Raphaël Lemkin

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Raphaël Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish lawyer and the mastermind behind the term 'genocide.' He was born in 1900 in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire. Lemkin's life was significantly shaped by the atrocities he witnessed during World War II, particularly the Holocaust, which fueled his desire to establish legal protections against such crimes. He dedicated his career to advocating for international laws to prevent and punish genocide, famously coining the term in 1944. His seminal work, "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe," laid the groundwork for understanding the systematic nature of genocide and the need for global accountability.