Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in 1944 after studying the destruction of European Jews and other groups.
Lemkin was a Polish Jewish lawyer who became concerned with the legal problem of the deliberate destruction of national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups. He combined the Greek word genos, meaning “race” or “tribe,” with the Latin suffix -cide, meaning killing, in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
He argued that mass destruction could include more than physical murder, such as attacks on a group’s culture, institutions, families, and ability to survive. The Holocaust strongly shaped his thinking, although his work also drew on earlier mass atrocities.
The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. Lemkin’s term is sometimes confused with crimes against humanity, a related but distinct legal category developed in the same era.