When knowledge of the atrocities of the National Socialist regime spread, there was a feeling among contemporary observers that they were faced with a phenomenon that was poorly addressed by the existing rules of international law. In those days, Winston Churchill felt that the world was in the presence of a ‘crime without a name’. And in those days, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who had lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust, gave a name to the crime. It was in his seminal book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1943/1944) that the term ‘genocide’ made its first appearance; the root of a concept on.
