East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"

by Philippe Sands

I became involved in several cases of mass killing. Some were argued as crimes against humanity, the killings of individuals on a large scale, and others gave rise to allegations of genocide, the destruction of groups. These two distinct crimes, with their different emphases on the individual and the group, grew side by side, yet over time genocide emerged in the eyes of many as the crime of crimes, a hierarchy that left a suggestion that the killing of large numbers of people as individuals was somehow less terrible.

“What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others,” the psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham wrote of the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent. The invitation from Lviv was a chance to explore those haunting gaps. I accepted it, then spent a summer writing the lecture.

Does the difference matter? someone else asked. Does it matter whether the law seeks to protect you because you are an individual or because of the group of which you happen to be a member? That question floated around the room, and it has remained with me ever since.

She said, “I want to let you know that your lecture was important to me, personally important for me.” I understood what she was telling me, sending a signal about her own roots. Whether a Pole or a Jew, this was not a matter to be spoken of openly. Issues of individual identity and group membership were delicate in Lviv. “I understand your interest in Lauterpacht and Lemkin,” she continued, “but isn’t your grandfather the one you should be chasing? Isn’t he the one closest to your heart?”

Only now, many years later, have I come to understand the darkness of the events through which Leon lived before this time, to emerge with a dignity intact, with warmth and a smile. He was a generous, passionate man, with a fiery temper that sometimes burst forth unexpectedly and brutally, a lifelong socialist who admired the French prime minister Léon Blum and loved soccer, an observant Jew for whom religion was a private matter not to be imposed on others. He was uninterested in the material world and didn’t want to be a burden on anybody. Three things mattered to him: family, food, and home.

The New York Times reported that Lemberg and Żółkiew were occupied by Russian forces, following a “most colossal battle” that involved over a million and a half men. The newspaper described a “thousandfold, cosmic destruction and wrecking of human life, the most appalling holocaust history had ever known.” One of the casualties was Leon’s brother Emil, killed in action before he reached his twentieth birthday. “What was a single murder,” Stefan Zweig asked, within “the cosmic, thousandfold guilt, the most terrible mass destruction and mass annihilation yet known to history?”

They were images of a regular life, of Leon having escaped his origins. There is “no harder lot than that of the Eastern Jew newly arrived in Vienna,” Joseph Roth wrote of the interwar years, yet Leon created a life among those Jews who had “their feet safely pushed under desks in the First District,” the ones that had “gone ‘native.’ ” Seemingly on the up, he occupied a position between the desk sitters and the Ostenjuden, politically active, a reader of the socialist Neue Freie Presse (New Free Press), and a supporter of the progressive Social Democrats, a party distinct from the Christian Socialists and the German Nationalists who placed identity, anti-Semitism, and purification at the center of their political programs.

I was surprised that Rita, a registered Jew, could be issued so late a document that allowed her to travel. An archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington described the journey as “improbable,” setting out the multitude of steps she would have had to go through to obtain the Fremdenpass, obstacles imposed by Adolf Eichmann. The archivist directed me to a large chart titled Die jüdische Wanderung aus der Ostmark, 1938–1939 (The Jewish migration from Austria, 1938–1939), as prepared by Eichmann. A stateless person like Rita, who lost her Austrian nationality after the Anschluss by reason of her marriage to a now-stateless Jew, was required to take even more steps than others.

In 1945, Leon had no information, but I now did. He never told me that every single person from his childhood, each and every member of the extended Galician family of Buchholzes and Flaschners, was murdered. Of the seventy or more family members living in Lemberg and Żółkiew when the war began, the only survivor was Leon, the smiling boy with big ears.

Leon never spoke to me of that period, nor did he mention any of these family members. Only now, as a consequence of accepting the invitation to deliver a lecture in Lviv, could I begin to comprehend the scale of the devastation that he lived with for the remainder of a life that ran to the end of the twentieth century. The man I came to know in the second half of his life was the last person standing from the years in Galicia. This was the cause of the silence I had heard as a child, a silence that dominated the small apartment he shared with Rita.

The philosopher Martin Buber, who lectured and lived in Lemberg, became an intellectual influence, opposing Zionism as a form of abhorrent nationalism and holding to the view that a Jewish state in Palestine would inevitably oppress the Arab inhabitants. Lauterpacht attended Buber’s lectures and found himself attracted to such ideas, identifying himself as a disciple of Buber’s. This was an early fluttering of skepticism about the power of the state.

In 1921, Kelsen became a judge on the Constitutional Court, bringing Lauterpacht into direct contact with a new idea, in Europe if not America: individuals had inalienable constitutional rights, and they could go to a court to enforce those rights. This was a different model from that which protected minority rights, as in Poland. The two key distinctions—between groups and individuals, between national and international enforcement—influenced Lauterpacht’s thinking. In Austria, the individual was placed at the heart of the legal order.

On the side, he participated in more mundane activity, helping to run a dormitory for Jewish students, which meant hiring a housekeeper. They appointed a young woman called Paula Hitler, unaware that her brother was the leader of the fast-growing National Socialist Party. Adolf Hitler turned up unexpectedly in Vienna in 1921, a visitor “fallen from heaven,” as his sister put it, not yet notorious.

Pragmatic and instinctive, a creature of his life and law courses in Lemberg, Lauterpacht believed in the possibility of reining in the power of the state. This would be achieved not by aspiration, whether of writers or pacifists, but through ideas that were rigorous and rooted, to do justice and contribute to “international progress.” To this end, he wanted an international law that was less isolated and elite, more open to “outside influence.” His thesis—to use general principles of national law to strengthen international obligations—was published in May 1927, to great scholarly acclaim. Today, nearly a century on, it continues to be recognized as a work of fundamental importance.

McNair identified his protégé as a man without “a trace of the political agitator in his temperament,” yet with a “passion for justice” and the “relief of suffering.” McNair believed the events he lived through in Lemberg and Vienna from 1914 to 1922 prompted a belief in protecting human rights as a matter of “vital necessity.” Individuals should “possess international rights,” an innovative and revolutionary idea then and, in many quarters, still now.

He was equally resistant to his mother’s efforts to influence Rachel, who adopted a fashionable Louise Brooks bob and fringe. “Incandescent” when he saw the new style, Lauterpacht insisted that she return to the bun, prompting a major row between the couple and a threat from Rachel to leave him. “I can and must have my private harmless life without you bullying me.” In the end, however, Rachel conceded: the bun was still in place when I met her, more than fifty years later. Individual rights for some, but not for the mother or the wife.

Miss Tilney was a compassionate woman, not an ideologue out to do the missionary thing. It wasn’t only that she hid people but that she went out of her way to hide people. “People are only capable of great heroism when they believe something passionately,” a friend suggested, when I told her the story. “An abstract principle is not enough to be heroic; it has to be something which is emotional and deeply motivated.”

Lemkin’s innate curiosity confronted the nature of the German occupation. How exactly was German Nazi rule imposed? Believing the answer might be found in the minutiae of legal enactments, he started to gather Nazi decrees and ordinances, as others might collect stamps. As a lawyer, he understood that official documents often reflected underlying objectives without stating them explicitly, that a single document might be less revealing than a collection. The group was more valuable than the sum of its individual parts. He spent time at the central library in Stockholm, gathering, translating, and analyzing, looking for patterns of German behavior. The Germans were orderly, putting many decisions in writing, producing documents and a paper trail, clues to a bigger conception. This might lead to “irrefutable evidence” of crime.

That summer, waiting for the book to be published, he was buoyed by a decisive turn in the war. Moving westward at speed, at the end of July the Red Army had taken Lemberg, Żółkiew, and Wołkowysk. En route, it uncovered terrible atrocities. In August, the Russian journalist Vasily Grossman, writing for the Red Army magazine, described what they came across in an article titled “The Hell of Treblinka.” How could this happen? Grossman asked. “Was it something organic? Was it a matter of heredity, upbringing, environment or external conditions? Was it a matter of historical fate, or the criminality of the German leaders?”

Frank assumed total control over life and death and intended to exercise it, putting into effect ideas expressed at the 1935 Berlin Congress: in his General Government, the “community of the people” would be the only legal standard, so individuals would be subjugated to the will of the sovereign, the führer.

Himmler’s letter offered no ambiguity or escape. When I showed it to Horst, he stared at it, without expression. If his father stood before him now, what would he say? “I don’t really know,” Horst said. “It’s very difficult…maybe I wouldn’t ask him anything at all.” A silence hung around the desolate room. After a while, Horst punctured it with an exonerating thought: his father was overwhelmed by the situation, its inevitability and catastrophic proportion, by the orders and their immediacy. Nothing was inevitable, I suggested to Horst, not the signature, not the oversight he exercised. Wächter could have left. This prompted another long silence, space for the sound of snow and the crackle of burning logs. Faced with such a document, could Horst not condemn the father? Was this a father to love, or was it something else? “I cannot say I love my father,” Horst said. “I love my grandfather.” He looked toward the portrait of the old military man that hangs above his bed. “I have a responsibility for my father in some way, to see what really happened, to tell the truth, and to do what I can do for him.” He reflected out loud. “I have to find some positive aspect.” He had somehow constructed a distinction between his father and the system, between the individual and the group of which he was a leader. “I know that the whole system was criminal and that he was part of it, but I don’t think he was a criminal. He didn’t act like a criminal.” Could his father have walked away from...

Allies were entitled to use military force to protect the “rights of man.” The argument was contentious then, and it remains so today, sometimes referred to as “humanitarian intervention.” Indeed, on the very day I first saw Lauterpacht’s original handwritten draft, President Obama and the British prime minister, David Cameron, were trying to persuade the U.S. Congress and the British Parliament that military intervention in Syria was justified in law, to protect the human rights of hundreds of thousands of individuals. The arguments they made—without success—drew on ideas expressed by Lauterpacht, reflected in the concept of crimes against humanity, acts so egregious that others were entitled to act in a protective capacity. Lauterpacht argued that he was doing no more than developing existing, well-established rules. The argument—an ambitious one in 1945—he now made as an advocate, not as a scholar.

was instinctively sympathetic to Lauterpacht’s view, which was motivated by a desire to reinforce the protection of each individual, irrespective of which group he or she happened to belong to, to limit the potent force of tribalism, not reinforce it. By focusing on the individual, not the group, Lauterpacht wanted to diminish the force of intergroup conflict. It was a rational, enlightened view, and also an idealistic one. The counterargument was put most strongly by Lemkin. Not opposed to individual rights, he nevertheless believed that an excessive focus on individuals was naive, that it ignored the reality of conflict and violence: individuals were targeted because they were members of a particular group, not because of their individual qualities. For Lemkin, the law must reflect true motive and real intent, the forces that explained why certain individuals—from certain targeted groups—were killed. For Lemkin, the focus on groups was the practical approach.

He spoke in a measured and calm voice of the journey from the Warsaw ghetto in August 1942, transportation by rail in inhumane conditions, eight thousand people in overcrowded cattle cars. He was the only survivor. When the Russian prosecutor asked about the moment of arrival, Rajzman told him how they were made to undress and walk along Himmelfahrtstrasse, the “street to heaven,” a short walk to the gas chamber, when suddenly a friend from Warsaw singled him out and led him away. The Germans needed an interpreter, but before that he loaded the clothes of the dead onto empty trains that departed Treblinka. Two days passed, then a transport arrived from the small town of Vinegrova, bringing his mother, sister, and brothers. He watched them walk to the gas chambers, unable to intervene. Several days later, he was handed his wife’s papers, with a photograph of his wife and child. “That is all I have left of my family,” he said in the courtroom, a public act of revelation. “A photograph.”

He offered a graphic account of killing on an industrial scale, individual acts of horror and inhumanity. A ten-year-old girl was brought to the Lazarett (infirmary) with her two-year-old sister, guarded by a German called Willi Mentz, a milkman with a small black mustache (Mentz later returned to the job, which he held until sentenced to life imprisonment at the Treblinka trial, held in Germany in 1965). The older girl threw herself onto Mentz as he removed his gun. Why did he want to kill the little girl? Rajzman described how he watched Mentz pick up the two-year-old, walk the short distance to a crematorium, and throw her into an oven. Then he killed the sister. The defendants listened in silence, two rows of shamed faces. Did Frank seem to slump? Rajzman continued in a flat monotone. An aged woman was brought to the Lazarett with her daughter, who was in labor, made to lie on a plot of grass. Guards watched her give birth. Mentz asked the grandmother which one she’d prefer to see killed first. The older woman begged to be the first. “Of course, they did the opposite,” Rajzman told the courtroom, speaking very quietly. “The newborn baby was killed first, then the child’s mother, and finally the grandmother.” Rajzman talked of conditions at the camp, of the fake railway station. The deputy commander, Kurt Franz, built a first-class railroad station with false signs. Later an imaginary restaurant was added, and schedules were listed with times of departures and arrivals....

Did you ever participate in the annihilation of Jews? Frank reflected, his face quizzical. He offered a carefully crafted response. “I say ‘yes,’ and the reason why I say ‘yes’ is because, having lived through the five months of this trial, and particularly after having heard the testimony of the witness Hoess, my conscience does not allow me to throw the responsibility solely on these minor people.” The words caused a commotion among the defendants, which he must have noticed. He wanted to be clear about what he was saying: he never personally installed an extermination camp or promoted their existence. Nevertheless, Hitler had laid a dreadful responsibility on his people, so it was his responsibility too. One step forward, one step back. “We have fought against Jewry for years.” These words he was bound to recognize. Yes, he’d made “the most horrible utterances”; the diaries bore witness against him, no escaping that. “Therefore, it is no more than my duty to answer your question in this connection with ‘yes.’ ” The courtroom was silent. Then he said, “A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.” This was too much for some defendants. Göring was seen to shake his head in disgust, whisper to a neighbor, pass a note along the dock. Another defendant expressed displeasure that Frank associated his individual guilt with that of the entire German people. There was a difference between the responsibility of the individual and that of t...

LEON CHOSE the path of silence. Nothing was said of Malke, his sisters Laura and Gusta, the family in Lemberg and Żółkiew, or the other family members in Vienna, including his four nieces. One of the four nieces was Herta, the eleven-year-old daughter of sister Laura, who was to travel to Paris with Miss Tilney and my mother in the summer of 1939, but did not do so. Leon never spoke of her. He said nothing either of his sister Gusta and her husband, Max, who remained in Vienna until December 1939. I knew little about Gusta and Max’s three daughters—Daisy, the eldest, Edith, the youngest, and the middle child, also called Herta—save that they had managed to leave Vienna in September 1938. The three made their way to Palestine, and in the 1950s my mother was in touch with two of them. As my mother and I were preparing to make the first trip to Lviv, she evoked the memory of these three sisters, Leon’s nieces, “long gone.” Two of them, Edith and Herta, had children; perhaps they might be worth tracking down. I had a distant memory of that generation, from childhood, but nothing more. Now I would try to locate them, to hear their stories.

Herta listened attentively to this account, which I shared with some anxiety. When I had finished, I waited to see if she had any questions, but there were none. She had heard and understood. She chose this moment to offer an explanation of her approach to the past, to silence and remembrance. “I want you to know that it’s not correct that I have forgotten everything.” That is what she said, her eyes fixed firmly on mine. “It is just that I decided a very long time ago that this was a period that I did not wish to remember. I have not forgotten. I have chosen not to remember.”

Leon’s name produced the most vivid of family memories. She described him as “beloved,” her uncle Leon, like an older brother, only sixteen years older than she. He was always around, a constant presence. “He was so nice, I loved him.” She stopped herself, surprised by what she had just said. Then she said it again, in case I missed it. “I really loved him.” He grew up with her, Herta explained, living in the same apartment after Malke returned to Lemberg in 1919. He was there when she was born in 1920, sixteen years old, a Viennese schoolboy. Her mother, Gusta, was his guardian in Malke’s absence. Over the years, Leon was a constant in her life. When Malke returned from Lemberg, she moved into an apartment in the same building, owned by Gusta and Max (later I found the papers that showed the building was sold by Max and Gusta for a pittance to a local Nazi, a few months after the Anschluss). Malke was reassuring, a matronly presence throughout Herta’s childhood, especially during the large family gatherings on religious holidays. As far as Herta can recall, there was almost no religion in the family life; they rarely went to synagogue. “I think Leon loved his mother very much,” Herta said suddenly, without prompting. “He was very attentive to her,” and she to him, her only son after the death of Emil, killed in the first days of World War I. There was no father around, Herta reminded me. As we went through the photo albums, her face visibly softened each time she came acr...

This prompted a question from me about women friends. Herta shook her head firmly, then smiled, a warm smile. Her eyes were expressive too. “Everyone was always saying to Leon, ‘When will you get married?’ He always said he never wanted to get married.” I asked again about girlfriends. She remembered none. “He was always with his friend Max.” That is all she said, repeating the words. Doron asked if she thought Leon might have been gay. “We didn’t know what that was back then,” Herta replied. The tone was flat. She was not surprised or shocked. She didn’t confirm; she didn’t deny.

Lesser terms—like “mass murder” or “mass extermination”—were inadequate, because they were incapable of conveying the vital element of racial motivation and the desire to destroy entire cultures. How impoverished we would be, Lemkin wrote, if the people doomed by Germany such as the Jews had not been permitted to create the Bible or to give birth to an Einstein [or] a Spinoza; if the Poles had not had the opportunity to give the world a Copernicus, a Chopin, a Curie; the Greeks a Plato and a Socrates, the English a Shakespeare; the Russians a Tolstoy and a Shostakovich, the Americans an Emerson and a Jefferson, the Frenchm[e]n a Renan and a Rodin. He also made clear that he was concerned with the destruction of any group, not just Jews. He singled out Poles, gypsies, Slovenes, and Russians. To stress “only the Jewish aspect” was something to be avoided, because it would offer an invitation to Göring and other defendants “to use the court for anti-Semitic propaganda.” The charge of genocide had to be part of a broader trial strategy, to show the defendants as enemies of mankind, a “specially dangerous crime,” one that went beyond crimes against humanity.

Robert Jackson opened for the prosecution on a Friday morning, July 26. Lemkin was still in Nuremberg, eager to hear what might be said about genocide; Lauterpacht stayed in Cambridge. Jackson took the tribunal back to the facts, the war, its conduct, and the enslavement of occupied populations. The “most far-flung and terrible” of the acts was the persecution and extermination of Jews, a “final solution” that led to the killing of six million. The defendants offered a “chorus,” claiming to be oblivious to the terrible facts. A “ridiculous” argument, Jackson told the judges. Göring said he “knew nothing” of any excesses, not suspecting an extermination program despite having signed a “score of decrees.” Hess was merely an “innocent middleman,” transmitting Hitler’s orders without reading them. Neurath? A foreign minister “who knew little of foreign affairs and nothing of foreign policy.” Rosenberg? A party philosopher with “no idea of the violence” that his philosophy incited. And Frank? A governor-general in Poland who “reigned but did not rule.” Among the upper echelons of government, he was “fanatical,” a lawyer who solidified Nazi power, brought lawlessness to Poland, and reduced the population to “sorrowing remnants.” Remember Frank’s words, Jackson told the judges, that “a thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will still not be erased.”

Shawcross was on a roll, turning to the techniques of genocide. He described the pattern of action that ended with the deliberate murder of groups, in gas chambers, by mass shootings, by working the victims to death. He spoke of “biological devices” to decrease the birthrate, of sterilization, of castration, of abortion, of the separation of man and woman. The evidence was overwhelming, he continued. Each defendant knew about the “policy of genocide,” each was guilty of the crime, each was a murderer. The only proper sentence was “the supreme penalty.” This caused a commotion in the dock.

Nevertheless, Shawcross drew much from Lauterpacht. There was no question of retroactivity, because all the acts involved—extermination, enslavement, persecution—were crimes under most national laws. The fact that they were lawful under German law offered no defense because the acts affected the international community. They were “crimes against the law of nations,” not mere matters of domestic concern. In the past, international law had allowed each state to decide how it would treat its nationals, but that was now replaced by a new approach: International law has in the past made some claim that there is a limit to the omnipotence of the state and that the individual human being, the ultimate unit of all law, is not disentitled to the protection of mankind when the state tramples upon his rights in a manner which outrages the conscience of mankind. War was just and lawful to prevent “atrocities committed by tyrants against their subjects.” If humanitarian intervention by war was allowed under international law, how could it be said that “intervention by judicial process” was illegal? Shawcross found his stride. He rejected the argument of the defendants that “only the state and not the individual” could commit a crime under international law. There was no such principle of international law, so those who helped a state commit a crime against humanity would not be immune from responsibility; they couldn’t shelter behind the state. “The individual must transcend the state.”

They shared what little information they had about events in Wołkowysk. “My father, Elias, found out there were only a few Jews remaining when the Soviets came in the summer of 1944, maybe no more than fifty or sixty.” A repetition of events in Żółkiew and Dubno and tens of thousands of other places small and large across central Europe, reflected in the stones of Treblinka. Saul spoke gently about this subject, but the light in his eyes was dimmed. “The rest, we knew what happened to them. A Jew sent us a letter. My grandparents were taken to an unknown destination. They were dead.” Did Saul have a photograph of Bella and Josef? No. He learned that the last transport from Wołkowysk was in January 1943 to Auschwitz, but it was an earlier transport that took his grandparents to another place, not far away. “Bella and Josef went to Treblinka, because it wasn’t far away.” He spoke these words with much sadness, a weary and deep sadness, and then he perked up. “What’s the name of that famous journalist, the one who wrote Life and Fate?” he asked. Vasily Grossman. “That’s it; he’s the one who wrote about Treblinka. I read it and thought of my grandparents.” Saul believed that Uncle Rafael never knew they went to Treblinka. “That information came only later, long after he was gone.” Saul’s account offered a frame of sorts for another story. In this way did I learn that my grandmother Malke Flaschner, who lived in Żółkiew on the same street as the Lauterpachts, had died in Trebli...

By then, the Frank family was pretty much impecunious, gathering food and information about the trial as best it could. More or less estranged from Frank, Brigitte maintained contact with a journalist in Bavaria, a man who offered a summary of the trial each evening on German radio. “My mother listened every night, at seven o’clock,” Niklas recalled. Occasionally, the journalist paid a visit, and sometimes he brought chocolate, a rare treat for the children. He was looking for snippets of information to use on his radio program. Niklas remembered one detail, that the journalist was Jewish: “My mother wrote to my father in the prison. ‘I like this Mr. Gaston Oulman, and would like that you meet each other in the prison.’ ” Niklas chuckled at the crazy idea. “My mother’s letter went on. ‘He is a Jew, but I think he has some heart.’ ” Niklas paused. “She wrote that,” Niklas exclaimed. “Can you imagine, that ‘he has some heart’? The end of the Nuremberg process, from the radio my mother knew all the crimes the Germans had done, yet she was still able to write such a sentence.” He shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he said, before pausing. “It was right that my father should be put on trial.” He was consistent in this view. Yes, when his father took the stand in April, he’d offered an expression of guilt, of sorts. “That was a good thing, but was it genuine?” Niklas had his doubts, confirmed by the change of direction in August. “His true character emerged with that second stateme...

How was his father? “He was smiling, trying to be happy. I remember too that my father lied to me.” Meaning? “He said, ‘In two or three months’ time, we will celebrate Christmas in Schliersee, at home, and we will be very happy all together.’ I was thinking, why are you lying? I knew from school, from what my friends were saying, what was going to happen. You must never lie to a seven-year-old child; it is never forgotten.” This was a week before the judgment. As far as Niklas was able to recall, he spoke not a word to his father. Nothing. “I didn’t say good-bye. The whole thing lasted not more than six or seven minutes. There were no tears. I was really sad, not that he’s going to be hanged, sad that he lied to me.”

Perhaps it was the power of Lemkin’s word, but as Lauterpacht feared, there emerged a race between victims, one in which a crime against humanity came to be seen as the lesser evil. That was not the only unintended consequence of the parallel efforts of Lauterpacht and Lemkin. Proving the crime of genocide is difficult, and in litigating cases I have seen for myself how the need to prove the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, as the Genocide Convention requires, can have unhappy psychological consequences. It enhances the sense of solidarity among the members of the victim group while reinforcing negative feelings toward the perpetrator group. The term “genocide,” with its focus on the group, tends to heighten a sense of “them” and “us,” burnishes feelings of group identity, and may unwittingly give rise to the very conditions that it seeks to address: by pitting one group against another, it makes reconciliation less likely. I fear that the crime of genocide has distorted the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity, because the desire to be labeled a victim of genocide brings pressure on prosecutors to indict for that crime. For some, to be labeled a victim of genocide becomes “an essential component of national identity” without contributing to the resolution of historical disputes or making mass killings less frequent.