In the course of writing this lucid and important book Sands became friends with Frank’s son, Niklas. Himself a lawyer, as Governor General of Nazi occupied territories in Poland, Frank was ultimately responsible for the murders of many of Lemkin’s and Lauterpacht’s families, as well as members of Sands’ own family.

Sands focusses particularly on the case of Hans Frank in this trial. Here the personal, political and legal strands of the book are drawn together into what must be the most important courtroom drama in history. The book builds considerable momentum towards its climax at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. The Soviets, whose own campaign in the East had been marked with atrocity, including mass rape during the conquest of Berlin, did not like the concept of “crimes against humanity.” Nevertheless, Lemkin and Lauterpacht’s advocacy, and the interventions of Robert Jackson the chief US prosecutor, and Hartley Shawcross, the British Attorney General, eventually got them included. The US and the UK did not like the idea of genocide having been formidable practitioners of it themselves in the past. However, it was a struggle to get them accepted at Nuremberg. Nevertheless, both “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” are now important concepts in international human rights law. Lauterpacht had deep concerns that the concept of genocide would drive human beings deeper into their group identities and hence perpetuate the roots of genocide, if not its actual manifestation. It was there that Lemkin and Lauterpacht originally studied law, and may well have come to know each other, though they do not seem ever to have become friends.

What binds all this into a remarkable whole is the strange coincidence that, like Sands’ grandfather, Lemkin and Lauterpacht had deep ties with the city of Lviv, currently in Ukraine, previously known as Lemberg when it was in the Hapsburg empire. The book is also a joint biography of the originators of key concepts of human rights: Rafael Lemkin postulated the idea of “genocide” – the destruction of groups of people based on their identity Hersch Lauterpacht formulated the idea of “crimes against humanity” – atrocities against individual civilians, often by their own governments. In part the book is a history of the philosophy of international law.

East West Street by Philippe Sands