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The word genocide came out of World War II and the Holocaust. The term was coined and used for the first time in 1944, by Professor Raphael Lempkin in response to Nazi racial theories and law, in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

Professor Lempkin was a Polish Jewish professor of international law who lost 49 members of his family to the Holocaust. For the first time in history a name was given to what Churchill once called the crime without a name, the crime of genocide. Professor Lempkin became the driving force in having genocide defined as a crime in international law and secured its inclusion in the Nuremberg indictments in 1945. In addition, in 1948 Professor Lempkin was able to secure an international law making the crime of genocide a matter of universal criminal jurisdiction.

The official definition is the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, religious, or racial group. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly gave genocide a legal definition in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed:

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.