How did the Holocaust influence the creation of the United Nations Genocide Convention?

The Holocaust served as the primary catalyst for the development of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The sheer scale of Nazi atrocities, revealed during and after World War II, created the international momentum necessary to codify the protection of human groups under international law.12

The legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide in 1944, argued that naming and outlawing such acts was essential to prevent their recurrence. While the Nürnberg trials established the precedent that crimes against humanity were punishable, they did not explicitly prosecute defendants for genocide, as the convention had not yet been adopted.132

In response to these revelations, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 96-I in 1946, declaring genocide a crime under international law. This led directly to the 1948 adoption of the Genocide Convention, which defined the crime as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. By establishing this legal framework, the international community affirmed the moral imperative to prevent the systematic destruction of human groups.123