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Article: Genocide
- Article from:
- Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying
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Genocide
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar who escaped Nazi Germany to safe haven in the United States, coined the word
genocide
in 1944. The word originally referred to the killing of people on a racial basis. In
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe
(1944) Lemkin wrote, "New conceptions require new terms. By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, devised by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word
genos
(race, tribe) and the Latin
cide
(killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide" (Lemkin 1944, p. 80). He also wrote about ...