Raphael Lemkin (; 24 June 1900 – 28 August 1959) was a Polish lawyer who is known for coining the term "genocide" and for campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention, which legally defines the act. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he fled the country and sought asylum in the United States, where he became an academic at Duke University and campaigned vigorously to raise international awareness of the atrocities that were being committed by the Axis powers across occupied Europe. It was amidst this environment of World War II that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policy. Wikipedia