How is genocide related to the holocaust

Noting that the term denoted "an old practice in its modern development," Lemkin defined genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.

Crimes against humanity were not an independent category of crimes in themselves. They were only considered crimes when their connection with other crimes could be established.

On December 9, , in the shadow of the Holocaust and in no small part due to the tireless efforts of Lemkin himself, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Killing members of the group; b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d.

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. While many cases of group-targeted violence have occurred throughout history and even since the Convention came into effect, the legal and international development of the term is concentrated into two distinct historical periods: the time from the coining of the term until its acceptance as international law and the time of its activation with the establishment of international criminal tribunals to prosecute the crime of genocide Preventing genocide, the other major obligation of the convention, remains a challenge that nations and individuals continue to face.

We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. The Holocaust is seen as a means of political power in contemporary politics and the link to the Holocaust is made out of political considerations. The link to other genocides is made to diminish or trivialise the Holocaust.

Key terms: Relating the terms "Holocaust", "genocide", "crimes against humanity" and "war crimes". Although these terms are often mentioned in the same context and, indeed, can be related, they each have very distinct and specific meanings. Three of these terms — crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes — refer to legal categories as well as to concepts in the scholarly field.

It is important to note that the legal categories are very strictly defined. For greater clarity of thinking and understanding, it is important that educators help their students to understand the different meanings of each of these terms. Crimes against humanity are widespread or systematic attacks on the civilian population, irrespective of whether the people are nationals or non-nationals and irrespective of whether the attacks are committed in time of war or in time of peace.

The attacks can for instance constitute murder, extermination, forced displacement, slavery, rape, torture and other inhumane acts. Crimes against humanity are essentially about the violation of common human rights and values.

It is also the umbrella category under which "war crimes" and "genocide" both fall in international law. War crimes are criminal acts committed during armed conflicts and the term refers to grave breaches of the rules of warfare.

These rules are set down in a number of international agreements, first and foremost the Geneva Conventions. These rules of warfare are intended to protect civilians, women, children, prisoners of war and sick or wounded military personal during armed conflicts. Acts such as torture, destruction of property, and the killing of civilians or hostages can be defined as war crimes, as can the wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, or any devastation not justified by military necessity.

War crimes are committed as part of a larger political or military campaign. Genocide refers to the coordinated and planned destruction of a group of people as that "group" is defined by the perpetrators. While genocide is almost always accompanied by mass killing, this crime is an attempt to destroy the group, not necessarily to murder every member of that group. Some call genocide "the crime of crimes".

Others label genocide as the ultimate crime against humanity because the aim of genocide is to eradicate a part of humanity. In this, acts constitute genocide if they are committed "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such".

Whereas this is the legally applicable definition of genocide, the term genocide predates the Convention and few scholars are wholly satisfied with this definition, partly because of the practical difficulties in proving "intent".

Scholars have for decades presented and debated a series of alternative definitions of what constitutes "genocide", often wanting to expand the list of groups contained in the UN definition. For some examples of alternative definitions, please see the accompanying document Defining genocide. However, during the Nuremberg trials in the immediate post-war period, perpetrators were not indicted for the crime of genocide but instead for aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other offences the reason being that the crime of genocide was not introduced into international law until the UN Genocide Convention of The Holocaust is often called the paradigmatic genocide.

In a number of ways, the Holocaust functions as a benchmark for other genocides. Some reasons for this are:. How do these terms relate to each other? In international law, crimes against humanity can be seen as an umbrella category of international crimes. The following fall under this category:. Genocide differs from other crimes against humanity by the intention to completely or partly destroy a certain group of people. Other crimes against humanity do not require this specific intent to destroy a group.

Some crimes against humanity — such as the use of forced labour, the mass killing of civilians, the confiscation of property and deportation — may be a prelude to genocide or part of its execution. However, these crimes against humanity do not always lead to genocide, nor are they all always a part of genocide. The Holocaust is the name given to one specific case of genocide: the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to destroy the Jewish people.

All were attempts to destroy a group of people, and all were accompanied by mass murder. However, the genocide of the Jewish people was unprecedented in its totality: in the Nazi's attempt to murder every last Jewish man, woman and child.

While this attempt at total murder was a distinctive feature of the Holocaust, it is important to note that it does not constitute part of the definition of genocide. Genocide is defined as intent to destroy a group, not necessarily to kill every member of that group.

So, while the Holocaust is an extreme example of genocide it should not be taken as a threshold in defining genocide: other crimes do not need to have reached this extreme in order to be defined, and punished, as genocide under international law.

Defining genocide : Some examples of how genocide has been defined The term "genocide" was coined during the Second World War by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin to mean the intentional destruction of national groups on the basis of their collective identity. Lemkin's purpose was to use this term to bring about a framework of international law with which to prevent and punish what the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had described as "a crime without a name".

In this, Lemkin was extraordinarily successful: by the new United Nations had been persuaded to draft the UN Convention on Genocide. The international legal definition of the crime of genocide is found in Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: a Killing members of the group; b Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

While it must be stressed that this remains as the only legal definition of genocide, still it should also be noted that many scholars disagree with this definition, finding the list of possible victim groups too narrow or that the need to prove intent is too demanding. A number of alternative definitions that have been offered are given below.

Adam Jones, in his Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction has compiled the following selection of scholarly definitions of genocide, which may be useful for educators and students to reflect upon.

Some scholars appear more than once, an indication of the development of ideas over time in this ongoing debate. Peter Drost Genocide is the deliberate destruction of physical life of individual human beings by reason of their membership of any human collectivity as such. Irving Louis Horowitz [Genocide is] a structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatus.

Genocide represents a systematic effort over time to liquidate a national population, usually a minority. This is not to say that I agree with the definition. On the contrary, I believe a major omission to be in the exclusion of political groups from the list of groups protected. In the contemporary world, political differences are at the very least as significant a basis for massacre and annihilation as racial, national, ethnic or religious differences.

Then too, the genocides against racial, national, ethnic or religious groups are generally a consequence of, or intimately related to, political conflict.

Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. These acts fall into five categories:. There are a number of other serious, violent crimes that do not fall under the specific definition of genocide.

They include crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and mass killing. Learn More. It is a very specific term coined by a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin — who sought to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder during the Holocaust, including the destruction of European Jews.

He formed the word genocide by combining geno- , from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide , from the Latin word for killing.