GENOCIDE
The crime of destroying or conspiring to destroy a
national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
Genocide can be committed in a number of
ways, including killing members of a group or
causing them serious mental or bodily harm,
deliberately inflicting conditions that will bring
about a group’s physical destruction, imposing
measures on a group to prevent births, and
forcefully transferring children from one group
to another.
Genocide is a modern term. Coined in 1944
by Polish scholar of INTERNATIONAL LAW
Raphael Lemkin, the word is a combination of
the Greek genos (race) with the Latin cide
(killing). In his book, Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe, Lemkin offered the definition of “a
coordinated plan of different actions aiming at
the destruction of essential foundations of the
life of national groups, with the aim of annihi-
lating the groups themselves” (Lemkin 1944,
79). The book studied in particular detail the
methodology of the Nazi German genocide
against European Jews, among whom were his
parents. Later, he served as an advisor to both
the U.S. War Department and the NUREMBERG
TRIALS of Nazi leaders for WAR CRIMES.He ded-
icated his life to the development of interna-
tional conventions against genocide.
The contemporary archetype of modern
genocide is the Holocaust, in which German
Nazis starved, tortured, and executed an esti-
mated six million European Jews, as well as mil-
lions of other ethnic and social minorities, as part
of an effort to develop a master Aryan race.
Immediately upon coming to power in Germany
in 1933, the Nazis began a systematic effort to
eliminate Jews from economic life. The Nazis
defined persons with three or four Jewish grand-
parents as being Jewish, regardless of their reli-
gious beliefs or affiliation with the Jewish
community. Those with one or two Jewish grand-
parents were known as Mischlinge, or mixed-
breeds. As non-Aryans, Jews and Mischlinge lost
their jobs and their Aryan clients, and were forced
to liquidate or sell their businesses.
With the onset of WORLD WAR II in 1939, the
Germans occupied the western half of Poland,
forcing nearly two million Jews to move into
crowded, captive ghettos. Many of these Jews
died of starvation and disease. In 1941,Germany
invaded the Soviet Union. The Nazis dispatched
3,000 troops to kill Soviet Jews on the spot,most
often by shooting them in ditches or ravines on
the outskirts of cities and towns.Meanwhile, the
Nazis began to organize what they termed a final
solution to the Jewish question in Europe. Ger-
man Jews were required to wear a yellow star
