After World War II ended, The United Nations coined the term "genocide" in its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, on December 9th 1948. It was in 1944 when Raphael Lemkin a Polish-Jewish lawyer first defined genocide as a new term to describe the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jewish people. The United Nations definition of the term says that it is the any action committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, religious or racial group.