Genocide means the total or partial destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
The term genocide appears during World War II, when the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin characterized in 1944 "the practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups".
The term "genocide" was later used retrospectively for the systematic massacre of the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa (1904-1908), that of the Armenians by the Turks (1915-1916), and finally that of the Tutsi in Rwanda (1994).
The Shoah Memorial today approaches through its exhibitions and activities the history of these three other genocides of the twentieth century.
