GENOCIDE, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, AND A LAWYER IMMORALITY

Phillippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" (New York: Knopf, 2016) (From the book jacket: "East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men [Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht] who simultaneously originated the ideas of 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity,' both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, 'the little Paris of Ukraine,' a city variously called Lemberg, Lwow, Lvov, or Lviv. [] And the author writes  of a third man, Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer, a Nazi from the earliest days who destroyed so many lives, friend of Richard Strauss, collector of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Frank oversaw the ghetto in Lemberg in Poland in August 1942, in which the entire Jewish population of the area had been confined on penalty of death. Frank, who was instrumental in the construction of concentration camps nearby and, weeks after becoming the governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, ordered the transfer of 133,000 men, women, and children to the death camps." From the text: "The cell was unforgiving, and so was Niklas [Frank] on the subject of his father's actions. 'My father was a lawyer; he knew what he did.'" Id. at 4.).