The word genocide

The word genocide was coined in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin had fled Poland after the German invasion and spent the war in the United States. He recognized that the systematic Nazi murder of Jews and other groups did not fit existing legal categories. Crime against an individual was insufficient; mass murder of civilians was something more. Lemkin combined the Greek genos (race, tribe) with the Latin cide (killing) to produce a new word for a phenomenon that, he argued, had occurred throughout history but had never been named precisely. He campaigned tirelessly to have genocide recognized as an international crime.