Theme 6: Genocide Becomes a Recognized Category

The word genocide was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin specifically to describe what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. The Holocaust forced international law to recognize this category as a distinct crime. The Armenian Genocide of WWI had foreshadowed this development; later genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia would draw on the same categories. Maria should treat the Holocaust as the central, but not the only, case of genocide in this era.