History of Europe

Was the Holocaust pronounced a genocide before Allies took action?

The Holocaust was not declared a genocide until after the war. Although there was a growing recognition of the mass killings of Jews and other minorities during the war, it was not until the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi death camps that the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed. The term "genocide" was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who was an expert in international law, to describe the intentional and systematic killing of an entire group of people. However, the concept of genocide was not yet widely recognized at the time, and the term was not included in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which were adopted after the war to prevent future crimes against humanity.