campaigns of the National Econ-omic Council, a body that feared the invasion of Orwellian thought-police control-ling the mode of speech and manner of social interaction. “Ratification of thisconvention, tying the American people into the legal systems of other countries,many of them having totally different concepts of law,” argued one of its represen-tatives Harry S. Barger to Congress, “would further . . . burden the Americanpeople in a way that is not only unnecessary but extremely unwise.”55 Somewhatperversely, as was amply shown in Bunzel’s piece in the American Mercury, theGenocide Convention is vested with authoritarian potential, and the very instru-ment inspired by the Holocaust becomes generic with state ideologies that pro-duced it. In the thought-control implicit in the Convention, any “John Doe, byhis conversation, or his communication to the newspapers, or his public speeches”could be liable for “causing ‘serious mental harm’” and be tried by a UN inter-national body for genocide.56

There was even an extraordinary reversal in some of the submitted statements tothe subcommittee in 1950 on the trope of the Final Solution. Such a Convention,

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argued Associate Secretary of the National Council for Prevention of War JamesFinucane, would not have stopped the aggrandizing schemes of Hitler. “Would ithave saved the Jews? Not likely. Rather, Hitler might have exploited it to perse-cute the Jews because he charged the Jews were plotting to destroy the Germannation.”57 Thus did Finucane reveal the penchant for the anti-Convention criticto be a critic of the Nuremberg trials, a view of the Final Solution that was con-fused and yet consistent with those who saw a Germany vengefully punished bythe victorious Allies. Beware, warned a sermonizing Finucane, how Nurembergand the Convention could come back to haunt policy-makers. “The Nurembergtrials were one-sided. We might someday have to stand in the Prisoner’s dock.”Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts was impatient with this line ofthought, which led to the following exchange:

Lodge: You don’t put General Eisenhower in the same category with General Goering, doyou?

Finucane: Technically, they were both in charge of an airforce that conducted massbombing.58

With some satisfaction, Finucane argued that “In all the wars since 1945—Palestine, Indonesia, India, Indo-Pakistan—the Nuremberg trials have notreceived the compliment of a single imitation.”59

North Korean interruptions

As the North Korean army stormed south in its 1950 offensive, debates on theGenocide Convention threatened to pass into obscurity. Perhaps Truman sensedthis and chose to bring to the attention of the Senate the importance of ratificationeven as the Korean peninsula was being engulfed in conflict. In his letter toSenator Tom Connally of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Truman warnedof a potential repeat of genocide in Korea, thereby extending the relevance ofthe Holocaust to a more recent context. This time, the offending party alsobecomes a totalitarian apparatus. “The Ambassador of Korea calls attention tothe imminent danger to the Christian population of Korea from the Communistinvaders.” Deterring genocide becomes a step in preserving American hegemony,“essential to the effective maintenance of our leadership of the free and the civi-lized nations of the world in the present struggle against the forces of aggressionand barbarism.”60

The enclosed note Truman received in early August from the South KoreanAmbassador was predictably pessimistic, stressing the potential for anotherrace-based slaughter of undesirable minorities by the communists. The spectreof the Final Solution was invoked by Ambassador Chang, who had only onewish: “to make a modest contribution to this great cause [of punishing genocide]by bringing to the attention of your government a new international need for theGenocide Convention which arises out of the sufferings of my people.” Thisthreat involved an “imminent danger that the invaders will commit genocide in

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Communist-controlled area on the Christian population, which amounts to some700,000 persons, of which 400,000 are Protestants and about 300,000 areCatholics.”61

The encouragement from the White House fell on deaf ears. The ratificationdebate gradually diminished as the war on Korea took centre stage. In 1951, theAssistant Secretary of State for UN Affairs John D. Hickerson was attemptingto resuscitate a dying discourse with the familiar reference to the Holocaust,again noting “the slaughter of some 6 million Jews and Poles by the Nazis.”62

He attempted to place the Korean conflict within the context of a possiblerepeat of genocide, noting that the claims from Seoul had “moral” weight. Hick-erson then countered the various arguments that had gathered momentum. Not allacts of war were genocidal, and therefore susceptible to trial at international law.“The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was merely another instrument of warand not an instrument of genocide.”63

With the new Eisenhower Administration, the Holocaust as an influentialtrope in international relations was lessened. The same general, whose belief inthe immutable nature of what he had seen at Buchenwald encouraged him toinvite American soldiers and pressmen to make a record of German atrocities,felt swayed by his administration to refuse any genuine participation in any com-prehensive human rights regime at the international level. This was evident bySecretary of State John Foster Dulles’ position that the United States wouldnever, under Eisenhower, “become a party to any [human rights] covenant for con-sideration by the Senate.”64 Given the position adopted by Washington towardsthe Genocide Convention including suspicions voiced by Senators Bricker andMcCarthy at the threat to US sovereignty posed by the United Nations andinternational law,65 it seems unsurprising to find the Final Solution somewhatdiminished, if not absent in US international relations at the end of the KoreanWar. In the spring of 1953, the UN would witness a series of, in the words ofthe Christian Century, puzzling “gyrations” that would illustrate the confusedstate of US foreign policy and the legacy of the Holocaust. Responding to a UNresolution calling on countries who had yet to ratify the Convention to speedilydo so, the American delegate, Archibald J. Carey of Chicago, said yes at firstinstance. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr, heading that very delegation, followed suite.But the moment Lodge “stepped outside the room in which he had voted forthat resolution [he] distributed to the press a statement which said that byvoting to call on other nations to ratify we had made no commitment as towhether or when we ourselves would ratify.”66 The episode proved so bafflingthat the Jesuit publication America could only put it down to diplomatic over-sight, “a case of insufficient briefing by the undermanned staff to the delegation.”67

Conclusion

At the war’s ending, the image of the concentration camp comes to the fore as adefining image of genocide, a crime against humanity that charges debate inthe United States on whether it should participate in a convention to deter its

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recurrence. The Final Solution as a trope is extended beyond ethnic exterminationby both sides of the debate, appropriating communism as a totalitarian ideologythat succeeded Nazism as the main enemy of American values. The effect, ironi-cally, was to regard the Holocaust as less than sui generis by enabling it to be usedin a different political context. The victims of genocide in the Second World Warbecome metaphorical images in a debate on the Convention’s relevance.

After the Convention came into being, with smaller nations (Guatemala,Ecuador, Australia) ratifying the instrument, the New York Times expressedconcern that the United States was ignoring its own legacy. “Those who foryears have worked hard in the State Department and civic organisations todevelop one of the greatest civilizing ideas of our century into law are deeply per-plexed that legal hair-splitters are now obstructing ratification by the government.”The Times emphasized America’s past record, “a long and honourable record offighting genocide over the years” which only left one avenue open: “On thisissue, our ratification is long overdue.”68 Critics of the anti-Convention advocatesfound various “ironies” in the American political discourse on genocide. “For onething,” noted an exasperated Rovere, “the chairman of the subcommittee on gen-ocide is Senator McMahon, who is also Chairman of the Joint Congressional Com-mittee on Atomic Energy, a group that is now concerned with forging instrumentsof genocide so effective that total race destruction is in prospect.”69 Far fromshowing an interest in the preservation of peace, these figures grappling withthe Convention were bound to undermine it. It would take an opportunistic Presi-dent Richard M. Nixon to put the Convention back into the spotlight after twodecades in hibernation; but the old divisions remained, only to be overcome byan equally opportunistic Reagan Administration in 1988.

Notes and References

1 Catharine Newbury and David Newbury, “The genocide in Rwanda and the Holocaust in Germany: parallelsand pitfalls,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 5, No 1, 2003, pp 135–145; Marla Stone, “When memoryshapes policy: Bosnia, Kosovo and the Holocaust,” New England Journal of History, Vol 59, No 2–3,2002–2003, pp 18–41.

2 Jacob Gunther, “Die Metaphern des Holocaust Wahrend dem Kosovo Kriegs,” 1999: Zeitschrift fur Sozial-geschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, Vol 15, No 1, 2000, pp 160–183.

3 For existing literature looking at the US role and its resistance to ratification of the Convention, see RichardF. McFarland, The United States and the Genocide Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Geno-cide, PhD thesis (Washington, DC: American University, 1971); Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The United States andthe Genocide Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Peter Ronayne, Never Again? TheUnited States and the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide since the Holocaust (London: Rowman &Littlefield, 2001); Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: American in an Age of Genocide (New York:Random House, 2002).

4 See Richard Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printer, 1944).5 See William Korey, “The United States and the Genocide Convention: leading advocate and leading

obstacle,” Ethics and International Affairs, Vol 11, 1997, p 2796 The same arguments would be repeated in subsequent debates held before a Senate Subcommittee of the

Foreign Relations Committee and Congress. Examples can be found in Hearings on the Genocide ConventionBefore a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 91st Congress, 2d sess. (Washington,DC: US Government Printing Office, 1970). See, for instance, the debates in the Congressional Digest, Vol63, December 1984, pp 295 ff.

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7 See the comments of the American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Telford Taylor in “U.S. urged to back GenocideTreaty,” New York Times, June 21, 1950, p 20.

8 Charles S. Maier regards the ethnic dimension as one of the key features of the Holocaust, in distinction to theatrocities committed by the Soviet state: The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German NationalIdentity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p 76.

9 Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York:Oxford University Press, 1996), p 9.

10 Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1988), p 92.

11 Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987), p 24.12 Michael Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997), p 156; Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

13 Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p 274.

14 For the shaping of narratives on victimization and its role in forming identity, see Iwona Irwin-Zarecka,Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers,1994), p 18.

15 Quoted in Genocide Hearings, 1950, p 98.16 Alan Barth, “Outlawing mass murder,” The Nation, Vol 166, 1950, pp 179–181, at p 179.17 Richard H. Rovere, “Letter from Washington,” New Yorker, Vol 25, 1950, pp 55–56, at p 55.18 Dean Rusk, “The place of the Genocide Convention in general pattern of U.S. foreign relations,” address

before the Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 23, 1950, Department ofState Bulletin 22, 552, January 30, 1950, pp 163–165, at p 163.

19 Rusk, “The place of the Genocide Convention,” pp 164–165.20 Ibid, p 165.21 Richard B. Perlman, “The Genocide Convention,” Nebraska Law Review, Vol 30, No 1, 1950, pp 1–10.22 Jack. B. Tate, “The problems of human rights and genocide,” address before the Law Society of Massachu-

setts at Boston, MA, January 5, 1950, abridged report in Department of State Bulletin 22, 552, January 16,1950, pp 91–96, at p 91.

23 Quoted in “U.S. urged to back Genocide Treaty,” p 20.24 Committee on Foreign Relations, Genocide Convention: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee

on Foreign Relations, United State Senate, 81st Congress, 2nd Sess., On Executive O, the InternationalConvention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (Washington, DC: US Government PrintingOffice, 1950), herein Hearings, 1950, at p 84.

25 A. C. Ivy, “Genocide Convention urged,” New York Times, January 18, 1950, p 30.26 Barth, “Outlawing mass murder,” p 179.27 Ibid, p 181.28 Arthur H. Kuhn, “The Genocide Convention and state rights,” American Journal of International Law,

Vol 43, 1949, pp 498–501, at p 499.29 Kuhn, “State rights,” p 500.30 Serbia National Defense Council of America (SNDCA), The Crime of Genocide: A Plea for Ratification of

the Genocide Pact (Chicago: 1951), pp 13–14, copy in Main Reading Room, Library of Congress,Washington, DC

31 SNDCA, The Crime of Genocide, p 26.32 Noted in New York Times, June 21, 1950, p 20.33 “D P change asked by Jewish women,” New York Times, January 12, 1950, p 30.34 Statement in Hearings, 1950, p 89.35 Statement in Hearings, 1950, p 98.36 Statement of Shad Polier, American Jewish Congress, in Hearings, 1950, p 100.37 Quoted in Finch, “Genocide Convention,” p 733.38 George A. Finch, “Genocide Convention does not prevent mass killing of people by governments,” address

before the Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington, DC, January 24, 1950,Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol 16, No 14, May 1, 1950, pp 444–448, at p 445.

39 Finch, “Genocide Convention,” p 445.40 Quoting Finch in Proceedings of the American Society of International Law, 1949, pp 80–81, noted in

Nehemiah Robinson, The Genocide Convention: A Commentary (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs,1960), pp 46–47.

41 Finch, “Genocide Convention,” p 445.

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42 George A. Finch, “The Genocide Convention,” American Journal of International Law, Vol 43, 1949,pp 732–738, at pp 733–734.

43 Finch, “Genocide Convention,” p 734.44 Ibid.45 Both quotes in New York Times, January 25, 1950, p 9.46 Alfred J. Schweppe, “Genocide Convention should embrace crimes committed with the complicity of govern-

ment,” delivered before Subcommittee of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, DC,January 24, 1950, Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol 16, No 11, March 15, 1950, pp 335–340, at pp 335–336.

47 Schweppe, “Complicity of government,” p 337.48 Ibid.49 Ibid.50 Hearings, 1950, p 319.51 Quoted in New York Times, January 25, 1950, p 9.52 Claude Bunzel, “The UN’s secret key to power,” American Century, Vol 83, 1956, pp 21–26, at p 22.53 Bunzel, “Secret key to power,” p 25.54 Bunzel, “Secret key to power,” p 26.55 Statement in Hearings, 1950, p 307.56 National Economic Council Letter, “Reject that Genocide Convention,” September 15, 1950, quoted in

Robinson, The Genocide Convention, p ix.57 Statement in Hearings, 1950, p 317.58 Lodge and Finucane, Hearings, 1950, p 315.59 Comment of Finucane, Hearings, 1950, p 314.60 Truman to Connally, White House press release, August 26, 1950 in U.S. Department of State Bulletin,

Vol 23, September 4, 1950, pp 379–380, at p 379.61 Note from John M. Chang to Ambassador Austin, July 31, 1950 enclosed in U.S. Department of State Bulletin,

Vol 23, September 4, 1950, pp 379–380, at p 379.62 John D. Hickerson, “Should the USA ratify the Genocide Treaty?” The Rotarian, Vol 79, 1951, pp 14–15,

52–53, quoted from p 14.63 Hickerson, “Genocide Treaty,” p 52.64 Noted in Editorial, “U.S. double-talk on Genocide Convention,” Christian Century, Vol 70, No. 46, 1953,

p 1315.65 Power, “A Problem from Hell,” pp 69, 73.66 Christian Century, “US double-talk,” p 1315.67 Editorial, “Hope for the Genocide Convention?” America, Vol 90, 1953, p 115.68 Editorial, “For a Genocide Treaty,” New York Times, January 22, 1950, Section IV, p 12.69 Rovere, “Letter from Washington,” p 56.

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