THE HOLOCAUST
Johann Chapoutot
This article was published with the support of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah
Article translated from English by Odile Demange
The choice of the most relevant term for an unnamed crime, the Nazi murder of six million Jews in the extermination camps and killing sites of Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945, has been the subject of much debate.The Nazis themselves resorted to a euphemistic formula, the "final solution of the Jewish question" ( Endlösung der Judenfrage ), to disguise their crime. The jurists of the Allied powers preferred the term “genocide” (“genocide” in English, Völkermordin German), coined by the Polish-American jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1944. The problem was that this word "genocide" was used in the...










