Genocide

   The term is generally credited to Raphael Lemkin, who in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Laws of Occupation-Analysis of Government, Propositions for Redress, coined the term, which refers to the deliberate policy of a state to murder an entire racial, political, or cultural group of people. Inasmuch as the Germans deliberately targeted the entire Jewish people for extinction, the Holocaust marks the most extreme form of genocide. The war against the Jews, however, was not the only act of genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II. The Germans attempted to exterminate the entire Polish ruling, political, and intellectual leadership, as well much of the Gypsy population that fell under its control.

   The precedent for the Nazi genocide was conducted against its own people when Adolf Hitler signed the order that authorized the Euthanasia Program in Germany following the start of the war in September 1939. Despite the evidence culled from the Nazi archives, the eyewitness accounts of survivors of the Holocaust, the photos taken by the Allies when they liberated the concentration camps, and the volumes of evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trials and the subsequent trials of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators, neo-Nazis both in the United States and in Europe continue to either negate the Holocaust, or insist that the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis is highly exaggerated. In the United States, the Institute for Historical Review publishes periodicals and sponsors conferences dealing with Holocaust denial. Notwithstanding the lessons of the Holocaust, the world has witnessed in recent years a genocidal war in Rwanda between the Hutus and the Tutsis, acts of mass extermination in Zaire, and “ethnic cleansing” in wars in Bosnia and Darfur. Responses of the international community to these acts of genocide have been as slow as during the Holocaust.