More than 50 million people were systematically murdered in the past 100 years—the century of mass murder: From 1915 to 1923 Ottoman Turks slaughtered up to 1.5 million Armenians. In mid-century the Nazis liquidated six million Jews, three million Soviet POWs, two million Poles, and 400,000 other "undesirables." Mao Zedong killed 30 million Chinese, and the Soviet government murdered 20 million of its own people. In the 1970s the communist Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 million of their fellow Cambodians. In the 1980s and early '90s Saddam Hussein's Baath Party killed 100,000 Kurds. Rwanda's Hutu-led military wiped out 800,000 members of the Tutsi minority in the 1990s. Now there is genocide in Sudan's Darfur region.
In sheer numbers, these and other killings make the 20th century the bloodiest period in human history. In 1944 Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish scholar who lost almost all of his family in the Nazi Holocaust, coined the word "genocide," from genos, Greek for tribe or family, and -cide, from the Latin for kill. Four years later, after the Nuremberg trials, the crime of genocide was recognized by the United Nations as the deliberate destruction of a racial, religious, or ethnic group. Today most societies add mass political killings to that definition.
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